Thus, in an age in which the productive tasks of the home have almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever slaking concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders,—the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs the spectators to say “thumbs down” and let her put it out of its agony altogether—in such an age there comes, at Fribourg, in this First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts, the most serious, the most notable, recognition ever given in any age to the home’s economic value.
A real paradox? Well, at any rate, it gives wings to the fluttering thought that theories of industrial evolution, one’s own as well as Mrs. Gilman’s, are a bit like automobiles—not always all that they are cranked up to be.
Certainly the revival of the home seems to 91 attract larger crowds to the mourners’ bench every year.
At the University of Missouri the first crop of graduates in home economics was gathered in the spring of 1910. They were seven. Of the 120 units of work required for graduation they had earned at least 38 in such subjects as “Textiles and Clothing,” “Food Chemistry,” “General Foods,” “Advanced Foods,” “Home Sanitation,” “House Furnishing and Decoration,” and “Home Administration.” Most of them, besides taking a degree in Home Economics, took likewise a degree in Education. We may therefore assume that schools as well as homes will listen to their new message.
Their preceptress, Miss Edna D. Day, who subsequently left Missouri to organize a department of home economics in the University of Kansas, is a novel type of New Woman in that she has earned the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in “Woman’s Sphere.” She took graduate work in the department of home administration in the University of Chicago and achieved her doctorate with an investigation into “The Effect of Cooking on the Digestibility of 92 Starch.” What she found out was subsequently printed as a bulletin by the United States Department of Agriculture.
In the midst of the festivities at the wake held over the home, it perplexes the mourners to learn that some of those domestic science bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture excite a demand for a million copies.
It is a wake like Mike McCarthy’s.
Mike was lookin’ iligant
As he rested there in state.
But