Vocational Guidance for Girls | Page 5

her pies would sell,
with all her might and main She opened up a factory, and spoiled it all
again.
Nonsense? Yes--but with a strong element of sense, nevertheless.
Entirely aside, however, from the industrial status of the home, unless
we are to see a practical cessation of childbearing and rearing, homes

must apparently continue to exist. No one has yet found a substitute
place for this particular industry. It is a commonly accepted fact that
young children do better, both mentally and physically, in even rather
poor homes than in a perfectly planned and conducted institution. And
we need go no farther than this in seeking a sufficient reason for saving
the home. This one is enough to enlist our best service in aid of
homemaking and home support.
From earliest ages woman has been the homemaker. No plan for the
preservation of the home or for its evolution into a satisfactory social
factor can fail to recognize her vital and necessary connection with the
problem. Therefore in answer to the question "What ought woman to
be?" we say boldly, "A homemaker." Reduced to simplest terms, the
conditions are these: if homes are to be made more serviceable tools for
social betterment, women must make them what they ought to be.
Consequently homemaking must continue to be woman's business--the
business of woman, if you like--a considerable, recognized, and
respected part of her "business of being a woman." Nor may we
overlook the fact that it is only in this work of making homes and
rearing offspring that either men or women reach their highest
development. Motherhood and fatherhood are educative processes,
greater and more vital than the artificial training that we call education.
In teaching their children, even in merely living with their children,
parents are themselves trained to lead fuller lives.
"The central fact of the woman's life--Nature's reason for her--is the
child, his bearing and rearing. There is no escape from the divine order
that her life must be built around this constraint, duty, or privilege, as
she may please to consider it."[1] It is the fashion among some women
to assume that it is time all this were changed, and that therefore it will
be changed. They look forward to seeing womankind released from this
"constraint, duty, or privilege," and yet see in their prophetic vision the
race moving on to a future of achievement. The fact, however, ignore it
as we may, cannot be gainsaid: no man-made or woman-made
"emancipation" will change nature's law.
It was well that after centuries of repression and subjection woman

sought emancipation. She needed it. But the wildest flight of fancy
cannot long conceal the ultimate fact. Woman is the mother of the race.
"The female not only typifies the race, but, metaphor aside, she is the
race."[2] Emancipation can never free her from this destiny. In the
United States, where woman has the largest freedom to enter the
industrial world and maintain herself in entire independence, the
percentage of those who marry is higher than in the countries where
woman is a slave. Ninety per cent of the mature women in our country
become homemakers for a certain period, and probably over 90 per
cent are assistant homemakers for another period of years before or
after marriage.
Any vocational counselor who fails to reckon first with the
homemaking career of girls is therefore blind to the facts of life. All
education, all training, must be considered in its bearing on the one
vocation, homemaking. The time will come when the occupations of
boys and men must likewise be considered in relation to homemaking,
but that problem is not the province of this book.
Women will bear and rear the children of the future, just as they have
borne and reared the children of the past. But _under what
conditions_--the best or those less worthy? And _what women_--again,
the best or those less worthy? Has woman been freed from subjection,
from an inferior place in the scheme of life, only to become so
intoxicated with a personal freedom, with her own personal ambition,
that she fails to see what emancipation really means? Will she be
contented merely to imitate man rather than to work out a destiny of
her own? We think not. When the first flush of freedom has passed, the
pendulum will turn again and woman will find a truer place than she
knows now or has known.
Two obstacles to the successful pursuit of her ultimate vocation stand
prominently before the young woman of to-day: first, the instruction of
the times has imbued her with too little respect for her calling; second,
her education teaches her how to do almost everything except how to
follow this calling in the scientific spirit of the day. She may scorn
housework as