We also observe that the housewife is going to be something of an interior decorator, since she studies “design, color, house planning and furnishing.”
She also acquires some skill as purchasing agent, bookkeeper, and employer of labor when she takes the course on household management and studies “the proper apportioning of income among the different lines of home expenditures, the systematizing and keeping of household accounts, and the question of domestic service.”
The second grand division is Food Study and Preparation.
Here the housewife becomes, to some extent, a dietitian, studying “the chemical processes in the preparation and digestion of foods,” and considering the question “how she shall secure for the family the foods best suited to the various activities of each individual.”
Here, likewise, she makes a start toward being a pure-food expert, through a study of “physical and chemical changes induced in food products 106 by the growth of molds, yeasts, and bacteria,” and a start toward being a health officer, through a study of “bacteria in their relation to disease, sources of infection, personal and household disinfection.”
Nor does she omit to acquire some of the technique of the physical director through a course in physiology bearing on “digestion, storage of energy, rest, sleep, exercise, and regularity of habits.”
Of course, in her work in cookery, she pays some attention to special cookery for invalids.
The third grand division, that of Clothing and Household Fabrics, produces a dressmaker, a milliner, and an embroiderer, as well as a person trained to see to it that “the expenditure for clothing shall be correct in proportion to the expenditure for other purposes.”
The fourth grand division, the Care of Children, is of course limitless. The rearing of the human young is, as we all know and as Mr. Eliot of Harvard has insisted, the most intellectual occupation in the world. Here the homemaker applies all the knowledge she has gained from her study of the hygiene of foods and of 107 the hygiene of clothes, and also makes some progress toward becoming a trained nurse and a kindergartner by means of researches into “infant diseases and emergencies,” “the stages of the mental development of the child,” “the child’s imagination with regard to truth-telling and deceit,” “the history of children’s books,” and “the art of story-telling.”
Passing over the fifth grand division, Home Nursing and Emergencies (in which the pupil learns simply “the use of household remedies,” “the care of the sick room,” etc.), we come to the wide expanse of the sixth grand division, Home and Social Economics.