Household Administration, Its Place in the Higher Education of Women

by Unknown

The rule of an abbey or a priory called for no mean business capacity on the part of their heads, and as a rule the abbess and prioress were women of great business and administrative ability. Before the Norman Conquest nearly all the nunneries founded in England were abbacies, subsequently priories were the most usual foundations, as according to feudal law women were unable to hold property.

The latter half of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries are renowned throughout history for their women, who, occupying foremost positions in the government, were clever, cultured, and liberal-minded. One has but to mention the names of Margaret, Countess of Richmond, the “Lady Margaret” of Oxford and Cambridge; of Leonore d’Este, the mother of equally famous daughters, Isabella and Beatrice d’Este; Marguerite de Valois, sister of Francis I., and Isabella of Castile, to conjure up before one’s eyes the whole procession of the proud and capable women of these days.

“One and all have been fruitful as successive stages of growth, yet they can never recur, and only the fanatic or visionary could wish that they 24 should recur, for each is narrow and insufficient from the standpoint of a later age.”

In England “the women who were the mothers of the men who created the great Elizabethan epoch were almost without exception brought up in nunnery schools”[7] and, alas, the destruction of the nunneries and the rise of the Puritan spirit sounded the death-knell of women’s education. After the Reformation the position of woman was peculiarly degrading; in the eyes of the law she possessed practically no status, and “the old chivalrous feeling for woman seems to have faded out with the romance of the Middle Ages—she now figured as the legal property of man, ‘the safeguard against sin,’ the bearer of children ad infinitum.”

So woman was left once more to sink back into a slough of despond, until with the end of the eighteenth century there arose the humanitarian movement and the gradual awakening of woman to the sense of her responsibility, with the inevitable corollary of her rightful position as the social equal of man.

If these ideals are to be realised, woman must recognise her responsibilities and act accordingly. She has proved herself a more than apt student in all the liberal studies, she has practically forced the door of nearly all the professions, now she must realise that she must apply her higher learning to what is probably the most difficult profession of all, the management of the home, or in other 25 words she must see that the knowledge she has acquired be adapted and turned to practical aims.

Up to the present time the conduct of the home has been regulated purely by rule of thumb methods; if however in the future it can only be administered with the same method and scientific exactitude as prevail in other great business enterprises, the drudgery of housekeeping will diminish and woman will cease to be a slave to household duties. She will have more time to devote to the cultivation of her own mind, and thus, while becoming a more real companion to man, she will be free to take a more enlightened interest in the education and development of her children.

“Incidentally this may go to prove that a sound knowledge of the household sciences and arts may serve, not to tie a woman more to the storeroom and kitchen, but to enable her to get better results with the expenditure of less time and energy, by enabling her to apply to everything simple and complex within the household the master-mind, instead of the mind of the uncertain amateur.”

Her responsibilities are great not only as an individual but as a member of the community to which she belongs; and if she is to fulfil these responsibilities in respect to the home, she cannot do so without a thorough scientific preparation.

The home is the “cradle of life,” it was the birthplace of those industries which to-day form the great centres and constitute the means of livelihood for millions. In some of these there is reason to believe that woman took her share as 26 originator. With the process of time, these primitive practices have grown into the great industries and arts of to-day, yet it is still to the woman that the call comes to cultivate and use her taste in these matters, so that when it falls to her to be responsible for the decoration and furnishing of a house, she may be able to choose in all departments of life what is the best, to the everlasting benefit of herself and her family, both physically and morally.