It's Up to the Women: A Symposium

HOME AND THE WAR WIFE

by RHONA RYAN WILBER

CONGRATULATIONS, gentlemen. In Della Cyrus you have found femininity’s answer to Philip Wylie. Our sex has produced its own glooming prophet, turning out her jeremiads with the same irritating generalizations airily tossed to the reader without statistics, case histories, or facts.

But Mrs. Cyrus must get her due. She had me arguing with myself all night, and has finally impelled me to write my first letter to an editor. (I hope it is not a minority report.)

Something that has intrigued me is the spectacle that might have entertained the American public if Mrs. Cyrus had written The Egg and I. Now there would have been a book really wrapped in gloom and bad humor. But Betty MacDonald, another housewifely discovery of yours, kept her sense of humor about this business of making a home, and made a few hundred thousand dollars. And, as someone has pointed out, The Egg and I is essentially the story of an unhappy marriage.

Now, as I understand Mrs. Cyrus’s point of view, the modern educated woman is brought up in a great wide wonderful world and is then suddenly tossed into an intellectual desert and chained to demanding children. She is isolated in a prison, loaded with menial and unintelligent work (all this is paraphrased directly from the article), and broods so much about her unhappy fate that she begins to envy her husband and regard her children with sulky unhappiness.

As the answer to this problem, Mrs. Cyrus suggests community nurseries, where presumably the released mother could plop her children and then begin the business of restoring her soul unhampered by diaper-changing and feedings.

I read the article several times (once aloud to a snorting husband), and nowhere in its unhappy paragraphs did I find a mention of the generally recognized rewards of homemaking, or an intimation that a young mother, far from being changed into a tragic figure, might, suddenly find herself.

Frankly, and this would probably annoy Mrs. Cyrus more than anything else, I find her conclusions dated. She smacks too much of feminism and the selfish twenties to find any echo in the hearts of most of the young wives of my acquaintance. I suspect that the war brought a change of feeling to most of us who got married during those sad years. The rising birth rate — it included my own month-old son — and our anguished cries for more homes refute Mrs. Cyrus’s fears for the future of the educated mother. We like this business of running a home after a few years of contemplating what life would be like without our husbands.

I could have understood her point of view if she had concentrated on the problems of the uneducated woman doomed to the business of living in poverty, without the means or money or even the desire to amuse and entertain herself. But for those of us who are educated and college-taught, running our households and being “chained” to our children is apt to prove the most satisfying experience of our lives. Far from envying our husbands as they leave our small apartments in the morning, we are apt to reflect that they will meet ten times as many discouragements and frustrations during a day in the business world as we shall meet in our homes, where we are our own employers, set our own hours, and plan our own jobs. I suspect the envy is on the other side, and rightly.

Here are a few of the conclusions in the Cyrus article that I found not only exaggerated but actually untrue. “One woman is to be in complete charge of a child twenty-four hours a day for the first five or six years of its life,” she writes. Good heavens, what are husbands for? I don’t know many young wives who ever have to feed their children or bathe them when their husbands are home. My own, a busy young doctor, gleefully assumes complete charge of our small son from the moment he steps in the door. Granted that he may be exceptionally parental, still I don’t know a young father who can’t change a diaper and fondle his baby with complete assurance and enthusiasm.

“In an earlier rural society . . . fathers had time really to be fathers,” Mrs. Cyrus says. Since my husband comes from a rural background, I’m fairly sure that no one has less time to spend with his children than the average farmer, who works hard from sun to sun and then spends the evening at chores. And the earlier the rural society, the less time he had with his children. The average whitecollar worker of today who comes home at five o’clock, with the evening free, has much more time to observe and appreciate his children.

“Only with practical, specific plans for making time available to mothers can we justify our claim that American women are emancipated,” she continues. It must be a very bad housewife indeed, who can’t schedule her time to allow herself almost as much leisure as she wishes. And after all, in the urban neighborhood Mrs. Cyrus picks as her locale, there are always baby sitters, and usually a convenient relative.

A community nursery where a mother could leave her child for an occasional uninterrupted afternoon would be a blessing everywhere. But as a constant substitute for a mother’s affectionate companionship — one wonders. Evidently Mrs. Cyrus has not yet heard of the discoveries of Anna Freud during the London blitz, when she found that the worst psychic damage in the children came from separation from their mothers — no matter how unfavorable their environment.

Mrs. Cyrus speaks of reducing the mechanics of homemaking far below the present minimum. How much farther can we reduce them, with vacuum cleaners, washing machines that automatically assume complete charge of the clothes, cakes that can be mixed all at once in four minutes, and complete meals, hard-frozen, that need only to be dropped in boiling water for ten minutes? With even a semblance of budgeting her time, any housewife can secure several hours a day to devote to just herself, whether it’s a visit to the hairdresser’s or catching up on a good book.

Mrs. Cyrus, calling at one time for less housework and at another for more, puzzlingly adds that “the urban way of life has deprived mothers of significant work.” This may be true of the bridgeplaying wife of cartoon fame, who makes cards a drug for her mind. But it doesn’t have to be.

Many a woman (myself included) still likes to bake her own bread, still knits and sews clothes for her children and herself, and still regards cooking as an art. As for regarding housework as menial, I defy anyone to match the satisfaction of furniture shining with polish, a well-planned and imaginatively cooked meal on the table, and the constant fascination of a child’s mental and physical development.

Since I. gave up what I laughingly called a “career” for the life of a housewife, I have discovered the hours that are now mine to keep in touch with college and school friends, to reread favorite books, to occupy myself with writing short stories and poems I may some day get the courage to send to a publisher, and to spend in the extremely agreeable pastime of knitting and sewing. Evidently, Mrs. Cyrus regards all these occupations as mere chaff. She never mentions the possibility that her educated housewife may have friends on whom to call and others to invite in for an evening of music, bridge, or just talk; that her urban life offers public libraries, community activities in which she may volunteer her aid, and a thousand interesting other things that make twentyfour hours seem far too short a time in which to enclose a day.

Lest I sound like a hopeless homebody, I perhaps should include the information that until six months ago, I was a political reporter in our busy state capital, and before that a radio news reporter, with some programs of my own on the side — both careers generally conceded to be “interesting.” But I’m afraid, despite the pleasant associates and the fascinating, ever changing character of my former jobs, that I wouldn’t trade them for this supposedly isolated life of mine with a month-old child.

Admittedly, housework is by no means a complete joy. But what work is anywhere? Anyone will admit that the most interesting job in the world entails a great deal of drudgery. And so it is with housework. I can still remember the morning when I cried for fifteen minutes because a frosting made with two cups of sugar didn’t turn out well and my sugar stamp wasn’t good for another month. I’ve never yet been able to iron a shirt satisfactorily. But still, unlike my former jobs, my house is my own to run as I see fit on my own schedule.

What career woman can decide not to do a certain necessary job on a certain day, and instead wheel her child out to relish a beautiful spring afternoon? What businessman can look over his work for the day and decide to read a book instead?

It is very true that many mothers are failing in their jobs. But is that due to the fact that they are housewives, or that they were never taught in their schools and homes that homemaking is as creative and rewarding as painting a picture or writing a book? And I wonder if statistics would bear out Mrs. Cyrus’s contention that it is the educated “civilized” woman who is failing in her job. I believe, though I am no sociologist, that juvenile delinquency has a distinct correlation with the economic status. Perhaps, instead of community nurseries and more and more leisure, the nation needs to take a long, steady look at this whole problem of homemaking and make sure that wives are taught to use their leisure time profitably.

But admitting that some wives don’t know what to do with themselves, I still feel that Mrs. Cyrus is wrong in her main conclusion that the educated woman of today is lost, and unhappy in her home. As I mentioned before, the war made a great readjustment in the thinking of most of us young enough to be considering marriage at the time. We made our choice, and when our husbands returned we were more certain than perhaps Mrs. Cyrus’s generation that the home is the most important thing in life. Even the rising divorce rate doesn’t discourage me from that conclusion — I think it stems from those who found that they couldn’t make a satisfactory home and want to try again.

I hope a great many other young wives write in as I have — I’d hate to think of all American womanhood weltering in the morass of self-pity described by Mrs. Cyrus. Mrs. Cyrus just cant make me sorry for myself.

DISCIPLINE AND THE MOTHER

by SELMA VAN BUSKIRK

I THINK it is fun to have an Atlantic Town Meeting to discuss the momentous subject proposed by Mrs. Cyrus: “Why Mothers Fail.” I hasten to put in my two cents’ worth.

The correct procedure, I believe, is first to identify oneself. Like Mrs. Cyrus, I too am the wife of a clergyman. Our brand is Presbyterian. Unlike Mrs. Cyrus, I am old, experienced, resigned. I think Mrs. Cyrus must be young — she is so passionately rebellious. However, I wish to submit a situation out of my past to indicate my right to participate in this discussion. I shouldn’t have this right if I did not, to some extent at least, understand her feeling in the matter.

Once upon a time I stood at the foot of my sons’ beds in the nursery, and looked at their rumpled hair, their fever-bright eyes, their swollen jaws.

“Mumps!” I said disgustedly. “Why did you have to get mumps when I was trying so hard to finish college — to get my degree! Now I have to stay at home and take care of you. I’ll lose the whole semester.”

They looked disconsolate, more because of my tone then because of any real understanding of my irritation. Then Paul, who was five and the spokesman, brightened visibly.

“But we’re worth it, aren’t we, Mother?”

I was ashamed of my outburst. “Of course you’re worth it!” I assured them. But of course, also, I was saying to myself, I’ll have that degree yet, or know the reason.

The unfolding years supplied the reason. I had two operations and another son. But no A.B. You see, very soon after marriage, I regretted the impetuosity that had impelled me to leave college in the third year and marry. All for love, and a degree well lost! (You can got your degree any time, my husband said.) Moreover, I wanted to write, professionally. But there was just enough illness, broken bones, or something, among the five of us, to prevent my serious application to anything other than my real job: looking after my family.

For, Mrs. Cyrus notwithstanding, when a woman marries she has taken upon herself a real job, a real career. And if that fact is unknown to her at the time of marriage, if it comes as a “shock,” then she has not been properly educated. As one reflects upon the lament of Mrs. Cyrus, one perceives that the solution of her problem lies not so much in more and better nursery schools for the children of frustrated mothers, as in more specialized and realistic education for girls, so that there wouldn’t be so many frustrated mothers. If it comes as a shock to a young married woman to find herself more or less suddenly surrounded with babies, brooms, and buckets, she just wasn’t taught the facts of life. Her mother, perhaps, failed just there. College or no college, she was uneducated. Every girl should learn beforehand that babies are not hats or gowns that can be returned when she finds them too expensive or when she changes her mind.

However, the fact remains that even when girls do receive some very realistic education — some schools are attempting it — no school can prepare a woman for the physical, mental, and spiritual disciplines that she must endure in the business of becoming a non-failing mother. And I suspect that it is just here that Mrs. Cyrus rebels. Discipline is tough. It is hard to take. Don’t we hate it! But it is essential.

Here is a case in point: —

Four years ago this summer, our youngest son insisted on enlisting at the age of seventeen. No amount of persuasion could turn him from a flaming desire to do his part to save his country. He left us with the banners of a burning patriotism fluttering in his idealistic young heart. He was sent to Fort Benning, Georgia, where, in the toughest infantry training center in these United States, he was told daily by a snarling sergeant that he was nothing, nothing, nothing but cannon fodder. Talk about shock! This was something to shock a boy trained in democracy —in the ideals of Christian democracy, if you please. (Should our son have been nazified somehow, so that this experience wouldn’t have shocked him — as Mrs. Cyrus almost suggests?) He drilled, he trained, he stood guard all night in the rain his first Christmas Eve away from home. Was this saving his country? He may have thought in his heart, for aught I know, then to hell with the country!

But — and here I give myself and my husband a pat on the back — he had been trained at home to accept responsibility, and he didn’t try to escape this grueling experience. It is to the everlasting credit of American parents that so few of these young soldiers in the making did try to run away. Eventually he was disciplined and ready for New Guinea and the bloody hills of northern Luzon. Sleeping — when he slept — in mudholes, escaping (by inches sometimes) the whining bullets, he at length realized that he was doing his part to save his country. But the discipline had to come first.

When we get down to fundamentals, as we all must sooner or later, we find there’s a price for everything. A period of a few years spent in the nursery with young human beings, although dull and difficult for people like Mrs. Cyrus, is just a matter of discipline, of paying a price for something worth while. It is in these first most plastic or pliable years that mothers have the opportunity to form the attitudes that will dominate their children the rest of their lives. It is in these years that young mothers may acquire the disciplines essential to mature adulthood.

I was fortunate in that I found my children interesting, fascinating. Nevertheless I experienced certain disciplines hard to take at times. I knew moments of frustration. There were periods when I thought the world was being deprived of something that I, and only I, could contribute. But today, when I look at my fine tall sons, I know that I could have contributed nothing more valuable. “What is the treasure of Rome?” runs the old legend. “The manhood of Rome!”

And as for being “really free” before women can be “really mothers” — who is free? Men are not free. Why should women be a special and privileged class? I think I know what ails Mrs. Cyrus. She hates housework. So do I. If some plan could be devised to provide “community services to reduce the mechanics of homemaking far below the present minimum” (doesn’t she say that neatly?) I should be all for it. That, in fact, would be swell! I hope she will work on that. But in the meantime, why not be philosophical about the whole thing? Let’s admit the truth: any job has its tedious side. One begins to feel that Mrs. Cyrus is not so intent on solving a specific problem as in achieving Utopia. And of course there’s no harm in dreaming. But, pending the millennium, ought: not Mrs. Cyrus to feel more charitably toward that large percentage of us who have accepted the disciplines, and have become mature enough to adjust to the “homemaker-mother pattern”?

This seems the intelligent way, to me. After all. it is just as ridiculous for women to refuse to accept the biological facts of life, as it would be for an aviator to go into tantrums because he can’t sprout wings and fly like a bird.

HOW TO SHARE THE WORK

by DOROTHY NATHAN

DELLA CYRUS’s vivid account of why mothers fail presents a sharp picture of the life I lead. She speaks, too, for dozens of my friends on the park bench circuit. Most of us, I think, do not object to the specific homemaking chores. After all, into each life some routine must fall; and if it isn’t dishes and beds, then it is office mail and monthly reports.

But while Mrs. Cyrus’s diagnosis is persuasive and accurate, I feel that her prescription for a solution is depressingly vague. The concept of a community plan for the care of homes and children may be valuable theoretically, but it seems unlikely that there will be any immediate stampede in this direction. For one thing, it invokes shades of Communism, and any plan which even seems related to Communism already has two strikes against it.

Besides, apart from ideologies, I think we mothers would hold back. I’m delighted when my husband confesses he prefers my cooking to that of any group kitchen conceivable. Group care of children brings up a thousand and one problems around conflicting schedules, overstimulation, isolation during illness, and so on. The mothers I know would prefer to remain in complete control of their own households.

But I am not writing simply to tear down Mrs. Cyrus’s solution and leave us all dangling. I think there are other adjustments possible which proceed more immediately out of the setup as we find it today and which are a cut less visionary. My own experience in achieving regular periods of absence from household and family may be of interest in this connection.

Between the births of my two children, I returned to a former job on a part-time basis and hired a housekeeper for the hours when I was away. I was at home just long enough to enjoy the prospect of going to work, and at my desk just long enough to look forward to returning home. Of course it was a busy time, physically active in the morning while I did the cleaning and marketing, and mentally stimulating in the afternoon when I wrestled happily with the problems assigned.

It was a happy arrangement for my son, too; he saw me for the major portion of the day and I was the one to assist him in his important eating, toilet, and sleeping routines, but it was a recess for him to be able to react to another individual, differently geared. Every afternoon she took him to the park for friends and adventure while I had an opportunity to keep my brain alive and my social graces polished. At the end of the day the family met one another with renewed interest and affection. In a sense I was carrying two jobs at once, but I always felt the pay-off was worth the added effort.

Now we have a second child whom I must see through the important businesses of learning to walk and talk and become a separate entity. During this period I manage to absent myself on regular occasions a few times a week. It does not amount to enough time to offer myself for regular paid employment, but it does allow time for taking courses, doing volunteer work — in short, keeping alert and sharp against the day when I can again return to the world.

The problem of caring for children during a mother’s absence is sometimes tough. If there are no willing aunts, it can be met by hiring a professional “sitter” or by entering into coöperative arrangements with neighbors. I have occasionally taken my neighbor’s child while she attends a bacteriology seminar, from which she returns exhilarated; and she has carried on for me while I go to my short-story course and come back with plans for exceeding Eudora Welty. It is amazing how these activities can spark up an otherwise drab week. It has such a tonic effect on the whole household that I feel the cost of taking courses and hiring sitters should be charged against the family budget like diaper service and Percomorphum.

Of course these outings are only stopgaps. One cannot take aimless courses forever, and volunteer work seldom carries enough responsibility or recognition to be really satisfying. What we want, those of us who feel we have something to contribute in the adult world, is the chance to do so.

If industry would offer flexible working arrangements, many of us could work part-time. In hundreds of kinds of clerical jobs two women could jointly carry one assignment. A double-up arrangement is admittedly less simple in the case of professional and research jobs, but on the other hand it is often the qualitative contribution which is important here, not the exact number of hours devoted on any one day. My own boss made it possible for me to return to work part-time because she was short of staff but also, more significantly, because she wanted to make it possible.

Other employers, if they accepted the situation, could similarly find constructive ways of meeting the specific difficulties. I can see that two staff members holding down one full-time receptionist or telephone or clerical job makes double work for the accounting office, which is already rocking under the burden of payroll deductions and vacation schedules and what not. It undoubtedly means more work, too, for the personnel office. But these are details in exchange for which the employer taps a rich source of labor power. Most employers, of course, are men, and men tend to act as though the problems of the housewife don’t concern them. But after all, they are only half the human population and they have to live intimately with the other half. So they should be as interested as their wives in assisting toward a solution.

This plea for a less adamant attitude on the part of employers is incomplete unless two corollary conditions are mentioned. In the first place, the Federal income tax law must be amended to allow women to deduct such housekeeping expenses as are entailed by their own employment. This is no private brainstorm. Taxpayers have been agitating for years to make the government see the sanity and justice of such a request. It certainly isn’t fair — and sometimes isn’t even possible — to pay a tax on your entire earnings when you turn two thirds of them over each week to the worker who replaces you at home.

The other condition is that homemaking, as an occupation, be pepped up to the point where it will attract women who would make it their choice of an outside activity. I think it would appear less onerous if it were afforded some of the protection given to other industries by minimum wage and hour regulations, unemployment insurance, retirement benefits. The reasons why this occupation was exempted from Federal Social Security in the first place were undoubtedly good, but were they sufficient?

If part-time work outside the home, for women who wanted to work, were considered desirable and acceptable, I am sure that many middle-aged, middle-class women now at large would, by preference, choose to recapture a period in their own lives by engaging to care for small children.

Back in the thirties the National Youth Administration ran a housekeeping project to train high school girls and to place them in jobs. I should think that trade schools and state employment offices could coöperate today in training and placing high school graduates in jobs which they might find both enjoyable and profitable.

Because, when all is said and done, looking after youngsters can be lots of fun. But, like candy and everything else in this world, unlimited doses are too much of a muchness.

MRS. CYRUS IS RIGHT

by MICHAEL DRURY

THE two articles on what is popularly but obsoletely referred to as the woman question fell on my heart like rain on a parched garden. I find it next to impossible to restrain my enthusiasm for Mrs. Cyrus and her point of view into anything resembling coherent sentences put down in orderly sequence. I speak from what borders on bitter experience.

I say “borders on” because, owing largely to the very intellectual training which most authorities claim was the cause of my difficulties, I have been able to establish some sort of balance in my life and make peace with my household gods.

I am twenty-seven years old, have been married five years, am a graduate of Stanford University. In addition to free-lance writing, I hold a job as assistant fiction editor on a women’s magazine. Any psychologist probing into my background would probably explode over all the “wrong” influences he would discover, but if he cared to look he would find enough of the right ones to offset the bad ones.

All wifely prejudice aside, my husband is a truly remarkable man who actually prefers that his wife work. “I married you,” he says, practically enough, “because you were active, alert, productive and I felt our minds would be flints for each other. If you let yours turn to wood or putty, where’s the spark for us?” We tried for a time, while he was in the Navy, having me be a housewife and nothing more. When the war was over, we fled to our former schedule like thirsty men to water.

For more years than I have done anything else except live and attend school, I’ve sought, answers to the questions Mrs. Cyrus tackles, not only for myself and my own peace of mind, but also in the interest of women generally. It has, for the most part, been a heart-breaking search. Ideas (a mockery of the word) concerning woman and her place in the larger scheme of things — and I consider that even more important — are as poorly grounded as are the stubborn superstitions that surround any racial minority or oppressed group.

Incidentally, I submit that women, at least women who want to be full human beings intellectually and spiritually as well as physically, are an oppressed group. I once startled a Negro woman by telling her that I knew all too well what she was up against. I too had had doors shut in my face, been betrayed by people I trusted, been laughed at, scorned, ridiculed — not because my skin was black but because I was a woman and I didn’t know my place. When I told her that, she wept.

Two main attitudes confronted me in my search, both equally thick, equally blank. From most women I received an absolute refusal to see the existence of any problem whatever. From men, when I could get them to talk seriously about it, the only solution was the resigned observation that nothing could be done about it for a couple of thousand years. I began to feel like a tearful drunk, insisting that the snakes were there, yet afraid that I was somehow making a fool of myself.

I do not for a minute believe that all the women who gave me a blank stare and asked mildly, “What problem?” were content, leading full lives and totally unaware of what problem. I think a good many of them had made their choices and didn’t dare acknowledge the validity of my search, lest the entire structure of their lives collapse around them. For this, they can’t be blamed. Most of us cling to illusions of one sort or another as a way of making our particular lots seem desirable. But I couldn’t help having more respect for the woman who said, “My dear, the road you want to travel is long and unpaved. Turn back while you can,” than for the “What problem?” girls whose reactions ranged all the way from laughter to raining epithets on my head.

The trouble with trying to deal honestly with the problems that confront women today is that every avenue can be and usually is made into a dead-end street by the landed gentry of the feudal system still operating. I’ll bet any editor on your magazine five dollars that some one of them has received at least, a few letters from psychologists, clergymen, and/or outraged housewives which read, in part, “Mrs. Cyrus was probably the child of divorced parents,” or suggest that she is an Exhibit A of the bad effects of education on women.

Armed with Mrs. Cyrus’s articles, I approached a group of the young women in my office on the question of equality of the sexes, an economic place for adolescents, their aims as women. Some of these girls are career-minded; others merely work as a fill-in before marriage or while their ex-servicemen husbands go to school.

Here is a sample of the answers I got: —

“There is no such thing as equality of the sexes. It isn’t right or possible. It’s just part of the propaganda they hand women. Makes them dissatisfied, too.”

“Pay kids to work at odd jobs? Good heavens, adolescents have more money now than they know what to do with. That’s why we have juvenile delinquency.”

“Why, my aim is to bring up a good family, of course.” I asked this particular girl what she intended to do when she was sixty, and she answered, “Have grandchildren.”

Mrs. Cyrus’s ideas of broadening our scope, of moving off our own doorsteps and letting up in our possessive grasp of those who live under our roofs, reveal her as a real pioneer. She’s fighting Indians — more than that, she’s fighting ghosts.

I find that a good deal of what I should like to say here only echoes what Mrs. Cyrus has already said so adequately — some of them my own pet theories and bulwarks, such as the difference between the kind of life a woman is trained to expect and the kind she must in fact lead.

There are, however, one or two side lines on the subject that I should like to mention. One is that, although the school which holds that motherhood is the sole reason for woman’s existence puts forth as a flying buttress the great joy children are in later years, almost no one of my generation has the least friendship for his parents. Respect, duty, a kind of apologetic love — yes, but how little friendship!

For me, this explodes the argument that merely having children will make you friends with them or give you something to do in your old age. I think Sidney Howard’s summary is appropriate: “Have them and love them and leave them alone.” If they turn out to be the kind of people you like, you will be friends.

The second thing I want to discuss is that gap between what women are educated to be and what they must become as wives and mothers. The rearing of children, as a full-time career, comes into conflict with a law equally strong, perhaps stronger: self-preservation.

If woman is to lose her selfhood, the thinking, living, productive, active being she has struggled to become and her parents have struggled to help her become through roughly twenty years of care and love; if she is to submerge this being she has every right to call “me” in the production of new creatures, the law of survival says to her through every channel: “Don’t do it.” If we don’t make it practicable for her to do both, one thing or the other will suffer. The more widespread education and opportunity for women become, the less it will be her selfhood that pays the price.

A last direction we might look in is the right of woman to search for the spiritual answers. (I use the word in an un-Biblical sense.) Those who argue that only a man could write the Ninth Symphony, but only a woman could give birth to its creator (implying that this is her spiritual reward), are saying in effect that you too can have a little genius in your home. Only a woman can give birth to a moron, a ditchdigger, or a garbage collector as well as to writers of symphonies and leaders of countries. Having children is one of the large experiences life has to offer; so are a lot of other things such as getting married, reading the world’s great books, working at a rewarding and satisfying job. No one of these things is the great answer. If it were, we should not be floundering around as we are.

Women are, as a class, no happier than men. Being mothers hasn’t given them the sublimity and serenity that is claimed for that occupation. Too many women have followed all the rules and found themselves still with the same baffling questions that confront all mankind. The young man in the Scripture who said, “All these things have I kept from my youth up; what lack I yet?” implied his recognition of the very profound truth that above and beyond the do’s and don’t’s is something which surpasses them and is more important than all of them put together.

Every man and every woman has the right to ask that question and to seek its answers to the utmost of his ability in all directions. Thanks to articles like Mrs. Cyrus’s and courageous editors, we’re beginning to make room for woman’s mind and soul, as well as her heart.