that parents do without
for themselves both luxuries and often comforts, in order that their
children shall have a chance in general education and in vocational
training to fit them for later economic success. This fact, so
honorable to parents, often leads away from family unity by increasing
a chasm of culture and of condition between parents and children.
This, again, indicates that the modern standardization of child-care
and of parental duty has in it elements that demand far more developed
character in all the members of a family in order to hold together by
affection, justice, and higher compulsions of tenderness those who
have by virtue of the self-sacrifice of the older ones lost touch on
many of the common fields of effort.

=Farming and the Farmer's Wife.=--There is one great area both of
man's work and of woman's work which supremely needs better
understanding and more efficient organization in the interest of
family life. That is the basic industry of all civilized life,
farming, and woman's service in the farm home. We now generally place
our farm houses far apart from each other, and we have usually but one
house on the place and that for the owner and his family. We have no
adequate provisions by which the seasonal nature of agricultural work
can be so arranged by ingenious dovetailing with other forms of labor
as to furnish an all-the-year employment to men who wish to marry and
bring up families and yet do not own but work upon farms. We have few
means for easing the burdens of household labor for the farmer's wife,
and hence the larger the farm, the more property it represents, the
more men laborers it demands for the owner's successful conduct of the
business, the more unbearable the pressure upon health, strength,
time, and energy of the woman who is the farmer's helpmate. These are
some of the fundamental reasons for the drift away from farm life to
the cities and the towns, a drift seen to be ominous and if not
checked socially destructive of national prosperity when the Great War
forced us to take account of social conditions in the United States
more seriously than ever before.

The girls of the farms want to go away from home to find easier work
than their mother's kitchens afford quite as much as do the boys who
wish to get away from the summer drudgery and the winter dulness of
the isolated farmstead; and now the girls can get away easily and
often do. It is the lack of workers to adequatel