on, is one that has as yet received little attention but which
should be a matter of deep concern. The fact that so many old women of
little physical strength and who require much personal care can yet
be useful and therefore actually wanted as helpers in many families is
indicative of the fundamental fact in industrial life that a general
training for general usefulness, such as the housewife has had through
the ages, has some advantages still.

Before Mrs. Perkins Gilman gets all women into some specialty,
alongside of the already highly specialized men workers, let us see to
it that men get a chance for a more general training! The restless
idleness of the man whose specialty of manual labor or definite type
of business interest is now beyond his strength or opportunity is a
sad thing to see. We have had to develop a special charity to furnish
a work-interest to aged men in public institutions. They were so
miserable and pathetic without that occupation. Women fare better in
this, as in many other elements of labor, for they can do so many
things, usually have to do so many things, most of them, in the
family, that some one sort of work, at least, is left to them for
special old age. "Mother's pies" or grandmother's cakes or needlework
or knack at dusting or baby-tending or what not keeps her young and
makes her actually a helper even when old. Grandfather's loss of his
job, of his specialty of effort, of his hold on the great industrial
machine, leaves him too often hopelessly at sea for the passing of
time still left to him.

Well-to-do women in the United States, moreover, have acquired through
the large leisure inherited wealth or their husband's means have
supplied, a social business that has not only delayed old age but
nearly obliterated its ancient signs and tokens. The Clubs, the
Leagues, the Alliances, the charitable agencies, the institutions of
care for the defective, the friendless, the infirm, the dependent
children, the countless societies and cooeperative social organizations
for social serviceableness, in which women are leaders and chief
workers, bear witness that "grandmother" has found a place for her
energies after the children have grown and set up households of their
own.

If such a grandmother is a member of the daughter's family she is not
half so objectionable to daughter's husband as when mother-in-law had
a permanent place at the fireside, perhaps in the exact spot where he
wanted to p