Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 209, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 September 1915 — WOMAN THE HOME BUILDER [ARTICLE]

WOMAN THE HOME BUILDER

Undoubtedly the Chief Trade In Which Females of the Country Are Engaged. Yes, of course. It is homemaking. Everybody knows that, but the figures for it, compiled by the United States Board of Education statisticians, are worth noting. Of the 31,000,000 females over ten years of age in the United States 24,000,000 are engaged in homemaking. Girls may be entering more and more into other trades, but in the last analysis they generally fall back or advance to the rank of homemakers. Hence, says the Federal Educational board, the Importance of giving special attention to scientific cooking in the vocational schools. The girlish hope of being able to hire a cook is apt to be disappointed as frequently as the hope of keeping one when she is hired. It is one of the oddest things of life that cooking, the preparation of the food that sustains life, the art that can waste or economize in the chief item of family expenditures, is so largely left to be picked up as best it may be without serious consideration or training. If the woeful waste resulting from amateur cookery could be computed in dollars and cents it would rival the war bills of Europe. If the indigestion, dyspepsia and kindred physical disturbances caused by incapable cooks could be tabulated they would dwarf the list of killed, missing and wounded.