Household Administration, Its Place in the Higher Education of Women

by Unknown

I. NEEDLEWORK AND DRESSMAKING

INTRODUCTION

Modern woman finds herself in the twentieth century heiress to an accumulation of domestic experience handed down from her primitive sisters, much of which originated in necessity, and survives from custom.

It is said that “of the billion and a half human beings on the earth, about 700,000,000 are females, and what share their mothers and grandmothers, back to the remotest generation, have had in originating and developing culture is a question which concerns the whole race,” though allusion only can be made to it in this paper.

If, from the study of anthropology, we find that man was the hunter, the killer of food, it was woman who cared for it, prepared it for use, tilled the ground, cleaned, dried, cut, and sewed skins for clothing and shelter. It is believed by many authorities that it was woman who invented and made many of the implements with which she worked, and who spun, wove, and dyed fibres of all 296 kinds into strong, useful, and sometimes beautiful fabrics of varied and pleasing tints and colours, from dyes of her own making, which she obtained from animal and vegetable sources. The introduction of much plain and ornamental stitchery, the forerunner of the needlework of the present day, followed quickly upon the coming of textiles.

Until the invention of machinery and the institution of the factory system, the practice of a large number of arts was in the hands of women as part of their lives and homes. Now, however, women are no longer leather-dressers, potters, or weavers in the home—these arts have become trades for men, carried on in factories; and even the more intimate arts of cooking, cleaning, and needlework are threatened from the outside.

The cheapness and readiness with which the products of the factory can be obtained, whether for the purposes of food or of clothing, has to a large extent removed the desire to exercise these arts herself, especially from the woman whose time can be otherwise employed to her financial advantage in industrial pursuits. It would almost appear that she has failed to perceive the intellectual and æsthetic enjoyment to be derived from them, and has been content to permit the skill and knowledge she originally acquired and exercised to rust from want of practice as each generation succeeds its predecessor. On the other hand, as the accumulated profits from the factory have made it possible for well-off women to depute their own share of cooking, cleaning, sewing, and 297 the care of children by payments to their less financially fortunate sisters, usually untrained women of narrow education, public opinion has shown a tendency to regard these arts as menial, and to some extent derogatory in practice to the educated and refined. Amongst this class of women, consequently, knowledge of these arts has steadily dwindled, until the home-made jams, jellies, cordials and pickles of our grandmothers, the linen they spun, wove, and fashioned, are no longer the glory of our storerooms and linen-presses; while the home has come to be less and less regarded as the right and proper place for instruction in the domestic arts.

Deep down, however, in the modern woman’s nature lies the old instinct for order, for caring for things animate and inanimate. This instinct has found expression since the early seventies among more fortunately situated women in an endeavour to arrest the decay of what I have called the more intimate household arts, to promote their revival and to raise their status in education—an endeavour due, shall we say, to “something in the air,” a kind of “Zeit Geist”—beginning more or less contemporaneously on the Continent of Europe, in Great Britain, and in the United States and Canada; an endeavour not to benefit themselves alone, but to help their poorer sisters.

It was soon agreed that the cultivation of the household arts belonged to education, and that they might and should be taught in schools; but the questions—What was their link with general 298 education, by what methods they could be most appropriately taught, and in the curriculum of what schools they should find a place—have been the basis of prolonged experimental effort. It is now the opinion of a large section of persons of authority in education, that these arts are neither “sacred mysteries which can only be understood by patient life study,” nor, on the other hand, can any woman, whatever her intellectual ability, master them without training. It has been well said, in effect, that the former attitude leads to a contempt for the plain everyday things of life, while the latter is responsible for the cultivation of a girl’s head at the expense of her hands.

The arts of cooking and cleaning took the lead in order of experiment. The results, as recorded, have proved their position to belong directly to the region of applied science, and to be worthy of a place in a specially arranged course of household science and economics for women, of university standard. We may confidently expect that this result only anticipates a corresponding triumph, awaiting in its turn similar experimental work, which has been carried on for some years in respect of the teaching also of the art of needlework. These experimental efforts include the intelligent employment of the pencil, the scissors, and the needle in the production of garments, draperies, napery, and so forth. The lines along which at the present moment this development is proceeding have regard indeed not only to the practical worth of needlecraft, but to its intimate 299 association with general education as well as to decorative and applied art.