The girl of the family in moderate circumstances is no better off.  She must contribute in some way, and there is no scientific management in her home—­no study of ways and means which enables her to contribute and remain at home.  She is driven outside in order to support herself.  I cannot but believe that here is one of the gravest weaknesses in our educational machinery, this failure to give the girl inclined to remain at home a training which would enable her to help make more of a limited income.  Nothing is so rare to-day as the fine habit of making much of little.  A dollar mixed with brains is worth five in every place where dollars are used.  Particularly is this true in the household.  The failure to teach how to mix brains and dollars, and to inspire respect for the undertaking, annually drives thousands of girls into our already overburdened industrial system who would be healthier and happier at home and who would render there a much greater economic service.  Such work as is being done in certain Western agricultural colleges for girls, in the Carnegie School for Women in Pittsburg, in Miss Kittridge’s Household Centers in New York City, is a recognition of this need of making scientific managers—­trained household workers—­of young women.  There is no more practical way of relieving the industrial strain.

It is not always the dependent and so humiliating position a girl finds herself in that drives her from home.  It is frequently the discovery that she is a member of a group that has no responsible place in the community; that regards itself as a purely isolated, unrelated, irresponsible unit,—­an atom without affinities!  The home can be, if it will, the most antisocial force in existence, for it can, if it will, exist practically for itself.  That excessive individualism, which is responsible for so many evils in our country, has encouraged this isolation.  The girl who finds herself without a productive place at home at the same time finds none of the fine inspiration which comes from fitting herself into a social scheme and helping to do its work.  The spirit of the age is social.  She feels its call, she sees how unresponsive, even antipathetic, to it her home is.  She concludes that if she is to serve she must seek something to do in some remote city.  The attraction the Social Settlement has for the girl finds its base here.  The loss to communities of their educated young women, who find no response to their need, no place to serve in their own society, is incalculable.

It is not infrequent that a girl who may have by some chance of fortune a sufficient sense of independence in her home, who knows herself needed there, and is ready to perform the service, is driven out by the persistence of that spirit of parental authority, which looks upon it as a duty to rule the life, particularly of the daughter, as long as she is at home.  There is nothing clearer than that the old domination of one person by another is a thing of the past.  A new spirit of cooeperation and friendly direction has come into the world.  The home which it does not pervade cannot keep its young.