Part 5 (1/2)
The same road after repairs were made through the efforts of members of the community]
Sometimes it will happen that the homemaker finds work to be done in the line of community reform. Perhaps the roads are out of repair, or the cemetery is neglected, or the school building insanitary. Perhaps the water supply is not properly guarded, or milk inspection not thoroughly looked after. Perhaps industrial conditions in the town are not what they should be. Perhaps laws are not being enforced. New conditions require new laws. There may be loafing places on streets and in stores which are dangerous. The billiard halls may need a thorough moral cleaning and a moral man placed in charge. The public dance halls may need proper chaperonage. The moving pictures need state and national censors.h.i.+p to eliminate the careless suggestions leading toward both vice and crime. The homemaker must know under such circ.u.mstances how to stir public opinion, how to make use of her existing organizations, how to set on foot the various movements necessary for reform.
In connection with the subject of the homemaker's place in the community we must return to the thought of woman as the buyer for the home and of her consequent influence upon the economic standards of the community. It is not unusual in these days to read or hear such statements as the following: ”The woman was no longer producer and consumer.... She became the consumer and her entire economic function changed.... The housewife is the buying agent for the home.” Like many statements in regard to woman and her function, this seems overdrawn, since woman in her capacity as homemaker is still a producer as well as a consumer in thousands of cases. That she will become, economically, _merely_ a buying agent, some of us not only doubt, but should consider a certain misfortune, should it occur. The fact remains, however, that as buyer of both raw materials and finished products the woman spends a very large percentage (some say nine-tenths) of the money taken in by the retail merchants of the country. This gives, or should give her, a commanding position in the producing world. If the women of America should definitely decide to-day that they would buy no more corn flakes, or mercerized crochet cotton, or silk elastic, the factories now so busy turning out these products would be shut down to-morrow until they could be converted to other uses. Women often fail to realize their power in this direction. When they do realize it, they are able to accomplish quietly all sorts of reforms in the mercantile and industrial worlds.
There need be no crusade against adulterated foods other than real education and the refusal of homemakers to buy from merchants who carry them in stock. The same remedy will apply to overworked and underpaid workers, to insanitary shops and factories. That it is the woman's duty to control these matters is a necessary conclusion when we consider her power as the ”spender of the family income.” Who else has this power as she has it?
We have already noted how this power might be used to regulate not only the quality but the character of products in the factories. If women merely pa.s.sed by the outlandish hats, the high heels, the hobble skirts, of fas.h.i.+on, their stay would necessarily be short. The woman, therefore, _if she choose_, is absolutely the controller of production along most lines of food and raiment. That she shall use this controlling power wisely is one of her obligations. And to meet the obligation she must be wisely trained.
It would seem that the homemaker, as we have conceived her, has a part in most of the concerns of the community. We speak of ”woman and citizens.h.i.+p.” To many this means, perhaps, ”woman and suffrage.” Woman in politics is already an accomplished fact in fourteen western states. Suffrage has been granted her in the state of New York. That her political influence will widen seems a foregone conclusion. She must therefore be prepared for real service in civic concerns. Women have already applied their housecleaning knowledge and skill to the smaller near-by problems of civic life. As time goes on they must render the same service to state and nation.
We shall soon see nation-wide ”votes for women,” in our own country, at least. But whether we do or not, or until we do, woman and citizens.h.i.+p are, as they have always been, closely linked together. In every community relation the homemaker is the good, or indifferent, or bad citizen; and in every home relation she is the citizen still, and, more than that, the mother of future citizens.
In spite of the ”uneasy women” who feel that the home offers insufficient scope for their intellectual powers, the executive ability required to run a home smoothly and well is of no mean order.
”This being a mother is a complicated business,” as one mother of my acquaintance expresses it. Can we afford to have homemaking underrated as a vocation, to be avoided or entered into lightly, often with neither natural apt.i.tude nor training to serve as guide to the ”complications”? It would seem not. We must then consider ”guidance toward homemaking” as a necessary part of a girl's education and as a possible solution of the home problems on every hand.
We have thus far in this book concerned ourselves with making plain our ideal of girlhood and womanhood and with considering the problems which our girl and woman, when we have done our best to prepare her, will have to meet. We have thus far not concerned ourselves with the questions of how, when, and where the work of preparation is to be done. A clear vision of the end to be attained, not obscured by thought of the means used in reaching it, seems a necessity. From this we may pa.s.s on to careful, detailed consideration of agencies and methods. Knowing what we desire our girls to be, we may enlist all the forces which react upon girls to make them into what we desire.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: No studies of present-day conditions are available. The proportion spent for food, clothing, etc., will remain nearly the same. It is safe to multiply the above estimates by two to obtain the actual cost of living in the year 1919.]
PART II
GUIDING GIRLS TOWARD THE IDEAL
”A vocational guide is one who helps other people to find themselves. Vocational guidance is the science of this self-discovery.”
CHAPTER V
THE EDUCATIONAL AGENCIES INVOLVED
The three agencies most vitally concerned in this problem of ”woman making” are necessarily the home, the church, and the school--the home and the church, because of their vital interest in the personal result; the school, because, whatever public opinion has demanded, schools have never been able to turn out merely educated human beings, but always boys and girls, prospective men and women. And so they must continue to do. Nature rea.s.serts itself with every coming generation.
This being so, we must continue to ”make women.” If we desire to make homemaking women, the most economical way to accomplish this is to use the already existing machinery for making women of some sort. We cannot begin too soon, nor continue our efforts too faithfully. The school cannot leave the whole matter to the home, nor can the home safely a.s.sume that the ”domestic science” course or courses will do all that is needed for the girl. Being a woman is a complex, many-sided business for which training must be broad and long-continued.
The teacher has perhaps scarcely realized her responsibilities or her opportunities in this matter. For years, and in fact until very recently, the whole tendency in education for girls has been toward a training which ignores s.e.x and ultimate destiny. The teachers themselves were so trained and are therefore the less prepared to see the necessity for any special teaching along these lines. They may even resent any demand for specialized instruction for girls.
Yet we are confronted by the fact that the majority of girls do marry, and that many of this majority are woefully lacking in the knowledge and training they should have. Nor are these girls exclusively from the poor and ignorant cla.s.ses. There is no question about the responsibility of the school in the matter. The state which ”trains for citizens.h.i.+p” cannot logically ignore the necessity for training the mothers of future citizens.
”While I sympathize profoundly with the claim of woman for every opportunity which she can fill,” says G. Stanley Hall in _Adolescence_, ”and yield to none in appreciation of her ability, I insist that the cardinal defect in the woman's college is that it is based upon the a.s.sumption, implied and often expressed, if not almost universally acknowledged, that girls should primarily be trained to independence and self-support; and matrimony and motherhood, if it come, will take care of itself, or, as some even urge, is thus best provided for.” This criticism, of existing educational conditions is quite as applicable to schools for younger girls as to those which Dr.
Hall has in mind. There is no reason why both school and college may not fit girls for a broad and general usefulness, for ”independence and self-support,” and at the same time give them the training for that which, with the majority already mentioned, comes to be the great work of their lives.
Through all the lower grades of school life, and to a certain extent through the whole course, the methods of instruction used will be largely indirect. The child will-seldom be told, ”This is to teach you how to keep house.” I can think of no field in which this indirect method will produce greater results than the one we are considering.
[Ill.u.s.tration: Montavilla School garden, Portland, Oregon, where boys and girls raise vegetables for serving in the lunchroom. Here the science of growing things is taught as part of the ”training for citizens.h.i.+p”]
[Ill.u.s.tration: Lunchroom where vegetables grown in the Montavilla School garden are prepared and eaten]