spend all our annual earnings on living expenses and still have a
surplus for fresh capital for new industrial enterprises. We are on
the point of perceiving that we are cramping and stunting the future
industrial expansion of the country by our personal extravagance. We
shall soon really believe Mr. James J. Hill when he says that "every
dollar unprofitably spent is a crime against posterity."
When international industrial competition reaches its climax, that
nation will have an advantage whose people feel most keenly that the
wise expenditure of income is a patriotic as well as a personal duty.
But is this a matter for women alone? Do not men also consume? Are
there no vats in Milwaukee, no stills in Kentucky, no factories
wrapping paper rings around bunches of dead leaves at Tampa? Are there
no men's tailors, gents' furnishing shops, luncheons, clubs,
banquets, athletics, celebrations? And as for home expenditures
themselves, is the man simply to bring the plunder to the door, get
patted on the head, and trot off in search of more plunder? We must
doubt if economy will be reached by such a route. We find ourselves
agreeing rather with the home economics lecturer who said: "There
never yet was a family income really wisely expended without
cooeperation in all matters between husband and wife."
The Massachusetts legislature has passed a law looking toward the
teaching of thrift in the public schools. Boys and girls need it
equally. And we venture to surmise that in so far as the new art and
science of consumption is concerned with wise spending, the bulk of
its teachings ultimately will be enjoyed by both sexes. It will not
be, to any great extent, a specialized education for women.
So much for the "money sense in expenditure" which a full home
economics course adds to "academic" education. The more we admit its
value, the more convinced we must be that it ought to include every
kind of expenditure and both kinds of human being.
A precisely similar conviction arises with regard to those "domestic
applications of the physical and sociological sciences" which a full
home economics course adds to an "academic" education.
Those "domestic" applications are most of them broadly "human"
applications. They bear on daily living, exercise, fresh air, personal
cleanliness, diet, sleep, the avoidance of contagion, methods of
fighting off disease, general physical efficiency. They largely amount
to what Mrs. Ellen H. Richards used to call Right Living. She wanted
four R's instead of three: Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, Right Living.
Now is Right Living to be only for girls?
Mr. Eliot of Harvard does not think so. In a recent "Survey of the
Needs of Education," he said:
"Public instruction in preventive medicine must be provided for all
children and the hygienic method of living must be taught in all
schools.... To make this new knowledge and skill a universal subject
of instruction in our schools, colleges, and universities is by no
means impossible--indeed, it would not even be difficult, for it is a
subject full of natural history as well as social interest....
American schools of every sort ought to provide systematic instruction
on public and private hygiene, diet, sex hygiene, and the prevention
of disease and premature death, not only because these subjects
profoundly affect human affections and public happiness, but because
they are of high economic importance."
It may very well be that what Mr. Eliot had in mind will not only come
to pass but will even exceed his expectations. It may very well be
that the educational policy of the future was correctly search-lighted
by Miss Henrietta I. Goodrich (who used to direct the Boston School of
Housekeeping before it was merged into Simmons College) when she
said:
"We need to have courage to break the present courses in household
arts and domestic science into their component parts and begin again
on the much broader basis of a study of living conditions. Our plea
would be this: that instruction in the facts of daily living be
incorporated in the state's educational system from the primary grades
through the graduate departments of the universities, with a rank
equal to that of any subject that is taught, _as required work for
both boys and girls_."
We revert now finally to the "manual arts" which a full course in home
economics adds to an "academic" education. In this matter, just as in
the matter of money sense in expenditure and in the matter of right
living, we observe that the ultimate issue of the movement is not so
much a specialized education for women as a practical efficiency in
the common things of life for men and women both.
A reasonable proficiency in manual arts will some day be the heritage
of all educated people. Mr. Eliot, in his "Survey of the Needs of
Education," speaks appreciatingly of his father's having caused him to
learn carpentry and wood-turning. He goes on to say:
"This I hold to be the great need of education in the United
States--the devoting of a much larger proportion of the total school
time to the training of the eye, ear, and hand."
[Illustration: PRACTICAL EXPERIENCE IN SERVING BREAKFASTS, DINNERS AND
SUPPERS FOR A SMALL FAMILY, CLEVELAND.]
[Illustration: THE GIRLS IN THE CLEVELAND TECHNICAL HIGH SCHOOL LEARN TO
MAKE POTTERY AS WELL AS TO MAKE DESIGNS.]
It follows, then, that cooking and sewing for girls in the elementary
schools must be made just as rigorous a discipline for eye and hand as
wood-working is for boys. It even follows that boys and girls will
often get their manual training together.
It will not be a case of "household drudgery" for the girls while the
boys are studying civics.
Somewhere in this chapter the reader will find a picture of the
"living room" of the "model" house of the Washington-Allston
Elementary School in Boston. The boys and girls of graduating grade
in that school give four hours a week to matters connected with the
welfare of that house. They have furnished it throughout with their
own handiwork, the girls making pillow-cases, wall-coverings,
window-curtains, etc., and the boys making chairs, tables, cupboards,
etc. Succeeding classes will furnish it again. _The reason why Mr.
Crawford, the master of the school, chose to have a house for a
manual training laboratory was simply that a house offers ampler
opportunities than any other kind of place for instruction in the
practical efficiencies of daily living for both sexes._
The system will be complete when the girls get a bigger training in
design by making more of the chairs, and when the boys get a bigger
training in diet by doing more of the cooking.
* * * * *
We have now glanced at each of the three principal contributions made
to modern education by the new study of the home. We have come to
understand that much of each contribution will be for the male as well
as for the female inhabitants of the home. If girls are to be led
toward wisdom in the use of money, so are boys. If girls are to be
habituated to the principles of Right Living, so again are boys. If
girls have a need of manual training, with certain materials and
implements, so boys, with perhaps other materials and implements, have
a need of manual training, too.
[Illustration: UPPER PICTURE IS A CLASS IN FOOD ADULTERATIONS IN THE HOME
ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.
LOWER PICTURE IS THE LIVING ROOM OF THE "MODEL" HOUSE IN THE
WASHINGTON-ALLSTON ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, BOSTON.]
It may be that in each case, except the last, there will be an ampler
body of instruction for feminine than for masculine use. But the
excess will be small enough to be absorbed without interference with
general education of the largest and most liberal sort. If this were
not true by natural fact, it would have to be made true artificially.
The body of home economics instruction could not be suffered to defeat
its own ultimate mental purpose. The study of specialized techniques
could not be permitted to narrow the spacious educational experience
needed for that broadest of all generalities, the homemaker's
intelligent Consumption, Enjoyment, Use of all the world's physical
and spiritual commodities.
Surely we can now say with unanimous consent that Home Economics
has revealed itself to be not a species of sex education but a
species of vocational education. We miss its inmost intent, and we
divert it from its mission, if we start with saying "Let us teach
girls." We have to start with saying "Let us teach Foods, Textiles,
Hygiene." We then ask "Who need to know about Foods, Textiles,
Hygiene?" In answer, our largest group of scholars will come from
among the prospective managers of households. But we are not
teaching feminine accomplishments. We are teaching human life-tasks.
Widening with this vocational principle, Miss Goodrich's vision of the
inclusion of both sexes in the courses of study now labeled
"domestic-science-and-art" finds widening fulfilment. Side by side
with young women in the Foods laboratory we shall see young men who
are going to be chefs, dietitians, pure-food inspectors. In the
Textiles laboratory we shall see young women who are going to sew at
home, young women who are going to sew in factories, young men who are
going to manufacture cloth. Hygiene will attract the sanitarian, the
nurse, the hotel manager, trousered or petticoated.
We come thus face to face with the final development of the home
economics movement. It issues into a double system. After providing,
to the young, that general introduction to life at large which we have
already detailed, it goes on, in its second phase, to provide
immediate information of a more specialized character to scholars more
mature _at the time when that information is immediately needed_. A
large part of the home economics movement of the future will be the
establishment of a system of continuous instruction for wives,
mothers, housekeepers, already entered upon their task of home-making
and child-rearing.
The need of this development appears as soon as we take the sequence
of events in a girl's life and place it beside the sequence of events
in a boy's. If a boy is going to be a cotton-machinery engineer, a
municipal sanitary expert, a food specialist, we do not give him his
real technical finish till he is entering his trade. We may have given
him, we ought to have given him, a vocational foundation of pertinent
knowledge. But we do not give him the minutiae of trade technique till
he is at the point of practicing his trade or has already begun to
practice it. This principle, applicable to the preparation for all
trades whatsoever, sets limits to the amount of detailed preparation
for home-making which can profitably be introduced, for most girls,
into the curricula of schools and colleges.
In former chapters of this book we have seen that for most girls there
is a gap, a large gap, between school and marriage, between girlhood
and motherhood. We have seen, too, that this gap tends to be filled
with money-earning work which demands a certain preparation of its
own. That point aside, however, the very existence of the gap in
question, no matter how it may be filled, means that if we give a
minute and elaborate preparation of home-making to girlhood we may
wait five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, before we see
wifehood and motherhood put that preparation to use.
Anybody who proposed to give a boy a minute and elaborate preparation
for civil engineering a possible twenty years before he became a civil
engineer and in contempt of the possible contingency of his not
becoming a civil engineer at all, would hardly deserve to be called
practical. Yet, in the name of practical education, we are sometimes
asked to tolerate a correspondingly complete preparation for wifehood
and motherhood at an age when both of those estates are mere
prospects, distant and indefinite. We cannot believe that so extreme a
demand will ever be acceded to by educators who have fully considered
the modern postponement of marriage. Home economics, in schools and
colleges, except for girls who are going to become teachers of it or
who in other ways are going to make it their immediate money-earning
work, must stop with its broad applications to daily human living. So
will it be useful, in different degrees, to both sexes and clash
neither with general academic preparation nor with the preparation for
self-support.
There will remain, unlearned, a great deal that modern science and
modern sociology have to offer to the wife and mother. Let that great
deal, in its more technical teachings, be learned when it can be
carried forward into action.
The machinery of home economics instruction for adults is even now
being erected, is even now being operated.
The Chicago School of Domestic Arts and Science, after much teaching
of young girls, has established a "Housekeepers' Association." The
members of that association are adult practicing housekeepers. The
same school will soon establish a course in the study of the Care of
Children. The pupils enrolled in that course will be mothers.
The fact is that science and sociology are so constantly amending and
enlarging their teachings that a knowledge of what they taught twenty
years ago is inadequate and a knowledge of the minutiae of what they
taught twenty years ago is futile. The housekeeper of the future will
have to keep on studying while housekeeping.
Several hundred housekeepers come each winter to the University of
Wisconsin to attend the "Women's Course in Home Economics." They hear
Professor Hastings talk about the "Production and Care of Milk." They
hear Dr. Evans talk about the "Prevention of Infant Mortality." They
hear Professor Marlatt talk about "Diets in Disease." In each case
they hear something very different from what they would have heard in
their girlhood. For this reason alone, even if the gap between
girlhood and motherhood did not exist, the machinery of home economics
instruction for adults would have become necessary.
[Illustration: ONE-WEEK COURSES IN HOME ECONOMICS, UNIVERSITY OF
WISCONSIN.]
It is for adults that the United States Government issues such
bulletins as "Modern Conveniences for the Farm Home." It is for adults
that Cornell University sends out its Farmers' Wives' Bulletins in
editions of twenty thousand. It is for adults that Columbia University
prints pamphlets like "The Feeding of Children in a Family with an
Income of $800 a Year."
For adults, again, are such institutions as the American School of
Home Economics, in Chicago, which, in the few years of its life, has
enrolled more than 10,000 pupils in its correspondence courses.
For adults, finally, are the Homemakers' Conferences held in
conjunction with Farmers' Institutes as well as the extension-course
lectures given to local groups in city and in country by teachers sent
out from state universities and agricultural colleges.
All this machinery, which here we do not attempt to describe but only
to indicate, will some day find its scattered units associated and
harmonized through the work of a Federal Bureau of Domestic Science
and Art. Bills for the establishment of such a bureau have already
been introduced into Congress. It will not be a cooking and sewing
school for children. It will be a technical continuation school for
adults. The National Congress of Mothers discerned one of its
functions when it said: "The time has come when every nation through
a special department should provide data concerning infants which may
be used by mothers everywhere."
At the end of chapter two of this book we asked whether or not, in the
field of education, the training for the home and the training for
self-support would impose a double burden on the girl pupil. If our
interpretation of the spirit of the home economics movement has been
correct we may now say that the training for the home is so largely a
training for life in general and is so distributed through different
life-periods that it will not be felt to be burdensome at all. We may
even go on to suggest that self-support and housekeeping, world and
home, and the trainings for them, will merge for the girl into a
progressive unified experience.
First. That part of home economics which can profitably be taught to
the mass of pupils in elementary and high school and in the colleges,
with its manual arts, its Right Living and its money-sense, will be
helpful, much of it, to boys as well as to girls and will actually,
since it develops the whole personality of the pupil, be part of the
training for self-support itself.
[Illustration: MARRIED WOMEN AND WOMEN WHO WORK DURING THE DAY ATTEND THE
EVENING COOKERY CLASSES IN THE ST. LOUIS HIGH SCHOOLS.]
Second. The years spent in self-support, in learning the world, will
be part of the training for the home, because hereafter, as the Mary
of our first chapter remarked, the mother who does not know the world
cannot wisely rear boys up into it.
Third. After the period of self-support, when marriage comes, what
further technical instruction the housekeeper and mother may need will
be furnished to her by a system of adult education limitless in its
possible growth.
IV.
The Wasters
It got talked around among Marie's friends that she didn't want
children.
This was considered very surprising, in view of all that her father
and husband had done for her.
Here is what they had done for her:
They had removed from her life all need, and finally all desire, to
make efforts and to accomplish results through struggle in defiance of
difficulty and at the cost of pain.
Work and pain were the two things Marie was on no account to be
exposed to. With this small but important reservation:
She might _work_ at _avoiding_ pain.
When the cook had a headache she took Getting Breakfast for it. When
Marie had a headache she worked not at breakfast but at the headache.
It was a social ceremony of large proportions, with almost
everybody among those present, from the doctor down through Mother
and Auntie to Little Sister. The decorations, which were very
elaborate, comprised, besides the usual tasteful arrangement of
thermometers, eau-de-Karlsbad, smelling-salts bottles, cracked ice,
and chocolate creams, a perfect shower of tourmaline roses, the odor
of which, alone among all the vegetable odors in the world, had
been found after long experimentation to be soothing to Marie on
such occasions. It was not thought that Marie could vanquish a
headache except after a plucky fight of at least one day's duration.
Actresses go on and do their turns day after day and night after night
with hardly a miss. Marie's troubles were no more numerous than
theirs. But they were much larger. Troubles are like gases. They
expand to fill any void into which they are introduced. Marie's spread
themselves through a vacuum as large as her life.
The making of that vacuum and the inserting of Marie into it cost her
father and her husband prodigious toil and was a great pleasure to
them. Marie belonged to the Leisure Class. Socially, she was therefore
distinctly superior to her father and her husband.
[Illustration: WORK? FOR MARIE? FOR MY DAUGHTER? SHOCKING!]
President Thomas of Bryn Mawr had Marie in mind when she said:
"By the leisured class we mean in America the class whose men work
harder than any other men in the excitement of professional and
commercial rivalry, but whose women constitute the only leisured
class we have and the most leisured class in the world."
Marie's father wasn't so very rich, either. He was engaged in a
business so vividly competitive that Marie's brother was hurried
through college as fast as possible and brought into the game at
twenty-two with every nerve stretched taut.
Nothing like that was expected of Marie. She was brought up to
think that leisure was woman's natural estate. Work, for any girl,
she regarded as an accident due to the unexpected and usually
reprehensible collapse of the males of the poor girl's family.
This view of the matter gave Marie, _unconsciously to herself_, what
morality she had. Hard drinking, "illegitimate" gambling, and
excessive dissipations of all sorts are observed commonly to have a
prejudicial effect on male efficiency and on family prosperity.
Against all "vices," therefore (although she didn't catch the
"therefore"), Marie was a Moral Force of a million angel-power.
Aside from "vices," however, all kinds of conduct looked much alike
to her. Ethics is the rules of the game, the decencies of the struggle
for existence. Marie had no part in the struggle. She violated its
decencies without being at all aware of it.
All the way, for instance, from stealing a place in the line in front
of a box-office window ahead of ten persons who were there before her,
up the tiny scale of petty aggressions within her narrow reach to the
cool climax of spending three months every summer in a pine-wood
mountain resort (thus depriving her city-bound husband of the personal
companionship which was the one best thing she had to give him in
return for what he gave her), she was as competent a little grafter as
the town afforded.
But she was a perfectly logical one. Her family had trained her to
deadhead her way through life and she did it. Finally she went beyond
their expectations. They hadn't quite anticipated all of the sweetly
undeviating inertia of her mind.
Nevertheless she was a nice girl. In fact, she was The Nice Girl. She
was sweet-tempered, sweet-mannered, and sweet-spoken--a perfect dear.
She never did a "bad" thing in her life. And she never ceased from her
career of moral forcing. She wrote to her husband from her mountain
fastness, warning him against high-balls in hot weather. She went
twice a month during the winter to act as librarian for an evening at
a settlement in a district which was inhabited by perfectly
respectable working people but which, while she passed out the books,
she sympathetically alluded to as a "slum."
It is hardly fair, however, to lay the whole explanation of Marie on
her father, her husband, and herself.
A few years ago, in the churchyard of St. Philip's Church at
Birmingham, they set up a tombstone which had fallen down, and they
reinscribed it in honor of the long-neglected memory of the man who
had been resting beneath it for a century and a half. His name was
Wyatt. John Wyatt. He had a good deal to do with making Marie what she
was.
What toil, what tossing nights, what sweating days, what agonized
wrenching of the imagination toward a still unreached idea, have gone
into the making of leisure--for other people!
Wyatt strained toward, and touched, the idea which was the real start
of modern leisure.
In the year 1733, coming from the cathedral town of Lichfield, where
the Middle Ages still lingered, he set up, in a small building near
Sutton Coldfields, a certain machine. That machine inaugurated, and
forever symbolizes, the long and glorious series of mechanical
triumphs which has made a large degree of leisure possible, not for a
few thousand women, as was previously the case, but for millions and
millions of them.
It was only about two feet square. But it accomplished a thing never
before accomplished. It spun the first thread ever spun in the history
of the world without the intervention of human fingers.
On that night woman lost her oldest and most significant title and
function. The Spinster ceased to be.
The mistress and her maid, spinning together in the Hall, their
fingers drawing the roving from the distaff and stretching it out as
the spindle twisted it, were finally on the point of separating
forever.
We all see what Wyatt's machine did to the maids. We all understand
that when he started his mill at Birmingham and hired his working
force of _ten girls_, he prophesied the factory "slum."
We do not yet realize what he did to the mistresses, how he utterly
changed their character and how he marvelously increased their
number.