was torn off her domestic workshop. Steam and machinery, like cyclones,
carried away her industries, and nothing was left to her but odds and
ends of occupations.

Toiling in the family circle from the days of the cave dwellers, mother
had become so intimately associated in the tribal mind with the
hearthstone that the home was called her sphere. Around this segregation
accumulated accretions of opinion, layer on layer emanating from the
mind of her mate. Let us call the accretions the Adamistic Theory. Its
authors happened to be the government and could use the public treasury
in furtherance of publicity for their ideas set forth in hieroglyphics
cut in stone, or written in plain English and printed on the front page
of an American daily.

One of the few occupations left to mother after the disruption of her
sphere at the end of the eighteenth century was the preparation of food.
In the minds of men, food, from its seed sowing up to its mastication,
has always been associated with woman. Mention food and the average man
thinks of mother. That is the Adam in him. And so, quite naturally, one
must first consider this relation of women to food in the
Adamistic Theory.

[Illustration: Countess de Berkaim and her canteen in the Gare de St.
Lazarre, Paris.]

When the world under war conditions asked to be fed, Adam, running true
to his theory, pointed to mother as the source of supply, and declared
with an emphasis that came of implicit faith, that the universe need
want for nothing, if each woman would eliminate waste in her kitchen and
become a voluntary and obedient reflector of the decisions of state and