and colleges of the various States. They tell housewives what to "put
into the garbage pail," what to "keep out of the garbage pail," what to
substitute for wheat, how to make soap, but, with a single exception,
not a word issued suggests to women any saving through group action.

This exception, which stood out as a beacon light in an ocean of
literature worthy of the Stone Age, was a small pamphlet issued by the
Michigan Agricultural College on luncheons in rural schools. Sound
doctrine was preached on the need of the children for substantial and
warm noon meals, and the comparative ease and economy with which such
luncheons could be provided at the school house. Children can of course
be better and more cheaply fed as a group than as isolated units
supplied with a cold home-prepared lunch box. And yet with the whole
machinery of the state in his hands, Adam's commissions, backed by the
people's money, goad mother on to isolated endeavor. She plants and
weeds and harvests. She dries and cans, preserves and pickles. Then she
calculates and perchance finds that her finished product is not always
of the best and has often cost more than if purchased in the
open market.

It may be the truest devotion to our Allies to challenge the
individualistic rôle recommended by Adam to mother, for it will hinder,
not help, the feeding of the world to put women back under eighteenth
century conditions. Food is short and expensive because labor is short.
And even when the harvest is ripe, the saving of food cannot be set as a
separate and commendable goal, and the choice as to where labor shall be
expended as negligible. It is a prejudiced devotion to mother and her
ways which leads Adam in his food pamphlets to advise that a woman shall
sit in her chimney corner and spend time peeling a peach "very thin,"
when hundreds of bushels of peaches rot in the orchards for lack of