Part 5

At the University of Missouri the first crop of graduates in home economics was gathered in the spring of 1910. They were seven. Of the 120 units of work required for graduation they had earned at least 38 in such subjects as "Textiles and Clothing," "Food Chemistry," "General Foods," "Advanced Foods," "Home Sanitation," "House Furnishing and Decoration," and "Home Administration." Most of them, besides taking a degree in Home Economics, took likewise a degree in Education. We may therefore assume that schools as well as homes will listen to their new message.

Their preceptress, Miss Edna D. Day, who subsequently left Missouri to organize a department of home economics in the University of Kansas, is a novel type of New Woman in that she has earned the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in "Woman's Sphere." She took graduate work in the department of home administration in the University of Chicago and achieved her doctorate with an investigation into "The Effect of Cooking on the Digestibility of Starch." What she found out was subsequently printed as a bulletin by the United States Department of Agriculture.

In the midst of the festivities at the wake held over the home, it perplexes the mourners to learn that some of those domestic science bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture excite a demand for a million copies.

It is a wake like Mike McCarthy's.

Mike was lookin' iligant As he rested there in state.

But

When the fun was at its height McCarthy sat up straight.

This ballad (one of the most temperately worded of literary successes) goes on to say that "the effect was great." So it has been in the parallel case here considered--great enough to be felt all the way around the world.

It is being felt in the Island Empire of the East. Miss Ume Tsuda's Institute at Tokyo (which stands so high that its graduates are allowed to teach in secondary schools without further government examination) has installed courses in English domestic science as well as in the domestic science of Japan.

It is being felt in the Island Empire of the West. King's College, of the University of London, has organized a three-year course leading to the degree of Mistress of Home Science, and has also established a "Post-Graduates' Course in Home Science," in which out of fourteen students (in the first year of its existence) four were graduates of the courses of academic study of Oxford or Cambridge.

It is being felt in the United States at every educational level.

We expect domestic science and art now in the schools of agriculture and we regard it as natural that the legislature of Montana should appropriate $50,000 to the Montana State Agricultural College for a women's dormitory.

We expect domestic science and art in the elementary schools and we are not astonished to find that in Boston, in every grade above the third, for every girl, there is sewing, or cooking, or both, for 120 minutes every week.

We begin to expect domestic science and art in the high schools. In Illinois there are 71 high schools in which instruction is offered in one or more of the three great divisions of the Study of Daily Life--Food, Clothing, the Home. In such of these high schools as are within the limits of the city of Chicago there is a four-year Household-Arts course so contrived that the girls who enroll themselves in it, while not neglecting literature, art, and the pure sciences like physics, will spend at least eight hours every week on "Domestic Science" or on "Textiles."

We are impelled now to admit that the work done in domestic science and art by the high schools should be recognized by the colleges and universities. The University of California requires its freshmen to come to it with 45 "units" of standardized high-school work, of various sorts, accomplished. We learn, but we are not startled when we learn, that the University of California will henceforth allow the entering freshman to offer nine of her 45 "units" in sewing, dressmaking, millinery, decorating, furnishing (all accompanied with free-hand drawing); and in cooking, hygiene, dietetics, laundering, nursing (all accompanied with chemistry).

Even in the colleges and universities themselves, especially if they are of recent foundation, we accept, if we do not expect, a domestic-science-and-art department of utilitarian value and of academic worth. At Chicago University it is called the Department of Household Administration; sixty women undergraduates are specializing in it. At the University of Illinois it is called the Department of Household Science; one-third of all the women in the university are taking courses in it; one-fifth of them are "majoring" in it; number four of volume two of the university bulletins is by Miss Sprague on "A Precise Method of Roasting Beef"; in the research laboratory Miss Goldthwaite, _Doctor_ Goldthwaite, is making chemical experiments with pectin, sugar, fruit-juice, tartaric acid, to the point of determining that the mixture should be withdrawn from heat at a temperature of 103 degrees Centigrade and at a specific gravity of 1.28 in order that it shall invariably "jell"; in the graduate school the women who attend the household-arts seminar are being directed toward original inquiries into "Co-operative Housekeeping," "Dietetic Cults," "Hygiene of Clothing," "Pure Food Laws."

Seeing how far the newer universities go, we return to rest our eyes, without their rolling in the frenzy which would attack Alexander Hamilton if he were with us, on Hamilton's alma mater, Columbia University, venerable but adventurous, giving courses in "Housewifery," in "Shirtwaists," and in "Domestic Laundering."

It is not till we come to the really-truly, more than masculinely, academic and cultural eastern women's colleges such as Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and Bryn Mawr that we experience a genuine journalistic shock on hearing a domestic-science-and-art piece of news. Those colleges will be the last to succumb. But the day of their fall approaches. The alumnae association of Wellesley voted, in 1910, to petition the trustees to establish home-economics courses; and, in the same year, the president of Wellesley put into her commencement address the words: "I hope the time may soon come when we can have a department of domestic science which shall give a sound basis for the problems of the household."

The resuscitated Home has become one of the livest of pedagogical personages. It has added a great and growing field to the estate of Education. To supply that field with teachers of high qualifications we find highly extended training courses in such institutions as Drexel in Philadelphia, Pratt in Brooklyn, Simmons in Boston and Teachers College in New York. In fact, the conclusion of the epoch of pioneer domestic-science-and-art agitation might perhaps be said to have been announced to the country when Teachers College, in 1909, erected a new building at a cost of $500,000 and dedicated it, in its entirety, to Household Arts.

What does it all mean?

"Fellow citizens," said the colored orator, reported by Dr. Paul Monroe of Columbia, "what am education? Education am the palladium of our liberties and the grand pandemonium of civilization."

But it does mean something, this Home Economics disturbance. _And something very different from what it seems to._

* * * * *

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. Devine'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 has had the warm personal commendation of such women as the late Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose skill as scientist and vision as philosopher 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 saw a new field of action, in this Mrs. Richards saw 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 techniques. Home economics will not narrow women's education but in the end will enlarge it. For consumption, instead of being a specialty, is a generality so broad as almost to glitter.

* * * * *

At Menomonie, Wis., Mr. L. D. Harvey, lately president of the National Education Association, has established a Homemakers' School. It does not turn out teachers. Its course of instruction is solely for the prospective housewife.

If we look at the number of things the prospective housewife is to be we shall soon perceive that she cannot be any one of them in any specialized technical way and that what she is getting is not so much a training for a trade as a training for life at large.

The first grand division of study is The House.

We here observe that the housewife is going to be something of a sanitary engineer, since she studies chemistry, physics, and bacteriology in their "application to such subjects as the heating, lighting, ventilation, and plumbing of a house." It is thought that knowledge of this sort "will go a long way toward improving the health conditions of the country."

We also observe that the housewife is going to be something of an interior decorator, since she studies "design, color, house planning and furnishing."

She also acquires some skill as purchasing agent, bookkeeper, and employer of labor when she takes the course on household management and studies "the proper apportioning of income among the different lines of home expenditures, the systematizing and keeping of household accounts, and the question of domestic service."

The second grand division is Food Study and Preparation.

Here the housewife becomes, to some extent, a dietitian, studying "the chemical processes in the preparation and digestion of foods," and considering the question "how she shall secure for the family the foods best suited to the various activities of each individual."

Here, likewise, she makes a start toward being a pure-food expert, through a study of "physical and chemical changes induced in food products by the growth of molds, yeasts, and bacteria," and a start toward being a health officer, through a study of "bacteria in their relation to disease, sources of infection, personal and household disinfection."

Nor does she omit to acquire some of the technique of the physical director through a course in physiology bearing on "digestion, storage of energy, rest, sleep, exercise, and regularity of habits."

Of course, in her work in cookery, she pays some attention to special cookery for invalids.

The third grand division, that of Clothing and Household Fabrics, produces a dressmaker, a milliner, and an embroiderer, as well as a person trained to see to it that "the expenditure for clothing shall be correct in proportion to the expenditure for other purposes."

The fourth grand division, the Care of Children, is of course limitless. The rearing of the human young is, as we all know and as Mr. Eliot of Harvard has insisted, the most intellectual occupation in the world. Here the homemaker applies all the knowledge she has gained from her study of the hygiene of foods and of the hygiene of clothes, and also makes some progress toward becoming a trained nurse and a kindergartner by means of researches into "infant diseases and emergencies," "the stages of the mental development of the child," "the child's imagination with regard to truth-telling and deceit," "the history of children's books," and "the art of story-telling."

Passing over the fifth grand division, Home Nursing and Emergencies (in which the pupil learns simply "the use of household remedies," "the care of the sick room," etc.), we come to the wide expanse of the sixth grand division, Home and Social Economics.

The work in this division begins with a study of the primitive evolution of the home and comes on down to the present time, when "the passing of many of the former lines of woman's work into the factory has brought to many women leisure time which should be spent in social service."

Note that last fact carefully. _Home economics is no attempt to drive women back into home seclusion. On the contrary, it is an attempt to bring the home and its occupants into the scientific and sociological developments of the outside world._

For this reason, in traversing the division of home and social economics, the pupil encounters "an effort to determine problems in civic life which seem to be a part of the duties of women."

Seventhly and lastly, there is a division dedicated to Literature, in which "a systematic course in reading is carried on through the two years." Indispensable! No degree of proficiency at inserting calories in correct numbers into Little Sally's stomach could atone for lack of skill in leading Little Sally herself through the "Child's Garden of Verses" with trowel in hand to dig up the gayest plants and reset them in the memory.

So we come back to our old statement and vary it in phrase but not in effect by saying that home-economics courses, totaled, do not give a _technique_ so much as an _outlook_.

The homemaker may happen to be a specialist in some one direction, but it is clear that she cannot simultaneously know as much about food values as the real dietitian, as much about the physical care of her child as the real trained nurse, as much about the wholesomeness of her living arrangements as the real sanitarian, as much about music as the Thomas Orchestra, as much about social service as Mr. Devine, and as much about poems as Mr. Stevenson. Her peculiar equipment, if she is a good homemaker, is a round of experience and a bent of mind which make it possible for her to cooeperate intelligently with the dietitian, the trained nurse, the sanitarian, the Thomas Orchestra, Mr. Devine, Mr. Stevenson, and the various other representatives of the various other specialized techniques of the outside world.

It follows that her school discipline cannot be too comprehensive. No other occupation demands such breadth of sense and sensibility. One could make a perfectly good cotton manufacturer on the basis of a very narrow training. One cannot make a good consumer without a really _liberal education_.

For this reason it becomes necessary to resist certain narrownesses in certain phases of home economics.

One of these narrownesses is the assumption that because a thing happens to be close to us it is therefore important. We have heard lecturers insist that because a house contains drain pipes a woman should learn _all_ about drain pipes. But why? In most communities drain pipes are installed and repaired and in every way controlled by gentlemen who are drainpipe specialists. The woman who lives in the house has no more need of a professional knowledge of the structural mysteries of drain pipes than a reporter has of a professional knowledge of the structural mysteries of his typewriting machine. The reporter is supplemented at that point by the office mechanic and, so far as his efficiency as a reporter is concerned, a technical inquiry into his faithful keyboard's internal arrangements would be in most cases an amiable waste of time.

Another possible narrowness is the attempt to manufacture "cultural backgrounds" for various important but quite safe-and-sane household tasks.

For instance, in the books and in the courses of instruction (of college grade) on "the house" we have sometimes observed elaborate accounts of the evolution of the human home, beginning with the huts of the primitive Simians. And in pursuing the very essential subject of "clothes and fabrics" we have not infrequently found ourselves in the midst of spacious preliminary dissertations on the structure of the loom, beginning with that which was used by the Anthropenguins.

Now we would not for the world speak disparagingly of looms or huts. We have ourselves examined some of them in the Hull House Museum in Chicago and in the woods of Canada, and have found them instructive. We suggest only that college life is short, that the college curriculum is crowded, and that (except possibly for those students who are especially interested in anthropology or in industrial evolution) it would surely be a misfortune to learn of the Simian hut and to miss Rossetti's "House of Life," or to get the impression that as a "cultural background" for shirtwaists the Anthropenguinian loom can really compete with Carlyle's "Sartor Resartus."

If this occasional tendency toward exaggerating the importance of drain pipes, window curtains, and door mats were to grow strong, and if girls, as a class, should be required to spend any large proportion of their time on the specialized history and sociology of feminine implements and tasks while the boys were still in the current of the affairs of the race, we should indeed want President Thomas of Bryn Mawr to repeat on a thousand lecture platforms her indignant assertion of the fact that "nothing more disastrous for women, or for men, can be conceived of than specialized education of women as a sex."