Not at all! The home woman
might cease altogether to sew and to cook (just as she has ceased
altogether to spin, weave, brew, etc.) without depriving the home
economics movement of any considerable part of its driving power.
Sewing and cooking are productive processes. They add economic value
to certain commodities; namely, cloth and food. But it is not
production, it is consumption, which the home economics movement is at
heart devoted to.

This is plainly set forth by some of its most zealous workers. Thus
Edna D. Day, at the Lake Placid Conference on home economics in 1908,
was more or less sorry that "domestic science has come to be so
largely sewing and cooking in our schools"; was quite willing to look
at the white of the eye of the fact that "more and more we are buying
ready-made clothes and ready-cooked foods"; and marked out the policy
of her "Survey Course in Home Economics" at the University of Missouri
in the statement that "sewing and cooking are decreasingly home
problems, while the problems of wise buying, of adjusting standards of
living to income, and of developing right feelings in regard to
family responsibilities are increasingly difficult."

To choose and use the world's resources intelligently on behalf of
family and community--in this Mr. Devine saw a new field of action, in
this Mrs. Richards saw a new field of education.

Women will train themselves for their duties as consumers or else
continue to lie under the sentence of condemnation pronounced upon
them by Florence Nightingale. "Three-fourths of the mischief in
women's lives," said she, "arises from their excepting themselves from
the rule of training considered necessary for men."

But what, in this case, is the training proposed?

The answer to that question will cause some more scales to fall from
our eyes. Just as we have seen that home economics does not consist
essentially of sewing and cooking, we shall see that consumption
is not at all a specialized technique in the sense in which
electrical engineering, department-store buying, railroading, cotton
manufacturing, medicine, and the other occupations of the outside
world are specialized techniques. Home economics will not narrow
women's education but in the end will enlarge it. For consumption,
instead of being a specialty, is a generality so broad as almost
to glitter.

* * * * *

At Menomonie, Wis., Mr. L. D. Harvey, lately president of the N