THE COOK STOVE AND DIVORCE.

Southern Cross, Volume 10, Issue 21, 23 August 1902, Page 11

THE COOK STOVE AND DIVORCE.

It is not the only mission of life to prepare food and to eat it. Both functions, however, are important. Some people think too much about what they shall eat and others spend too much time preparing it. Some eat too much and some not enough. And then there are others. The latter class includes those who do not properly prepare food to be edible. According to the Chicago bureau of Charities, the failure of present-day women to make the home comfortable and attractive and their inability to cook and sew properly, is responsible for a large percentage of the oases ©f estrangement between husband and wives among the poor. In the last issue of its Weekly Bulletin the bureau makes a strong plea to

charity workers for the education of girls in household duties : “If the home is to be the centre and root of our civilisation it must be made a place worth while going to and spending time in. It is the girls who must be taught this lesson and aroused to the nobility of their calling. We are hearing clarion notes on this subject sounding from even the university halls. The men and women of thought are realizing the faults of the old education that looked well to filling the head with facts. President G. Stanley Hall, of Clark University, says : —‘ The home should be served by every child, who should feel himself a useful and integral member of it, with duties. Every girl should cook, sew, clean, polish and perhaps wash—have something to do with flowers, develop some domestic taste and prife, in place of the shame so often felt by high school girls for their lowly homes, for which their education often breeds distaste. They should be reminded that too soft hands in the young suggest a soft brain ; that hand and brain both grow and are educated together. The kitchen is the heart of the home ; its industries, intelligently understood, are among the most educational of all possible influences, and to overcome the alienation school often breeds for home life in the modern American girl is one of our most serious problems.”