chosen vocation retained as an
avocation, during the housemother's active service, must not, however,
be a chief dependence for either her own or the family support lest
the family or herself suffer. It must be in the nature of a leasehold
upon her chosen career to be retaken for full occupancy as soon as the
children are out of hand and she has begun to feel the call of empty
hours to the old familiar task. This is not an impractical plan, as
many women are proving by experience. And as has been previously
demonstrated, society in the past has wasted the work-power of women
past the childbearing age in more ruthless and stupid prodigality than
any other of its treasures. Third, as has been before indicated,
married women with young children must learn to combine in "team
work," as they have never yet done, and to make engagements by two's
or three's for the work one unmarried woman may take alone. This is
especially called for in the great social task of teaching, "woman's
organic office in the world," as Emerson called it. The evils charged
against a "feminized school," where they really exist, are those due
not so much to the sex of the grade-teachers as to the celibate
condition in the "permanent supply" and to the too rapidly changing
personnel of those who marry. The same suggested team work would
operate well in all the higher professions; and the success of
"continuation schools" proves that half-time and third-time labor
schedules are perfectly feasible in manual work. The fourth social
principle to be accepted in the interest of women and the family is
one little perceived at the present time: namely, that which marks the
limitations of social usefulness in the specialization of labor
itself.

=Dangers of Specialization in Professional Work.=--We are beginning to
see that this process may be carried so far that a shallow and a cheap
person may so fill the exacting and narrow routine of a specialty of
manual work or professional service as to check ambition and power to
achieve a full and rich personality. Last of all, the social
principle, by which the claims of personality and the demands of
social solidarity (now so entangled in friction) may work smoothly to
individual and social well-being, the principle yet to be clearly
outlined and helpfully applied, should receive interpretation and
guidance through the race-experience of women. For that service the
social education of women must be lifted to a far hi