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THE HOME OF A GRADUATE
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Home-making has not kept pace with our great industrial
advancement. The average home-maker of today is less thoroughly
prepared for her business in life than the woman of a generation
ago. It would seem that she considers the home-making profession
of much less importance than such occupations as curling feathers
and making shirtwaists. The latter has a commercial value, the
former has not; and we have learned to weigh things by their money
value. Then, again, competition has become the one incentive to
work. Tie badly the million little knots in the willow plume and
the next girl in the line gets the job. Feed the baby with poor
milk, let the air in the room become polluted, ignorantly buy and
ignorantly cook, and no one takes the work from you. Why worry
over the way it is done?
There are many reasons why the woman of a generation or two ago
was a better home-maker than the woman of today. The home duties
today often are only part of the daily work of a woman’s life. The
housekeeper today is (in millions of cases) a wage earner as well.
She cannot be as single-minded as the old-fashioned mother whose
only thought was the home. Schools, newspapers, settlements, the
trend of the times, all fill the mind with outside interests.
These things are important, but they have a tendency to crowd out
domestic responsibilities and make women restless under the homely
tasks. Suffrage we will have, and we must interest and educate
women until we do have it; but, at the same time, the dishes have
to be washed clean, the beds have to be aired and made well, and
the babies have to eat nourishing food, or we’ll have an anaemic,
poor race to govern when we get the suffrage.
Is it the fault of the home-maker of today if weakness instead of
strength is the inheritance of her children, and will it be the
fault of the home-maker of tomorrow if she bears and rears a weak
race? If household administration is to take its place in the
front rank with the other professions of the day, educators as
well as women must wake up and realize that the whole housekeeping
question is dependent upon scientific management, efficiency,
skilled labor, and effective tools.
There are those who say that this training should be taught at
home, and in many cases our school children, whether foreign or
American, do come from homes where the mothers are good
housekeepers according to their light; but the last generation
cannot teach the coming one everything. As Samuel Merwin says in a
recent book, “the accumulated experience of the ages is the
grandmothers, and yet she is authority no longer; since her day
science has stepped in. To her mind the gulf between herself and
her daughter is nothing but the old gulf between age and youth.
She is wrong. It is a million miles wide and if the mother keeps
to the old way she risks the life of her child.”
Again, home-making must be made interesting. The man regards his
business as a pleasure. He plays it as he plays a game, and he
plays to win. And so housekeeping has become a “game, not a duty.”
In a natural, enjoyable way our girls should be taught to play the
game of household administration. Home duties are not mere duties
any longer; the old way of “doing up the housework” made every act
an end in itself. Now every act is simply a means to an end; every
move is important,—the way the dishes are washed, the beds made,
the cooking done, may win or lose the game. In the child’s mind
must be a perfect plan; to work out that plan correctly will bring
health, order and happiness as the prize.
The world must stop trying to make progress by walking backward.
We must make room for a vaster scheme of household economics than
the last generation ever dreamed of. The home must be made to
catch up with the factory, the store and the office, and we know
that in comparison with these industries home-making has lagged
behind. Now—suddenly—we realize that feeble-minded children are
becoming more numerous, that malnutrition in school children is
becoming so great that the highest standard of study is impossible
and that street life is taking the place of home life. We wake up
and ask what we can do to make the home-maker realize that she is
responsible for these things.
But is she?
Educators who admit that life and health are absolutely dependent
on the home have failed to find room in the educational scheme to
provide this home knowledge. There were in the elementary schools
in New York city last year 388,000 girls. Only 43,500 of them were
in cooking classes. That means that 344,500 girls in this one year
never had a suggestion given them that home-making was a
profession worth studying. Only seventh and eighth grade girls are
permitted to have cooking lessons, and that means that during the
entire grammar school course a few fortunate girls received nine
full days of domestic science instruction. I say a few, for out of
560 elementary schools only 170 are equipped for cooking; and for
these 170 schools, there are only 135 domestic science
teachers—some cooking rooms are closed altogether and others
running on half time. A girl is fortunate if she happens not to be
in one of the 390 schools where no instruction in domestic science
is given, and still more fortunate if she stays in one of the few
selected schools until she reaches the seventh grade. There she
first learns that home-making is worth studying. But 20,000 left
school last year before this grade was reached.
Our public school children may be cash girls, or sales women, or
factory hands. These things may or may not be; but one thing is
certain, and that is that every girl must live in a home and take
her part in home responsibilities.
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