in life and in the social movements around us.

The grown-up son has so long been considered a citizen with well-defined
duties and a need of "making his way in the world," that the family
claim is urged much less strenuously in his case, and as a matter of
authority, it ceases gradually to be made at all. In the case of the
grown-up daughter, however, who is under no necessity of earning a
living, and who has no strong artistic bent, taking her to Paris to
study painting or to Germany to study music, the years immediately
following her graduation from college are too often filled with a
restlessness and unhappiness which might be avoided by a little clear
thinking, and by an adaptation of our code of family ethics to modern
conditions.

It is always difficult for the family to regard the daughter otherwise
than as a family possession. From her babyhood she has been the charm
and grace of the household, and it is hard to think of her as an
integral part of the social order, hard to believe that she has duties
outside of the family, to the state and to society in the larger sense.
This assumption that the daughter is solely an inspiration and
refinement to the family itself and its own immediate circle, that her
delicacy and polish are but outward symbols of her father's protection
and prosperity, worked very smoothly for the most part so long as her
education was in line with it. When there was absolutely no recognition
of the entity of woman's life beyond the family, when the outside claims
upon her were still wholly unrecognized, the situation was simple, and
the finishing school harmoniously and elegantly answered all
requirements. She was fitted to grace the fireside and to add lustre to
that social circle which her parents selected for her. But this family
assumption has been notably broken into, and educational ideas no longer