s social significance, saw that the work of home-making in this
engineering age must be worked out on engineering principles, and with
the cooperation of both trained men and trained women. The mechanical
setting of life is become an important factor, and this new impulse
which is showing itself so clearly today for the modified construction
and operation of the family home is the final crown or seal of the
conquest of the last stronghold of conservatism, the home-keeper.

Tomorrow, if not today, the woman who is to be really mistress of her
house must be an engineer, so far as to be able to understand the use
of machines and to believe what she is told. Your ham-and-eggs woman
was of the old type, now gone by in the fight for the right to think.

The emergence from the primitive condition was slow because the few of
us who did show our heads were beaten down and told we did not know.
It has required many college women (from some 50,000 college women
graduates) to build and run houses and families successfully, here one
and there another, until the barrel of flour has been leavened.
Society _is_ being reorganized, not in sudden, explosive ways, but
underneath all the froth and foam the yeast has been working. The
world is going to the bad only if one believes that material progress
is bad. If we can see the new heaven and the new earth in it, then we
may have faith in the future.

The human elements of love and sacrifice, of foresight and of faith,
are going to persist, and any apparent upheaval is only because of
settling down into a more solid condition, a readjustment to
circumstances. As Caroline Hunt has said[17]: "We may disregard the
popular fear that the home will finally take upon itself the
characteristics of a public institution.... Human intelligence, which
suits means to ends, and which is ever coming to the aid of human
affection, will prevent that. So long as affection lasts it will seek
satisfactory expression in home life, and so long as intelligence
endures it will stand in the way of the extension of the borders of
the home beyond the possibilities of the mutual helpfulness to its
members."

[17] Home Problems from a New Standpoint, p. 140.

The persistent efforts of the farsighted to secure a place in
education for the subjects fundamental to the modern home are now
respectfully listened to.

It is, perhaps, not strange that the first successes in modern
housekeeping were gained in public