a
better preparation for an orderly home than the rush of the department
store or the factory. Purely routine workers, who put little or no
thought into their daily tasks, will enter upon homemaking lacking the
initiative that homemakers need. But the able office worker is not
merely a follower of routine. The greatest lack of office work as
preparation for a homemaking career is that the girl's interests
during so large a part of her day are led away from the home and all
that pertains to it. She works neither with people nor with the things
which go to make homes. Probably, on the whole, office work in a
general way may be classed as a neutral occupation, which neither adds
to, nor reduces, in any great degree the girl's possibilities as a
homemaker.

Salesmanship for girls, especially in the great department stores of
the cities, is a vocation of at least doubtful advantage for the
home-minded girl to pursue as a step in her training for managing her
own home. In the quiet of the village store, with few associates in
work, and with one's neighbors and fellow townsmen for customers,
salesmanship takes on a somewhat different aspect. But the city store
means usually hurry, excitement, nerve strain, a long day, with quite
probably reaction to excessive gayety and hence more nerve strain at
night. It means spending one's days among great collections of finery
which tend to assume undue importance in the girl's eyes. It means
constant association with people who spend, until spending seems the
only end in life. It means almost always pay lower than is consistent
with decent living if the girl must depend alone upon her own
earnings. And none of these things tends toward steady, skillful,
contented wifehood and motherhood in later years. This question of
underpaid work is of course not found alone in the department store.
But, wherever it is found, we may be sure that it tends on the one
hand toward marriage as a way of escape from present want, and on the
other toward inefficiency in the relation so lightly assumed.

The factory girl is in many respects in a position parallel to that of
the saleswoman. She earns too little to make comfortable living
possible. She too must leave home early and return late, wearied by
the monotony of a day in uninteresting surroundings, with neither
energy nor inclination for anything other than complete relaxation and
"fun." This desire for relaxation leads her often away from a crowded