The Women of Tomorrow Part 9

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 _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 has had the warm personal commendation of such women as the late Mrs. Ellen H.

Richards, of the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, whose skill as scientist and vision as philosopher 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 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 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 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 a.s.sociation, 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: MARY D. CHAMBERS, HOME ECONOMICS, ROCKFORD COLLEGE.

_Photograph by Devenier._]

[Ill.u.s.tration: MR. L. D. HARVEY, HOMEMAKERS' SCHOOL, MENOMONIE, WISCONSIN.

_Photograph by Stein, Milwaukee._]

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 diet.i.tian, 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."

Pa.s.sing 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 pa.s.sing 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 diet.i.tian, 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 cooperate intelligently with the diet.i.tian, 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 a.s.sumption 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 s.p.a.cious 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 cla.s.s, 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 a.s.sertion of the fact that "nothing more disastrous for women, or for men, can be conceived of than specialized education of women as a s.e.x."

These parenthetical observations, however, amount simply to the expression of our personal opinion that home economics, like every new idea, carries with it large quant.i.ties of dross which will have to be refined out in the smelter of trial. The real metal in it is its attempt to establish the principle that intelligent consumption is an important and difficult task. For that reason it will not only desire but demand the utmost equality of educational opportunity. And women, like men, will continue to get their "cultural backgrounds" in the great achievements of the whole race, where they can hold converse with Lincoln and Darwin and the makers of the Cologne Cathedral and George Meredith and Pasteur and Karl Marx and Whistler and Joan of Arc and St. John.