© 1997 Lawrence University Press
Home Economics at Milwaukee-Downer: Implications for Women's Role
It is instructive of President Ellen Sabin's attitude about women's role in society that her statement about "specialization" after college, quoted earlier, said only that it might be done "if such further study is desired." This could hardly have been construed as encouragement for, much less advocacy of, professional training for women. Indeed, Sabin would very likely have been subject to the same criticism that many of the Eastern women's colleges came under in the early 20th century, to the effect that their focus on general culture and achievement of well-roundedness did not allow students the opportunity to intelligently explore vocational possibilities. Yet, Sabin did introduce into the Milwaukee-Downer curriculum a course of study in domestic science that appeared to include a definite vocational aspect.
Beginning in 1901, a Department of Home Economics went into operation at the school that, while offering lessons to college and seminary students in cooking, sewing, and housekeeping, significantly also offered a two-year teacher training course whose diplomates would be qualified, indeed expected, to take positions teaching domestic science to girls of public school age. Did this, perchance, represent a retreat by Sabin from her fundamental opposition to the sort of "specialization" that aimed at purely vocational training?
The answer to the above question is that the establishment of the two-year teacher training course in domestic science at Milwaukee-Downer did not constitute a significant departure from Ellen Sabin's basic goals of character-building and stimulating devotion to social service. Although this two-year program sought to place women in public-school teaching positions where they could earn a livelihood, a goal that, by itself, Sabin would have scorned as "utilitarian," it ultimately would serve society by equipping young women to transmit the knowledge and skills required for rational, scientific management of the American home. The very presence of a home economics department at Milwaukee-Downer would, at one and the same time, allow two-year students to earn a diploma and a credential to teach, while giving the four-year, degree-bound students opportunity to round out their education with electives in such aspects of homemaking as dietetics, house management, home nursing, evolution of the home, textiles, and food study.
For the regular, four-year college students, then, there was initially no suggestion that home economics be used for vocational purposes; these courses were for their own enrichment only. And while the department did prepare two-year students for vocational life as teachers, this was always seen in the much broader context of serving the higher need of society for intelligent homemaking. Ellen Torelle, a faculty member of the home economics department, explained this in the following way:
It is difficult. . . to overestimate the importance to the individual woman and to the nation at large of the work of domestic science. Since it affects all sides of life, the teaching of cookery, household management, and sanitation throughout the land will affect the health and prosperity of all our people to the end that they will become stronger physically, mentally, and morally.
One did not teach domestic science just to accomplish the utilitarian goal of earning a livelihood; the greater purpose was to achieve a wide range of salutary social effects.
Not long after its initial introduction as a two-year teacher training course, home economics at Milwaukee-Downer also came to be offered as a four-year degree program. The college's catalogue for 1910-1911 announced its intention to confer a new degree, the Bachelor of Science in home economics, upon four-year students who majored in that area, making them eligible to teach home economics in high school, as well as take positions as institutional supervisors and managers.
Could this have represented a shift in the college's basic aims; did it now make the pursuit of narrow, vocational goals, of a "career," rather than the pursuit of a well-rounded education, the more legitimate concern of the undergraduate curriculum? No, because for Ellen Sabin, training in domestic science and training in academic subjects that promoted mental discipline were not mutually exclusive but, rather, complementary. Domestic science represented to Sabin the realm of problems that were part of women's unique responsibility to understand and help solve problems pertaining to the welfare of the home, childhood, and society. It was the responsibility of the women's college, in her view, to endow women with the discipline that inevitably resulted from the study of languages, mathematics, and the sciences, in order that they be properly equipped to deal with these problems.
Upon many occasions during her long tenure as Milwaukee-Downer's president, Sabin could indeed be found repeating some version of the statement that "Woman's education should prepare a woman for women's chief vocation, and. . . the science and art of homemaking, which is a business most complex and most significant, should form a recognized part of her training for life."
As important as what this says about the place of home economics within a liberal arts curriculum is what it says about the view of what constituted women's proper role. Homemaking, according to Sabin, was women's chief vocation, and so it was through no accidental oversight on Sabin's part that neither her public nor private pronouncements advocated that women be educated to pursue paid, professional work, "careers," unrelated to their homemaker roles. On the contrary, Sabin maintained that homemaking and social service were what women should be prepared for, "even more specifically than the gainful occupations."
That Milwaukee-Downer engaged in the training of teachers did not represent an exception to Sabin's main line of thought, as it remained her view that teaching, like homemaking, was simply a part of women's natural and proper social role. In performing as homemakers and as teachers, women were simply living up to what was expected, to what they were supposed to do. This was clearly an expression of the ideology that held that women made their most significant contribution through the intelligent performance of those functions that fell within women's own "separate sphere."
Occupational Therapy at Milwaukee-Downer: Expanding "Women's Sphere"