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Because women students can anticipate no more important career than home-making, it is argued that within their four undergraduate years training should be given in the practical details of house-keeping. Any woman who has been both a student and a housekeeper knows that this argument is fallacious. Before examining it, however, we must clear away possible misunderstandings.
Her old ambitions were torn away from her one by one, and in their place came the hardly-desired satisfactions of love and marriage, and home-making and housekeeping, the dear, womanly, sheltered fashions of life, toward which she had been thankful to see her friends go hand in hand, making themselves a complete happiness which nothing else could match.
And education ought especially to develop the natural aptitude of most of our girls for efficiency in home-making and child-rearing. Most young women enter upon the vocation of wifehood and motherhood practically without any training for these duties. It is as unscientific to expect all women to be successful wives and mothers as it would be to expect all men to be successful farmers.
Florette made it warm and cozy even when there was no heat in the radiator. She had all sorts of clever home-making tricks. She toasted marshmallows over the gas jet; she spread a shawl on the trunk; or she surprised Freddy by pinning pictures out of the funny page on the wall. She could make the nicest tea on a little alcohol stove she carried in her trunk.
Such developments as the long, specialized, four-year course in Household Economics at Simmons College in Boston are not here in point. That Simmons course is more than an education for home-making. Our subject is not Home Economics as a money-earning occupation for a few women, but Home Economics as part of the education of all women.
The papers flamed with full-page and half-page announcements of the wonderful home-making opportunity; circulars were mailed to possible home-buyers by the hundred thousand; every street-car told of the bargain on striking cards; immense electric signs blazoned the project by night; sixteen-sheet posters were spread upon all the bill-boards, and every device known to expert advertising was requisitioned.
The oak timbers were said to have been taken from the frame of the first Pilgrim fort and common house which stood on a hill back of the town. How like their characters were the works of those early Pilgrims, relics of those bygone days when character-building and home-making were considered essentials.
There must be something wrong with our system of education when the aim of this education seems to be to prepare the girl for a temporary position in an office or store or for a gay social life; and when there is no preparation for the important work of home-making and the rearing of children.
The agricultural colleges through their departments of domestic science better, of "home-making" should inaugurate a comprehensive movement for carrying to the farm home a larger measure of the advantages which modern science is showering upon humanity. The agricultural college must also lead in a more adequate development of extension teaching.
Her husband will help her more or less in the task, often bringing material and helping to place it in the negligent pile of which their nest is composed. But he does a good deal more fussing and cheering up than he does actual work, and she seems to depend much upon his cheerful presence for her happiness. It is hard to discourage Madam Sparrow when once she has set her mind on home-making.
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