Large parts of what was once the
Home are now spread out through the Community. The new course
will teach the life of the community, its activities and
opportunities, civic, aesthetic, industrial. Such a course is
nothing but Home Training for the enlarged Home.
But we must go back for a moment to that biggest and hardest
department of all in the old homes of New England.
"Deceit, weeping, spinning, God hath give
To women kindly that they may live,"
said Chaucer in a teasing mood.
But spinning was a very small part of the Department of Textiles.
We forbear to dilate on the courses of instruction which that
department offered. We confine ourselves to observing that:
First. In the Sub-Department of Flax, after heckling that flax
with combs of increasing degrees of fineness till the fibers lay
pretty straight; after spinning it into yarn on her
spinning-wheel; after reeling the yarn off into skeins; after
"bucking" the skeins in hot lye through many changes of water;
and after using shuttle and loom to weave the stuff into cloth,
the home woman of those days had to accomplish some twenty
subsequent processes of bucking, rinsing, possing, drying, and
bleaching before the cloth was ready for use.
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