son for it.

"Home Economics is the study of Right Living, the study of the
importance, the utility, and the possible beauty of the common things
of daily existence. Now one cannot study sanitation, fresh air, pure
food, adequate housing, the care of children, the protection of the
family from disease, the maintenance of a proper environment and
regimen for health and efficiency, without instantly perceiving the
closeness of the relationship between the life of the individual and
the life of the community.

"The so-called bread-and-butter studies, now being inserted into
women's education, have the merit, superficially paradoxical, of
raising the mind to the duties of citizenship. The simplest mother,
immured in her home with her small children, will in the days to come
realize, as she does not now at all realize, what the freshness of the
milk supply, what the purity of the city water, what the efficiency of
the health department, mean to those children. She will know--and when
she knows she will care.

"Let me give you one illustration of the extent to which certain
teachers of Home Economics recognize the future civic responsibilities
of their pupils.

"In a little town far up in the Northwest there's a famous Homemakers'
School. It is far from the social pressure of packed populations.
Nevertheless, along with all the housekeeping details which crowd its
two-year course, you'll find a series of lectures on 'Home and Social
Economics' based on a theory which I'll try to give in almost the very
words used by the school itself in its public announcements of policy.
It's this:

"'The growing wealth of different communities, the application of
modern inventions to home industries, the passing of many of the
former lines of women's work into the factory have brought to many
women leisure time which should be spent in social service. Civic
cleanliness, the humane treatment of children, the city beautiful,
education, civic morality, the protection of children from immoral
influences, child labor, the organizations to protect neglected
children and to reform delinquent children--all are legitimately
within the province of motherhood, and the attempt to improve
conditions is a part of the duty of the modern woman.'

"Is that radical? Surely not. Surely it's conservative. There's not a
suggestion in it of any change in woman's interests. There's only an
awakening to the fact that her interests are now diffused througho