Saving The Home From Martha Stewart.

It may sound old-fashioned, but teaching Home Ec is common sense

CAN WHIP UP A BITTERSWEET CHOCOLATE-and-mandarin orange cheesecake good enough to rub in your hair. I can do exquisite white-on-white embroidery, fashioning elaborate flowers and glossy leaves from a skein of thread. Yet I don't think I could plan, purchase, and prepare a week's worth of family meals or sew a simple dress if you held a gun to my head. When it comes to homemaking, I am an idiot savant.

No big deal, right? I mean, isn't that why God created cleaning ladies and Chinese restaurants? When a smart gal can pull down big bucks in the workplace, does it really matter if she doesn't do her laundry until she runs out of clean underwear?

Yes. In fact, I think it matters a great deal. Because I'm not alone. There are millions of men and women of my generation who are missing a whole cluster of basic life skills, who simply don't know how to iron a shirt, replace a button, paint a wall, or even scrub a toilet properly. We don't have the basic competence to run our homes smoothly and efficiently, so we can't pass down those skills to the next generation. And our functional illiteracy on the domestic front is having a devastating effect on our society. With the rise of Martha Stewart and the many Martha wannabes, we've created a strange culture of domestic elitism, in which only women who have the means to hire household help have the leisure to learn household skills. So those who can least afford expensive processed foods are the least able to prepare a nutritious stew or bake a loaf of bread.

But there's a simple solution to all this. To fight rampant consumerism, to reduce the divorce rate, to diminish child abuse, to prevent cancer and heart disease, and to ensure domestic tranquility, this is all we have to do: Bring back home economics.

Home Wrecks

All right. I can hear you snickering out there. You think home ec is trivial. Home ec is stupid. Home ec is sexist.

Well, if that's what you believe, just take a look at the core subjects in the home economics curriculum--child development, nutrition, personal health, personal finance, and consumer protection. Publishers make millions putting out books and magazines to feed our insatiable national appetite for information on all these topics. Of the 25 books currently leading Amazon.com's sales, nine of them would fit comfortably into any basic home ec reading list.

Everywhere you look, you see American families desperately in need of help with the basics of daily life. Consider our national epidemic of obesity, with 55 percent of American adults now overweight--due, in large part, to our increasing reliance on high-fat, high-sugar convenience foods. Our rapidly expanding national waistline is a major cause of heart disease and several deadly cancers. Perhaps most disturbingly, one in five children between ages six and 17 is overweight, and the number of overweight children in the United States has doubled over the past 30 years. If current trends continue, nearly half of today's children will eventually die of heart disease. Yet how many parents know the number of calories contained in a McDonald's cheeseburger Happy Meal? (It's 680, if you're interested.) And how many of those parents could tell you how many calories the average 5-year-old needs each day to stay healthy? (About 1,700).

We're equally inept when it comes to balancing our checkbooks. Despite our unprecedented economic expansion, there's been an explosion of personal bankruptcy, with some 1.4 million Americans filing for bankruptcy last year alone. That figure has almost tripled over the past decade. It's no wonder this magazine has devoted years to the quixotic promotion of Cheap Chic, trying to make it fashionable to cut up our credit cards and spend less. But how can you ask uneducated consumers to content themselves with cheaper products and pass up the overpriced name brands and designer labels, when price is their only basis for judging quality?

These are not trivial matters. And it is criminal that we are allowing generations to grow up without the basic knowledge they need to care for themselves, their children, and their homes.

The Lost Art

For the first half of this century, the public schools took home economics education very seriously, at least where their female students were concerned. The notion that life skills could--and should--be taught in a classroom developed in the late 1800s. Just as university schools of agriculture promised to teach modern, scientific methods to farmers, home ec departments could bring the same level of sophisticated knowledge to their wives. Cornell University's legendary home ec department dates back to 1901, when the ag school started a correspondence course in home management for farm wives. By 1903, the school offered three for-credit courses in home and family life.

In its earliest incarnation, home ec expressed the high-minded principles of its female founders, who saw the new profession in the context of the progressive movement. "Women wanted home ec to provide women with a scientific education they could take into the community," says Sarah Stage, a professor of women's studies at Arizona State University and co-editor of Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession. "There was a lot of talk about `that larger household, the city.' They were interested in female values, female moral authority that you could take into the larger world." Although their pioneering work has largely been forgotten, most of those early home economists were fervently feminist. In fact, the home ec department was often the only division on campus that offered women full professorships and the chance to move into higher administrative posts.

Over the years, however, home economics lost its lofty moral and political underpinnings. The idea that women would use this knowledge to begin housekeeping on a municipal scale gradually faded. Instead, home ec was viewed only as a means to teach individual students to care for their own homes and families. "Instead of `Let's go out and help everybody,' the focus changes to `Me and mine,'" Stage says. "The social mission of those earlier home economists was completely lost."

Wife Ed 101

Then came the women's movement. And home ec didn't stand a chance. The young feminists of the early 1970s viewed home ec (with some justification) as Wife Ed 101. To them, home economics conjured up a vision of white middle-class girls in ruffled aprons, learning to make a bechamel sauce. When the Home Economics Association invited noted feminist Robin Morgan to speak at their annual meeting, she told them bluntly, "I'm here to face the enemy." If they really cared about women's education, Morgan told the assembled home ec teachers, the best thing they could do was disband. The Dump Home Ec movement immediately caught on with school administrators, who saw a perfect opportunity to grab the moral high ground and cut costs at the same time.

The evaporation of home ec from the mandatory curriculum coincided with a new age in American consumerism. Shopping malls started springing up in cornfields, and a generation of middle-class Americans embraced the concept of shopping as recreation. Consumers who once limited their forays to the local department store were suddenly surrounded by a dazzling array of cute little shops selling cute little dresses. Suddenly, the solitary pursuit of home sewing didn't make sense anymore. Why invest $25 and untold hours in sewing a dress that might not turn out right, when you could probably find just what you were looking for at the local mall? And at the mall, you and your girlfriends could have lunch.

The demise of home sewing led inexorably to the rise of designer labels. Back in the home ec era, you never went clothes shopping without hearing some matron tsk-tsk at the price tag and say, "I could sew this myself for about five dollars." Even if a home seamstress didn't want to go to the trouble of whipping up a ball gown out of $5 worth of cheesecloth, she had the knowledge to recognize good craftsmanship. But when women forgot how to sew, they had no baseline to distinguish good-quality clothes from bad. Thus arose the designer brand, which reassured women that they were buying the good stuff (even though the label was often the only piece of quality material in the garment.)

The rise of the service economy made it possible for young middle-class women (and men) to avoid many of the domestic tasks they never quite mastered in the first place. Thanks to frozen foods, cleaning services, and carry-out restaurants, you could survive without drafting the detailed household management plans once required of home ec students.

Certainly, one of the engines of this change was the increasing presence of women in the workplace. When you devote 40 or 50 hours of your week to earning wages, simple mathematics shows that you're going to have less time for housekeeping. But the change went deeper than that. In fact, American women have always worked. (Even in the hyperdomesticated 1950s, nearly half of all mothers worked outside the home.) The difference was that now neither men nor women considered homemaking to be as valuable as wage-earning. Women whose mothers had prided themselves on their shining floors and snowy linens now boasted that they hadn't cleaned their refrigerators in two years. An untidy house became a badge of honor, showing that the tenant had more important things to do in life.

Enter The Domestic Diva

Then came Martha Stewart.

In 1982, Martha Stewart launched her empire with Entertaining, a book of party recipes and menus. In and of itself, that was hardly revolutionary. Gourmet cookbooks and recreational cooking had been popular among affluent consumers for years, since

Craig Claiborne and Julia Child introduced sophisticated cuisine to an eager American audience. But Martha was something different. Despite her slick, smug, and self-congratulatory tone, she touched a chord that resonated throughout the country. Annoying as she was, no one could doubt that Martha Stewart took homemaking very seriously indeed. And, as Martha would say, we thought that was a Good Thing.

Martha's appeal stretched across demographic boundaries. K-Mart hired her to create Martha's World, a store-within-a-store in its home departments, after the company's market researchers found that their shoppers trusted Martha Stewart even more than their own doctors.

But the domestic diva is hardly a proponent of Cheap Chic. Just look at her own catalog, "Martha By Mail" If you're planning a holiday meal, you might send off for her complete turkey cooking kit, which includes an instruction booklet, a 6-inch trussing needle, a spool of cotton twine, a stainless steel roasting pan and adjustable rack, a baster, a thermometer, a pastry brush, a fat separator and cheesecloth, for the low, low price of $128--plus shipping. For dessert, you can order her exclusive canvas pasty cloth, a pastry cutter, wheel and brush, two pie tins, a copper cookie cutter, and a pie basket for only $102. With her books, TV shows, and magazine, Martha Stewart has become our national home ec instructor. And we've paid her a billion dollars to do it.

"I think people are missing something in their lives, and they haven't quite figured out what it is," muses Virginia Vincenti, professor of Family Consumer Sciences at the University of Wyoming. "Martha makes people think of a time when we paid more attention to home life. I think she fools them into thinking that what she's doing is going to recapture this wonderful sense of security, that `life is ok' feeling"

The problem is, Martha presents an unattainable goal of domestic perfection, and then makes us feel guilty when we're unable to achieve it. She tells us it's only laziness that keeps us from following in her perfectly shaped, impeccably color-coordinated footsteps. But it's ridiculous to advise suburban Americans to obtain the freshest eggs by raising their own chickens. It's almost as silly to teach us the correct way to iron the monograms on our towels (no doubt using the "Martha By Mail" $125 steam iron). What we really need is a good anti-Martha, someone who could promote living well while living on less. In other words, what we need is a real home ec teacher.

Home Ec--Now More Than Ever

In my daughter's high school, like most high schools nationwide, home ec is no longer a mandatory subject. Instead, the kids are required to take Consumer Economics. We don't even try to teach them how to produce or repair. We just teach them how to buy. "It's a very different ethic," comments historian Stage. "`Make over and make do' was the motto of home economics. Now nobody wants to do that any more."

However, I'm starting to see signs that Americans are rediscovering those neglected homely arts. Cheryl Mendelson is the author of Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House. In its 884 pages, she does more than give helpful household hints on the most efficient way to dust a piano or remove a grease spot. She talks about the philosophy of making a home, why it's important to her, and why it should be important to the rest of us. "When I talk about housekeeping, I don't mean just cleaning," says Mendelson, a lawyer and professor who holds a Ph.D. in philosophy. "It's the whole concept of the structure of private life, organizing this physical environment for yourself and others."

In 1997, Arlie Russell Hochschild brewed up a storm of controversy with her book, The Time Bind: When Work Becomes Home and Home Becomes Work. Pundits turned themselves inside out trying to figure out why Americans are so willing, even eager, to put in extra hours at the office. But one basic fact seems paramount: The office is generally tidy and bright and there's always hot coffee in the pot. That's not because the office cleaning staff is particularly skilled; it's because we value what goes on in the workplace, and we all agree that you can't work effectively or productively when you're surrounded by chaos. So office managers hire window washers and rent potted plants, and workers stay late to reorganize their file cabinets and clear their desks. Similarly, we wonder why teenagers choose to hang out at the mall. Could it be that there's no hospitable place at home where they feel comfortable entertaining their friends?

We just aren't willing to put energy and effort into the home front. In every decision we make, we reinforce the notion that home life always runs a distant second, or even third, to the other spheres of existence. Even in child-rearing, home always comes last. When was the last time a parent insisted that a child skip a soccer game because it conflicted with family dinnertime? "This is something I'm rabid about," Mendelson fumes. "You can't have a democracy without a home life, this place where people go that's apart from work or government. People who don't have a strong private life and a strong home cannot resist their jobs. It leaves no place where a different set of values comes into play."

Bringing It All Back Home

Obviously, this isn't a problem that can be solved in the classroom alone. But it seems clear that schools could fan the resurgence of interest in the domestic arts. If high schools required two years of home ec--complete with homework--for every student, many parents would get with the program. I got a personal taste of this last year, when my daughter took an elective six-week cooking class at her parochial elementary school. Inspired by her emerging interest and developing skills, I began using her as a sous-chef, assigning her to chop onions and saute chicken strips. We probably spent more time cooking together during those six weeks than we had in the preceding 13 years, and it helped me to revive culinary skills I'd long forgotten. And I realized I'd actually save time if I made pizza at home, instead of driving to the local pizza parlor to pick up my carry-out order.

For the thousands of kids who don't have skilled adults to teach them, a renewal of home ec classes could be a godsend. I remember some years back, when one government official responded to critics of the stingy food stamp program by living on the basic allotment for seven days. He and his wife sat down to a week of nutritious but inexpensive cuts of meat, and beans prepared from scratch, with the smiling approval of a band of nutritionists. There's just one problem: Who the hell remembers how to cook beans any more? You have to sift them (to remove the stones), soak them overnight, then let them simmer for hours. Most middle-class housewives have forgotten that ritual. Why do we expect needy young people to figure it out on their own?

We need to do a better job of teaching our children how to live, and we need to start right now. First of all, that means that we've got to make home ec education a priority on the college level. The number of degrees awarded in family and consumer sciences dropped by 94 percent from 1968 to 1991. Currently, five states don't offer a single undergraduate program in home economics education, and the number of programs in other states is dwindling. Right now, we don't have enough qualified teachers to staff our current programs, much less expand them.

Parents need to demand that their school systems offer a comprehensive home ec curriculum. It's not enough to teach seventh-graders how to make chocolate chip cookies. "Learning to live is not something you can cram into a 10-week course," Vincenti says. No one--male or female--should graduate from high school without demonstrating the ability to run a washing machine, fry an egg, balance a checkbook, compile a grocery list, and use a power drill. "Just as students need to know math and science, they need to know how to function in life," Vincenti believes. And don't listen to critics who worry that such plebian instruction will nibble away at more valuable academic classes. Our schools have made time for drug and sex education; we can find time for this too. Because, in the end, there's no place like home.

ELIZABETH AUSTIN is a Chicago writer.