There is no more critical time for her than when her young people go out to try themselves in the world.  The girl particularly needs this pull of the home, not only to keep her on a straight path, but to keep her from the narrowness and selfishness which overtake so many self-supporting women who have no close family responsibilities.  The fetich which has been made, for many years now, of work for women, that is, of work outside of the home, frequently leads the woman to take some particular virtue to herself for self-support.  She feels that it entitles her to special consideration, releases her from obligations which she does not voluntarily assume.  The attitude is enough to narrow and harden her life.  The great preventive of this disaster is a responsible home relation.  If she must share her earnings, it is a blessed thing for her.  If not, she should share its burdens and its hopes, in order to have a continued source of outside interest to broaden and soften her, to keep her out of the ranks of the charmless, self-centered, single women, whose only occupations are self-support and self-care.

The problems involved in keeping the girl who has a home from being homeless are not simple.  They are as intricate as anything a woman can face.  They call for the highest understanding, responsiveness, and activity.  No futile devices will meet them.  “My daughter is not coming home to be idle,” I heard a fine-intentioned woman say recently.  “I insist that she take all the care of her room, save the weekly cleaning, and that she keep the living-room tidy.”  But what an occupation for a young woman with a college degree, who for four years has led a busy, well-organized life in which each task was directed toward some definite purpose!  What a commentary on the mother’s understanding of “economic independence,” a matter of which she talks eloquently at her club!  All that it proved was that the woman had never realized the girl’s case, had never given consecutive, serious thought to its handling.

How little chance there will probably be for this same girl to do at home any serious work in case she develops a talent for it.  The home of the prosperous, energetic American woman is pervaded by a spirit of eager and generally happy excitement.  Good works and gay pleasures fill its days in a wild jumble.  There is little or no order, selection, or discretion discernible in the result.  “Something doing” all the time seems to be the motto, and to take part in this headless procession of unrelated events becomes the first law of the household.  The daughter has been living an organized life in college.  She wants to study or write, or do regular work of some kind.  But there is no order in the spirit of the place, no respect for order, no respect for a regular occupation.  “I cannot work at home”—­one hears the cry often enough.  It is not always because of this atmosphere of helter-skelter activity.  It is often because of something worse,—­an atmosphere of slothful, pleasure-loving indifference to activities of all kinds, or one of tacit or expressed discontent with the burdens and the limitations which are an inescapable part of the Business of Being a Woman.