3 - Teaching girls about housework

Summary

In the early 1900s a social investigator and welfare worker called Cecile Matheson undertook to explore for the British Board of Education how some European countries set about the business of training girls for the performance of home duties. She personally went to look at many different kinds of schools in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In one she visited, in Cassel (now Kassel), Germany, domestic hygiene was taught in a ground- floor kitchen with a tiled floor, a light green dado and cream- coloured walls, around the top of which were painted a series of mottoes: ‘The little kitchen builds the big house’, ‘Your home is your kingdom – stay there’. The 25 children who attended the class Matheson witnessed were ‘bright and tidy’, although some wore the patched clothes that told of poverty.

The lessons Matheson attended mostly took the form of question and answer. The children were asked such questions as: ‘What are the constituents of the body and why do we need food?’ ‘What are the chief kinds of food and why are they mixed?’ In the lesson she witnessed they were taught how to make a milk soup. Glasses of sour milk, strainers and plates were fetched from the attached larder and store room, and the class considered what milk is made of and what it can be made into. The children were already, noted Matheson, ‘acquainted with the action of bacteria, the value of ice, boiling, covering, and, above all, of cleanliness in the preservation of milk’. ‘Homely illustrations’ were used to demonstrate the unappetising details of how milk is digested and acted on by the gastric juices. Once the soup was made, the class was shown the best way to extend hospitality, with a clean tablecloth and a vase of flowers. The meal that followed provided an ‘opportunity for the practice of the politeness and good manners which are too often obscured in home when the pressure of poverty is great’. Science and good manners went hand in hand as markers of future womanhood.