Surely we may now say: If education does not (1) give women a comprehension of the organization of the money-earning world, and (2) train them to one of the techniques which lead to self-support in that world, it is not education.
Just at this point, though, we encounter a curious conflict in women’s education. Just as we see their urgent need of a money-earning technique, we simultaneously hear, coming from a corner of the battlefield and swelling till it fills the air with a nation-wide battle cry, the sentiment: “The Home is also a technique. All women must be trained to it.”
At Rockford College, illustrating this conflict, there exists, besides the course in Secretarial Studies, an equivalent course in Home Economics.
In an illustration in this chapter we show the tiny children of the Francis Parker School in Chicago taking their first lesson in the technique of the home. In another picture we show the 86 post-graduate laboratory in the technique of the home at the University of Illinois. And the space between the kindergarten and the degree of Doctor of Philosophy threatens to get filled up almost everywhere with courses in cooking, sewing, chemistry of diet, composition of textiles, art of marketing, and other phases of home management.
The money-earning world, a technique! The home, a technique! The boy learns only one. Must the girl learn two, be twice a specialist?
III.
Learning for Spending
The First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts was held in 1908 at Fribourg in Switzerland. It was no improvised, amateur-uplift, private-theatricals affair.
The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of Fribourg’s State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics were printed and circulated beforehand. The participating members numbered seven hundred. The discussions developed the characteristic points of three rival varieties of household-arts instruction—the German, the Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were made to the normal schools of Fribourg, Berne, and Zurich, in each of which there is an elaborate system for the training of household-arts teachers. In the end, in order that facts and ideas about the education of girls for their duties as housekeepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted 90 to establish, at some place in Switzerland, a Permanent International Information Committee.