Vocational Guidance for Girls | Page 7

read his newspaper "in peace," the younger children who
want to pop corn or blow bubbles or play games, all must be planned
for. There will be no room too good for use, and no furnishings so
delicate that mother worries over family contact with them. There will
be a minimum of "keeping up appearances" and a maximum of comfort
and cheer. There will be little formal entertaining, but many
spontaneous good times. In addition to being comfortable, the ideal
home must be convenient. There will be places for things, and every
appliance for making work easy.
[Illustration: Photograph by Brown Bros. Contrast this old-fashioned
kitchen with the modern one shown on the opposite page]
The ideal mother, who is the mainspring of the smoothly running
mechanism of the ideal home, will be scientifically trained for her
position. Her "domestic science" will no longer be open to the criticism
that it is not science at all, nor will she feel that her business is
unworthy of scientific treatment. Always she will keep before her the
object of her work--to make of her family, including herself, good,
happy, efficient people. She will not be overburdened with housework,
for overworked mothers have neither time nor strength for the higher
aspects of their work. She will know how to feed bodies, but also how

to develop souls. She will clothe her children hygienically, but she will
teach them to value more the more important vestments of modesty and
gentleness and courtesy. She will require obedience, but, as their years
increase, the requirement will be less and less obedience to authority
and more and more obedience to a right spirit within.
[Illustration: Photograph by Brown Bros. The wise mother will teach
her children the true value of work by making them wish to work with
her]
She will work for her children and will make them wish to work with
her, teaching them the true value of work and sacrifice. She will play
with them, for their pleasure and development, and she will also play,
in her own way, for her own rejuvenation and her soul's good. She will
study each member of her family as an individual problem, and,
abandoning forever the idea of pressing any child's soul into the mold
that she might choose, will rather strive to aid its growth toward its
natural ideal. She will strive to hold and to be worthy of her children's
confidence, that they may turn to her in those times that try their souls.
But she will always respect the personal liberty of either child or
husband to live his own life.
She will interest herself in the interests of husband and children, that
she may remain a vital factor in their lives; and she will make the home
so delightful as to reduce to a minimum the scattering influences that
tend to destroy home life. She will weave intangible but indestructible
ties of affection, holding all together and to herself. She will keep her
interest in the outside world, so that she may better prepare her children
to live in it and may resist the narrowing influence of her enforced
temporary withdrawal. She will take some part in civic work and social
uplift, and, when her years of child rearing are ended, in the leisure of
middle age she will return to the less circumscribed life of her youth,
bending her matured energies to the world's work.
The father of this ideal family will be first of all a man happy in his
work. The plodding, weary slave to distasteful labor can be ideal
neither as husband nor as father. Overworked fathers are quite as
impossible in our scheme as overburdened mothers. In ideal conditions

the father will have time, strength, and willingness to be more of a
factor in the home life than he sometimes is at the present time. More
than that, his early education will have included definite preparation for
homemaking, so that his coöperation will be intelligent and therefore
helpful. He will know more than he does now about the cost of living
and he will assist in making a preliminary division of the year's income
upon an intelligent basis. He will recognize the necessity for equipment
for the homemaking business and will contribute his share of thought
and labor to improving the home plant.
He will be a companion as well as adviser to his boys and girls and will
retain their respect and love by his sympathetic understanding and his
remembrance of the boy's point of view. In all his dealings with his
children he will be careful that interference with his comfort and
convenience or the wounding of his pride by their shortcomings does
not obscure his sense of justice. He will be a student of child nature and