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The home must always claim the first place in the large majority of women’s lives. It has done so in the past, it does so in the present, it will continue to do so in the future. But woman’s activities are no longer to be merely confined to her own fireside, though that must always hold a prominent place. The real problem of the day is the right conduct of the home on scientific lines.

In some ways the management of the home has never been more difficult. The servant problem has never been more acute than to-day; the cost of living and the standard of comfort is going up by leaps and bounds, and the old recipe of “Feed the brute,” as far as the husband is concerned, is no less inefficient. It is essential to-day to know something about food values, the arrangement of meals, which avoid monotony, and provide that requisite variety in nourishment, on which the good health and ultimately the good temper of the household depend.

Again we are realising the great complexities of all questions dealing with child-rearing and 14 education. We have travelled far from the self-complacency of the woman of thirty years ago, who based her claims to a thorough knowledge of the up-bringing of children on the fact that she had buried ten. This need for wider knowledge in all branches of housekeeping is equally important to the unmarried woman, who is more and more being called upon to act as a foster-mother, whether as a teacher or in some other capacity, to the nation’s children.

The care of the children is considered by all shades of opinion to be the clou of a woman’s life, and every day more and more responsibility is cast upon her in this respect. How can she, then, fulfil these duties as they should be fulfilled if she is utterly ignorant of the laws of health and of child-life, and how both are affected by environment and all the other grave and fundamental truths which lie at the root of the successful up-bringing and development of the child? It is now a hackneyed saying “that the child of to-day is the man or woman of to-morrow,” but a whole world of truth lies enshrined in those words; the children are the assets of the nation, and if their up-bringing is not of the best they can never attain to that full heritage of development which is the right of every soul born into the world.

Scientific training in Household Administration can alone save the sorely taxed housewife of to-day from becoming more than a slave to her domestic responsibilities. It is only by being a 15 mistress of her craft, “whether China fall or no,” that she can make sufficient time to devote herself to necessary self-culture and recreation as well as to those ever-growing outside duties which the twentieth century is imposing upon her in the shape of public and social work. If there is one thing which is becoming increasingly obvious, it is that the help and advice of scientifically trained women are absolutely necessary in the management of hospitals, the administration of the Poor Law, and the general solution of social problems.

At no other epoch in the history of mankind has woman stood on the same high plane as she does to-day, and at no other period has so much been demanded of her, intellectually, morally, and physically. It is only within recent years that Science has attempted to come to the aid of woman in helping her firstly to obtain, and then to maintain, the position for which she was originally designed, as the complement of man and as the chief element of preservation in human society.

If the history of mankind is traced back to primordial times, we find that it was the female who possessed power over the emotional nature of man, and it is becoming increasingly evident that the family owes its origin as a social factor to the Mother, not to the Father. Lippert is convinced “that the idea of an exclusively maternal kinship at one time extended over the whole earth,” and McLennan says, “We shall endeavour to show that the most ancient system in which the idea of 16 blood-relationship was embodied was a system of kinship through the females only.”

Occupation seems to have been the main factor in determining that the mother rather than the father should be the founder of the family. Agriculture originally appears to have been entirely the woman’s industry, while the men were engaged in hunting or looking after the cattle, and wherever agriculture was the predominant feature of life we find that relationship is traced through the mother; while on the other hand those tribes who were chiefly pastoral had a paternal system of relationship—that is to say, that descent was counted through the males.

Drummond, in his book on the “Ascent of Man,” places the Evolution of Motherhood long before that of Fatherhood. “An early result, partly of her sex, partly of her passive strain, is the founding through the instrumentality of the first savage Mother of a new and beautiful social state—Domesticity—while Man, restless, eager, and hungry, is a wanderer on the Earth, Woman makes a Home!” And according to the same authority we find “that to Man has been assigned the fulfilment of the first great function—the Struggle for Life—Woman, whose higher contribution has not yet been named, is the chosen instrument for carrying on the Life of Others.” Nature took many æons to make a mother, whose gift to the world was Love and Sympathy; the evolution of the Father came still later. “It was when man’s mind first became capable of making its own provision against 17 the weather and the crops that the possibility of Fatherhood, Motherhood and the Family were realised.” “The Mother-age, with its mother-right customs, was a civilisation, as I have indicated, largely built up by woman’s activity and developed by her skill; it was an age within the small social unit of which there was more community of interest, far more fellowship in labour and partnership in property and sex, than we find in the larger social unit of to-day.”[1]

In connection with this theory of the “Mother-age” it is interesting to note that the Etruscans traced their descent through the female line, and it was from the Etruscans that the Romans derived nearly all their institutions; thus many of the “initiative forces of civilisation” have come down to us from women.

It is believed that the patriarchal system—where the man was the head of the family, as amongst the Jews—which succeeded the Mother-age, grew out of the custom of capturing women belonging to other tribes, this being succeeded later on by purchase, and “as soon as the woman ceased to be protected by the force of ideas, as soon, that is to say, as she lost her position as head of the family, her downward path was certain.” But even among primitive people we find that it was an almost universal custom that a woman should be provided with an independent property, “Mitgift,” though as time went on and the patriarchal system became more firmly established, it appears 18 that this Mitgift became the husband’s property, and that every bride was expected to bring a dowry to her husband, whose property she became, thus losing all independence.

However, in Greece the position of woman, during the Heroic times was to a certain extent an independent one, as is clear from the poems of Homer and the treatment of Homeric and Heroic themes by the Athenian dramatists. But one has only to compare the “Nausicäa” of Homer or the “Electra” of the Tragedians with the women of the time