rained to it."

At Rockford College, illustrating this conflict, there exists, besides
the course in Secretarial Studies, an equivalent course in Home
Economics.

In an illustration in this chapter we show the tiny children of the
Francis Parker School in Chicago taking their first lesson in the
technique of the home. In another picture we show the post-graduate
laboratory in the technique of the home at the University of Illinois.
And the space between the kindergarten and the degree of Doctor of
Philosophy threatens to get filled up almost everywhere with courses
in cooking, sewing, chemistry of diet, composition of textiles, art of
marketing, and other phases of home management.

The money-earning world, a technique! The home, a technique! The boy
learns only one. Must the girl learn two, be twice a specialist?

III.

Learning for Spending

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

The head of the organizing committee was M. Python, president of
Fribourg'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
three rival varieties of household-arts instruction--the German, the
Swiss, and the Belgian. Visits were made to the normal schools of
Fribourg, 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
slaking 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 Fribourg, in this First International Congress on Domestic
Science and Arts, the most