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THE CONGRESS OF WOMEN.

and they well know that the good of no one organ can be found apart from the good of the whole.

What will be the steps of readjustment? I think I see at least five. First of all there will be a remodeling of primary and secondary school-life. The school was and is designed as a means of education; but what is it to be educated? “ To have passed successful examinations upon a certain number of books,” answers the average mem­ber of the school board and the average teacher; “ hence everything must bend to this mental feat.” “ To have gained command of all one’s powers, mental, moral, and physical,” answers the woman who has climbed all the rounds of the educational lad­der and stands at the top, “ and to gain such command requires brain work and hand work, work for self and work for others, work with others in the school and work alone in the home, theoretical work and practical work, and the two sides of the coup­lets should go hand in hand, to attempt to separate them means a one-sided develop­ment unworthy the name of education. Hence the curriculum of the school must be so remodeled as to leave time for the training of the home to go side by side with it.”

Second: There will be needed a remodeling of the curricula of secondary and higher education to make them touch more closely the life and needs of men and women. Anatomy, physiology and psychology, heat and light, air and its movements, chemistry and germ theories, if studied first in the laboratories of the schools, should be tested anew in the practical laboratory of the home and of society. The nation and its history are only the family and its history writ large; political economy domestic economy magnified.

Third: With the home and its needs thus made the practical objective point of a large part of college study, the home will rise into new importance, and the home keeper to a new place of honor; since only the owner of the cultured brain can aspire to the rank of a scientific as well as practical housekeeper, and such housekeeping will be seen to be as worthy an object of ambition as club work, reporting or teaching.

Fourth: Housekeeping alone will not fill all the time or satisfy all the aspirations of every cultured woman, and unless the home is to lose many of its brightest lights, it must be demonstrated that the brains of a cultured woman put into a household may save time for other work—the club, the magazine article, the book to be written, the profession to be followed while yet the home suffers no loss. But to make all this possible another step must be taken in the process of readjustment; namely,

Fifth: Under the wise guidance of the woman of higher education, the woman of secondary education will come again into the home, not as a drudge but as “ help,” and very efficient help—yes, come out of not a few stores and offices and even school­rooms into the domestic circle, there to receive full recognition and adequate compen­sation as trained workers, they having had, as a part of their education, the training which will make domestic work easy and pleasant.

If, then, the higher education of woman tends at all today to unfit women for domestic life, it seems to me to carry with it the promise and potency of a revivified and reglorified domestic life in a not-distant future; a domestic life which shall be recognized as not a slavery, but the broadest freedom; not a drudgery, but the noblest service, because the once household drudge—drudge because dependent and ignorant—is now the independent, self-poised, scientific mistress of a position of rec­ognized importance.