ich would pay them to continue
in business even after marriage.

WOMEN IN DOMESTIC SERVICE

Others of these girls are utterly unfitted for office work. Some of them
would succeed very well as teachers, some as artists, and others as
musicians. Like so many of their brothers, however, they have followed the
line of least resistance--regardless of their aptitudes. Most of these
girls belong in the home. They are quite justified in looking forward to
matrimony as their true career. How much better if they would only earn
the necessary pin-money in domestic service! From a monetary point of
view, thirty dollars a month, with board, room, laundry, and many other
necessities furnished, is a princely compensation compared with the five
or eight dollars a week received by most girls in an office. From an
economic point of view, the coming into our homes of thousands of
intelligent, fairly well educated, trained, and ambitious young women
would be a blessing and benefit. Socially, of course, the first young
women who adopted such a radical change in custom would be pariahs. They
would also, doubtless, suffer many hardships in the way of irregular
hours, small, dark, stuffy rooms, unreasonable mistresses, no adequate
place to entertain their friends, and other such injustices. But, with a
higher and more intelligent class of household servants, doubtless these
abuses would disappear.

We opened this chapter with the disavowal of any intention to advocate
reform. We make this one exception. We most earnestly hope that such a
reform may be consummated. At the same time, we have an uneasy suspicion
that we are sighing for the moon.

THE TRAGEDY OF BAD COOKING

The whole problem of household management is just now a very serious one.
When the maid is ignorant, untrained, and, as is so often the case, slack,
wasteful, and inefficient, the situation is, in all conscience, bad
enough. But when the mistress is only a little less ignorant than her
servant, is equally slack, and perhaps even more inefficient, the high
cost of living gets a terrific boost in that household, while comfort,
wholesomeness, and adequacy of living are correspondingly depressed. One
of the saddest elements in our consultation work is the stream of both men
and women who lack courage, aggressiveness, initiative, mental focus, and
personal efficiency generally because they are deficient in physical
stamina. Their whole life is, as it were, sub-normal. With inh