Dear General Reader, please let that sentence stand for the
thousand words (much like those of a competent barker at the door
of a show-tent) which you usually oblige an author to expend on
enticing you into reading his article. Think how much time you
save by walking straight into the tent and observing that--
THE First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts was
held in 1908 at Freiburg in Switzerland. It as no improvised
amateur uplift, private-theatricals affair.
The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of
Freiburg's State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics
were printed and circulated beforehand. The participating members
numbered seven hundred. The discussions developed the
characteristic points of the three rival breeds of household-arts
instruction--the German, the Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were
made to the normal schools of Freiburg, Berne, and Zurich, in
each of which there is an elaborate system for the training of
household-arts teachers. In the end, in order that facts and
ideas about the education of girls for their duties as
house-keepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted to
establish, at some place in Switzerland, a Permanent
International Information Committee.
Thus, in an age in which the productive tasks of the home have
almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which
even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample
empire, are forever making concessions of territory to those
barbarian invaders, the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and
ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies
fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs
the spectators to say "thumbs-down" and let her put it out of its
agony altogether--in such an age there comes, at Freiburg, in
this First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts,
the most serious, the most notable, recognition. ever given in
any age to the home's economic value.
A real paradox? Well, at any rate, it gives wings to the
fluttering thought that theories of industrial evolution, one's
own as well as Mrs. Gilman's, are a bit like automobiles--not
always all that they are cranked up to be.
Certainly the revival of the home seems to attract larger crowds
to the mourners' bench every year.
At the University of Missouri the first crop of graduates in Home
Economics was gathered this last spring. They were seven. And as
most of them took likewise a degree in Education, it may be
assumed that they will go forth to spread the gospel.
Their preceptress, Miss Edna D. Day, who next year will head the
just-organized Department of Home Economics in the University of
Kansas, is a novel type of new woman in that she has earned the
degree of Doctor of Philosophy in "Woman's Sphere." She took
graduate work in the Department of Home Administration in the
University of Chicago and achieved her doctorate with an
investigation into "The Effect of Cooling on the Digestibility of
Starch." What she found out was subsequently printed as a
bulletin by the United States Department of Agriculture.
In the midst of the festivities at the wake held over The Home,
it perplexes the mourners to learn that some of those domestic
science bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture
excite a demand for a million copies.
It is a wake like Mike McCarthy's.
Mike was lookin' iligant
As he rested there in state.