The family, however, exists to make a small spot in which there may be a unity found nowhere else, and at the centre of the family life is still the mother.
Says Schiller, "Knowledge and culture demand a blissful sky, much careful nursing and a long number of springs." Who shall be able to secure this for every son of man if no one stands at the door of young life to make these the first demand upon time and strength and devotion for every child in the interest of every child?
"The community" has been called "an endowment for human progress." Parental love, so often supremely expressed by the mother, works still and in any future in sight must work ever more devotedly and wisely to secure for each child his rightful share in that endowment.

The main business of life is the carrying on of life, and in that business women were drafted long ago for the heaviest end of service and with little social permission to do their work by proxy.

Many social helps in her task now make possible leisure and opportunity for individual vocation as never before.

Her primal duty to the race remains, however, a debt to be paid as a first obligation wherever and whenever a woman accepts the august function of motherhood.

And to-day the majority of most successful families absorb in large measure the time and strength of the housemother.
=What Women Need Most= is moral sanity and mental poise; the ability to adjust themselves to radical and rapid changes in their relationship to society without losing the finest and most useful results of their past social discipline.