But women in any case are called for in large numbers to translate the ancient personal duty of protective care of the young in terms of social obligations.
=The Provision of Food, Clothing, and Shelter.=--The second recognized ancient duty of mothers is in respect to the provision of food, clothing, and shelter for the young.

This duty has undergone great changes of method during the last century, and in the large centres of population has altered almost past recognition.

These changes seem to many to minimize the individual mother's responsibility in these matters to the vanishing point.
It is indeed an almost immeasurable distance from the primitive mother scratching the soil with her sharpened stick, her baby bound to her bended back, in order to plant a few seeds for a tiny harvest to save the life of her child when the hunt should be poor, to the modern mother whose food supply for her family comes to the table from all parts of the earth at the call of her telephone.

Is the modern mother, then, released from all obligations as to that food supply?
It is a long step also from the primitive mother making slowly with her thorn needle the only garment her child may wear, and even a long step from the home spinning, weaving and dyeing of later handicraft, to the modern use of the "ready-made" shop and the division of all garment-making into innumerable specialties of labor.

Is the modern mother thereby released from care concerning the family clothing?
For the modern housing of families do we not all have to depend upon the architect, the builder, the real estate broker, the speculator in land, the laws concerning boundaries, taxes and title deeds, rent and landlords' powers, and press all one upon another for a chance for a home when we elect to live where many other people want also to live?
Is, then, the shelter of the family no longer the mother's care?
=The Woman in Rural Life.=--The country-woman, dealing at first hand with rural conditions, has many of the same problems of personal devotion in the provision of food, clothing, and shelter with which her ancient ancestor struggled.