In a Western city, somewhat addicted to the formation of literary clubs and reading-circles, is a company of women who meet for the study of history, closing the afternoon’s work with a discussion of current events. In alluding to these discussions, a member once said, “No matter what subject is introduced, we always drift off to the woman question.” The half-jesting remark has in it more of wisdom than of criticism. The so-called “woman question” is not, as was once popularly supposed, synonymous either with woman suffrage or with the higher education of woman--it is as broad and as deep as the thoughts and activities of woman. It was inevitable that for many years efforts should be made to open new occupations to women, to give them better preparation for their work, and to secure fair remuneration for service well done. It was inevitable, because, however much some sociologists may wish it otherwise, the fact remains that woman is and must be to a certain extent a wage-earner. These efforts have been reasonably successful; almost every avenue of work is open to women, and almost every coveted opportunity for preparation is hers. The reaction, however, has come, and the pertinent question is being asked, “Why has so little been done to improve the work of woman in those fields which have always without question been considered legitimately hers?” A glance at our periodical literature does indeed show unusual interest in all questions affecting domestic life. Economists are asking why the wages paid for domestic service are higher than those paid the average woman in other occupations, and why, in spite of this, the demand for household workers is greater than the supply. Philanthropists are puzzled to know why girls prefer to live in crowded tenement-houses on the merest pittance rather than enjoy many of the comforts of home life as a household employee. Experienced housekeepers find life a burden when it becomes necessary to change the divinity who rules the kitchen or the nursery, and wonder why it is so difficult to secure efficient help. Educated women without homes who desire to learn the principles of domestic science can find no explanation for the fact that the United States with its hundreds of thousands of schools affords scarcely one where this subject can be studied as a serious profession as is law, medicine, or theology. None of these questions has been satisfactorily answered. The editor who discourses of “half-baked writers on political economy” settles one of them by saying that there is no reason whatever why women should dislike domestic service. But the autocratic assertion has not visibly increased the number of women desiring employment as house-servants. The benevolent individual who has not yet learned that thousands of girls have neither mothers nor homes, blandly answers another of these questions by saying, “Let girls learn housekeeping at home.” The world at large