of business management of the ordinary household. When we get along a little further, we shall see better how to add to the training for specialties of selfsupport in the shop and factory and counting-room such specialties of household aid as are most susceptible of this organization and business management. Then it will be quickly perceived how many girls, and their parents as well, choose these instead of specialties more remote from the home life.

Mrs. Richards, whose inestimable service to the women of the United States makes her recent death a public calamity, once said that "the old family life took the dining and sitting room into the kitchen; the new family life would take the kitchen into the dining room and the sitting room." It was a fine way of stating a fact, more and more apparent, that mechanical invention and modern industry are so refining and easing the processes of household labor that the woman-head of the household can more and more dispense with kitchen paraphernalia of the inherited sort and do her work in the daintiest surroundings. When she can and does so manage her own supreme share of the household demand, she can begin to utilize to its utmost efficiency, the hour help of the well-bred and educated woman and girl who will then be ready and more than willing to aid her. This, of course, does not apply and will not for a long time, if ever, to the rich family of many servants, or to the needs of those women who should be emancipated from even the usual

Ellen H. Richards, former editor Journal of Household Economics, Professor in Boston Institute of Technology.

burdens of the home life by reason of special talent and social usefulness which make it well worth while that society should release them from the general for the sake of the special usefulness. This discussion is dealing with the average condition and the average need, not with the exceptions either of circumstance or of individual genius. The fundamental need in the reorganization of this average household is to democratize the home in all its relationships. The extension of the trade-teaching of girls along the lines indicated will prove a great help in hastening that reorganization. The extension of the college curriculum along the lines of domestic economy and the preparation for professional work in lines near the home life will be the great leading influence toward that extension of the trade-teaching of girls and the better organization of domestic labor. ready a pronounced and healthy guidance along this line is shown by college graduates and other cultured women of democratic tendencies and of high social ideals.

Al

To this end, as well as to the ends of social progress in every direction, one study has contributed more than any other; and that a new study, and one especially capable of forming the more philosophic element in the preparation for life work given by the new courses for women in high school, college and university. Reference is here made, of course, to the new science of sociology. Sociology is so new that it is still in its callow youth and denied the honors of the older and

See Lester F. Ward, Outlines of Sociology.

more definitely outlined disciplines of the mind. Its very title of "science" is contested by many educational leaders. Yet at least sociology is a daring and masterful combination of accepted sciences; of biology, ethnology, psychology, history, economics and politics. As such it is offering its new explanation of many ancient riddles of life and its still newer gospel of social control in the interest of a purposive human progress. It not only boldly shows "why we are so," but why and how we should become something different, in social relationship. In its forms of theory it has proved most congenial to the feminine truth-seeker, and in its forms of practical suggestion still more the very bread of intellectual life to women desirous of doing their duty. Abstract philosophy has never been close to the feminine genius; that is why philosophers have been so prone to believe in the hopeless inferiority of women! For a human being to sit down and evolve a theory which he called "universal" and "ultimate" has always affected the sense of humor in women! It has seemed to brilliant and clever women a bit absurd for the finite to be so sure about infinite truth. Also the incurable practicality of women, which has often enough made them poor helpmeets for the idealism of men, has made them query "what's the use" when the philosopher painfully evolved some "camel" of theory from his inner consciousness, and never thought to test at first hand the real things of daily living. This has been at once an advantage and a disadvantage to woman: an advantage in keeping her mental tendency close to facts and useful work; and a disadvantage in

depriving her of some of the delights of mental aviation. The new ways which sociology has inaugurated of making explanatory notes of the universe, the new ways of dealing with the age-long riddles of the existence of evil and the way of escape from it, which sociology offers, the new ways of going directly to the facts of environment for the reasons for social ills, and the still newer ways of demanding radical changes in environment for the benefit of the social whole, exactly suit the feminine mind, and are in direct line with the special sex-development of women. Naturally the new sociology is furnishing, along with other fresh explanations of life, the most complete solution of the old puzzle, What are women and what are they for? which any science or philosophy or guess of the human mind has yet offered. Naturally, also, although the fact is not yet clearly perceived in full significance, we find that those colleges and universities which develop "courses suited to the special needs of women" also offer the most advanced and varied courses in social economics. In many of these the attempt to suit educational opportunity to the new feminine ideal has defi-` nitely linked itself to the attempt to incorporate the new social philosophy and the new tendency to social service into the new education. This is true not only in the colleges and universities, but also in the secondary schools, where it is already a pressing question,-What elements of sociology may properly and usefully be taught in the high school, and where shall we insert them? In this connection let us note that training in household economics and home-making is

now given in at least four kinds of educational institutions of grade above the elementary school, namely: I. As a department of high school instruction; often the extension of a course in manual training in the grades below, and in any case conceived and treated for the most part as general preparation for life, but having an increasingly distinct bearing upon vocational choice and business training.

II. As a department of normal schools; chiefly as a means of preparing manual training teachers for the grade schools, the courses being technical and practical and attempting to deal only with such processes as children can understand and practise.

III. As a department in colleges and universities attended by women and with the double purposes, seldom differentiated in the consciousness of the teaching body itself: one to fit undergraduates for the home, and the other to aid toward vocational usefulness and success. As has been shown, increase in these courses is called for by three classes, those that demand enlargement of the inherited curriculum of men's higher education for purposes of general feminine culture; those that desire a more varied training of women for self-support in professional fields; and those who see the need for better training of women for philanthropic service.

IV. As a specialty in a separate technical school, like Pratt Institute, for example; or as a distinctly defined technical department in a university, like the School of Industrial Arts of Teachers College, Co'Brooklyn, N. Y.