“Now, what I want to show you, ladies and girls…” smiled the conservatively dressed Home Ec teacher as she pinned a sleeve to the bodice piece of a modest A-line dress under construction.
“Ladies and girls.” Puh-leeze. The downright campy emphasis of strict gender roles on that DVD came as nails on a blackboard to my rebel feminist self. (My other, long-shunned self, wanted to hurry up and make that long, old-fashioned dress as lacy and frilly as I could.)
What came as something of a surprise was how difficult it is, in 2013 when many Americans long for a return to traditional values, to find a true, comprehensive Home Economics curriculum of the sort that I remember as a young girl growing up during the late Triassic period, one that taught sewing, types and characteristics of cloth, fashion versus style, dress design, child development, food and nutrition, and cooking skills and terms that are advanced by today’s standards – everything that a girl would need to know to fulfill Her Prepared Destiny As A Housewife.
This was no dummy stuff. If your recipe called for cooking your confection to the soft ball stage, would you know how to tell without using a thermometer? If your scalloped cauliflower called for a moderate oven, would you know what temperature to select? Do you know what it means to dredge a piece of meat? (No cheating with a search engine, now!) Would you know how to tell wool from cotton with no special equipment, if you were given two fabric samples, one of each, so made as to look and feel the same?
All of these serious skills were thoroughly taught to us in order to raise up the next generation of June Cleavers and Betty Crockers – the ultimate super homemakers who were so many a man’s dream.
It wasn’t that I stunk at Home Ec. To the contrary, I mastered innumerable useful skills, such as how to surreptitiously blow out the pilot light of some hapless girl’s stove so that her range top burners wouldn’t start. (Back in my day, gas stoves had a small gas flame that was always lit, known as a pilot light, roughly the size of a small candle flame, which provided an ignition source when the burner’s knob was turned.) The problem was that my heart longed for wood shop.
There aren’t many old-style Home Ec teaching materials out there now. But I had been bitten by the bug of a bygone world embedded in a part of me that hadn’t seen much daylight in a half century. So, find some online I did, though obtaining them required me to do something that I resist as stubbornly as being told what a woman must be – order online using a credit card.
Yes, I actually bought some. Me. Yes, me.
Evidently home economics as a formal subject has been lost and largely abandoned for a quite a long time, because in many instances, the glossary definitions of cooking and sewing terms in the materials that I bought were lifted word for word from what I remember as a tween. “Boil: To heat a liquid until bubbles rise continuously and break on the surface.”
Home Ec has received a bum rap over the years, and not just because it was often co-opted as a tool for conditioning, conforming, and predetermining the lives of women. It taught skills and knowledge that were standard back in the day, but now leak out to the public at a much later age as “money-saving tips” and “how to shop for” pointers aimed at adults.
And, despite Home Ec’s obvious use as a means of solidifying patriarchy in the 1950s and 1960s, preparing girls for “that very important career of being Mrs. Johnson,” its roots were in fact progressive at the time; advanced studies in home economics helped bring women onto the college campus, previously an almost entirely male domain. (Today, we outnumber guys two to one on many a college campus. We rock.)
Much of that patriarchal emphasis remains in available home economics materials, undoubtedly due to their largest market base. The unit on “Godly womanhood,” with all of my fastidious respect for different faith traditions, could be used as an effective substitute for castor oil, should I ever need an emetic. (Or would it. The black hole keeps dragging me in.)
I have said on many occasions that if I ever became a Christian, I could, with a few major modifications, really get along as an Amish woman.
Imagine my amazement at the planetary alignment when I discovered that all of the materials that I purchased were put together by Mennonites, of whom the Amish are a branch.
However, don’t get your hopes up, or despair, depending on your point of view; my skin, my bones, my heretic heart are still my authority, as a contemporary Pagan song goes. If I end up being a weird kind of eclectic Menno Witch, so mote it be.
I must say that it fits purrrrty nice. I feel closer to the earth than ever, accomplishing a modern-day feat of going three straight months without ever buying bread, rolls, or buns from a store, instead relying entirely on my own baking. (And, those buns! Mmmm-mmm, so delicious that they compete with the rest of the sandwich for the title of Most Dominant Flavor.)
I had to relent a bit to endure the current desert heat wave without adding oven heat to the already over-abundant ambient supply of same. With almost a feeling of failure I broke down and bought two loaves of bread two weeks ago. But upon the next available respite, the yeast will rise again.
I think I’m going to simply let go and hang on for the ride, wherever it takes me. Of one thing I know for certain; this is happening for a reason. Sigh, for a reason.
Original appears here: https://theretrowitch.wordpress.com/2013/07/23/wither-home-economics/