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Page 67
THE MUSES ON THE HEARTH
"How to be efficient though incompetent" is the title suggested by a
distinguished psychologist for the vocational appeals of the moment. Among
these raucous calls none is more annoying to the ear of experience than
the one which summons the college girl away from the bounty of the
sciences and the humanities to the grudging concreteness of a domestic
science, a household economy, from which stars and sonnets must perforce
be excluded. We have, indeed, no quarrel with the conspicuous place now
given to the word "home" in all discussions of women's vocations.
Suffragists and anti-suffragists, feminists and anti-feminists have united
to clear a noble term from the mists of sentimentality and to reinstate it
in the vocabulary of sincere and candid speakers. More frankly than a
quarter of a century ago, educated women may now glory in the work
allotted to their sex. The most radical feminist writer of the day has
given perfect expression to the home's demand. Husband and children, she
says, have been able to count on a woman "as they could count on the fire
on the hearth, the cool shade under the tree, the water in the well, the
bread in the sacrament." We may go farther and say that our high emprise
does not depend upon husband and children. Married or unmarried, fruitful
or barren, with a vocation or without, we must make of the world a home
for the race. So far from quarrelling with the hypothesis of the domestic
scientists, we turn it into a confession of faith. It is their conclusions
that will not bear the test of experience. Because women students can
anticipate no more important career than home-making, it is argued that
within their four undergraduate years training should be given in the
practical details of house-keeping. Any woman who has been both a student
and a housekeeper knows that this argument is fallacious.
Before examining it, however, we must clear away possible
misunderstandings. Our discussion concerns colleges and not elementary
schools. Those who are loudest in denouncing the aristocratic theory of a
college education must admit that colleges contain, even today, incredible
as it sometimes seems, a selected group of young women. It is also true
that the High Schools contain selected groups. Below them are the people's
schools. The girls who do not go beyond these are to be the wives of
working men, in many cases can learn nothing from their mothers, and
before marriage may themselves be caught in the treadmill of daily labor.
It is probable that to these children of impoverished future we should
give the chance to learn in school facts which may make directly for
national health and well-being. But the girls in the most democratic state
university in this country are selected by their own ambition, if by
nothing else, for a higher level of life. Their power and their
opportunities to learn do not end on Commencement Day. The higher we go in
the scale of education, until we reach the graduate professional schools,
the less are we able and the less need we be concerned to anticipate the
specific activities of the future.
Furthermore, we are discussing colleges of "liberal" studies, not
technical schools. Into the former have strayed many students who belong
in the latter. The tragic thing about their errantry is that presidents
and faculties, instead of setting them in the right path, try to make the
college over to suit them. The rightful heirs to the knowledge of the ages
are despoiled. The most down-trodden students are those who cherish a
passion for the intellectual life. Among these are as many women as men.
If domestic science were confined to separate schools, as all applied
sciences ought to be, we should have nothing but praise for a subject
admirably conceived, and often admirably taught. In these schools it may
be studied by such High School graduates as prefer to deal with practical
rather than with pure science, and, in a larger way, by such college
graduates as wish to supplement theory with practice for professional
purposes. But in liberal colleges domestic science is but dross handed out
to seekers after gold. Against its intrusion into the curriculum no
protest can be too stern.
Faith in this study seems to rest upon the belief that the actual
experiences of life can be anticipated. This is a fallacy. There is no
dress rehearsal for the r�le of "wife and mother." It is a question of
experience piled on experience, life piled on life. The only way to
perform the tasks, understand the duties, accept the joys and sorrows of
any given stage of existence is to have performed the tasks, learned the
duties, fought out the joys and sorrows of earlier stages. In so far as
"housekeeping" means the application of principles of nutrition and
sanitation, these principles can be acquired at the proper time by an
active, well-trained mind. The preparation needed is not to have learned
facts three or five or ten years in advance, when theories and appliances
may have been very different, but to have taken up one subject after
another, finding how to master principles and details. This new subject is
not recondite nor are we unconquerably stupid. To learn as we go--_discere
ambulando_--need not turn the home into an experiment station.
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