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Show THE HOME, I This Department is Edited by Miss Hazel Love of the Agricultural Agricul-tural College. Harper Bazar. "There are seventy-five per cent more applications from women for employment and seventy-five per cent less employment to give them than for years past," is a statement recently recent-ly made by the superintendent of Working Women's Protective Union in New York City. The fact is sensational sensa-tional but less so than a further statement state-ment from the same source: "The greatest handicap of women workers as a whole is marriage. Women have their ambition to excel in any kind of work checked' by their expectation of getting married, and the most helpless help-less woman in the world is the one who has been taken care of all her life by a good man, and for some reason or other, has to get out and earn her living in middle age or later. I have no desire to say anything against marriage; I am simply stating facts." This statement of facts is, however, misleading, because it implies that if one were so disposed, something might be said against marriage, whereas where-as the fault of the situation described lies in' the education of women. Since women, as a class, aim eventually to find occupation in marriage, this should be perfected in domestic trade and sciences as men arc perfected in their life's work; their education in the beginning should correct the. erroneous er-roneous idea possessed by the generality gener-ality of American women that to marry is to go out of business. Every sort of work a woman has to do in home making might profitably, in case of necessity, be undertaken as means of bread winning if women were educated for such work. All professional schools for women in France are erected with a view to educating women to be wives and mothers first, and afterwards anything that the particularly gifted or singularly singu-larly needy ones may elect to become, and the women of France arc universally univer-sally conceded to be the "better" half of a very thrifty and happy people. It would be unfortunate, indeed, for the notion to become current in the United Slates that the problem of the unemployqd women is to be solved by putting restrictions upon marriage or by subjecting the holy state of matrimony matri-mony to the suspicion of being badf for the industrial progression of the sex. It is to be solved by the right education edu-cation of women, and then, as Prcs. E1ist of Harvard lias so justly observed, ob-served, should take cognizance of the fact that the rearing of children and tlu making of homes arc pre-eminent- t ly the work for which women, even " twentieth century American women, i aro destined in the world. |