down of barriers during the last few years, woman's horizon has marvelously expanded. There has been a prodigious multiplication of her wants and club activity measures her desire to supply those wants.
The club woman is a bee not a butterfly. The bee and the butterfly may bask in the same sunshine, may extract sweets from the same flower. One exists only the satisfaction or enjoyment of the present—-the other garners and carries home a surplus for future use. The woman who attends the club with no other motive than to while away a pleasant hour, only smells of a feast without eating of it. She who does not carry home some bit of information, some inspiration, some material to be incorporated into the tissues of home life, to beautify or to strengthen, loses a higher pleasure than entertainment.
Thousands of women will endorse the expression of that woman who declared, "This is the busiest world I ever lived in." With the multiplicity of duties which confront each one of us, obligations which "wait and will not go away, wait and will not be gainsaid," it is utterly impossible for any one to keep up with the whole busy world, with nations, rulers, statesmen, scientists, inventors and writers racing, rustling and jostling each other like the denizens of an ant-hill, and herein lies the secret of mutual help.
Turning from the past and present-—what of the future? Ignorance and narrowness being vanquished by the club scheme of the new woman, against what other sentiment shall revolt be instituted?
The new woman has announced that something ought to be done to eradicate the erroneous idea that the proper thing to do is to depreciate and minify the duties of home. Domestic life is a profession just as truly as medicine, journalism and law, and it is a profession which in truth requires a more liberal preparation than any other.
There are misfits in every profession, and home making is not an exception to the rule. We have heard of men proving a failure in the law who might have been excellent machinists, of others who stumbled into the pulpit, but might have served their fellow men better as professors, others have attempted to pound ideas into brains, but would have elicited more sparks from an anvil. There are too many homes whose comforts are dispensed from a hand-me-down counter, but it will be found that the home maker who is mistress of her profession, possesses an unlimited education, quite as much executive ability, judgment and discrimination as is needed in the so-called wage earning professions, and her holdings in these lines frequently rival the tenure of her husband.
The mother with her infantile disputants, must exercise as great aptness and discrimination as the judge on the bench. She requires as great fertility of resource and attention to details as the petitioner at the bar. In the oversight of procuring needed supplies and the manufacture of raw materials into food, clothing and comforts for the family, she exercises a greater versatility, superintends the working of a larger number of machinery, turns out an infinitely larger variety of products than any manufactory or laboratory in the world.
The head of a mammoth iron establishment admits that he knows comparatively nothing of fabrics, silk, linen, cotton and wool, he is not a connoisseur of china or furniture, he is not a judge of leather and its manufactured forms, he is not versed in the unwritten lore of food products; but the home maker must know something of all trades and professions, from hats to hams, from mirrors to carpet tacks, from laces to door mats, from pottery to pills and from edibles to bric-a-brac.
Besides this materialistic knowledge she is expected to know something of poetry, history, fiction, music and art; must be versed in the newest ideas of science, know more nostrums than the family doctor, answer theological questions which puzzle the preacher, and so on, ad infinitum. The only wonder is that one head can contain it all. The ludicrous experiences of the husband who exchanged places for one day with his wife is no impossibility.
It fails of recent confirmation simply because the husbands of to-day are too shrewd to be caught in such a trap.
Truly home making is a profession without a rival. All others dwindle into respectable "second best."
Because so much of this department of woman's work is "far from the maddening crowd," because her full returns are not immediate, because her books cannot be balanced until the generation which follows her has audited the accounts, because it is not so prominent as important, not so brilliant as inspiring, not so showy as divine; woman herself has permitted it to be called drudgery. The home maker has without protest permitted a $2 estimate of her profession, and let clerks, saleswomen, dressmakers, milliners and type-writers pocket the $39,998 worth of praise to which she has an equal right.
Let us hope that the present agitation of thought and the opportunity for getting a good square look at things as they really are, will teach home makers to place a fair estimate upon themselves.
Some other hobgoblins which the new woman seeks to expose to the light of reform (and correctly named hobgoblins, because as soon as confronted they vanish), are these, an over-sensitiveness, a lack of self-confidence, a sentimentality of feeling rather than reason, a preference to imitate rather than initiate.
These are legacies for which woman is not respon-
