Mr. Devine’s proposition therefore would seem finally to sanction some such conclusion as this:
Physical science and social science (and common sense) are making such important contributions to the subject of the rearing of children and to the subject of the maintenance of wholesome and beautiful living conditions and to the subject of the use of leisure that, while the home woman has lost almost all of the productive industries which she once controlled, she has simultaneously 101 gained a whole new field of labor. Consumption has ceased to be merely passive and has become active. It has ceased to be mere Absorption and has become Choice. And the active choosing of the products of the world (both spiritual and material) in connection with her children, her house, and her spare time has developed for the home woman into a task so broad, into an art so difficult, as to require serious study.
We have quoted at length from Mr. Devine’s discourse because it is recognized as the classic statement of the case and because it has had the warm personal commendation of such women as the late Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, whose skill as scientist and vision as philosopher made her the most authoritative personality in the American Home Economics Association. (That association, by the way, has some fifteen hundred due-paying members.)
The scales fall from our eyes now and we see at least one thing which we had not seen before. We had supposed that sewing and cooking were the vitals of the home economics movement. 102 Not at all! The home woman might cease altogether to sew and to cook (just as she has ceased altogether to spin, weave, brew, etc.) without depriving the home economics movement of any considerable part of its driving power. Sewing and cooking are productive processes. They add economic value to certain commodities; namely, cloth and food. But it is not production, it is consumption, which the home economics movement is at heart devoted to.
This is plainly set forth by some of its most zealous workers. Thus Edna D. Day, at the Lake Placid Conference on home economics in 1908, was more or less sorry that “domestic science has come to be so largely sewing and cooking in our schools”; was quite willing to look at the white of the eye of the fact that “more and more we are buying ready-made clothes and ready-cooked foods”; and marked out the policy of her “Survey Course in Home Economics” at the University of Missouri in the statement that “sewing and cooking are decreasingly home problems, while the problems of wise buying, of adjusting standards of living to income, and of developing right feelings in 103 regard to family responsibilities are increasingly difficult.”
To choose and use the world’s resources intelligently on behalf of family and community—in this Mr. Devine saw a new field of action, in this Mrs. Richards saw a new field of education.
Women will train themselves for their duties as consumers or else continue to lie under the sentence of condemnation pronounced upon them by Florence Nightingale. “Three-fourths of the mischief in women’s lives,” said she, “arises from their excepting themselves from the rule of training considered necessary for men.”
But what, in this case, is the training proposed?
The answer to that question will cause some more scales to fall from our eyes. Just as we have seen that home economics does not consist essentially of sewing and cooking, we shall see that consumption is not at all a specialized technique in the sense in which electrical engineering, department-store buying, railroading, cotton manufacturing, medicine, and the other occupations of the outside world are specialized 104 techniques. Home economics will not narrow women’s education but in the end will enlarge it. For consumption, instead of being a specialty, is a generality so broad as almost to glitter.