ocial factor can fail to recognize her vital and necessary connection
with the problem. Therefore in answer to the question "What ought
woman to be?" we say boldly, "A homemaker." Reduced to simplest terms,
the conditions are these: if homes are to be made more serviceable
tools for social betterment, women must make them what they ought to
be. Consequently homemaking must continue to be woman's
business--_the_ business of woman, if you like--a considerable,
recognized, and respected part of her "business of being a woman." Nor
may we overlook the fact that it is only in this work of making homes
and rearing offspring that either men or women reach their highest
development. Motherhood and fatherhood are educative processes,
greater and more vital than the artificial training that we call
education. In teaching their children, even in merely living with
their children, parents are themselves trained to lead fuller lives.

"The central fact of the woman's life--Nature's reason for her--is the
child, his bearing and rearing. There is no escape from the divine
order that her life must be built around this constraint, duty, or
privilege, as she may please to consider it."[1] It is the fashion
among some women to assume that it is time all this were changed, and
that therefore it will be changed. They look forward to seeing
womankind released from this "constraint, duty, or privilege," and yet
see in their prophetic vision the race moving on to a future of
achievement. The fact, however, ignore it as we may, cannot be
gainsaid: no man-made or woman-made "emancipation" will change
nature's law.

It was well that after centuries of repression and subjection woman
sought emancipation. She needed it. But the wildest flight of fancy
cannot long conceal the ultimate fact. Woman is the mother of the
race. "The female not only typifies the race, but, metaphor aside, she
_is_ the race."[2] Emancipation can never free her from this destiny.
In the United States, where woman has the largest freedom to enter the
industrial world and maintain herself in entire independence, the
percentage of those who marry is higher than in the countries where
woman is a slave. Ninety per cent of the mature women in our country
become homemakers for a certain period, and probably over 90 per cent
are assistant homemakers for another period of years before or after
marriage.

Any vocational counselor who fails to reckon first with the homemaking
care