For instance, in the books and in the courses of instruction (of college grade) on “the house” we have sometimes observed elaborate 111 accounts of the evolution of the human home, beginning with the huts of the primitive Simians. And in pursuing the very essential subject of “clothes and fabrics” we have not infrequently found ourselves in the midst of spacious preliminary dissertations on the structure of the loom, beginning with that which was used by the Anthropenguins.
Now we would not for the world speak disparagingly of looms or huts. We have ourselves examined some of them in the Hull House Museum in Chicago and in the woods of Canada, and have found them instructive. We suggest only that college life is short, that the college curriculum is crowded, and that (except possibly for those students who are especially interested in anthropology or in industrial evolution) it would surely be a misfortune to learn of the Simian hut and to miss Rossetti’s “House of Life,” or to get the impression that as a “cultural background” for shirtwaists the Anthropenguinian loom can really compete with Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus.”
If this occasional tendency toward exaggerating the importance of drain pipes, window 112 curtains, and door mats were to grow strong, and if girls, as a class, should be required to spend any large proportion of their time on the specialized history and sociology of feminine implements and tasks while the boys were still in the current of the affairs of the race, we should indeed want President Thomas of Bryn Mawr to repeat on a thousand lecture platforms her indignant assertion of the fact that “nothing more disastrous for women, or for men, can be conceived of than specialized education of women as a sex.”
These parenthetical observations, however, amount simply to the expression of our personal opinion that home economics, like every new idea, carries with it large quantities of dross which will have to be refined out in the smelter of trial. The real metal in it is its attempt to establish the principle that intelligent consumption is an important and difficult task. For that reason it will not only desire but demand the utmost equality of educational opportunity. And women, like men, will continue to get their “cultural backgrounds” in the great achievements of the whole race, where they 113 can hold converse with Lincoln and Darwin and the makers of the Cologne Cathedral and George Meredith and Pasteur and Karl Marx and Whistler and Joan of Arc and St. John.
The woman voiced a great truth who said that the soul which can irradiate the numberless pettinesses of home management (and it is folly to deny that there are numberless pettinesses in it) is the soul “nourished elsewhere.” Think that over. It tells the story. Whether the “elsewhere” is the deep recesses of her own religious nature or the wide stretches of the great arts and sciences, it is always an “elsewhere.”
Let that be granted, as it must be granted. Let us say that there shall be no abridgment of the offerings of so-called academic education. What does a course of study like that of Mr. Harvey’s Homemakers’ School attempt to add to academic education?
Principally three things.
First: Certain manual arts.
Second: Certain domestic applications of the physical and sociological sciences.