III.Learning for Spending

First, when she has completed the lowest grades of her regular public school, she may go for a while to the North Bennet Street Industrial School. Here she will give just about half her time to manual work such as machine- and hand-sewing. She will also study arithmetic, literature and composition, geography and history; but (or, rather,and) her interest in these subjects will be stimulated as powerfully as possible by their practical applications, as well as by their general relations, to the manual work she is doing and to the working world she is so soon to enter.

EDNA D. DAY, THE FIRST WOMAN TO BECOME A DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE FIELD OF HOME ECONOMICS.

MARY SCHENCK WOOLMAN, FOUNDER OF THE MANHATTAN TRADE SCHOOL. Photograph by Crawford, New York.

We are coming to admitthe fact now that “pure” language and “pure” mathematics unapplied to actual problems are, for the mass of boys and girls, not only uninteresting but astonishingly unproductive of mental results. One of the first discoveries made by Mrs. Mary Schenck Woolman in her management of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls was that the public-school pupils who came to her after several years in the grades were “unable to utilize their public-school academic work in practical trade affairs.” Their progress, if it could be called so,77had been toward reception, not toward action. In the North Bennet Industrial School our Boston girl will make progress toward action.

Next, from the North Bennet, she may go to the Boston Trade School for Girls. This school was given its first form under private management by Miss Florence Marshall. It has now been absorbed into the public-school system. What was a private fad has become a public function.

In the Trade School the pupil whom we are following may decide to be a milliner. But she will not yet confine her attention to millinery. She will take courses in personal hygiene, business forms, spelling, business English, industrial conditions, textiles, color-design. She’s not yet in the purely “technical” part of her education. She’s still, to some extent, in the general vocational part of it. But she is entering deeper and deeper into technique. While in the Trade School she will give much of her time for four months to plain sewing, then for four months to making summer hats and finally for four months to making winter hats.

She has now completed two of the industrial78educational periods we mentioned. She may go on to a third. She may proceed to spend a year in the millinery trade-shop of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union. Here she will get into technique completely. The conditions will be virtually those of a factory. She will be trained to precision and to speed. Her product will be sold. She will receive wages. Yet she is still in school. She is still regarded not as an employee to be discharged offhand for incompetency but as a pupil to be instructed and assisted on into competency.

When that girl goes to a real commercial millinery shop she will be as thoroughly ready for it as the New England girl was ready for a loom when her mother let her at last run it by herself.

We have looked now at the industrial educational level. And, happening to be in the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, we can look at two other educational levels without going out of the building.

On the commercial level we can remind ourselves of the rapid spread of modern commercial education by visiting the classroom of Mrs. Prince’s school of department-store salesmanship.79It is such a successful school now that the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union offers, in conjunction with Simmons College, to teach people to teach salesmanship in other similar schools which are being started elsewhere.

Leaving this commercial level, we can go to the academic level by visiting the Appointment Bureau. We may call it the academic level because the Appointment Bureau exists chiefly for the benefit of girls who have been to college. Its purpose, however, is non-academic in the extreme.

The Appointment Bureau is an employment agency, and one of the most extraordinary employment agencies ever organized. Its object is not merely to introduce existing clients to existing jobs (which is the proper normal function of employment agencies), but to make forays into the wild region of “occupations other than teaching,” and there to find jobs, and then to find girls to fit those jobs. In other words, it is a kind of “Company of Adventurers Trading into Hudson’s Bay” for the purpose of exploring, surveying, developing, and settling the region80of “occupations other than teaching” on behalf of college women.

It is managed by Miss Laura Drake Gill, president of the National Association of Collegiate Alumnæ and former dean of Barnard College. She is assisted by an advisory council of representatives of near-by colleges—Radcliffe, Wellesley, Simmons, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Brown.

In harmony with this work the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union has just issued a handbook of three hundred pages, entitled “Vocations for the Trained Woman.” It is an immense map of the occupational world for educated women, in which every bay and headland, every lake and hill, is drawn to scale, from poultry farming to department-store buying, from lunch-room management to organized child-saving.

We here see the educational system, at its college academic level, moving not simply toward preparing girls for money-earning work but also toward actually putting them into that work and, in order to put them into it, finding it.

This last innovation, this advising of graduates with regard to the occupational world and this guiding of them into the occupations for which they are best fitted, will bring education closer to the ultimate needs of those who are being educated than any other innovation of recent years. It will establish the final permanent contact between two isolations,—the isolation of aimless learning and the isolation of ignorant doing. It is still, however, a project, a prospect. The other two innovations which we have mentioned press closer to immediacy. Immediate, certainly, is the demand of “middle class” women for larger occupational opportunities. And almost immediate is the success of the demand that the school system shall fit them to the use of those opportunities.

In a small Illinois city there is a woman’s college, founded as a preparatory school in the forties and soon advanced to be a seminary, which, with Anna P. Sill for its first head, Jane Addams for its best-known graduate, and Julia Gulliver for its present president, has come to be a college of standing and of leading. Only Troy Female Seminary and Mount Holyoke82Seminary preceded it, in date of foundation, among the important women’s institutions.

Rockford College is ranked to-day, by the reports of the United States Commissioner of Education, in rank one—among the sixteen best women’s colleges in the United States. It hasn’t risen to that rank by any quick, money-spurred spurt. It brings with it out of its far past all the traditions of that early struggle for the higher education which, by friction, kindled among women so flaming an enthusiasm for pure knowledge. It remains “collegiate” in the old sense, quiet, cloistral, inhabiting old-fashioned brick buildings in an old-fashioned large yard, looking still like the Illinois of war times more than like the Illinois of the twentieth century, retaining all the home ideals of those times—a large interest in feminine accomplishments, a strict regard for manners, a belief in the value of charm.

But here, in this quiet, non-metropolitan college, so really “academic,” so really—in the oldest-fashioned ways—“cultural,” here is a two-year course in Secretarial Studies.

ROCKFORD COLLEGE, IN ROCKFORD, ILLINOIS. IN ITS OLD-FASHIONED BUILDINGS, WHICH PRESERVE THE SPIRIT OF THE ACADEMIC LIFE OF THE OLD DAYS, THERE IS NOW A VERY MODERN DEPARTMENT OF SECRETARIAL STUDIES.

It is the first time(within our knowledge)83that such a thing has happened in any of the old first-rank women’s colleges.

The course in Secretarial Studies at Rockford gives the pupil English, accounts, commerce, commercial law, and economic history in her first year, and political science, English, and economics in her second year. Shorthand and typewriting are required in both years, and a few hours a week are reserved in each year for elective courses to be chosen by the pupil among offerings in French, German, Spanish, and history.

There is here a double concession: first, to the increased need of “middle class” women for “occupations other than teaching”; second, to the increased recognition of those other occupations as being worthy of “cultural” training.

This turn in education has been made on an economic pivot. The commercial and industrial occupations of the world are coming to demand scholastic preparation. And the women who have had scholastic preparation, even the most complete and long-continued scholastic preparation, are coming to demand admission into the commercial and industrial occupations84of the world. The era of the purely scholastic occupationand no otherfor the scholastically trained woman has come to an end.

We have observed the contraction of the home as a field of adequate employment for daughters. We have observed the postponement of marriage in its effect on the occupational opportunities of those daughters. Deprived of adequate employment at home, we have seen them seek it elsewhere. Marriage and housekeeping and child-rearing, as an occupation, we have seen deferred to a later and later period in life. Let us now assume that every woman who has a husband is removed from money-earning work. It is an assumption very contrary to fact. But let us make it. And then let us look at this compact picture of the extent to which being married is an occupation for American women:

In the United States, in the year 1900, among women twenty years of age and over, the married women numbered 13,400,000. The unmarried women and the widows together numbered 6,900,000. For every two women married there was one woman either single or widowed.

THESE CHILDREN IN THE FRANCIS PARKER SCHOOL IN CHICAGO ARE GETTING AN EARLY START IN THEIR TRAINING FOR THEIR FUTURE WORK IN THEIR HOMES.Photograph by Burke & Atwell, Chicago.

What futility, as well as indignity, there is in the idea that the query of support for women gets its full answer in a husband!

Surely we may now say: If education does not (1) give women a comprehension of the organization of the money-earning world, and (2) train them to one of the techniques which lead to self-support in that world, it is not education.

Just at this point, though, we encounter a curious conflict in women’s education. Just as we see their urgent need of a money-earning technique, we simultaneously hear, coming from a corner of the battlefield and swelling till it fills the air with a nation-wide battle cry, the sentiment: “The Home is also a technique. All women must be trained to it.”

At Rockford College, illustrating this conflict, there exists, besides the course in Secretarial Studies, an equivalent course in Home Economics.

In an illustration in this chapter we show the tiny children of the Francis Parker School in Chicago taking their first lesson in the technique of the home. In another picture we show the86post-graduate laboratory in the technique of the home at the University of Illinois. And the space between the kindergarten and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy threatens to get filled up almost everywhere with courses in cooking, sewing, chemistry of diet, composition of textiles, art of marketing, and other phases of home management.

The money-earning world, a technique! The home, a technique! The boy learns only one. Must the girl learn two, be twice a specialist?

89III.Learning for Spending

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

The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of Fribourg’s State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics were printed and circulated beforehand. The participating members numbered seven hundred. The discussions developed the characteristic points of three rival varieties of household-arts instruction—the German, the Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were made to the normal schools of Fribourg, 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 housekeepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted90to 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 slaking 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 Fribourg, 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 to91attract larger crowds to the mourners’ bench every year.

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 of92Starch.” 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’ iligantAs he rested there in state.

Mike was lookin’ iligant

As he rested there in state.

But

When the fun was at its heightMcCarthy sat up straight.

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 further93government 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-hand95drawing); 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,DoctorGoldthwaite, 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 the96women 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.”

97UPPER PICTURE: IN CENTER IS THE NEW $500,000 HOUSEHOLD ARTS BUILDING OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN NEW YORK.LOWER PICTURE IS THE HOUSEHOLD ARTS BUILDING OF CALIFORNIA POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL AT SAN LUIS OBISPO.

UPPER PICTURE: IN CENTER IS THE NEW $500,000 HOUSEHOLD ARTS BUILDING OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN NEW YORK.LOWER PICTURE IS THE HOUSEHOLD ARTS BUILDING OF CALIFORNIA POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL AT SAN LUIS OBISPO.

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 alumnæ 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 Economics98disturbance.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,99the 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 be100used, 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 simultaneously101gained a whole new field of labor. Consumption has ceased to be merelypassiveand has becomeactive. It has ceased to be mereAbsorptionand has becomeChoice. 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.102Not 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 in103regard 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 specialized104techniques. 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.

MARY D. CHAMBERS, HOME ECONOMICS, ROCKFORD COLLEGE.Photograph by Devenier.

MR. L. D. HARVEY, HOMEMAKERS’ SCHOOL, MENOMONIE, WISCONSIN.Photograph by Stein, Milwaukee.

We here observe thatthe 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 of105a 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 products106by 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 of107the 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 scientific108and 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 atechniqueso much as anoutlook.

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 about109the 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 coöperate 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 reallyliberal education.

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

One of these narrownesses is the assumption110that 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 learnallabout 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 elaborate111accounts 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, window112curtains, 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.”

These parenthetical observations, however, amount simply to the expression of our personal opinion that home economics, like every new idea, carries with it large quantities 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 they113can 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.

The woman voiced a great truth who said that the soul which can irradiate the numberless pettinesses of home management (and it is folly to deny that therearenumberless pettinesses in it) is the soul “nourished elsewhere.” Think that over. It tells the story. Whether the “elsewhere” is the deep recesses of her own religious nature or the wide stretches of the great arts and sciences, it is always an “elsewhere.”

Let that be granted, as it must be granted. Let us say that there shall be no abridgment of the offerings of so-called academic education. What does a course of study like that of Mr. Harvey’s Homemakers’ School attempt to add to academic education?

Principally three things.

First: Certain manual arts.

Second: Certain domestic applications of the physical and sociological sciences.

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Third: Money sense in expenditure (in the course on household management).

Let us review these things in reverse order.

The last of the three is showing itself in many places. At the University of Illinois, for instance, Professor Kinley, recently delegate from the United States to the Pan-American Congress, has given courses in home administration for women which he has regarded as of equal importance with his courses in business administration for men.

At the University of Chicago, in the department of household administration, course 44 is on “the administration of the house” and includes “the proper apportionment of income.”

The business man says: “My sales cost, or my manufacturing cost, or my office force cost, is such and such a per cent. of my total cost. When it goes above that, I want to know why; and I find out; and, if there isn’t a mighty good reason for its going up, I make it go down again to where it was.” Shall we come to the day when in spending the money which has been earned in business we shall say: “Such115and such a per cent. to food; and such and such a per cent. to clothes; and such and such a per cent. to shelter; and such and such a per cent. to health and recreation; and such and such a per cent. to good works; and such and such other per cents. to such and such other purposes”? Shall we come to the day when we shall consume wealth with as much forethought and with as much balance of judgment between conflicting claims as we now exhibit in acquiring wealth?

They are trying to develop this “costs system for home expenditures” in many of the schools and departments of home economics to-day. They believe that most people, because of not looking ahead and because of not making definite plans based on previous experience, come to the contemplation of their bills on the first of each month with every reason to confess that they have bought those things which they ought not to have bought and have left unbought those things which they ought to have bought.

But it is not only a matter of reaching a systematic instead of a helter-skelter enjoyment of116the offerings of the world. It is also a matter of reaching, by study of money values, a mental habit of economy. And it comes at a time when that habit is needed.

We are just beginning to realize in the United States that we cannot spend all our annual earnings on living expenses and still have a surplus for fresh capital for new industrial enterprises. We are on the point of perceiving that we are cramping and stunting the future industrial expansion of the country by our personal extravagance. We shall soon really believe Mr. James J. Hill when he says that “every dollar unprofitably spent is a crime against posterity.”

When international industrial competition reaches its climax, that nation will have an advantage whose people feel most keenly that the wise expenditure of income is a patriotic as well as a personal duty.

But is this a matter for women alone? Do not men also consume? Are there no vats in Milwaukee, no stills in Kentucky, no factories wrapping paper rings around bunches of dead leaves at Tampa? Are there no men’s tailors,117gents’ furnishing shops, luncheons, clubs, banquets, athletics, celebrations? And as for home expenditures themselves, is the man simply to bring the plunder to the door, get patted on the head, and trot off in search of more plunder? We must doubt if economy will be reached by such a route. We find ourselves agreeing rather with the home economics lecturer who said: “There never yet was a family income really wisely expended without coöperation in all matters between husband and wife.”

The Massachusetts legislature has passed a law looking toward the teaching of thrift in the public schools. Boys and girls need it equally. And we venture to surmise that in so far as the new art and science of consumption is concerned with wise spending, the bulk of its teachings ultimately will be enjoyed by both sexes. It will not be, to any great extent, a specialized education for women.

So much for the “money sense in expenditure” which a full home economics course adds to “academic” education. The more we admit its value, the more convinced we must be that118it ought to include every kind of expenditure and both kinds of human being.

A precisely similar conviction arises with regard to those “domestic applications of the physical and sociological sciences” which a full home economics course adds to an “academic” education.

Those “domestic” applications are most of them broadly “human” applications. They bear on daily living, exercise, fresh air, personal cleanliness, diet, sleep, the avoidance of contagion, methods of fighting off disease, general physical efficiency. They largely amount to what Mrs. Ellen H. Richards used to call Right Living. She wanted four R’s instead of three: Reading, Riting, Rithmetic, Right Living.

Now is Right Living to be only for girls?

Mr. Eliot of Harvard does not think so. In a recent “Survey of the Needs of Education,” he said:

“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 and119skill 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.”

It may very well be 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: that120instruction 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.”

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