The Birmingham age-herald. [volume] (Birmingham, Ala.) 1902-1950, 1923-06-15
Emphasizes
Importance
OF The
Domestic Arts
Dorothy Dir
No Girls Education However High Is Complete With
out knowledge Of Cooking And Sewing

| a postgraduate of the school of di-
| plomacy.
Teach girls all that they will
learn, but while we are spending
time and money in educating them,
why should we slight the art and
science that they are going to most
need to be proficient in. that they
| will be called on to practice every
day of their lives, and on their skill
! in which will depend their happiness
! and prosperity?
1T is all very we'll for girl to be
expert in free hand drawing, but it
isn't going to help her like being a
free hand breadmaker. 1t is a fine
thing for a girl to have a cultivated
eye, SO that she can distinguish a
| genuine old master from a good re-
! production at glance, but what she
| Is really going to need to know is TO
be able to tell spring lamb from Old
mutton at sight; to be a connoisseur
III beef and pork that no butcher can
fool.
TT is wonderful for a girl to be
able to work out geometrical prob
lens, but the thing that is going to
be money in her pocket is to be able
to work out a perforated paper pat
tern and fit fitless dress SO that it
looks as If 1t had come off Fifth
avenue.
"Of course, some of the schools do
teach at these things, but most of it
is so superficial that it amounts to
nothing. My complaint is that girls
are not grounded in the most impor-
tant branch of knowledge that they
can possibly acquire.
ut ought to be just as much
matter of course for a girl to be
taught to cook and sew as it is for
l. y-t Is.
and when that time arrives 1t will
offer the solution of many of tho
moral and domestic problems that
confront us.
For one thing, 1t would do more
than anything else to promote do
nestle happiness and stop divorce;
The home is founded on physical
comfort--a clean hearth and good
table, wise expenditure of the fam
lily funds. If these are lacking, the
home goes to pieces no matter how
brilliant or beautiful or accomplished
the woman at the head of it is.
Thousands of young chaps. like
my sons, who are ambitious and
energetic but who have their own
way to make in the world, marry
charming and educated girls expect
ing to be happy ever after. And
they would be and the marriage
would be a success II the girls had
onlv been taught how to cook and
sew. But they haven't. They feed
their husbands out of tin cans and
paper bags. They waste their money
in buying ready-made things, and
when tired man comes home to
wife who is hysterical because she
has burnt the roast and scorched the
soup, and the darns in his socks hurt
his feet, and he has to begin lodging
the bill collector, it doesn't take long
n ere
busted to smithereens. and for him to
decide that matrimony Is failure.
"Of course. the burden Of teaching
girls how to cook and sew should
not be shunted onto the schools.
every mother shout begin her
little daughters education along
those lines in her mud pie and doll
playing days.
But mothers are too lazy. are too
Indifferent, are too tender to do it.
They don't want to bother with
teaching their girls how to do things
or else they want to save them from
doing anything that looks like work.
, i"'My girls will learn how to sew
and cook after they get married.
That's the way l did, they say. and
never stop to think what an injustice
this is to the poor young husband who
has to be the victim of his brides
experiments in the culinary art.
"Nor do the mothers consider what
a needless cruelty they are inflicting
on their own daughters by chucking
them, unframed and unprepared, into
the hard job of being a poor mans
wife. For there is no more pathetic
figure than that of the young wife
who wrestles Intellectually with the
pots and pans, who bungles her sew
ing. and who can never make ends
meet in her household accounts.
perhaps the reason mothers do NOT
teach their daughters how to cook
and sew is because they all expect
their darlings to marry millionaires.
But even SO, Knowledge is always
power. The woman who knows how
to do things herself can always get
better service than the woman who
doesn't know, and she is never in
the power of servants as is the " '0l-