THIS IS A VERY IMPORTANT SUBJECT.
Dear General Reader, please let that sentence stand for the thousand words (much like those of a competent barker at the door of a show-tent) which you usually oblige an author to expend on enticing you into reading his article. Think how much time you save by walking straight into the tent and observing that—
THE First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts was held in 1908 at Freiburg in Switzerland. It as no improvised amateur uplift, private-theatricals affair.
The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of Freiburg's State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics were printed and circulated beforehand. The participating members numbered seven hundred. The discussions developed the characteristic points of the three rival breeds of household-arts instruction—the German, the Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were made to the normal schools of Freiburg, Berne, and Zurich, in each of which there is an elaborate system for the training of household-arts teachers. In the end, in order that facts and ideas about the education of girls for their duties as house-keepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted to establish, at some place in Switzerland, a Permanent International Information Committee.
Thus, in an age in which the productive tasks of the home have almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever making concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders, the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs the spectators to say "thumbs-down" and let her put it out of its agony altogether—in such an age there comes, at Freiburg, in this First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts, the most serious, the most notable, recognition. ever given in any age to the home's economic value.
A real paradox? Well, at any rate, it gives wings to the fluttering thought that theories of industrial evolution, one's own as well as Mrs. Gilman's, are a bit like automobiles—not always all that they are cranked up to be.
Certainly the revival of the home seems to attract larger crowds to the mourners' bench every year.
At the University of Missouri the first crop of graduates in Home Economics was gathered this last spring. They were seven. And as most of them took likewise a degree in Education, it may be assumed that they will go forth to spread the gospel.
Their preceptress, Miss Edna D. Day, who next year will head the just-organized Department of Home Economics in the University of Kansas, is a novel type of new woman in that she has earned the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in "Woman's Sphere." She took graduate work in the Department of Home Administration in the University of Chicago and achieved her doctorate with an investigation into "The Effect of Cooling on the Digestibility of Starch." What she found out was subsequently printed as a bulletin by the United States Department of Agriculture.
In the midst of the festivities at the wake held over The Home, it perplexes the mourners to learn that some of those domestic science bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture excite a demand for a million copies.