housing of families do we not all have to depend upon
the architect, the builder, the real estate broker, the speculator in
land, the laws concerning boundaries, taxes and title deeds, rent and
landlords' powers, and press all one upon another for a chance for a
home when we elect to live where many other people want also to live?
Is, then, the shelter of the family no longer the mother's care?

=The Woman in Rural Life.=--The country-woman, dealing at first hand
with rural conditions, has many of the same problems of personal
devotion in the provision of food, clothing, and shelter with which
her ancient ancestor struggled. She has, it is true, "scientific
farming" of men to raise the harvests that ancestor's heroic but
feeble efforts could not secure. She has mechanical and commercial
aids as housemother such as the primitive woman never imagined. She
has been released from much of the drudgery which burdened her
grandmother in the domestic stage of industry. She is under social
protection such as no previous woman enjoyed in the solitary household
of the past. And in the United States the Federal Government is
offering her aids.[3] It is, however, true that the housemother in
rural communities still feels many of the obligations of the ancient
woman. The three-meal-a-day routine, the actual preparation of raw
material of food for the table, the personal offices of housework,
washing, ironing, mending, making, sweeping, dusting, cleaning, in all
their varied details, keep her in active sympathy with the past. This
fact furnishes the main reason why "Women's Columns" and "Magazines
for Women" reach such large circulation in rural districts, where they
help toward lessening the domestic burden by showing how to carry it
more easily.

The farm woman, however, is moving, many thousand strong, with men as
many, to mitigate the isolation of the solitary household, to bring
the home nearer to the neighbors, the school, the church and the
store, by massing rural homes in villages and forming the habits of
the men-folk to go further afield for their own work. This movement,
which is of all social reforms most needed because affecting larger
classes than any other and also because affecting the basic industry
of all countries, that of agriculture, is working toward making
farm-life once more attractive to young men and capable of winning
young women to the life of the farmer's wife.

Meanwhile, the higher forms of social org