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.Home economicsnow the brunt of derisive jokeswas booming in the United States, providing women with a toeholdin higher education.13 Columbia Teacher's College aimed for leadership, turning out teachers and dieticians forschools, for government service, and for the rapidly mechanizing food industry.The land-grant university in theTerritory of Hawaii, way off in the middle of the Pacific, like land-grant universities across the country, recruitedgraduates from Columbia.The frontispiece of Edwards' Guidebook for Homemaking displays an aerial photograph supplied by the HawaiianSugar Planters' Association: a trim plantation village half hidden by trees, neat church at one end, neat manager'shouse at the other, surrounded by flat fields of cane, the mountains towering over all.The caption reads, "On thestrength of our home depends the strengthTHE HOME ECONOMISTS ARRIVECaroline Edwards was not alone.From East Coast schools, home economistshad arrived in Hawaii in force.In 1922, Carey Dunlap Miller, of Irish andSwiss ancestry, stepped off the S.S.Wilhelmina, clutching a cage with eightwhite rats for her experiments.14 She had just finished her master's degree atColumbia.For the next 23 years, she headed the Home EconomicsDepartment at the University of Hawaii, increasing the number of majorsgraduated each year from 1 to 160.A year or two later, her friend, Ada B.Erwin, established the Home Economics Department at Punahou, Hawaii'spremier private school.In 1926, the Hawaiian Electric Company, mindful ofthe electric ovens that so few people knew how to use, hired MiriamJackson.And in 1930, Katherine Bazore, born in the Middle West, butanother Columbia graduate, joined the University of Hawaii faculty: "In myalphabet," she said, "'H' stands for Home Economics, Hawaii, Honolulu, andHappiness."15These women, and others like them, found an immigrant population that hadfew of the Italians or the Jews or the Eastern and Central Europeans whocrowded into the cities of the East Coast and the Middle West.Undeterredby the unfamiliar foods they encountered, they taught the women whostaffed the school cafeterias, the classrooms, and the extension service.Theypoured out an astonishing quantity Page 102of research: among other things, they established the nutritive values ofHawaiian and other locally grown tropical food; they recorded the localJapanese diet; they established basal metabolic rates for Pacific Islandpeoples; they analyzed the vitamin content of local fruits; and they wrote thefirst books on the ethnic foods of the Islands and on the fruits of the Islands.16 Their students who staffed the extension services and other homeeconomists who worked for the utility companies wrote many of the mostsuccessful Local cookbooks.17of our country." Many of Caroline Edwards' students would have come from towns, but the plantation economy stilldominated the way people thought about the nonhaole population, and it was students from villages such as this,destined at best to work as servants in a haole household, that she seems to have had in mind."Hawaii has thousands of fine young Americans whose parents are not American citizens," went on CarolineEdwards.She admonished her young readers: "Show [your parents] that American education teaches proper ways ofliving so that you may get the most out of life.In the land where your parents were born, children were probablytaught that they must never question anything their parents wished them to do.In Hawaii, the aim of education is toprepare children to think out for themselves and to act with intelligence.Keeping this great difference in mind, trynot to oppose your parents, but help them to see things as you learn to see them in school."18 One parent, as if in sadresponse, reported: "I don't say much to my children.I know that they know and understand about America betterthan I.My children tell their mother what foods are good for one's health.They say we must eat more vegetables andfruits and less rice.They learn this in schoolAmerican school.I mean, I believe that their teachers are betterinformed along this line.So I do not interfere or ignore their suggestions.I believe that the children should obeytheir teachers."19What things learned in school were parents to see? They were to see and learn from their daughters' home projects.That might mean accepting floor rugs made from burlap sacks, or curtains and bedspreads.It might mean gettingaccustomed to upholstered packing box furniture with ruffled skirts (a big change for a Japanese household).Many of the projects centered on food.Daughters learned how to make ovens out of empty cracker cans.Thesecould be used to bake cakes and homemade meatloaf.Daughters learned that milk was the perfect food andencouraged their families to consume some every day, perhaps in the form of a custard baked in that useful cracker-can oven [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]