The slow development of the demand for the training of girls of the
middle and upper classes in the details of household management has been
to a great extent due to the common observation that persons of
imperfect education are frequently proficient in the domestic arts, and
to the assumption that good housekeeping consists entirely in the
efficient exercise of those arts.
The fact that in the early Victorian period girls living much at home
learned, almost insensibly, from their mothers the routine of daily
duties in the house, has made elder women look askance on the lectures
dealing with domestic economy which appear to them so needless, and has
led them to foster the superstition that woman _qua_ woman should be
equal to any demand that may be made upon her as organiser of her own
household.
That the housekeeping of to-day is more complex than that of half a
century ago is incredible to the older woman who remembers the baking
and brewing, and divers other matters, that demanded the attention of
the notable housewives of the forties and fifties of the nineteenth
century. That the horizon of women's lives has widened, and that other
interests than those appertaining to their immediate circle claim their
attention, is not acceptable to all; it is however the claims of these
outside interests that have awakened in the more thoughtful the desire
so to order their households that they may in some degree free
themselves from petty cares, and be able to help in the amelioration of
the lives of less fortunate persons; or to pursue other branches of
knowledge in which they have learned to take a keen intellectual
pleasure.
It is a paradox that one of the difficulties with which the modern
mistress has to contend is the fact that her house is "replete with
every modern convenience." Every labour-saving contrivance, every
mechanical convenience, calls for vigilance to ensure its proper use,
and for knowledge as to the ways in which it may fail, and of the method
of readjustment if it should happen to do so. No apparatus which is not
thoroughly understood by the mistress will be well used by the servants,
and servants will rarely if ever exercise any knowledge they possess to
prevent the expense of calling in a workman. If the mistress of a house
can use such ordinary tools as a hammer, a screwdriver, a gluepot, and a
soldering-iron, a great deal of expense may be saved in small repairs;
on the other hand, ignorant meddling with scientific apparatus may be
worse than useless. There can be no doubt that a course of instruction
in natural philosophy, combined with work in a well-equipped laboratory
and workshop, should find a place in the curriculum of every girls'
school, whether elementary or secondary, as this training lays the
surest foundation for a superstructure of experimental domestic science.
The argument against including the application of the physical sciences
to domestic methods in the ordinary educational course of every girl,
namely, that she may not be called upon to keep a house of her own,
cannot be sustained; there are no circumstances in which knowledge of
the laws which govern the health and well-being of human beings can be
useless. We all live in houses, either our own or other people's, and we
are all liable to disease and discomfort caused by the faulty
construction of the house or the unhealthy practices of the inmates.