we shall see young women who are going to sew at
home, young women who are going to sew in factories, young men who are
going to manufacture cloth. Hygiene will attract the sanitarian, the
nurse, the hotel manager, trousered or petticoated.

We come thus face to face with the final development of the home
economics movement. It issues into a double system. After providing,
to the young, that general introduction to life at large which we have
already detailed, it goes on, in its second phase, to provide
immediate information of a more specialized character to scholars more
mature _at the time when that information is immediately needed_. A
large part of the home economics movement of the future will be the
establishment of a system of continuous instruction for wives,
mothers, housekeepers, already entered upon their task of home-making
and child-rearing.

The need of this development appears as soon as we take the sequence
of events in a girl's life and place it beside the sequence of events
in a boy's. If a boy is going to be a cotton-machinery engineer, a
municipal sanitary expert, a food specialist, we do not give him his
real technical finish till he is entering his trade. We may have given
him, we ought to have given him, a vocational foundation of pertinent
knowledge. But we do not give him the minutiae of trade technique till
he is at the point of practicing his trade or has already begun to
practice it. This principle, applicable to the preparation for all
trades whatsoever, sets limits to the amount of detailed preparation
for home-making which can profitably be introduced, for most girls,
into the curricula of schools and colleges.

In former chapters of this book we have seen that for most girls there
is a gap, a large gap, between school and marriage, between girlhood
and motherhood. We have seen, too, that this gap tends to be filled
with money-earning work which demands a certain preparation of its
own. That point aside, however, the very existence of the gap in
question, no matter how it may be filled, means that if we give a
minute and elaborate preparation of home-making to girlhood we may
wait five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, before we see
wifehood and motherhood put that preparation to use.

Anybody who proposed to give a boy a minute and elaborate preparation
for civil engineering a possible twenty years before he became a civil
engineer and in contempt of the possible contin