ublic school, and probably the elementary
school, must do the work.

Physiology and hygiene are already contributing to the knowledge which
makes for human betterment, but they also can be made to contribute
much more than they have sometimes done. The physiology of infancy
must be widely and insistently taught.

With proper education she [the young mother] would know the
meaning of the words food and sleep; she would know
something of their overwhelming importance upon the future
being and career of her child, who in his turn is to be one
of the world's citizens with full capacity for good or evil.
Knowing what were normal functions, she would be able to
recognize and guard against deviations from them. No day
would pass in which she would not find opportunity to
exercise self-restraint, keen observation and sensible
knowledge in furthering the normal and healthful evolution
of her child.[6]

The "little mother" classes in settlement houses, in community social
centers, and in some public schools are doing excellent work in
beginning this knowledge of infancy. No elementary school can really
afford to miss the opportunity such work holds out. Have we any right
to let a girl approach the care of her child with less than the best
that modern science can offer in this most important and exacting work
of her life? If not, it is again the public school which alone can be
depended upon to do the work, and we must get at least the beginning
of it done before the girl escapes us at the close of her
elementary-school course.

If you are impatient with a program which presupposes that practically
all women will be homemakers and mothers, either trained or otherwise,
let me remind you that the majority of women do marry, that most of
these and many of the unmarried do become homemakers, and that it will
be far safer for society to train the few--less than 10 per cent--who
never enter the career than to pursue the economically wasteful plan
of assuming educationally that no women will be homemakers, or that if
they are they can successfully undertake the most complicated,
difficult, and most important profession open to women with no
preparation at all, or with only what they have unconsciously absorbed
at home in the brief pauses of the education which did not educate
them for life.

The education for homemaking will never lose sight of the fact that
girls must really