LAST month's article ended with the inquiry whether the new
education for homemaking would clash seriously with the modern
young woman's necessary education for money-earning. We conclude
that it will not.
Such developments as the long, specialized, four-year course in
Household Economics at Simmons College in Boston are not here in
point. That Simmons course is more than an education for
home-making. It is an education for earning money by teaching
home-making or by becoming (among other things) a dietitian in a
hospital, or a manager of a lunch-room, or an interior decorator.
Our subject is not Home Economics as a money-earning occupation
for a few women, but Home Economics as part of the education of
all women.
In that aspect it does not seem likely to result in any "special
feminine education" of such bulk as to withdraw women, in any
serious degree, from the general education of the race. This is
undeniably true, provided our observations have been correct
that----
1. Home Economics is at heart Consumption, and must be so because
the home woman is more and more purely a consumer.
2. Consumption is the broadest of generalities, requiring the
broadest of liberal educations.
3. So far as manual arts are concerned, the "non-academic"
cookery of the girl is balanced by the "non-academic" carpentry
of the boy.
4. Right Living and Wise Spending will, to a great extent, get
diffused throughout the whole educational system for boys and
girls, men and women, alike.
If there remains (and there does remain) certain further
specialization which the average girl needs in order to be a good
wife, mother, and home-maker, she will get it in "finishing
courses" furnished at the various levels of the educational
system, when she leaves school, or else (better still) she will
get it in "continuation schools" for adults to which she may
resort when she is actually going to be a wife, mother, or
home-maker.
Why learn really technical specialized things years and years
before they are needed? Why learn them at a time when it is not
certain that they will be needed at all?
The modern postponement of marriage is here a controlling
element.
The fact that in Boston, among women from thirty to thirty-four
years of age, 297 out of every 1,000 (more than a quarter) are
still unmarried is usually put down to a scarcity of men. That
scarcity is exaggerated.
Observe the comparative numbers of unmarried women and of
unmarried men in that age-period in Boston:
Unmarried Women 8,081
Unmarried Men 10,651.
Observe further:
The total number of men of all conjugal conditions in the
age-period in question is 28,603.
A little work with pencil and paper will now still further weaken
the scarcity theory by revealing the fact that in Boston, among
men from thirty to thirty-four years of age, 372 out of every
1,000 are still single.
Social conditions in rural communities tend to approach those of
urban communities. Social conditions in the West tend to approach
those in the East. Boston is not eccentric. It is only ahead.
"Continuation School" instruction in Home Economics for engaged
and married women is a form of education beginning to appear in
every part of the world.
But it lies beyond the woman's period of money-earning. How long
is that period? And what are the social and racial consequences
of the fact that (speaking generally) the more highly prepared
modern men and women are to transmit intelligence to posterity,
the more steadily do they tend to give their most vigorous years
to singleness?
----I'LL NIVER GO HOME AGAIN!