ing, and, further, the chance of her
marriage being an assured provision for her maintenance throughout
life, is by no means a certainty.

These considerations must militate against the appearance of domestic
subjects in the school time-table, but there are others working in
exactly the opposite direction. These are the increase in house rent
and general rise in prices which make economy in domestic affairs, and
good management, more valued; the dearth of servants; and the decay of
the old traditions of housekeeping. Another factor is the new cult
of hygiene, and increased interest in diet, shown especially by
the inhabitants of large towns, who bewail their lack of energy and
fitness.

If the home is to establish itself as an acknowledged success in
modern conditions, it ought to be run by women with brains. It is
now becoming acknowledged that the work needs the application of the
scientific method of thinking. It may be true that home-making in the
non-material sense is an art, but housekeeping nowadays is a science;
and so much a science that a woman who has the chance of making
herself an expert will be tempted to make housekeeping a career, and
to undertake the job on a much larger scale than is needed in the
ordinary house.

Thus, while there was practically no teaching of domestic subjects
in girls' secondary schools until about seven years ago, a demand
for teachers of the kind has sprung up very recently, and is rapidly
increasing.

The headmistress anxious to undertake something of the sort has had
many difficulties to face in the immediate past. The only teachers
of domestic arts whom she could engage had received a very different
education from the other members of her staff. If their whole time
were not taken up with teaching their subject, they had few or
no subsidiary subjects to offer, nor were they prepared for those
curiously mingled clerical and pastoral duties which fall to the
lot of a form mistress. In general education they might, indeed, be
obviously below the girls in the upper forms, whose general culture
had been sedulously cultivated for years. If teachers of this kind
were, nevertheless, not to be kept for selected "stupid girls," it
was possible (1) to introduce domestic work of the simple handicraft
nature into the middle school, leaving it out of the upper school
where there was a greater pressure on the time-table, or (2) to
organise a post-school domestic course for girls who wer