d and one more enter into this question of
whether a woman who has the ability to do a job outside the home should
do it or not. In the last few years I have been getting many letters
from women whose husbands have fallen ill or died and left them alone or
with dependents. Those who have had no training are the most pathetic,
but those who once worked and then gave up altogether are in almost as
difficult a position.

I doubt that it is ever wise for a woman who has once had a skill to
allow herself to lose it entirely, for, granting that she makes of
marriage a career, there may come a time when she will need work, and
there will certainly come a time when her children are grown. If the
demands on her time are fewer and she is well, she may feel the
necessity of taking up some kind of regular work again, particularly if
in her youth she was trained to keep busy. This may not be a financial
necessity, but merely something to take the place of the duties which
were hers when marriage was her only job.

In my own experience I have found there is one other thing that may
happen to a woman. For some reason she may have to interest herself in
things that have seemed to be more directly her husband's interests and
in which she never expected to take any personal part. She may find she
becomes interested for a variety of reasons. This necessity of
developing interests of her own which take her out of her home will find
her better equipped if she has once done a job for pay and kept on doing
it now and then throughout her life so that she is able to maintain a
professional attitude toward all work, both in her home and out of it.

There are just a few women who have special gifts, who have established
careers before they meet the men they wish to marry. If they give up
these careers, they may find much of the savor of life is removed when
they are not doing something which requires independent thought and
initiative. These are the women who go to work because they are
conscious of a capacity within themselves which cannot be denied, and
they should marry only men who understand this and are willing to make
some compromises. It can be done very happily, but it depends on both
the man and the woman in each case. These "career" women do a job for
the love of it. They may be so gifted that they can cope successfully
with household affairs from the administrative point of view. They may
not be interested in doing any of the homely