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. Deville'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
is warmly commended by such women as Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose skill as
scientist and vision as philosopher have 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 sees a new field of
action, in this Mrs. Richards sees 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 technigues. Home
Economics will not narrow women's education but in the end will
enlarge it, because Consumption, instead of being a specialty, is
a generality so broad as almost to glitter.