On the working side the life of the family has an evil record for pettiness and monotony, but much of this is due to wrong comparisons.  A woman who does her own housework would presumably have to work in any case.  Is the work of the family more petty or monotonous than the work of the factory, shop or office?  Surely the woman who spends her days looking after the details of furnishing a house and keeping it clean, of providing and serving meals, of looking after clothing and caring for children, has a world of self-expression compared with which factory and shop work is infinitely petty and mean.  In the social life of friends, neighborhood, school and church she is at least as well placed as the factory worker.  If the woman has the preparation required for teaching or independent business, she will find ways to use her powers that will relieve the routine of housework.  And if the family has means to hire help, the wife has a position from which she can exercise social and political power superior to that of the foot-loose celibate.

Meantime, the housework grows steadily simpler and less exacting, even with the growing complexity of our modern life.  Most of the primitive industries have left the home, and products come from the factory ready to use.  Furnace heating, hot and cold water, improved cooking conditions and many domestic inventions of our day are keeping housework well abreast of other unspecialized work in attractiveness.

The fact that domestic servants are scarce and unwilling to do general housework, in no way disproves the soundness of these conclusions.  The wife, if she is a real wife, and we are discussing no others, is working for those she loves, under conditions of free initiative.  The general servant is working for those who will not even admit her right to participate in their social life, and instead of freedom in her industrial life, she must generally adjust her efforts to the caprices of an untrained mistress.  Well-trained mistresses, who know how to work themselves and who have a democratic sense of human values, seldom have trouble in securing able servants, even in this transition time when the shops and factories are calling so loudly to working girls.

No intelligence which a woman may possess needs remain unused in the handling of a family.  Women spend most of the household money to-day, at least in lower and middle-class homes.  To use wisely the family pay-envelope requires knowledge and judgment of a high order.  Problems in economics, sanitation, food-values and aesthetics confront the housewife at every turn of the day’s work.  “Even a slave need not work as a slave;” and a woman living with the man she loves is the freest woman on earth, so far as mind and spirit are concerned.

But the factory girl, or the teacher, or the professional woman who seeks the fulfilment of all of life in the factory, the school or the consulting-room, will soon tire and clamor for relief.  The housewife, or the mistress of a home, must likewise seek life away from her work if she is to love it and wake each morning with a desire to continue it.  Luckily we have reached a place where working women in the home are seeking supplementary life outside, and they seem to be quite as successful in their search as are factory girls or teachers.