It will not be a case of "household drudgery" for the girls while the boys are studying civics.
Somewhere in this article (and as close to this paragraph as we can get the Art Director to put it) the reader will find a picture of the "living room" of the "model" house of the Washington-Allston Elementary School in Boston. The boys and girls of graduating grade in that school give four hours a week to matters connected with the welfare of that house. They have furnished it throughout with their own handiwork, the girls making pillow-cases, wall-coverings, window-curtains, etc., and the boys making chairs, tables, cupboards, etc. Succeeding classes will furnish it again. THE REASON WHY MR. CRAWFORD, THE MASTER OF THE SCHOOL, CHOSE TO HAVE A HOUSE FOR A MANUAL TRAINING LABORATORY WAS SIMPLY THAT A HOUSE OFFERS AMPLER OPPORTUNITIES THAN ANY OTHER KIND OF PLACE FOR INSTRUCTION IN THE PRACTICAL EFFICIENCIES OF DAILY LIVING FOR BOTH SEXES.
The system will be complete when the girls get a bigger training in design by making more of the chairs, and when the boys get a bigger training in diet by doing more of the cooking.
IV
LAST month's article ended with the inquiry whether the new education for homemaking would clash seriously with the modern young woman's necessary education for money-earning. We conclude that it will not.
Such developments as the long, specialized, four-year course in Household Economics at Simmons College in Boston are not here in point. That Simmons course is more than an education for home-making. It is an education for earning money by teaching home-making or by becoming (among other things) a dietitian in a hospital, or a manager of a lunch-room, or an interior decorator.
Our subject is not Home Economics as a money-earning occupation for a few women, but Home Economics as part of the education of all women.
In that aspect it does not seem likely to result in any "special feminine education" of such bulk as to withdraw women, in any serious degree, from the general education of the race. This is undeniably true, provided our observations have been correct that——
1. Home Economics is at heart Consumption, and must be so because the home woman is more and more purely a consumer.
2. Consumption is the broadest of generalities, requiring the broadest of liberal educations.