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"This being a mother is a complicated business," as one mother of my acquaintance expresses it. Can we afford to have homemaking underrated as a vocation, to be avoided or entered into lightly, often with neither natural aptitude nor training to serve as guide to the "complications"? It would seem not.
For the untrained girl of merely average abilities, with no pronounced talent or inclination, but with an interest in persons and a pleasure in doing things for people, helping in the tasks of homemaking ought to prove suitable work.
Scorn frequently takes the place of understanding. The town or village girl goes out to teach in the country school, knowing little of country living and less of country homes. It is difficult, if not impossible, for such a teacher to be an influence for good. Especially as she approaches the homemaking problem is she without the knowledge which must underlie successful work.
As the child grows older, methods of teaching grow increasingly direct. Even here we shall perhaps not talk a great deal about "preparing for homemaking." But we shall see that the tools grow increasingly familiar, and that ideals once taught are retained and added to. We shall see that our science, our mathematics, our art, all contribute to the acquirement of homemaking knowledge.
Somebody chose me! That's what motherhood and homemaking rest on: the whole world is just one great big question of sex, spinning away in space! And even after a woman is married, she still plays with sex; she likes to feel that men admire her, doesn't she? At dinners there must be a man for every woman; at dances no two girls must dance together!
In this art of homemaking I have set down in my mind certain first principles, like the axioms of Euclid, and the first is, No home is possible without love. All business marriages and marriages of convenience, all mere culinary marriages and marriages of mere animal passion, make the creation of a true home impossible in the outset.
More than that, his early education will have included definite preparation for homemaking, so that his coöperation will be intelligent and therefore helpful. He will know more than he does now about the cost of living and he will assist in making a preliminary division of the year's income upon an intelligent basis.
No girl should feel that her industrial experience, however short, has nothing to contribute to the home life of which she dreams. No girl need waste the knowledge and skill gained in industrial life when she abandons gainful occupation for the home. Homemaking education, with industrial experience, ought to make the ideal preparation for life work.
The teacher must be seeing new possibilities in the same old schoolroom. The mother must be getting a larger horizon in her homemaking. We only live as we grow and learn. When anybody stays in the same place year after year and fills it, he does not rattle. Unless the place is a grave!
My experience has been that teachers have only to begin this work in order to arouse enthusiasm in any class of little girls. Once begun, it carries itself along. There should be no compulsion in this work. Choice and not necessity must be the rule in all our training for homemaking.
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