We have used our brains while getting hold of money. We are going to use our brains while getting rid of it. We have studied banking, engineering, shop practice, cost systems, salesmanship. We are going to study food values, the hygiene of clothing, the sanitary construction and operation of living quarters, the mental reaction of amusements, the distribution of income, the art of making choices, according to our means, from among the millions of things, harmful and helpful, ugly and beautiful, offered to us by the producing world.
Mr. Devine ventures to hope that "we may look for a radical improvement in general economic conditions from a wiser use of the wealth which we have chosen to produce."
This enlarged view of the economic importance of Consumption brings with it a correspondingly enlarged view of the economic importance of the Home. "If the Factory," says Mr. Devine, "has been the center of the economics which has had to do with production, the Home will displace the Factory as the center of interest in a system which gives due prominence to Enjoyment and Use."
"There will result," continues Mr. Devine, "an increased respect on the part of economists for the industrial function which woman performs," for "there is no economic function higher than that of determining how wealth shall be used," so that "even if man remain the chief producer of wealth and woman remain the chief factor in determining how wealth shall be used, the economic position of woman will not be considered by those who judge with discrimination to be inferior to that of man."
Mr. Devine then lays out for the economist a task in the discharge of which the innocent bystander will sincerely wish him a pleasant trip and a safe return.
"It is the present duty of the economist," says Mr. Devine, "to accompany the wealth expender to the very threshold of the home, that he may point out, with untiring vigilance, its emptiness, caused not so much by lack of income as by lack of knowledge of how to spend wisely."
Mr. Deville's proposition therefore would seem finally to sanction some such conclusion as this:
Physical science and social science (and common sense) are making such important contributions to the subject of the rearing of children and to the subject of the maintenance of wholesome and beautiful living conditions and to the subject of the use of leisure that, while the home woman has lost almost all of the productive industries which she once controlled, she has simultaneously gained a whole new field of labor. Consumption has ceased to be merely PASSIVE and has become ACTIVE. It has ceased to be mere ABSORPTION and has become CHOICE. And the active choosing of the products of the world (both spiritual and material) in connection with her children, her house, and her spare time has developed for the home woman into a task so broad, into an art so difficult, as to require serious study.
We have quoted at length from Mr. Devine's discourse because it is recognized as the classic statement of the case and because it is warmly commended by such women as Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose skill as scientist and vision as philosopher have made her the most authoritative personality in the American Home Economics Association. (That association, by the way, has some fifteen hundred due-paying members.)
The scales fall from our eyes now and we see at least one thing which we had not seen before. We had supposed that sewing and cooking were the vitals of the Home Economics movement. Not at all! The home woman might cease altogether to sew and to cook (just as she has ceased altogether to spin, weave, brew, etc.) without depriving the Home Economics movement of any considerable part of its driving power. Sewing and cooking are productive processes. They add economic value to certain commodities; namely, cloth and food. But it is not Production, it is Consumption, which the Home Economics movement is at heart devoted to.