These departments might give a girl a pretty fair education of the hand and a pretty fair acquaintance with the technique and organization of the working world; but we haven't yet mentioned the biggest and hardest department of all.
Before mentioning it, we call attention to a picture reproduced in this article from a book published in the year 1493. The book was a French translation of Boccaccio's collection of stories called "Noble Women." The picture shows a woolen mill being operated in the grounds of a palace by a queen and her ladies-in-waiting. It summons back the days when even the daughters of kings and nobles could not help acquiring a knowledge of the working world, because they were in it. One of the ladies in-waiting is straightening out the tangled strands of wool with carding-combs. The other has taken the combed and straightened strands and is spinning them into yarn. The queen, being the boss, has the best job. She is weaving the yarn into cloth on a loom.
The daughters of the Emperor Charlemagne, who was a very rich man, learned how to card and spin and weave. Noble women had to boss all that kind of thing on their estates. They lived in the very midst of Industry, of Business.
So it was with those early New England women. And therefore, whether well-to-do or indigent, they passed on to their sons as well as to their daughters a steady daily lesson in the world's work. The most intelligent mother in the United States to-day, let her be kindergartner and psychologist and child-study-specialist as much as she pleases, cannot give her children that broad early view of the organization of life. The only place where her children can get it now is in the school.
On the first of January of this year Mrs. Ella Flagg Young, superintendent of schools in Chicago, took algebra out of the eighth grade of the elementary schools, and, in its place, inserted a course on Chicago. Large parts of what was once the Home are now spread out through the Community. The new course will teach the life of the community, its activities and opportunities, civic, aesthetic, industrial. Such a course is nothing but Home Training for the enlarged Home.
But we must go back for a moment to that biggest and hardest department of all in the old homes of New England.
"Deceit, weeping, spinning, God hath give
To women kindly that they may live,"
said Chaucer in a teasing mood.
But spinning was a very small part of the Department of Textiles. We forbear to dilate on the courses of instruction which that department offered. We confine ourselves to observing that:
First. In the Sub-Department of Flax, after heckling that flax with combs of increasing degrees of fineness till the fibers lay pretty straight; after spinning it into yarn on her spinning-wheel; after reeling the yarn off into skeins; after "bucking" the skeins in hot lye through many changes of water; and after using shuttle and loom to weave the stuff into cloth, the home woman of those days had to accomplish some twenty subsequent processes of bucking, rinsing, possing, drying, and bleaching before the cloth was ready for use.