In our exhibit at the Madison meeting of the National Educational Association last summer were numbers of aprons, dresses, shirts, etc., made by pupils, often of the primary grades; and one of the most noticed specimens was a neatly darned stocking. Even darning must be taught to these girls in school; there is no instructor at home.
2. Cooking is much more widely understood by the colored mothers. Indeed, there is a sort of illusory tradition abroad that the negroes are a race of cooks; though, according to my observation, nothing could be farther from the truth. And cooking is only one part of domestic economy. Of this art as a whole, the colored women are densely ignorant. They know nothing of orderly housekeeping, of marketing, or of economy in any true sense of the word.
In several of our schools—notably Le Moyne Institute at Memphis—instruction in domestic economy, including cooking, is now well systematized as a part of the course of study for girls. At Atlanta University, a class of young women each year is inducted into a full and careful knowledge of good housekeeping by what is called the cottage plan, the girls doing their own housekeeping through the year under the training of a cultivated house-mother.
Nor should it be forgotten that in every boarding school of the A. M. A. the regular ongoing of the domestic work of the institution, nearly all of which except the cooking and washing is done by the students, furnishes no insignificant or ineffectual training in the art of housekeeping.
8. Nursing and the general care of the sick is also a branch in which instruction and training are sadly needed by the colored women. Few things are more pitiful than the condition of the sick among any half-civilized people, with their caprices, their superstitions and their irregularities. In this direction, Fisk University takes a prominent place among our institutions, employing a professionally trained woman who gives her whole time to the hygiene of the school and the training of the students in health-preserving and health-restoring.
It would have been easy to double the length of this article by going more into details with respect to the industrial features in process of incorporation into the work of all our leading institutions, and their industrial influence, the "unconscious tuition" of industry which they have come more and more to exert. Suffice it to add, without hyperbole, that it is easy to track these missionary schools, to trace their influence by their results upon the home life and domestic ambitions of the young people who have gone out from them to the work of the world. And this influence is yet in its beginnings.