Chapter 19

"Public instruction in preventive medicine must be provided for all children and the hygienic method of living must be taught in all schools. . . . To make this new knowledge and skill a universal subject of instruction in our schools, colleges, and universities is by no means impossible--indeed, it would not even be difficult, for it is a subject full of natural history as well as social interest. . . . American schools of every sort ought to provide systematic instruction on public and private hygiene, diet, sex hygiene, and the prevention of disease and premature death, not only because these subjects profoundly affect human affections and public happiness, but because they are of high economic importance."

A large part of Home Economics is simply Living Conditions. It is simply the lessons of Bacteriology, Chemistry, Physiology, and Sociology about the common facts of daily physical and social existence.

It may very well be, therefore, that what Mr. Eliot had in mind will not only come to pass but will even exceed his expectations. It may very well be that the educational policy of the future was correctly search-lighted by Miss Henrietta I. Goodrich (who used to direct the Boston School of Housekeeping before it was merged into Simmons College) when she said:

"We need to have courage to break the present courses in household arts and domestic science into their component parts and begin again on the much broader basis of a study of living conditions. Our plea would be this: that instruction in the facts of daily living be incorporated in the state's educational system from the primary grades through the graduate departments of the universities, with a rank equal to that of any subject that is taught, AS REQUIRED WORK FOR BOTH BOYS AND GIRLS."

We revert now finally to the "manual arts" which a full course in Home Economics adds to an "academic" education. In this matter, just as in the matter of Money Sense in Expenditure and in the matter of Right Living, we observe that the ultimate issue of the movement is not so much a specialized education for women as a practical efficiency in the common things of life for men and women both.

A reasonable proficiency in manual arts will some day be the heritage of all educated people. Mr. Eliot, in his "Survey of the Needs of Education," speaks appreciatingly of his father's having caused him to learn carpentry and wood-turning. He goes on to say:

"This I hold to be the great need of education in the United States--the devoting of a much larger proportion of the total school time to the training of the eye, ear, and hand."

It follows, then, that cooking and sewing for girls in the elementary schools must be made just as rigorous a discipline for eye and hand as wood-working is for boys. It even follows that boys and girls will often get their manual training together.

It will not be a case of "household drudgery" for the girls while the boys are studying civics.

Somewhere in this article (and as close to this paragraph as we can get the Art Director to put it) the reader will find a picture of the "living room" of the "model" house of the Washington-Allston Elementary School in Boston. The boys and girls of graduating grade in that school give four hours a week to matters connected with the welfare of that house. They have furnished it throughout with their own handiwork, the girls making pillow-cases, wall-coverings, window-curtains, etc., and the boys making chairs, tables, cupboards, etc. Succeeding classes will furnish it again. THE REASON WHY MR. CRAWFORD, THE MASTER OF THE SCHOOL, CHOSE TO HAVE A HOUSE FOR A MANUAL TRAINING LABORATORY WAS SIMPLY THAT A HOUSE OFFERS AMPLER OPPORTUNITIES THAN ANY OTHER KIND OF PLACE FOR INSTRUCTION IN THE PRACTICAL EFFICIENCIES OF DAILY LIVING FOR BOTH SEXES.

The system will be complete when the girls get a bigger training in design by making more of the chairs, and when the boys get a bigger training in diet by doing more of the cooking.

IV

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!

By ARTHUR STRINGER

I'll niver go home again, Home to the ould sad hills, Home through the ould soft rain, Where the curlew calls and thrills!

For I thought to find the ould wee house, Wid the moss along the wall! And I thought to hear the crackle-grouse, And the brae-birds call!

And I sez, I'll find the glad wee burn, And the bracken in the glen, And the fairy-thorn beyont the turn, And the same ould men!

But the ways I'd loved and walked, avick, Were no more home to me, Wid their sthreets and turns av starin' brick, And no ould face to see!

And the ould glad ways I'd helt in mind, Loike the home av Moira Bawn, And the ould green turns I'd dreamt to find, They all were lost and gone!

And the bairns that romped by Tullagh Burn Whin they saw me sthopped their play-- Through a mist av tears I tried to turn And ghost-like creep away!

And I'll niver go home again! Home to the ould lost years, Home where the soft warm rain Drifts loike the drip av tears!

***************************************************************** Vol. XXIII October 1910 No. 4

THE WOMEN OF TO-MORROW {page 486-496 part 3.}

By

WILLIAM HARD

III LOVE DEFERRED

Mary felt she would wait for John even if, instead of going away on a career, he were going away on a comet.

She waited for him from the time she was twenty-two to the time she was twenty-six, and would have waited longer if she hadn't got angry and insisted on marrying him.

Into why she waited, and why she wouldn't wait any longer, chance put most of the simple plot of the commonplace modern drama, "Love Deferred." It is so commonplace that it is doubtful if any other drama can so stretch the nerves or can so draw from them a thin, high note of fine pain.

We will pretend that John was a doctor. No, that's too professional. He was a civil engineer. That's professional enough and more commercial. It combines Technique and Business, which are the two big elements in the life of Modern Man.

When they got engaged, Mary was through college, but John had one more year to go in engineering school.

How the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

When Judge Story was professor at Harvard in the thirties of the last century, he put the law into his pupils' heads in eighteen months. The present professors require three years.

In 1870 the Harvard Medical School made you attend classes for four months in each of three years. It now makes you do it for nine months in each of four years.

As for engineering, the University of Wisconsin gave John a chill by informing him in its catalogue that "it is coming to be generally recognized that a four-year technical course following the high-school course is not an adequate preparation for those who are to fill important positions; and the University would urge all those who can afford the time to extend their studies over a period of five or six years."

John compromised on five. This gave him a few Business courses in the College of Commerce in addition to his regular Technique courses in the College of Engineering. He was now a Bachelor of Science.

He thereupon became an apprentice in the shops of one of the two biggest electrical firms in the United States. He inspected the assembling of machines before they were shipped, and he overheard wisdom from foremen and superintendents. His salary was fifteen cents an hour. Since he worked about ten hours a day, his total income was about forty dollars a month. At the end of the year he was raised to fifty. This was the normal raise for a Bachelor of Science.

The graduates of Yale and Harvard in the bright colonial days of those institutions married almost immediately on graduation. John didn't. He didn't get married so early nor become a widower so often. He didn't carry so many children to the christening font nor so many to the cemetery.

Look at the dark as well as the bright side of colonial days.

Pick out any of the early Harvard classes. Honestly and truly at random, run your finger down the column and pick any class. The class of 1671!

It had eleven graduates. One of them remained a bachelor. Don't be too severe on him. He died at twenty-four. Of the remaining ten, four were married twice and two were married three times. For ten husbands, therefore, there were eighteen wives.

Mr. G. Stanley Hall, President of Clark University, very competently remarks: "The problem of superfluous women did not exist in those days. They were all needed to bring up another woman's children."

The ten husbands of the Harvard class of 1671, with their eighteen wives, had seventy-one children. They did replenish the earth. They also filled the churchyards.

TWENTY-ONE OF THOSE SEVENTY-ONE CHILDREN DIED IN CHILDHOOD.

This left fifty to grow up. It was an average of five surviving children for each of the ten fathers. But it was an average of only 2.7 for each of the eighteen mothers.

In commending the colonial family one must make an offset for the unfair frequency with which it had more than one wife-and-mother to help out its fertility record. And in commending the era of young wives and numerous children one must make an offset for the hideous frequency with which it killed them.

Turn from Harvard to Yale. Look at the men who graduated from 1701 to 1745.

The girls they took in marriage were most of them under twenty-one and were many of them down in their 'teens, sometimes as far down as fourteen.

May we observe that they were not taken in marriage out of a conscious sense of duty to the Commonwealth and to Population? They were taken because they were needed. The colonial gentleman had to have his soap-kettles and candle-molds and looms and smokehouses and salting-tubs and spinning-wheels and other industrial machines operated for him by somebody, if he was going to get his food and clothes and other necessaries cheap. He lost money if he wasn't domestic. He was domestic.

Our young engineering friend, John, when HE looked forward to HIS future domestic establishment, saw no industrial machines in it at all except a needle and a saucepan. Consequently he had very little real use for a wife. What he wanted was money enough to "give" Mary a home.

Marriages are more uncertain now. And fewer of them are marriages of mere convenience. It is both a worse and a better state of things. On the one hand, John didn't marry Mary so soon. On the other hand, he was prevented from wanting anything in his marriage except just Mary.

The enormous utility of the colonial wife, issuing in enormous toil (complicated by unlimited childbearing), had this kind of result:

Among the wives of the 418 Yale husbands of the period from 1701 to 1745, there were

Thirty-three who died before they were twenty-five years old;

Fifty-five who died before they were thirty-five years old;

Fifty-nine who died before they were forty-five years old.

Those 418 Yale husbands lost 147 wives before full middle age. It ceases, therefore, to be surprising, though it remains unabatedly sickening, that the stories of the careers of colonial college men, of the best-bred men of the times, are filled with such details as:

"----First wife died at twenty-four, leaving six children."

"----Eight children born within twelve years, two of them feeble-minded."

"----First wife died at nineteen, leaving three children.

"----Fourteen children. First wife died at twenty-eight, having borne eight children in ten years."

From that age of universal early marrying and of promiscuous early dying we have come in two centuries to an age of delayed (and even omitted) marrying and of a settled determination to keep on living.

The women's colleges are so new and they attracted in their early days so un-average a sort of girl that their records are not conclusive. Nevertheless, here are some guiding facts from Smith College, of Northampton, Massachusetts:

--> We are taking college facts not because this article is confined in any respect to college people but merely because the matrimonial histories in the records of the colleges are the most complete we know of.)

In 1888, Smith College, in its first ten classes, had graduated 370 women.

In 1903, fifteen years later, among those 370 women there were 212 who were still single.

This record does not satisfy Mr. G. Stanley Hall, who figured it out. The remaining facts, however, might be considered more cheering:

The 158 Smith women who had married had borne 315 children. This was two for each of them. And most of them were still in their childbearing period. Compare this with the colonial records. But don't take the number of children per colonial father. Be fair. Take it per mother.

We have the matrimonial histories of colonial Yale and Harvard men grouped and averaged according to the decade in which they graduated. We will regard the graduates of each decade as together constituting one case.

In no case does the average number of children per wife go higher than 3.89. In one case it goes as low as 2.98.

Perhaps the modern wife's habit of going on living and thereby protracting her period of childbearing will in time cause her fertility record to compare not unfavorably with that of the colonial wife, who made an early start but a quick finish.

In the year 1903, among all the 370 Smith graduates in those first ten classes, only twenty-four had died. And among all the 315 children, only twenty-six had died. On the whole, between being the wife of a Yale or Harvard colonial graduate and being a member of one of the first ten Smith classes, a modern girl might conclude that the chances of being a dead one matrimonially in the latter case would be more than offset by the chances of being a dead one actually in the former.

This deplorable flippancy would overlook the serious fact that permanent or even prolonged celibacy on the part of large numbers of young men and young women is a great social evil. The consequences of that evil we shall observe later on.[1]

[1] In speaking about celibacy we refer wholly to secular and not at all to religious celibacy.

In the meantime we return to John and Mary.

While John was doing his last year in engineering school, Mary did a year of technical study in the New York School of Philanthropy, or in the St. Louis School of Social Economy, or in the Chicago School of Civics and Philanthropy, or in the Boston School for Social Workers.

They won't even let you start in "doing good" nowadays without some training for it. This is wise, considering how much harm doing good can do.

But how the preparation for life does lengthen itself out!

Mary took a civil service examination and got a job with the State Bureau of Labor. She finished her first year with the Bureau at the same time when John finished his first year with the electrical firm. She had earned $600. He had earned $480.

There were several hundred other apprentices in the shops along with John. When he thought of the next year's work at fifty a month and when he looked at the horde of competing Bachelors of Science in which he was pocketed, he whitened a bit.

"I must get out of the ruck," he said to himself. "I must get a specialty. I must do some more preparing.

He began to perceive how long it takes the modern man to grow up, intellectually and financially. He began to perceive what a tedious road he must travel before he could arrive at maturity--and Mary!

But he had pluck. "I'll really prepare," he said, "and then I'll really make good."

A western university offered a scholarship of $500 a year, the holder of which would be free to devote himself to a certain specified technical subject. John tried for the scholarship and got it, and spent a year chasing electrical currents from the time when they left the wheels of street cars to the time when they eventually sneaked back home again into the power-house, after having sported clandestinely along gas mains and water pipes, biting holes into them as they went.

It was a good subject, commercially. At the end of the year he was engaged as engineer by a street-car company which was being sued by a gas company for allowing its current to eat the gas company's property. He was to have a salary of $1,000 a year. He was going strong.

One thousand dollars! Millions of married couples live on less than that. But John didn't even think of asking Mary to share it with him.

Mary, when married, was to be supported in approximate accordance with the standards of the people John knew. Every John thinks that about it, without really thinking about it at all. It's just in him.

It bothered Mary. How much money would John want to spend on her before he would take her? It made her feel like a box of candy in a store window.

Still, a social standard is a fact. Just as much so as if it could be laid off with a tape. And there is sense in it.

"After all," thought Mary, "if we had only $1,000 a year we couldn't live where any of our friends do, and John would be cut off from being on daily intimate terms with people who could help him; and if we had children--Well, there you are! We surely couldn't give our children what our children ought to have. That settles it."

The influence of social standards is greatly increased and complicated in a world in which women earn their living before marriage and have a chance to make social standards of their own in place of the ones they were born to.

We here insert a few notes on cases which are not compositely imagined--like Mary and John--but are individually (though typically) existent in real life in one of the large American cities:

R----J----. Makes $6,500 a year. Only man she was ever "real sweet on" was a teamster. When she was selling in the perfumes at five a week he used to take her to the picnics of the Social Dozen Pleasure Club. They would practice the Denver Lurch on Professor DeVere's dancing platform. At midnight he would give her a joy-ride home in his employer's delivery wagon. He still drives that wagon. She is in charge of suits and costumes and has several assistant buyers under her. She has bought a cottage for her father, who is an ingrain weaver in a carpet factory. She wears a stick-pin recently presented to her by her teamster. "I like him all right," is her notion about it, "but I ought to have took him ten years ago. Now he can't support me."

S----V----. Makes twelve dollars a week as a manicurist. Thinks a man ought to have at least thirty dollars a week before marrying.

T----V----. Sister of S----V----, who doesn't think much of her. She works in a paper-box factory at five dollars a week and is engaged to a glove cutter who makes eleven.

T----A----. Saleswoman. Thinks women ought to be paid as much as men. "Then they wouldn't be so ready to marry ANYBODY." Works in the cloak department. Is a star. Makes about eighteen dollars a week. Says that most of the men she knows who could support her would certainly get in a terrible row at home if they married a cloak-department girl. Families are stuck up. "But I don't care; let it run awhile. Tell you something. I was born in the steerage. I've been right where the money isn't. I'm not taking any chances on getting there again. Let Georgina do it."

R----B----. Sub-bookkeeper. Seven dollars a week. Engaged to clerk who earns thirteen. Says: "Of course I'm not earning much, but I'm living with my folks and when we're married I'll have to give up a lot of things. Kinda wish I hadn't got used even to the seven."

This last case, of the bookkeeper engaged to the clerk, is the modern situation at its happiest normal. The modern marriage, except among the rich, is a contraction of resources. It is just the reverse, in that respect, of the colonial marriage.

The colonial bride, marrying into Industry, brought her full economic value to her husband.

The modern bride, marrying out of Industry, leaves most of her economic value behind. And the greater that value was, the sharper is the shock of the contraction of resources.