Widening with this vocational principle, Miss Goodrich’s vision of the inclusion of both sexes in the courses of study now labeled “domestic-science-and-art” finds widening fulfilment. Side by side with young women in the Foods laboratory we shall see young men who are going to be chefs, dietitians, pure-food inspectors. In the Textiles laboratory we shall see young women who are going to sew at home, young women who are going to sew in factories, young men who are going to manufacture cloth. Hygiene will attract the sanitarian, the nurse, the hotel manager, trousered or petticoated.
We come thus face to face with the final development of the home economics movement. It issues into a double system. After providing, to the young, that general introduction to life at large which we have already detailed, it goes on, in its second phase, to provide immediate information of a more specialized character to scholars more mature at the time when that information is immediately needed. A large part of the home economics movement of the future will be the establishment of a system of continuous instruction for wives, mothers, 125 housekeepers, already entered upon their task of home-making and child-rearing.
The need of this development appears as soon as we take the sequence of events in a girl’s life and place it beside the sequence of events in a boy’s. If a boy is going to be a cotton-machinery engineer, a municipal sanitary expert, a food specialist, we do not give him his real technical finish till he is entering his trade. We may have given him, we ought to have given him, a vocational foundation of pertinent knowledge. But we do not give him the minutiæ of trade technique till he is at the point of practicing his trade or has already begun to practice it. This principle, applicable to the preparation for all trades whatsoever, sets limits to the amount of detailed preparation for home-making which can profitably be introduced, for most girls, into the curricula of schools and colleges.
In former chapters of this book we have seen that for most girls there is a gap, a large gap, between school and marriage, between girlhood and motherhood. We have seen, too, that this gap tends to be filled with money-earning work which demands a certain preparation of its own. 126 That point aside, however, the very existence of the gap in question, no matter how it may be filled, means that if we give a minute and elaborate preparation of home-making to girlhood we may wait five years, ten years, fifteen years, twenty years, before we see wifehood and motherhood put that preparation to use.
Anybody who proposed to give a boy a minute and elaborate preparation for civil engineering a possible twenty years before he became a civil engineer and in contempt of the possible contingency of his not becoming a civil engineer at all, would hardly deserve to be called practical. Yet, in the name of practical education, we are sometimes asked to tolerate a correspondingly complete preparation for wifehood and motherhood at an age when both of those estates are mere prospects, distant and indefinite. We cannot believe that so extreme a demand will ever be acceded to by educators who have fully considered the modern postponement of marriage. Home economics, in schools and colleges, except for girls who are going to become teachers of it or who in other ways are going to make it their immediate money-earning work, must stop 127 with its broad applications to daily human living. So will it be useful, in different degrees, to both sexes and clash neither with general academic preparation nor with the preparation for self-support.
There will remain, unlearned, a great deal that modern science and modern sociology have to offer to the wife and mother. Let that great deal, in its more technical teachings, be learned when it can be carried forward into action.
The machinery of home economics instruction for adults is even now being erected, is even now being operated.
The Chicago School of Domestic Arts and Science, after much teaching of young girls, has established a “Housekeepers’ Association.” The members of that association are adult practicing housekeepers. The same school will soon establish a course in the study of the Care of Children. The pupils enrolled in that course will be mothers.
The fact is that science and sociology are so constantly amending and enlarging their teachings that a knowledge of what they taught twenty years ago is inadequate and a knowledge 128 of the minutiæ of what they taught twenty years ago is futile. The housekeeper of the future will have to keep on studying while housekeeping.
Several hundred housekeepers come each winter to the University of Wisconsin to attend the “Women’s Course in Home Economics.” They hear Professor Hastings talk about the “Production and Care of Milk.” They hear Dr. Evans talk about the “Prevention of Infant Mortality.” They hear Professor Marlatt talk about “Diets in Disease.” In each case they hear something very different from what they would have heard in their girlhood. For this reason alone, even if the gap between girlhood and motherhood did not exist, the machinery of home economics instruction for adults would have become necessary.