I’ve been trying to untangle my thoughts about Home Economics for months. I took Home Ec in middle school back in the ‘90s, but it seems to have faded out of most school curricula since then. I recently heard that my local public middle and high schools offer a cooking class, so maybe it’s not entirely gone.
This topic interests me because I notice it’s trendy to complain about “adulting” and I see how hard it is for many to run a home. It’s not easy to do, so this is no criticism; I just wonder if we’d all have an easier time if we actually learned these important adult skills in school. Like people used to—or at least, some people sometimes used to.
Additionally, women often struggle under the mental load, the second shift, invisible labor, whatever you want to call it. The administrative work of being a person and running a household is severely under-acknowledged and under-valued. Would explicit Home Ec, done right, help with this?
Part of my mission in writing here is to professionalize the very real work involved in running a household. This not fluffy stuff; it’s hard work worth investing time and effort into getting right. The impact on home life, and by extension society, can be enormous.
Turns out the initial founders of Home Economics had a similar idea. This diverse group included abolitionists, feminists, wives of prominent scientists, among others, who aimed to spread best practices (sometimes problematically) and professionalize the work that women contributed in the home (and back then, it was always women).
I realize the way Home Ec was implemented in practice wasn’t always ideal. In my mind, an ideal Home Ec class would include things like: