fferences between persons. Women have now, for the
first time in the civilization called Christian, arrived at a point in
which differences between members of their sex can claim social
recognition. They are, therefore, now called upon as never before to
balance by conscious effort the personal desire and the social claim.
The family, more than any other inherited institution, feels the
oscillations between the individual demand for personal achievement
and the response to the social need for large service within group
relationships which now, for the first time, stir in the consciousness
of average women.

=The Family as We Know It Is the Central Nursery of Character.=--The
inevitable outcome of the new freedom, education and economic
opportunity of women gives us the problem of the modern family. The
ideal of the democracy we are trying to achieve is higher personality
in all the mass of the people. The method of democracy so far as we
can see is education, perfected and universalized, by which all the
children of each generation may be developed physically, mentally,
morally, and vocationally to their utmost excellence and power. The
family, as we have inherited it, is so far the central nursery and
school in this development. So far in the history of the race or in
its present social manifestation no rival institution, even the formal
school, offers an adequate substitute for the family in this beginning
of the educative process. The intimate and vital care and nurture of
the individual life still depends for the mass of the people upon the
private, monogamic, family. This intimate and vital care of the
children of each generation has so far in human experience cost women
large expenditure of time and strength; so large expenditure that
personal achievement has been wholly and is even now largely
subordinated to the social service implied in home-making. The deepest
problems of the modern family inhere in the effort to adjust the new
freedom of women, and its new demands for individual development in
customary lines of vocational work, to the ancient family claim. New
adjustments are called for not only in the family itself but in all
the educational, political, economic, and social arrangements of life
to accommodate this new demand of women to be achieving persons
whether married or single. Women have entered, as newly emerging from
status to contract, into a man-made social organization, a man-made
school, a man