The particular work of women is not just like any other work; indolence and failure in doing it, however, have been too often excused on account of this fact. Their work is yearly becoming more and more allied with other commercial, intellectual and moral activities. Even their housekeeping is no longer a disagreeable thing kept out of sight as much as possible, as the plumbing used to be. Its varied problems are being recognized and studied. Nobody denies that they are difficult, but it is not reasonable to suppose that they are the most difficult in the world, nor that they are unsolvable. One reason why they are difficult is that they are an attempt to establish order and law, without destroying individuality and freedom; and another reason is that the housewife exercises her profession chiefly for the benefit of her own family. If the physician had to doctor himself, the preacher preach to his wife, and the teacher teach his own children, their professions might be in as much confusion as the housekeeping profession is. The efforts to do away with these difficulties by having families live together, eat together, or do anything else in a wholesale way, have not succeeded and have led in a wrong direction. What is wanted is a way to preserve the separate family and the separate family home, not a way to make them into something else. Difficulty is a characteristic of their work which should appeal to women. They are seeking to do difficult things. They are seeking to prove that there is no profession, nor labour, nor art in which they cannot succeed. In many cases they have succeeded admirably; it has not proved the point they set out to prove however, but another. What they have proved by their activities is that they are amply able to solve the problems and accomplish the organization of the work which is especially their own. They cannot get it believed that they are equal to anything while their own work lies undone--while they wilfully leave the home or helplessly stay in it. Things which we are proud to do in other fields, we neither see nor do in our own. For the sake of a college degree, or a paper to be read before a club, we delve in difficult books; yet we do not study, nor even read about our own work. We would be proud to invent a flying machine, or a mud-digger, yet most of the inventions to aid housework are made by men. We aspire to be stockbrokers, merchants, accountants, bankers--while housekeeping finance has become a stock joke. We are eager to study social problems and take up settlement work, but we do not think it worth while to study our own cooks. We feel in ourselves a power to organize and betake us to the club, and leave the cook and the nursemaid to organize our homes and our children's lives. We have raised the woman's work of teaching and of nursing into excellent professions, and yet we are ready to sit down and cry before the difficulties of housekeeping.