ready to be women. The education of
the home and the school must be unified, and together they must give a
training that will lead girls into the actualities of the life that lies
before them. Our present elementary schools, and still more our high
schools, lead girls neither to intelligent work nor to intelligent
living as women and mothers. Up to at least the age of fourteen, the
education should be general, looking to the development of all the
powers of body, mind and sensibilities. But through all these eight or
ten years of training, two factors should receive constant and
intelligent attention. In the first place, we should realize that we are
not fitting women for drawing-rooms nor for convents, but for a working
world; therefore well graded and interesting manual training should run
through all these years and should furnish a well-developed base for
later special industrial preparation of some kind. In the second place,
the girls should be taught by men and women, married and unmarried, and
fine ideals of actual womanhood, not alone in shops and factories, in
school-rooms, and in professions--but also in homes, should be
constantly held before them. Our present education leaves this training
mainly to the homes, and neither the parasitic rich nor our eight
million wage-earning women, when mothers, can or will attend to it.

After the girl reaches the age of fourteen, she should have at least two
years of further education in which she could master the details of some
necessary work which would enable her to look the world in the face and
offer fair payment for her living. With most girls, this work would be
connected with children and the service of the home; for domestic
service, no matter how organized, must always occupy a multitude of
women. All girls should have at least rudimentary training in these
matters.

During the period of transition from schools to their own family life,
the girls might well give a half dozen years to work in factories and
stores where the conditions should be as good, and as well guarded, as
in our best school buildings--in factories, in a word, where the
employers would be willing that their own daughters should work. This is
surely a fair standard. Work which is not safe or fit for me to do, is
not fit for me to hire done. If this principle fails, then democracy is
but a dream.

But during all this period of preparation we should never forget that,
as Madame Gnauck-Kuehne s