Illinois there are 71 high schools in which instruction is offered in
one or more of the three great divisions of the Study of Daily
Life--Food, Clothing, the Home. In such of these high schools as are
within the limits of the city of Chicago there is a four-year
Household-Arts course so contrived that the girls who enroll
themselves in it, while not neglecting literature, art, and the pure
sciences like physics, will spend at least eight hours every week on
"Domestic Science" or on "Textiles."
We are impelled now to admit that the work done in domestic science
and art by the high schools should be recognized by the colleges and
universities. The University of California requires its freshmen to
come to it with 45 "units" of standardized high-school work, of
various sorts, accomplished. We learn, but we are not startled when we
learn, that the University of California will henceforth allow the
entering freshman to offer nine of her 45 "units" in sewing,
dressmaking, millinery, decorating, furnishing (all accompanied with
free-hand drawing); and in cooking, hygiene, dietetics, laundering,
nursing (all accompanied with chemistry).
Even in the colleges and universities themselves, especially if they
are of recent foundation, we accept, if we do not expect, a
domestic-science-and-art department of utilitarian value and of
academic worth. At Chicago University it is called the Department of
Household Administration; sixty women undergraduates are specializing
in it. At the University of Illinois it is called the Department of
Household Science; one-third of all the women in the university are
taking courses in it; one-fifth of them are "majoring" in it; number
four of volume two of the university bulletins is by Miss Sprague on
"A Precise Method of Roasting Beef"; in the research laboratory Miss
Goldthwaite, _Doctor_ Goldthwaite, is making chemical experiments with
pectin, sugar, fruit-juice, tartaric acid, to the point of determining
that the mixture should be withdrawn from heat at a temperature of 103
degrees Centigrade and at a specific gravity of 1.28 in order that it
shall invariably "jell"; in the graduate school the women who attend
the household-arts seminar are being directed toward original
inquiries into "Co-operative Housekeeping," "Dietetic Cults," "Hygiene
of Clothing," "Pure Food Laws."
Seeing how far the newer universities go, we return to rest our
eyes, without their rolling in the frenzy which would attack
Alexander Hamilton if he were with us, on Hamilton's alma mater,
Columbia University, venerable but adventurous, giving courses in
"Housewifery," in "Shirtwaists," and in "Domestic Laundering."
[Illustration: UPPER PICTURE: IN CENTER IS THE NEW $500,000 HOUSEHOLD
ARTS BUILDING OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN NEW YORK.
LOWER PICTURE IS THE HOUSEHOLD ARTS BUILDING OF CALIFORNIA POLYTECHNIC
SCHOOL AT SAN LUIS OBISPO.]
It is not till we come to the really-truly, more than masculinely,
academic and cultural eastern women's colleges such as Vassar,
Wellesley, Smith, and Bryn Mawr that we experience a genuine
journalistic shock on hearing a domestic-science-and-art piece of
news. Those colleges will be the last to succumb. But the day of their
fall approaches. The alumnae association of Wellesley voted, in 1910,
to petition the trustees to establish home-economics courses; and, in
the same year, the president of Wellesley put into her commencement
address the words: "I hope the time may soon come when we can have a
department of domestic science which shall give a sound basis for the
problems of the household."
The resuscitated Home has become one of the livest of pedagogical
personages. It has added a great and growing field to the estate of
Education. To supply that field with teachers of high qualifications
we find highly extended training courses in such institutions as
Drexel in Philadelphia, Pratt in Brooklyn, Simmons in Boston and
Teachers College in New York. In fact, the conclusion of the epoch of
pioneer domestic-science-and-art agitation might perhaps be said to
have been announced to the country when Teachers College, in 1909,
erected a new building at a cost of $500,000 and dedicated it, in its
entirety, to Household Arts.
What does it all mean?
"Fellow citizens," said the colored orator, reported by Dr. Paul
Monroe of Columbia, "what am education? Education am the palladium of
our liberties and the grand pandemonium of civilization."
But it does mean something, this Home Economics disturbance. _And
something very different from what it seems to._
* * * * *
Mr. Edward T. Devine, of the New York Charity Organization Society,
has distinguished himself in the field of economic thought as well as
in the field of active social reform. Among his works is a minute but
momentous treatise on "The Economic Function of Women." It is really a
plea for the proposition that to-day the art of consuming wealth is
just as important a study as the art of producing it.
"If acquisition," says Mr. Devine, "has been the idea which in the
past history of economics has been unduly emphasized, expenditure is
the idea which the future history of the science will place beside
it."
We have used our brains while getting hold of money. We are going to
use our brains while getting rid of it. We have studied banking,
engineering, shop practice, cost systems, salesmanship. We are going
to study food values, the hygiene of clothing, the sanitary
construction and operation of living quarters, the mental reaction of
amusements, the distribution of income, the art of making choices,
according to our means, from among the millions of things, harmful and
helpful, ugly and beautiful, offered to us by the producing world.
Mr. Devine ventures to hope that "we may look for a radical
improvement in general economic conditions from a wiser use of the
wealth which we have chosen to produce."
This enlarged view of the economic importance of consumption brings
with it a correspondingly enlarged view of the economic importance of
the Home. "If the factory," says Mr. Devine, "has been the center of
the economics which has had to do with Production, the home will
displace the factory as the center of interest in a system which gives
due prominence to Enjoyment and Use."
"There will result," continues Mr. Devine, "an increased respect on
the part of economists for the industrial function which woman
performs," for "there is no economic function higher than that of
determining how wealth shall be used," so that "even if man remain the
chief producer of wealth and woman remain the chief factor in
determining how wealth shall be used, the economic position of woman
will not be considered by those who judge with discrimination to be
inferior to that of man."
Mr. Devine then lays out for the economist a task in the discharge of
which the innocent bystander will sincerely wish him a pleasant trip
and a safe return.
"It is the present duty of the economist," says Mr. Devine, "to
accompany the wealth expender to the very threshold of the home, that
he may point out, with untiring vigilance, its emptiness, caused not
so much by lack of income as by lack of knowledge of how to spend
wisely."
Mr. Devine's proposition therefore would seem finally to sanction some
such conclusion as this:
Physical science and social science (and common sense) are making such
important contributions to the subject of the rearing of children and
to the subject of the maintenance of wholesome and beautiful living
conditions and to the subject of the use of leisure that, while the
home woman has lost almost all of the productive industries which she
once controlled, she has simultaneously gained a whole new field of
labor. Consumption has ceased to be merely _passive_ and has become
_active_. It has ceased to be mere _Absorption_ and has become
_Choice_. And the active choosing of the products of the world (both
spiritual and material) in connection with her children, her house,
and her spare time has developed for the home woman into a task so
broad, into an art so difficult, as to require serious study.
We have quoted at length from Mr. Devine's discourse because it is
recognized as the classic statement of the case and because it has had
the warm personal commendation of such women as the late Mrs. Ellen H.
Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose skill as
scientist and vision as philosopher made her the most authoritative
personality in the American Home Economics Association. (That
association, by the way, has some fifteen hundred due-paying
members.)
The scales fall from our eyes now and we see at least one thing which
we had not seen before. We had supposed that sewing and cooking were
the vitals of the home economics movement. Not at all! The home woman
might cease altogether to sew and to cook (just as she has ceased
altogether to spin, weave, brew, etc.) without depriving the home
economics movement of any considerable part of its driving power.
Sewing and cooking are productive processes. They add economic value
to certain commodities; namely, cloth and food. But it is not
production, it is consumption, which the home economics movement is at
heart devoted to.
This is plainly set forth by some of its most zealous workers. Thus
Edna D. Day, at the Lake Placid Conference on home economics in 1908,
was more or less sorry that "domestic science has come to be so
largely sewing and cooking in our schools"; was quite willing to look
at the white of the eye of the fact that "more and more we are buying
ready-made clothes and ready-cooked foods"; and marked out the policy
of her "Survey Course in Home Economics" at the University of Missouri
in the statement that "sewing and cooking are decreasingly home
problems, while the problems of wise buying, of adjusting standards of
living to income, and of developing right feelings in regard to
family responsibilities are increasingly difficult."
To choose and use the world's resources intelligently on behalf of
family and community--in this Mr. Devine saw a new field of action, in
this Mrs. Richards saw a new field of education.
Women will train themselves for their duties as consumers or else
continue to lie under the sentence of condemnation pronounced upon
them by Florence Nightingale. "Three-fourths of the mischief in
women's lives," said she, "arises from their excepting themselves from
the rule of training considered necessary for men."
But what, in this case, is the training proposed?
The answer to that question will cause some more scales to fall from
our eyes. Just as we have seen that home economics does not consist
essentially of sewing and cooking, we shall see that consumption
is not at all a specialized technique in the sense in which
electrical engineering, department-store buying, railroading, cotton
manufacturing, medicine, and the other occupations of the outside
world are specialized techniques. Home economics will not narrow
women's education but in the end will enlarge it. For consumption,
instead of being a specialty, is a generality so broad as almost
to glitter.
* * * * *
At Menomonie, Wis., Mr. L. D. Harvey, lately president of the National
Education Association, has established a Homemakers' School. It does
not turn out teachers. Its course of instruction is solely for the
prospective housewife.
If we look at the number of things the prospective housewife is to be
we shall soon perceive that she cannot be any one of them in any
specialized technical way and that what she is getting is not so much
a training for a trade as a training for life at large.
The first grand division of study is The House.
[Illustration: MARY D. CHAMBERS, HOME ECONOMICS, ROCKFORD COLLEGE.
_Photograph by Devenier._]
[Illustration: MR. L. D. HARVEY, HOMEMAKERS' SCHOOL, MENOMONIE,
WISCONSIN.
_Photograph by Stein, Milwaukee._]
We here observe that the housewife is going to be something of a
sanitary engineer, since she studies chemistry, physics, and
bacteriology in their "application to such subjects as the heating,
lighting, ventilation, and plumbing of a house." It is thought that
knowledge of this sort "will go a long way toward improving the health
conditions of the country."
We also observe that the housewife is going to be something of an
interior decorator, since she studies "design, color, house planning
and furnishing."
She also acquires some skill as purchasing agent, bookkeeper, and
employer of labor when she takes the course on household management
and studies "the proper apportioning of income among the different
lines of home expenditures, the systematizing and keeping of household
accounts, and the question of domestic service."
The second grand division is Food Study and Preparation.
Here the housewife becomes, to some extent, a dietitian, studying "the
chemical processes in the preparation and digestion of foods," and
considering the question "how she shall secure for the family the
foods best suited to the various activities of each individual."
Here, likewise, she makes a start toward being a pure-food expert,
through a study of "physical and chemical changes induced in food
products by the growth of molds, yeasts, and bacteria," and a start
toward being a health officer, through a study of "bacteria in their
relation to disease, sources of infection, personal and household
disinfection."
Nor does she omit to acquire some of the technique of the physical
director through a course in physiology bearing on "digestion, storage
of energy, rest, sleep, exercise, and regularity of habits."
Of course, in her work in cookery, she pays some attention to special
cookery for invalids.
The third grand division, that of Clothing and Household Fabrics,
produces a dressmaker, a milliner, and an embroiderer, as well as a
person trained to see to it that "the expenditure for clothing shall
be correct in proportion to the expenditure for other purposes."
The fourth grand division, the Care of Children, is of course
limitless. The rearing of the human young is, as we all know and as
Mr. Eliot of Harvard has insisted, the most intellectual occupation in
the world. Here the homemaker applies all the knowledge she has gained
from her study of the hygiene of foods and of the hygiene of clothes,
and also makes some progress toward becoming a trained nurse and a
kindergartner by means of researches into "infant diseases and
emergencies," "the stages of the mental development of the child,"
"the child's imagination with regard to truth-telling and deceit,"
"the history of children's books," and "the art of story-telling."
Passing over the fifth grand division, Home Nursing and Emergencies
(in which the pupil learns simply "the use of household remedies,"
"the care of the sick room," etc.), we come to the wide expanse of the
sixth grand division, Home and Social Economics.
The work in this division begins with a study of the primitive
evolution of the home and comes on down to the present time, when "the
passing of many of the former lines of woman's work into the factory
has brought to many women leisure time which should be spent in social
service."
Note that last fact carefully. _Home economics is no attempt to drive
women back into home seclusion. On the contrary, it is an attempt to
bring the home and its occupants into the scientific and sociological
developments of the outside world._
For this reason, in traversing the division of home and social
economics, the pupil encounters "an effort to determine problems in
civic life which seem to be a part of the duties of women."
Seventhly and lastly, there is a division dedicated to Literature, in
which "a systematic course in reading is carried on through the two
years." Indispensable! No degree of proficiency at inserting calories
in correct numbers into Little Sally's stomach could atone for lack of
skill in leading Little Sally herself through the "Child's Garden of
Verses" with trowel in hand to dig up the gayest plants and reset them
in the memory.
So we come back to our old statement and vary it in phrase but not in
effect by saying that home-economics courses, totaled, do not give a
_technique_ so much as an _outlook_.
The homemaker may happen to be a specialist in some one direction, but
it is clear that she cannot simultaneously know as much about food
values as the real dietitian, as much about the physical care of her
child as the real trained nurse, as much about the wholesomeness of
her living arrangements as the real sanitarian, as much about music as
the Thomas Orchestra, as much about social service as Mr. Devine, and
as much about poems as Mr. Stevenson. Her peculiar equipment, if she
is a good homemaker, is a round of experience and a bent of mind which
make it possible for her to cooeperate intelligently with the
dietitian, the trained nurse, the sanitarian, the Thomas Orchestra,
Mr. Devine, Mr. Stevenson, and the various other representatives of
the various other specialized techniques of the outside world.
It follows that her school discipline cannot be too comprehensive. No
other occupation demands such breadth of sense and sensibility. One
could make a perfectly good cotton manufacturer on the basis of a very
narrow training. One cannot make a good consumer without a really
_liberal education_.
For this reason it becomes necessary to resist certain narrownesses in
certain phases of home economics.
One of these narrownesses is the assumption that because a thing
happens to be close to us it is therefore important. We have heard
lecturers insist that because a house contains drain pipes a woman
should learn _all_ about drain pipes. But why? In most communities
drain pipes are installed and repaired and in every way controlled by
gentlemen who are drainpipe specialists. The woman who lives in the
house has no more need of a professional knowledge of the structural
mysteries of drain pipes than a reporter has of a professional
knowledge of the structural mysteries of his typewriting machine. The
reporter is supplemented at that point by the office mechanic and, so
far as his efficiency as a reporter is concerned, a technical inquiry
into his faithful keyboard's internal arrangements would be in most
cases an amiable waste of time.
Another possible narrowness is the attempt to manufacture "cultural
backgrounds" for various important but quite safe-and-sane household
tasks.
For instance, in the books and in the courses of instruction (of
college grade) on "the house" we have sometimes observed elaborate
accounts of the evolution of the human home, beginning with the huts
of the primitive Simians. And in pursuing the very essential subject
of "clothes and fabrics" we have not infrequently found ourselves in
the midst of spacious preliminary dissertations on the structure of
the loom, beginning with that which was used by the Anthropenguins.
Now we would not for the world speak disparagingly of looms or huts.
We have ourselves examined some of them in the Hull House Museum in
Chicago and in the woods of Canada, and have found them instructive.
We suggest only that college life is short, that the college
curriculum is crowded, and that (except possibly for those students
who are especially interested in anthropology or in industrial
evolution) it would surely be a misfortune to learn of the Simian hut
and to miss Rossetti's "House of Life," or to get the impression that
as a "cultural background" for shirtwaists the Anthropenguinian loom
can really compete with Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus."
If this occasional tendency toward exaggerating the importance of
drain pipes, window curtains, and door mats were to grow strong, and
if girls, as a class, should be required to spend any large proportion
of their time on the specialized history and sociology of feminine
implements and tasks while the boys were still in the current of the
affairs of the race, we should indeed want President Thomas of Bryn
Mawr to repeat on a thousand lecture platforms her indignant assertion
of the fact that "nothing more disastrous for women, or for men, can
be conceived of than specialized education of women as a sex."
These parenthetical observations, however, amount simply to the
expression of our personal opinion that home economics, like every new
idea, carries with it large quantities of dross which will have to be
refined out in the smelter of trial. The real metal in it is its
attempt to establish the principle that intelligent consumption is an
important and difficult task. For that reason it will not only desire
but demand the utmost equality of educational opportunity. And women,
like men, will continue to get their "cultural backgrounds" in the
great achievements of the whole race, where they can hold converse
with Lincoln and Darwin and the makers of the Cologne Cathedral and
George Meredith and Pasteur and Karl Marx and Whistler and Joan of Arc
and St. John.
The woman voiced a great truth who said that the soul which can
irradiate the numberless pettinesses of home management (and it is
folly to deny that there _are_ numberless pettinesses in it) is the
soul "nourished elsewhere." Think that over. It tells the story.
Whether the "elsewhere" is the deep recesses of her own religious
nature or the wide stretches of the great arts and sciences, it is
always an "elsewhere."
Let that be granted, as it must be granted. Let us say that there
shall be no abridgment of the offerings of so-called academic
education. What does a course of study like that of Mr. Harvey's
Homemakers' School attempt to add to academic education?
Principally three things.
First: Certain manual arts.
Second: Certain domestic applications of the physical and sociological
sciences.
Third: Money sense in expenditure (in the course on household
management).
Let us review these things in reverse order.
The last of the three is showing itself in many places. At the
University of Illinois, for instance, Professor Kinley, recently
delegate from the United States to the Pan-American Congress, has
given courses in home administration for women which he has regarded
as of equal importance with his courses in business administration for
men.
At the University of Chicago, in the department of household
administration, course 44 is on "the administration of the house" and
includes "the proper apportionment of income."
The business man says: "My sales cost, or my manufacturing cost, or my
office force cost, is such and such a per cent. of my total cost. When
it goes above that, I want to know why; and I find out; and, if there
isn't a mighty good reason for its going up, I make it go down again
to where it was." Shall we come to the day when in spending the money
which has been earned in business we shall say: "Such and such a per
cent. to food; and such and such a per cent. to clothes; and such and
such a per cent. to shelter; and such and such a per cent. to health
and recreation; and such and such a per cent. to good works; and such
and such other per cents. to such and such other purposes"? Shall we
come to the day when we shall consume wealth with as much forethought
and with as much balance of judgment between conflicting claims as we
now exhibit in acquiring wealth?
They are trying to develop this "costs system for home expenditures"
in many of the schools and departments of home economics to-day. They
believe that most people, because of not looking ahead and because of
not making definite plans based on previous experience, come to the
contemplation of their bills on the first of each month with every
reason to confess that they have bought those things which they ought
not to have bought and have left unbought those things which they
ought to have bought.
But it is not only a matter of reaching a systematic instead of a
helter-skelter enjoyment of the offerings of the world. It is also a
matter of reaching, by study of money values, a mental habit of
economy. And it comes at a time when that habit is needed.