To shelter two people and the children that come to them, to provide them a place in which to eat and sleep, is that the only function of these homes?
If that were all, few homes would be built.

When that becomes all, the home is no more! To furnish a body for a soul, that is the physical function of the home.
There are certain people who cry out that for a woman this undertaking has no meaning--that for her it is a cook stove and a dustpan, a childbed, and a man who regards her as his servant.

One might with equal justice say that for the man it is made up of ten, twelve, or more hours, at the plow, the engine, the counter, or the pen for the sake of supporting a woman and children whom he rarely sees! Unhappily, there are such combinations; they are not homes! They are deplorable failures of people who have tried to make homes.

To insist that they are anything else is to overlook the facts of life, to doubt the sanity of mankind which hopefully and courageously goes on building, building, building, sacrificing, binding itself forever and ever to what ?--a shell?
No, to the institution which its observation and experience tell it, is the one out of which men and women have gotten the most hope, dignity, and joy,--the place through which, whatever its failures and illusions, they get the fullest development and the opportunity to render the most useful social service.
It is this grounded conviction that the home takes first rank among social institutions which gives its tremendous seriousness to the Business of Being a Woman.

She is the one who must sit always at its center, the one who holds a strategic position for dealing directly with its problems.