e and opportunity for individual vocation
as never before. Her primal duty to the race remains, however, a debt
to be paid as a first obligation wherever and whenever a woman accepts
the august function of motherhood. And to-day the majority of most
successful families absorb in large measure the time and strength of
the housemother.

=What Women Need Most= is moral sanity and mental poise; the ability
to adjust themselves to radical and rapid changes in their
relationship to society without losing the finest and most useful
results of their past social discipline. Woman is acquiring a new
relationship to the home--that of mutual headship with man in the
social institution in which for ages she has been a legal subordinate.
Social welfare demands that she take into the new copartnership of
domestic life the old devotion to family interests. Woman is acquiring
a new relationship to the school--that of learner in the highest
educational opportunity and of teacher in an ever-widening area.
Social welfare demands that she take into the modern school her
ancient devotion to child-life.

The mass of women are acquiring a new relationship to the industrial
order--that of spenders instead of producers. Social welfare demands
that the modern woman put into her function of purchasing consumer of
staple products the same conscientious standardizing of those products
and the same sense of responsibility for the conditions surrounding
laborers which she displayed in the old handicraft days of domestic
industry. A minority of women are acquiring also a new relationship to
the industrial order in becoming the recipient of wages or salary,
instead of being paid for work as of old in "truck" or in "kind." The
feel of the pay envelope on her palm is an unaccustomed but a
delicious pleasure to the modern woman. Social welfare demands that
she be not beguiled thereby into complicity with industrial
exploitation of the weak and the poor, such as she would not have
tolerated in the old days of personal relationship in labor in
domestic handicraft.

Woman is acquiring a new relationship to recreation and the social
control of the customs ruling leisure hours. Social welfare demands
that gambling be not made fashionable in the drawing room as it is
being driven out of the business world; that dancing be not vulgarized
and the mother-tongue not corrupted, but that self-control, purity,
dignity, mark the "new woman" as it did her best ancest