Home Economics

This week for the first time I have decided to participate in Sepia Saturday.  I have been following the Sepia Saturday posts by others for quite a while after being introduced to the site on one of the blogs I follow: Robs Webstek Historybits.  While I had hoped to look through my old family photos and find pictures of my female ancestors participating in suffrage parades, or something equally significant, it was not to be.  Perhaps there were no such activities for women in the small, rural towns of  South Dakota or Oklahoma.  I can't imagine that the issues were not important to these women.  I know that education of both men and women was of the highest importance in my family.   The papers and documents that have been preserved make it clear that everyone was acutely aware and interested in issues of national importance and world affairs.  My mother was college educated in the 1930s which, although not unheard of, was not entirely common among her peers at that time.   During WWII she actually left home to work for the FBI in the big cities of Chicago and Washington D.C.   I expect that she may have been a participant in these parades had she been of age at the time.

The most relevant picture to Sepia Saturday's prompt that I could find in my files was one of  my mother and her  female high school classmates "holding signs":

Lennox High School, 1935

The signs that these girls were holding, however, were not signs for women's voting rights, but were signs to promote the importance of "home economics" for girls.  The girls are holding fabric samples, a cake, needlework and have what appears to be cages with live chickens  in front of them.  My mother is the girl in the plaid shirt and dark skirt holding a small sign just left of center.   

Hmm...Home Economics.  I had a home economics class while I was in junior high in the 1960s.  The girls went to Home Economics while the boys went to Shop class.   I don't remember much about the class except that we made brownies and sewed an apron (which I still own).   Home Economics was not a subject offered to my daughter at any time during her school years.   While I am very happy that she and her generation of girls see the world as having a much wider spectrum of opportunities than perhaps mine or my mother's did, I am also very sorry she was not given more information about how to "run a home."   She is away at college now.  My husband and I are constantly reminded, and I think it is also becoming clear to her now, that she has almost no clue about how to fix a healthy meal or balance her bank account  or replace a lost button on a blouse.  I know full well that this knowledge will eventually come to her, but it is really hard for us to wait for it!