University of Virginia Library

I

THE First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts was held in 1908 at Freiburg in Switzerland. It was no improvised amateur uplift, private-theatricals affair.

The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of Freiburg's State Council. Seventy-two papers on technical topics were printed and circulated beforehand. The participating members numbered seven hundred. The discussions developed the characteristic points of the three rival breeds of household-arts instruction—the German, the Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were made to the normal schools of Freiburg, Berne, and Zurich, in each of which there is an elaborate system for the training of household-arts teachers. In the end, in order that facts and ideas about the education of girls for their duties as housekeepers might be more rapidly circulated, it was voted to establish, at some place in Switzerland, a Permanent International Information Committee.

Thus, in an age in which the productive tasks of the home have almost all been surrendered to the factory; in an age in which even cooking and sewing, last puny provinces of a once ample empire, are forever making concessions of territory to those barbarian invaders, the manufacturers of ready-to-eat foods and ready-to-wear clothes; in an age in which home industry lies fainting and gasping, while Mrs. Charlotte Perkins Gilman begs the spectators to say "thumbs-down" and let her put it out of its agony altogether—in such an age there comes, at Freiburg, in this First International Congress on Domestic Science and Arts, the most serious, the most notable, recognition. ever given in any age to the home's economic value.

A real paradox? Well, at any rate, it gives wings to the fluttering thought that theories of industrial evolution, one's own as well as Mrs. Gilman's, are a bit like automobiles—not always all that they are cranked up to be.

Certainly the revival of the home seems to attract larger crowds to the mourners' bench every year.

At the University of Missouri the first crop of graduates in Home Economics was gathered this last spring. They were seven. And as most of them took likewise a degree in Education, it may be assumed that they will go forth to spread the gospel.

Their preceptress, Miss Edna D. Day, who next year will head the just-organized

Department of Home Economics in the University of Kansas, is a novel type of new woman in that she has earned the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in "Woman's Sphere." She took graduate work in the Department of Home Administration in the University of Chicago and achieved her doctorate with an investigation into "The Effect of Cooling on the Digestibility of Starch." What she found out was subsequently printed as a bulletin by the United States Department of Agriculture.

In the midst of the festivities at the wake held over The Home, it perplexes the mourners to learn that some of those domestic science bulletins of the United States Department of Agriculture excite a demand for a million copies.

It is a wake like Mike McCarthy's.

But

The ballad (one of the most temperately worded of literary successes) goes on to say that "the effect was great." So it has been in this case—great enough to be felt all the way around the world.

It is being felt in the Island Empire of the East. Miss Ume Tsuda's Institute at Tokyo (which Stands so high that its graduates are allowed to teach in secondary schools without further government examination) has installed courses in English domestic science as well as in the domestic science of Japan.

It is being felt in the Island Empire of the West. King's College, of the University of London, has organized a three-year course leading to the degree of Mistress of Home Science, and has also established a "Post-Graduates' Course in Home Science," in which out of fourteen students (in this its first year of existence) four are graduates of the courses of academic study of Oxford or Cambridge.

It is being felt in the United States at every educational level.

It has familiarized us with household arts in the public schools, and we are not astonished to learn that in the public schools of Boston in every grade above the third, there is sewing or cooking, or both, for 120 minutes every week for every girl.

It has accustomed us to such news as that in Illinois there are fifty-eight public high schools in which instruction is offered in one or more of the three following subjects: Food, Clothing, or The Home.

It has brought us to the point of expecting domestic science in all schools of agriculture and of regarding it as natural for the legislature of Montana to appropriate $50,000 to the State Agricultural College for a woman's dormitory.

It has cushioned the shock of the tidings from the University of California to the effect that entrance credit will this fall be given for high school domestic science work.

We are reduced to equanimity in the face of the fact (which might have frenzied Alexander Hamilton) that Columbia University, through its Teachers College, is offering courses in Elementary Cookery, in Shirt-waists, in Domestic Laundering, and in Housewifery.

And at last, when we see the resuscitated home making its way even into the really-truly, more-than-masculinely, academic Eastern women's colleges, we rush up to the Mike McCarthy of this case and assure him warmly that we were not deceived for a moment by his apparent demise, having just learned that President Hazard of Wellesley College, in her latest commencement address, said: "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 "

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."

But it does mean something, this Home Economics disturbance. And something very different from what it seems to.