Signs of an emerging home ec for modern times
Today, our local paper featured a front-page story on the “end” of home economics courses (now called “family and consumer sciences”). Apparently, it’s on the verge of elimination in schools due to changes in minimum education standards. However, in the greater world, I’m seeing signs of a new “home ec” for today’s times …
Did you know that our very word “economy” comes from two Greek words that mean household and stewardship?
The field of inquiry, scholarship, and practice called “home economics” picked up a bad reputation as women moved out of the home into the workforce en masse during the late 1960s and 1970s.
Much of the unpaid work that had been the province of the home for centuries—cooking, laundry, cleaning, caring for children and elders—gradually got outsourced to the market economy. Some economists say that this artificially inflated the “economic growth” of the era, as households began paying cash for what used to be done in the unpaid (and invisible) economy of the home.
I don’t yearn for the old days of “stitch and stir” in the girls-only home ec classrooms of yesteryear, and I’ve always felt cool to the concept of “consumer sciences.”
I do yearn for a society that accords deep respect and value to the unpaid labor and productivity of the American household. And I think we’re heading back in that direction.
Photo: Home economics, 1917, by doc1. Some rights reserved.
Valuing “Unpaid” Labor and Modern Life Skills
Households create other forms of essential economic value, too, that are more difficult to outsource. They teach children their native language, transmit culture and values, and shape a child’s understanding of the world and of human relationships.
Research reports have shown that women are the sole or primary breadwinners in 52 percent of United States households. They bear the children, still take on the lion’s share of the housework, and provide the childcare and eldercare.
Families are stretched to their limits.
The Return of Home Economics
Demographers have predicted that the increasing caregiving roles in coming decades, combined with a loss of many traditional paying jobs, will transform the American family and the ways in which families interact with the marketplace.
They forecast more three-generation households, more in-home self-employment, more single-income households, more job-sharing, and more part-time work to accommodate the dual demands of childcare and eldercare.
They forecast more home economics! I’m defining home economics as the value of what individuals and families, aided by various support networks, make or do for their own direct use.
These new households of necessity will have less money to spend on eating out, vacationing away from home, and new cars and appliances. But they will be more in the market for tools and technologies that enable new forms of household production.
The sort of home economics I envision wouldn’t be so much taught as widely demonstrated and promoted. It would become a central feature of our private lives and public policies. It wouldn’t be relegated to classrooms. It would intertwine with both the market and nonprofit economies in new and fascinating ways. It will invite new scholarship and new forms of entrepreneurship.
And as the home economics of earlier times adopted sewing machines, electric stoves, and dishwashers and clothes dryers, the new home ec will employ and be supported by a variety of new technologies, as well as a large dose of community-wide collaborations.
5 Emerging Signs of the New “Home Ec”
- “Maker” culture promises to transform public libraries, schools, museums, health promotion centers, academic research institutions, and especially homes, into centers of production rather than consumption. These collaborative learning environments (so called makerspaces), where people come together to share materials and learn new skills, promote the mind-set of community partnership, collaboration, and creation.
- Repair cafés are nonprofit, often volunteer-run spaces, outfitted with tools, where people can learn how to fix the broken items that they bring in.
- Science shops are small entities that carry out scientific research in a wide range of disciplines, responding to the local citizenry’s needs for expertise and knowledge—usually free of charge. Burgeoning throughout Europe, the idea has begun to grow throughout the world, including the U.S.
- Fab labs (fabrication laboratories) are small-scale workshops offering (personal) digital fabrication. Like makerspaces, repair cafés, and science shops, they offer collaborative learning environments where participants learn by making, inventing, and/or repairing at little or no cost.
- Many fab labs feature access to 3-D printers. As these devices become more common and less expensive, designers say, they will become ubiquitous in homes, spawning a revolution in creating and making, just as home computing devices have transformed learning and communicating.
- Cooking, sewing, food gardening, carpentry? Oh, yes! I think that we’ve already seen a sharp turn back toward these classic forms of home production, in some cases dramatically changed by new tools and the advent of online collaborative learning.
These seem so ho-hum and old-fashioned, and you just don’t hear very much about them in the daily news. But they’re on the way back—not that they ever left to begin with!
Margaret Boyles
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As a retired home economics teacher--later family and consumer sciences, I saw many changes in the curriculum. We always tried to stay up with the times and teach relevant information that the students could use forever in their lifetimes. Many schools have had budget cuts leading to some useful classes being eliminated. So often I hear people talking about how students are not being taught "our life skills" as we called them. They are not learning etiquette, how to write thank you notes, basic banking skills, clothing care, nutrition, job skills, child care, etc. It is sort of like kids will have to learn lots of things on their own since schools can't and families may not be teaching them. Maybe one day the educational system will come back around and recognize it and restore the curriculum. I loved every aspect as a high school student and especially as a teacher for 38 years!
Not sure how worthwhile HomeEc is, as I was taught in a parochial school in the '60's, and we didn't have such classes. However, all my public school friends who did have them seemed to learn to hate cooking and sewing! I learned these skills after asking my mother to teach me, and loved doing them.
That being said, I learned VERY QUICKLY after I was married how to take care of a house, garden, budget, and later children. Unlike some women today, I considered my role as a housewife and mother (we preferred "Domestic Engineer" in those days) as very important and I took great pride in my skills. I now work out in the world for a paycheck, but those years of being the household manager are priceless. People on the jobsite are amazed at my ability to bake bread, make clothes, can food, etc. I think Margaret Boyles is correct, the wheel will turn full circle, eventually.
I think home ec does need to move out of the schools and into society in general as a pursuit worthy of serious policy, practice, and scholarship.
I always preferred the title of Domestic Goddess, and I still yearn for a new breed of Domestic Gods. Both genders need to tend to the productive (not just consumptive) activities of the home.
And that is exactly why we are where we are today. No respect for home, school, neighbors. It is an "instant society" when something brakes - get a new one not let me see if I can fix it. Apparently as can be seen by our society one parent needs to be home with the kids. They need to be taught respect. There is no God or discipline in school so the family must teach the basics of living in society. If they can - can we fix things????
Home economics is an important subject. They teach children their native language, transmit culture and values, and shape a child’s understanding of the world and of human relationships.
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They should have a course titled, "first apartment". Many kids do not know the cost of basic food purchases, cooking, renting and heating. Nor do they know basic cleaning of clothes, themselves, or the apartment. Simple repairs such as a clogged sink or a running toilet were never taught at home. And the most wanted lesson never taught, how to respect your neighbors. They have to be reminded they do not live at home anymore. Include a lesson on budgets and what happens to credit.
Modern attitudes seem to get farther and farther from basics. You want to start at the top, with modern technology and equipment. The basics are still needed.. really. A child may not be taught at home, how to make a bed, comfortably and easily, without risking a back injury or why the sheets should be changed regularly. The importance of cleaning anything and everything or that not sanitizing a counter really can make your family sick. One of my home EC classes taught how to give a bed bath. That's something I've never learned anywhere else and it has been very useful knowledge, not fascinating, just useful. Like cursive writing, basic hygiene seems to be disappearing or there wouldn't be so many signs in bathrooms with instructions in hand washing.
Good points! I love the idea that home economics includes knowledge of how to give a bed bath, as well as the many forms of basic healthcare that help individuals and families avoid a trip to the doctor's office.
However, I'd suggest that "modern technology," at least in the form of online savvy, has become part of the basic skill set needed to navigate the modern world, learn, teach, solve problems, and collaborate.
From my perspective, home economics needs to expand way beyond the domain of schools and move into communities of place and communities of learning,in both physical and virtual environments.
I also think we need to infuse government policymaking with an understanding of the essential economic values of non-market (household)production of goods and services.
Interesting how these things have come full circle in my own lifetime! I took Home Ec as a youngster, watched the home arts become passe, and now am seeing a resurgence of home based skills and values. But I do not agree with the "unpaid" moniker. We homemakers are paid, not in cash, but in kind. A secure pleasant home is rewarding to the provider as well as to the family.
I couldn't agree more with your assertion that homemakers are richly rewarded for their work, Traci.
My concerns lie with the way in which our national accounting standards consider as "economic" only those activities that occur in markets (where consumers exchange cash for goods and services).
Shop at a supermarket, eat at a restaurant, pay someone to care for your children or adult parent, and the dollars you spend become part of the nation's Gross Domestic Product(GDP).
Grow a garden, prepare a meal,provide care for your children or elders, and the value of your labor disappears from any meaningful standard of measuring economic value. (Although the value of your raw materials, for which you pay cash, does count.)
Serious economists have calculated that the total value of the "household (non-market) economy," if we impute even a minimum dollar value to the labor involved, easily equals or surpasses the value of the market economy in advanced industrial democracies.
This matters a lot. What's invisible (the value of family caregiving, for example)isn't accounted for in government planning for health care,long-term care, and other social programs--remember, families' capacity for unpaid care is limited, and already stretched almost to the breaking point.
Unpaid family labor doesn't count towards social security benefits and other provisions for old age, dispriviliging (still mostly women)homemakers in their own elder years.
It's a complex matter. The value of nonmarket work needs a full accounting alongside our current standards of economic vitality, which don't even notice it.
