simply because they dislike housekeeping and the "bother" of little children, put an inefficient or efficient substitute in the position of family care-taker, while they themselves accept a clerkship in the husband's or stranger's down-town office, under the subterfuge of earning more than enough to pay for the extra service at home. Assuming maternity and shirking motherhood is even more dangerous and condemnatory than assuming paternity and shirking fatherhood. I understand from our Commissioner of Labor, Mr. Carroll D. Wright, that 88.7 per cent of employed women are single. If this is not true, and the majority or even a large minority of women wage-earners are married, then it is a serious matter that may be regulated in some degree by sociologists and capitalists.
The writer is a member of two clubs that are stimulating and helpful to the primary social settlement—the family—and believes that a moderate use of the club, like that of any good thing, is desirable. But when the club is ubiquitous and disproportionately valued, so that men, women, and adult children "recognize themselves more by their badges," and care more for ties of ribbon than ties of blood, then the club is inimical to home life. The remedy for this is in making the family a fraternity—an enlarged fellowship of people and ideas, a comradeship, that shapes itself into forms of mutual helpfulness. When heads of families, who now entertain their gentlemen friends in elaborate, expensive ways of eating and drinking at their clubhouse, are free and willing to bring them to the family house, where eating and drinking shall be the subordinate part of a home welcome; when it is the custom of women to open the doors of their homes and hearts in retail hospitality, instead of disposing of social indebtedness in the lump, as it were, at their club-house; when the ornaments of a house are "the friends who frequent it" and the family who live in it, and when courtesy between the members of the family is as pronounced as that between club members; when family amusements are pleasant and recreative, the home will be as popular as the club. To avoid disintegration and disloyalty, the family must satisfy the reasonable desires of its individual members.
That very important family function of communicating psychical impulses is too often disused, abused, or transferred. When this function is in normal exercise,[1] the family conversation at table is not the same category of questions and answers as to individual tasks, or the familiar rehearsal of the grocer's blunders, the servant's inefficiency, or the children's mishaps.
- ↑ See An Introduction to the Study of Society. By Small and Vincent, p. 246.
