This is plainly set forth by some of its most zealous workers. Thus Edna D. Day, at the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics in 1908, was more or less sorry that "domestic science has come to be so largely sewing and cooking in our schools," was quite willing to look at the white of the eye of the fact that "more and more we are buying ready-made clothes and ready-cooked foods," and marked out the policy of her "Survey Course in Home Economics" at the University of Missouri in the statement that "sewing and cooking are decreasingly home problems, while the problems of wise buying, of adjusting standards of living to income, and of developing right feelings in regard to family responsibilities are increasingly difficult."
To choose and use the world's resources intelligently on behalf of family and community—in this Mr. Devine sees a new field of action, in this Mrs. Richards sees a new field of education.
Women will train themselves for their duties as consumers or else continue to lie under the sentence of condemnation pronounced upon them by Florence Nightingale. "Three-fourths of the mischief in women's lives," said she, "arises from their excepting themselves from the rule of training considered necessary for men."
But what, in this case, is the training proposed?
The answer to that question will cause some more scales to fall from our eyes. Just as we have seen that Home Economics does not consist essentially of sewing and cooking, we shall see that Consumption is not at all a specialized technique in the sense in which electrical engineering, department store buying, railroading, cotton manufacturing, medicine, and the other occupations of the outside world are specialized technigues. Home Economics will not narrow women's education but in the end will enlarge it, because Consumption, instead of being a specialty, is a generality so broad as almost to glitter.
III
AT Menomonie, Wisconsin, Mr. L. D. Harvey, lately president of the National Education Association, has established a Homemakers' School. It does not turn out teachers. Its course of instruction is solely for the prospective housewife.
The first grand division of study is The House.
We here observe that the housewife is going to be something of a Sanitary Engineer, since she studies Chemistry, Physics, and Bacteriology in their "application to such subjects as the heating, lighting, ventilation, and plumbing of a house." It is thought that knowledge of this sort "will go a long way toward improving the health conditions of the country."
We also observe that the housewife is going to be something of an Interior Decorator, since she studies "design, color, house planning and furnishing."