goods, to come into her home. She would
never buy a ready-made garment which did not bear the label of the
Consumer's League. She would recognize that she is a guardian of
quality, honesty, and humanity in industry.

A persistent misconception of the nature and the possibilities of this
practical side of the Business of Being a Woman runs through all
present-day discussions of the changes in household economy. The woman
no longer has a chance to pay her way, we are told, because it is
really cheaper to buy bread than to bake it, to buy jam than to put it
up. Of course, this is a part of the vicious notion that a woman only
makes an economic return by the manual labor she does. The Uneasy
Woman takes up the point and complains that she has nothing to do. But
this release from certain kinds of labor once necessary, merely puts
upon her the obligation to apply the ingenuity and imagination
necessary to make her business meet the changes of an ever changing
world. Because the conditions under which a household must be run now
are not what they were fifty years ago is no proof that the woman no
longer has here an important field of labor. There is more to the
practical side of her business than preparing food for the family! It
means, for one thing, the directing of its wants. The success of a
household lies largely in its power of selection. To-day selection has
given way to accumulation. The family becomes too often an
incorporated company for getting things--with frightful results. The
woman holds the only strong strategic position from which to war on
this tendency, as well as on the habits of wastefulness which are
making our national life increasingly hard and ugly. She is so
positioned that she can cultivate and enforce simplicity and thrift,
the two habits which make most for elegance and for satisfaction in
the material things of life.

Whenever a woman does master this economic side of her business in a
manner worthy of its importance, she establishes the most effective
school for teaching thrift, quality, management, selection--all the
factors in the economic problem. Such scientific household management
is the rarest kind of a training school. And here we touch the most
vital part in the Woman's Business--that of education.

Every home is perforce a good or bad educational center. It does its
work in spite of every effort to shirk or supplement it. No teacher
can entirely undo what it does, be that good or ba