A few years since a carefully prepared paper read before the Association of Collegiate Alumnæ, showed that of the 2619 women graduates of the fourteen colleges then represented in the association, thirty-eight per cent were married, thirty-six per cent were teaching, five per cent were engaged in other occupations and professions, and twenty per cent were “at home,” that is engaged in no occupation for remuneration. Those married and at home, to whom the subject of domestic science is presumably of most interest, form fifty-nine per cent of the whole number, while the forty-one per cent engaged in teaching and other occupations are certainly not indifferent to it. With trained mind and a realization that opportunity has brought responsibility, most often in a position where domestic affairs are those most prominently before her, the woman who is a college graduate is especially well situated to turn her attention to this subject.
What can she do? She can prove, as she is proving, that her college education has not unfitted her for domestic pursuits. Before the college door was opened to them, the education of women was largely a matter of information and accomplishment. Within two generations systematic training has been substituted for the acquisition of information and the advantage of this change should be seen first in improved methods of domestic work. The college graduate who is married or who is at home can prove more effectually than any other class of graduates the practical utility of college education for women. She can prove how puerile is the assertion that the average girl does not need a thorough course of technical study, because her household duties will not demand a knowledge of these subjects. The lawyer forgets his science, the business-man his classics, the theologian his mathematics, and the physician his metaphysics, yet each proves daily the value of these studies. So the college woman brings into every-day life, and may bring still more, the evidences of the advantage to her of a college course. She may go further, and show that resources within herself enable her to rise above much of the inevitable drudgery of household work, and thus overcome, in a measure, the common distaste for routine duties.
The college woman can do much by way of discussion. The love of study fostered by her college course shows itself after graduation in the formation of clubs and societies for literary work. There is scarcely a town that has not from one to a dozen, and there are few college women who have not belonged to one or more. There is a tendency, too, for college women to organize among themselves select classes for the pursuit of favorite studies. All of these clubs are valuable up to a certain point in giving help through association, but in too many cases they seem examples of misdirected effort. Their great numbers show that women have time and interest to give to intellectual matters. Cannot college women divert a part of this zeal from the discussion, for example, of the tulip mania in Holland, into the channels of social and domestic science? No company of political economists will ever work out for women “the servant-girl problem,” or make possible for women to learn systematic housekeeping. The college woman can do something—not everything—by showing that these subjects deserve consideration; that their proper place on the programme of the women’s club is not the closing half-hour of informal conversation, but the post of honor as one of the chief subjects of thought and study. But she need not wait for the movements of the literary club; she can herself organize a society whose sole purpose shall be the discussion of ways and means to lessen the friction in the ordinary household between mistress and maid, to remedy the scarcity of competent help, to relieve the overburdened housewife, a society which shall attempt to understand the “saleslady” situation, and to study the causes of the prejudice that still clings to household service as well as the means of removing it. She can help to show women that it is a matter of more vital interest to themselves and to society as a whole to discuss these topics than to seek after information that may not be worth the acquisition.
There is another phase of the question the thoughtful consideration of which the college woman can urge. She can at least make the attempt—her prospects of success may seem dubious—to bring before her sisters the subject of the wise expenditure of money. Women have bequeathed fortunes for every object from the endowment of theological seminaries to the establishment of a hospital for invalid cats; they have multiplied buildings and apparatus that language and science might be taught according to the Presbyterian, the Baptist, or the Methodist creed. The college woman may at least suggest that a long-felt want has been that of a polytechnic, an institution where the college graduate can learn household science as a serious profession, as an advocate or physician studies the principles of law and medicine. Such an institution, requiring a college degree for admission, and providing in a two years’ course for instruction in sanitary science, physiology and hygiene, the care of the sick, cooking, marketing, the care of the house, sewing, the principles of the kindergarten, artistic house-furnishing, domestic economy, and such other subjects as belong distinctively to the care of the house and home, would certainly have for a few years a limited number of students. An examination, however, of all that has been done and of the underlying principles leads to the conclusion that more could ultimately be done in this way than in any other to dignify that part of labor connected with domestic occupations. It would most certainly not do everything—no one thing could do that—but it would do much.
In a word, the relation of college women to the question of domestic science is first of all the duty of recognizing the importance of the subject itself, and of its special importance to them as college women; and second, a duty of examination, of discussion, of intelligent study, of appeal to public sentiment, of effort to secure at no distant day the establishment of a technical school of domestic science which shall in no sense be a substitute for collegiate and academic training, but shall be built upon such training as its most secure foundation. The present strain coming upon the majority of women is too great to be much longer borne. Relief must come, either in improved facilities for individual work, or in coöperative enterprises. The home must be preserved, and at the same time household work must be reduced to a minimum. College women owe it to themselves and to society to do their part toward attaining this end.
FOOTNOTE:
[10] Bulletin Inter-Municipal Research Committee, Nov. 1905.