The school-room is the place in which the principles of work are
implanted: thoroughness, grasp, speed, decision, and definite purpose.
The shop is the apprentice-place of work, before one takes up individual
responsibilities. The man who wishes to rise in the railroad service
goes into the shops and roundhouse. The man who wishes to take charge of
an important department in a department store is put to tying packages.
Teachers' work will not be rightly done until certain advantages are
given to teachers that are now largely withheld. Teachers need more
society, more hours of play, freer opportunity of marriage. Instead of
being tied up to exercise-books and roll-books, in their home-hours,
they should have a chance to spend their time on the golf-links, at
afternoon teas, in visiting and in entertaining friends. Take away
society from any man or woman, and you take away the possibility of a
growing, happy, and helpful life. We need friends just as we need air.
Teachers need admiration and affection, just as much as the society
girl does.
Universities should have, in their faculties, men and women who
represent the best social as well as the best intellectual life of the
world--who are not only, in the highest sense of the word, society men
and women, but who are social leaders, inspiring truth, inculcating
larger social ideals of the best sort.
The problem between capitalist and laborer, however, only affects a
portion of the world; that of domestic service a still smaller
proportion; that of teachers affects only a class. There is another
problem, which affects nearly all married women, and therefore a large
section of the human race. It is the problem of mother-work. Here is
where the economist should next turn his attention. First, What is
Mother-work? Second, What are the best economic conditions under which
this work can be done? When we have solved this question, we shall have
solved a great human problem.
Mother-work includes the bearing and the rearing of children, the
conduct of a home, and the placing of that home in the right social
atmosphere and relations. It includes manual, intellectual, and
spiritual labors. The one who lives and works, as God meant her to live
and work, will never feel over-fatigue. Why do mothers often look so
tired? It is because they too often do not have what every mother ought
to have: education, rest, change, a Sabbath-day, individual income,
intellectual interests, society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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