Stories from Everybody's Magazine Part 27

Dear General Reader, please let that sentence stand for the thousand words (much like those of a competent barker at the door of a show-tent) which you usually oblige an author to expend on enticing you into reading his article. Think how much time you save by walking straight into the tent and observing that--

THE First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts was held in 1908 at Freiburg in Switzerland. It as no improvised amateur uplift, private-theatricals affair.

The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of Freiburg's State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics were printed and circulated beforehand. The partic.i.p.ating members numbered seven hundred. The discussions developed the characteristic points of the three rival breeds of household-arts instruction--the German, the Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were made to the normal schools of Freiburg, Berne, and Zurich, in each of which there is an elaborate system for the training of household-arts teachers. In the end, in order that facts and ideas about the education of girls for their duties as house-keepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted to establish, at some place in Switzerland, a Permanent International Information Committee.

Thus, in an age in which the productive tasks of the home have almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever making concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders, the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs the spectators to say "thumbs-down" and let her put it out of its agony altogether--in such an age there comes, at Freiburg, in this First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts, the most serious, the most notable, recognition. ever given in any age to the home's economic value.

A real paradox? Well, at any rate, it gives wings to the fluttering thought that theories of industrial evolution, one's own as well as Mrs. Gilman's, are a bit like automobiles--not always all that they are cranked up to be.

Certainly the revival of the home seems to attract larger crowds to the mourners' bench every year.

At the University of Missouri the first crop of graduates in Home Economics was gathered this last spring. They were seven. And as most of them took likewise a degree in Education, it may be a.s.sumed that they will go forth to spread the gospel.

Their preceptress, Miss Edna D. Day, who next year will head the just-organized 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 Cooling 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.

The ballad (one of the most temperately worded of literary successes) goes on to say that "the effect was great." So it has been in this case--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 Inst.i.tute 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 j.a.pan.

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 this its first year of existence) four are graduates of the courses of academic study of Oxford or Cambridge.

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

It has familiarized us with household arts in the public schools, and we are not astonished to learn that in the public schools of Boston in every grade above the third, there is sewing or cooking, or both, for 120 minutes every week for every girl.

It has accustomed us to such news as that in Illinois there are fifty-eight public high schools in which instruction is offered in one or more of the three following subjects: Food, Clothing, or The Home.

It has brought us to the point of expecting domestic science in all schools of agriculture and of regarding it as natural for the legislature of Montana to appropriate $50,000 to the State Agricultural College for a woman's dormitory.

It has cushioned the shock of the tidings from the University of California to the effect that entrance credit will this fall be given for high school domestic science work.

We are reduced to equanimity in the face of the fact (which might have frenzied Alexander Hamilton) that Columbia University, through its Teachers College, is offering courses in Elementary Cookery, in Shirt-waists, in Domestic Laundering, and in Housewifery.

And at last, when we see the resuscitated home making its way even into the really-truly, more-than-masculinely, academic Eastern women's colleges, we rush up to the Mike McCarthy of this case and a.s.sure him warmly that we were not deceived for a moment by his apparent demise, having just learned that President Hazard of Wellesley College, in her latest commencement address, said: "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 "

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.

II

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 amus.e.m.e.nts, 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. Deville'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 Pa.s.sIVE 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 cla.s.sic statement of the case and because it is warmly commended by such women as Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, of the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, whose skill as scientist and vision as philosopher have made her the most authoritative personality in the American Home Economics a.s.sociation. (That a.s.sociation, 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 sees a new field of action, in this Mrs. Richards sees a new field of education.

Women will train themselves for their duties as consumers or else continue to lie under the sentence of condemnation p.r.o.nounced 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 technigues. Home Economics will not narrow women's education but in the end will enlarge it, because Consumption, instead of being a specialty, is a generality so broad as almost to glitter.

III

AT Menomonie, Wisconsin, Mr. L. D. Harvey, lately president of the National Education a.s.sociation, has established a Homemakers'

School. It does not turn out teachers. Its course of instruction is solely for the prospective housewife.