This alone is enough to guarantee the development of the home. No unchanging shell can contain a growing body, something must break; and the positive force of growth is stronger than the negative force of mere adhesion of particles. A stronger, wiser, nobler woman must make a better home.
In the place itself, its customs and traditions, we can also note great progress. The "domestic industries" have shrunk and dwindled almost out of sight, so greedily has society sucked at them and forced them out where they belong.
The increasing difficulties which assail the house-keeper, either in trying to occupy the primeval position of doing her own work, or in persuading anyone else to do it for her, are simply forcing us, however reluctantly, to the adoption of better methods. Even in the most neglected field of all, the care and education of the little child, some progress has been made. Education in the hands of men, broad-minded, humanly loving men, has crept nearer and nearer to the cradle; and now even women, and not only single women, but _even mothers_, are beginning to study the nature and needs of the child. The more they study, the more they learn, the more impossible become the home conditions. The mother cannot herself alone do all that is necessary for her children, to say nothing of continuing to be a companion to her husband, a member of society, and a still growing individual.
She can sacrifice herself in the attempt,--often does,--but the child has a righteous indifference to such futile waste of life. He does not require a nervous, exhausted, ever-present care, and it is by no means good for him. He wants a strong, serene, lovely mother for a comfort, a resource, an ideal; but he also wants the care of a trained highly qualified teacher, and the amateur mama cannot give it to him. Motherhood is a common possession of every female creature; a joy, a pride, a nobly useful function. Teacherhood is a profession, a specialised social function, no more common to mothers than to fathers, maids, or bachelors. The ceaseless, anxious strain to do what only an experienced nurse and teacher can do, is an injury to the real uses of motherhood.
Why do we dread having children, as many of our much-extolled mothers so keenly do? Partly the physical risk and suffering, which are not necessary to a normal woman,--and more the ensuing care, labour, and anxiety,--and oh,--"the responsibility!" The more modern the mother is, the more fit for a higher plane of execution, the more unfit she is for the lower plane, the old primitive plane of home-teaching.