We are impelled now to admit that the work done in domestic science and art by the high schools should be recognized by the colleges and universities. The University of California requires its freshmen to come to it with 45 “units” of standardized high-school work, of various sorts, accomplished. We learn, but we are not startled when we learn, that the University of California will henceforth allow the entering freshman to offer nine of her 45 “units” in sewing, dressmaking, millinery, decorating, furnishing (all accompanied with free-hand 95 drawing); and in cooking, hygiene, dietetics, laundering, nursing (all accompanied with chemistry).
Even in the colleges and universities themselves, especially if they are of recent foundation, we accept, if we do not expect, a domestic-science-and-art department of utilitarian value and of academic worth. At Chicago University it is called the Department of Household Administration; sixty women undergraduates are specializing in it. At the University of Illinois it is called the Department of Household Science; one-third of all the women in the university are taking courses in it; one-fifth of them are “majoring” in it; number four of volume two of the university bulletins is by Miss Sprague on “A Precise Method of Roasting Beef”; in the research laboratory Miss Goldthwaite, Doctor Goldthwaite, is making chemical experiments with pectin, sugar, fruit-juice, tartaric acid, to the point of determining that the mixture should be withdrawn from heat at a temperature of 103 degrees Centigrade and at a specific gravity of 1.28 in order that it shall invariably “jell”; in the graduate school the 96 women who attend the household-arts seminar are being directed toward original inquiries into “Co-operative Housekeeping,” “Dietetic Cults,” “Hygiene of Clothing,” “Pure Food Laws.”
Seeing how far the newer universities go, we return to rest our eyes, without their rolling in the frenzy which would attack Alexander Hamilton if he were with us, on Hamilton’s alma mater, Columbia University, venerable but adventurous, giving courses in “Housewifery,” in “Shirtwaists,” and in “Domestic Laundering.”
UPPER PICTURE: IN CENTER IS THE NEW $500,000 HOUSEHOLD ARTS BUILDING OF COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN NEW YORK.
LOWER PICTURE IS THE HOUSEHOLD ARTS BUILDING OF CALIFORNIA POLYTECHNIC SCHOOL AT SAN LUIS OBISPO.
It is not till we come to the really-truly, more than masculinely, academic and cultural eastern women’s colleges such as Vassar, Wellesley, Smith, and Bryn Mawr that we experience a genuine journalistic shock on hearing a domestic-science-and-art piece of news. Those colleges will be the last to succumb. But the day of their fall approaches. The alumnæ association of Wellesley voted, in 1910, to petition the trustees to establish home-economics courses; and, in the same year, the president of Wellesley put into her commencement address the words: “I hope the time may soon come when we can have a department of domestic science which shall give a sound basis for the problems of the household.”
The resuscitated Home has become one of the livest of pedagogical personages. It has added a great and growing field to the estate of Education. To supply that field with teachers of high qualifications we find highly extended training courses in such institutions as Drexel in Philadelphia, Pratt in Brooklyn, Simmons in Boston and Teachers College in New York. In fact, the conclusion of the epoch of pioneer domestic-science-and-art agitation might perhaps be said to have been announced to the country when Teachers College, in 1909, erected a new building at a cost of $500,000 and dedicated it, in its entirety, to Household Arts.
What does it all mean?
“Fellow citizens,” said the colored orator, reported by Dr. Paul Monroe of Columbia, “what am education? Education am the palladium of our liberties and the grand pandemonium of civilization.”