Chuck

You would learn to bake a cake.

As time wore on, you would learn to take care of a child, maybe learn to balance a checkbook, just basic life skills as a class in high school or middle school.

And that is, it turns out, I didn't quite realize the extent of home ec.

One little slice of the whole home ec pie, which is delicious because it was made by home economists.

That's right.

And there's a whole history to it.

And it's actually pretty feminist in nature, too.

Right, and that was actually one of the initial points of it.

But if you were a home ec proponent and you were arguing with a feminist, you might start by saying, let me give you a little picture of what life used to be like for the average woman in the United States before we came along.

And you would start in about the 19th century.

They were on the turn of it.

So they were still wearing tri-cornered hats, but they were looking forward to trains.

Mm-hmm.

And if you were a farm woman at this time, you worked yourself to the bone, right?

Yeah.

And like you would say, that's not even home economics.

That's just home terribleness, right?

Yeah.

When home economics came along, it was based on this idea that, okay, all of these people are working really hard.

There has to be ways to improve this, to make it more efficient.