The Women of Tomorrow Part 8

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 a.s.sume that every woman who has a husband is removed from money-earning work. It is an a.s.sumption 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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, ill.u.s.trating this conflict, there exists, besides the course in Secretarial Studies, an equivalent course in Home Economics.

In an ill.u.s.tration 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 the post-graduate laboratory in the technique of the home at the University of Illinois.

And the s.p.a.ce 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?

III.

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 partic.i.p.ating 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 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 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 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 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 Furnis.h.i.+ng and Decoration," and "Home Administration." Most of them, besides taking a degree in Home Economics, took likewise a degree in Education. We may therefore a.s.sume 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 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 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, furnis.h.i.+ng (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 "s.h.i.+rtwaists," and in "Domestic Laundering."

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 Va.s.sar, 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 succ.u.mb. But the day of their fall approaches. The alumnae a.s.sociation of Wellesley voted, in 1910, to pet.i.tion 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 inst.i.tutions 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, salesmans.h.i.+p. 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."