a half-dozen
days during the whole time. Few men would exchange places with their
wives. Their hours are shorter, and when their day's work is done, it is
done, while a wife and mother not only works all day, but is also likely
to be called during the night. If any one is disturbed in the night by
the children, it is the mother; rarely the father.

How long would men continue to conduct their business offices or
factories with the primitive, senseless methods in vogue in the average
kitchen to-day? Man puts all his inventiveness, his ingenuity, in
improving methods, in facilitating his business and getting the drudgery
out of his work in his office and factory, but the wife and mother still
plods along in an ill-fitted kitchen and laundry. And yet our greatest
modern inventor has said that the cares of the home could be reduced to a
minimum and the servant problem solved if the perfectly practicable
devices, for lightening household labor were adopted in the home!

"But," many of our men readers will say, "is there any profession in the
world grander than that of home making? Can anything be more
stimulating, more elevating, than home making and the rearing of
children? How can such a vocation be narrowing or monotonous?"

Of course it is grand. There is nothing grander in the universe than the
work of a true wife, a noble mother. But it would require the
constitution of a Hercules, an infinitely greater patience than that of a
Job, to endure such work with almost no change or outside variety, year
in and year out, as many wives and mothers do, without breaking down.

The average man does not appreciate how almost devoid of incentives to
broadmindedness, to many-sidedness, to liberal growth, the home life of
many women is.

There is a disease called arrested development, in which the stature of
the adult remains that of a child, all physical growth and expansion
having stopped.

One of the most pitiable phases of American life and one of the most
discouraging elements in our civilization is the suppressed wife who is
struggling with arrested development after marriage.

I have known of beautiful young wives who went to their husbands with the
same assurance of confidence and trust as to their hopes and ambitions
with which a child would approach its mother, only to meet with a brutal
rebuff for even venturing to have an ambition which did not directly
enhance the husband's comfort or convenience in his h