Progress in the household

by Lucy Maynard Salmon

The difficulties of the situation are comparable only to those of the Bellman who

“Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,

And that was to tingle his bell.

He was thoughtful and grave—but the orders he gave

Were enough to bewilder a crew.

When he cried ‘Steer to starboard, but keep her head larboard!’

What on earth was the helmsman to do?”

But granting that some agreement could be reached as to the content of the term domestic science, there would still remain the question as to how instruction in it could be given. We have learned in nearly every other department of education the extreme difficulty of teaching what we do not know, but we still cling to the superstition that it is possible to teach domestic science in private and public schools when the university has not as yet made the household the subject of scientific or economic investigation. The one or two notable exceptions to this statement do not invalidate its general truth.

The reasons are manifold why the university does not as yet investigate the household, although every other field of human knowledge and activity has apparently been taken into its libraries, its laboratories, and its workshops; but undoubtedly one of the weightiest is the survival of the tradition that affairs of the household concern only women, that women work always through instinct and intuition, and therefore that the household is not a suitable field for scientific investigation. But with the breaking down of the artificial barriers between the interests of men and of women, it is found that the affairs of the household do concern every member of it. Modern investigations in psychology are showing that the mental processes of women are precisely the same as those of men. It therefore remains for the university to recognize that the household is worthy of investigation. That there is scope for such an inquiry would seem evident from the curriculum of an excellent school of domestic science, selected from among hundreds of other illustrations that might be given. Course I in Domestic Science places in conjunction lectures on food adulteration, bacteriology, furniture, decorations, textiles, and housekeeping in other lands—an enumeration not saved even by alphabetical arrangement.

But not only is there difficulty in deciding what should be included under the head of domestic science and how instruction in it should be given, but a third difficulty lies in deciding who should be instructed in the subject. If it is said that all young women should receive such instruction, we are confronted by the fact that the young woman trained for domesticity takes up stenography and occupies a hall bedroom, or becomes a commercial traveler and spends her life in hotels and on railway trains; the girl taught sewing and cooking in the public school goes into the shop or the factory; the young woman who frankly acknowledges her engagement spends the time prior to her marriage in preparing her trousseau and in embroidering her initials on her household linen. The young woman who has prepared herself for the profession of law or of medicine decides to marry and goes into business partnership with her husband. It would seem as if all plans for teaching household economics in the college or in the public school with reference to preparing young women for their future careers as housekeepers must be futile until the orbit of the matrimonial comet can be predicted.