STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. IO5 



Now there comes a question as to why we are teaching home 

 economics, why it is put into the school curriculum, and why 

 women should know something about this work any more than 

 they should have done a great many years ago. With the great 

 industrial evolution and the great factory system being devel- 

 oped, the home became less and less a producer and more and 

 more a consumer. The industries that were formerly carried 

 on in the home are now being removed and have been removed 

 constantly. We do not have the spinning and weaving. We do 

 not know anything now about the materials that we buy unless 

 we have the training and the knowledge to judge those things, — 

 unless we know the conditions under which they are made, 

 while formerly the woman absolutely controlled all those things. 

 She knew that she had cotton or wool. She knew under what 

 conditions it was made, for that work was carried on largely in 

 the home or in small communities which worked together. 



Then we have had, with the great change in the industries of 

 the home, a great change in the economic position of woman. 

 W^oman has gone more and more from the home into factory 

 conditions, into factory work. These things have changed the 

 social conditions of our homes. The family is no longer, per- 

 haps, so much a unit in a certain sense as it was at one time. 

 Our interests are varied. The woman is interested in one thing, 

 the man in another, and the child in another, and each one seems 

 to be pursuing his own special interests. So that with this 

 removal of industries, with the removal of the women especially 

 in the factory districts from the home and with the great 

 changes that have come in the social activities of the family, the 

 child, it seems, does not have the opportunity to learn how to 

 cook and how to sew, and to learn the fundamental things that 

 a girl should know. She does not have the opportunity to learn 

 those things in her home and so naturally it has fallen into the 

 school curriculum. And of course our ideas of education have 

 changed very decidedly in order to make it possible for us to 

 teach this work and put it on the same basis as the other courses 

 of study that are given. So with those things in mind as to why 

 we put it in the schools, we may consider why each woman, 

 each girl, should know these things. Regardless of all the ex- 

 treme things that we hear, and the extreme experiments that 



