The housewife
Preparing the young girl

Is the woman strongly prepared to fulfill her economic, moral, educational task at home? Rarely, and yet like any task, like any profession, that of "wife and mother", said Jean Brunhes, must be prepared.
The more a profession is important, difficult, the more it must be prepared for a long time and carefully. It is an apprenticeship for all things, how many months to prepare a mason, a locksmith, a notary's clerk, a typist? ...
To note here only one of the difficulties in preparing the woman of the working classes for her family and social responsibilities, it is the need for the young girl to leave the home at the age of fourteen or fifteen to provide additional financial resources to the family. Busy from morning to night, outside, she can only initiate herself or be initiated imperfectly to the work of the interior. However, let us point out in passing some happy attempts by the Mouvement Familial Ménager which aims to overcome this drawback to a certain extent.

Here, in a district of the Parisian suburbs, it is a population of unskilled workers (one third illiterate) socialists, who are reached every Tuesday afternoon. The method is special, seventy mothers arriving with their babies in their arms asking, some, for data on hygiene, cutting, accounting, transformation and use of old clothes, usual medicine for a child or a sick husband; others, advice on education for their children, etc.

This information given as if on the fly pursues a precise goal, and a determined program which (doubled by home visits requested by the listeners) often results in a moral and Christian transformation of the interior and of the family (for example: regularized marriages, baptized children, etc.). All these questions are the starting point of the course which is given by making practice predominate over theory.