base their
activities in church work upon such a conception. The church built
upon such a foundation will be foremost among local forces devoted to
community service and will be a true force in the individual lives of
its people. The women of the church need to use the church as an
effective instrument for community betterment--not merely material
welfare, but actual increase in spiritual worth. Perfunctory church
attendance has little part in such a program. It calls rather for
intelligent understanding of church problems and an application of
spiritual ideals to everyday life.

Outside the organizations common to all communities the homekeeper
finds that she must keep in touch with her particular neighborhood
through its social life. It is here that her children are growing up,
here that they find their friends, here that they give and take
knowledge of themselves, of people, of ways to enjoy life and to meet
its problems. Here perhaps they will find their life mates and will
start out to be homemakers themselves. The mother of a family must
know her community thoroughly. She must do her share toward making it
a safe place and a pleasant place in which her children and other
children may grow up, and in which she and her husband, other women
and their husbands, may spend their lives. The mother who knows her
children's friends, who makes them welcome at her house, who "gets
acquainted" with their qualities good and bad, who is a "big sister"
to them all, will not find herself shut out from her children's social
life. If all the mothers were "big sisters" and all the fathers were
"big brothers," neighborhood society would be a safer thing than it
sometimes is.

Nor should all the social life center about the young people. The
woman's club, the village improvement society, the men's civic league,
all have their places. Club life will menace neither the man nor the
woman whose first interest is the home; and every man and woman needs
the stimulus of contact with other minds.

[Illustration: Photograph by Brown Bros.
A road in DeKalb, Illinois, before improvements were made. Through
the agency of improvement societies, homemakers may often bring about
community reforms]

[Illustration: Photograph by Brown Bros.
The same road after repairs were made through the efforts of members
of the community]

Sometimes it will happen that the homemaker finds work to be done in
the line of community reform. Perhaps the roads