n immigrants know
some kind of beautiful handicraft which they have entirely dropped for
fear of being laughed at.

A very frequent excuse for the lack of pains that the average woman
gives to the training of the raw girl is that she marries as soon as
she becomes useful. But is it not part of the woman's business in this
democracy to help the newcomer to an independent position? Is it not
part of her business to help settle her servants in matrimony?
Certainly any large and serious conception of her business must
include this obligation.

It is the failure to recognize opportunities for public service of
this kind that makes the woman say her life is narrow. It is parallel
to her failure to understand the relation of household economy to
national economy. She seems to lack the imagination to relate her
problem to the whole problem. She will read books and follow lecture
courses on Labor and come home to resent the narrowness of her life,
unconscious that she personally has the labor problem on her own hands
and that her failure to see that fact is complicating daily the
problems of the nation. It is the old false idea that the interesting
and important thing is somewhere else--never at home--while the truth
is that the only interesting and important thing for any one of us is
in mastering our own particular situation,--moreover, the only real
contribution we ever make comes in doing that.

The failure to dignify and professionalize household labor is
particularly hard on the unskilled girl of little education who
respects herself, has pretty clear ideas of her "rights" under our
system of government, and who expects to make something of herself.
There are tens of thousands of such in the country; very many of them
realize clearly the many advantages of household labor. They know that
it _ought_ to be more healthful, is better paid, is more interesting
because more varied. They see its logical relation to the future to
which they look forward.

But such a girl feels keenly the cost to herself of undertaking what
she instinctively feels ought to be for her the better task. She
knows the standards and conditions are a matter of chance; that, while
she may receive considerate treatment in one place, in another there
will be no apparent consciousness that she is a human being. She knows
and dreads the loneliness of the average "place." "It's breaking my
heart I was," sobbed an intelligent Irish girl, serving a term for