What Was Home Economics?
Canning peaches. Sewing a dress. Making perfect gravy. These are familiar images of home economics, but do they tell the whole story? So often home economics has been cast as a "conspiracy to keep women in the kitchen," an interpretation that has overlooked its impressive and diverse contributions. New scholarship in American women's history suggests that home economics was a progressive field that brought science to the farm home and women into higher education and leadership positions in public education, academia, government and industry.
On the philosophy of repetition
On the one hand, there is nothing so predictable, so tiresomely unwelcome, as the ideal copy: it is a marker of a merely traditional, conventional desire for consistency, a loyalty to a past that, repetition assures us, has never really gone away. Repetition, as some of our most lingering modern cultural beliefs inform us, is nothing but a serial disorder: a compulsion equally tragic and pathological, so the argument goes, in both its contemporary manifestation as revival or nostalgia and in its classic form as cultural continuity... a sort of endlessly reflected dementia: echopraxia (the thoughtless and meaningless repetition of the actions or movements of others) or echolalia (imitation of speech).
But repetition is also the indispensable condition for all kinds of cultural values: from a coherent sense of a self that we carry from one moment to another, to the notion of scientific truth. How valid would an experiment be if it could never be repeated? The very word 'revolution' implies a movement of return, a spectral rehearsal of what has gone before that, so the revolutionary believes, can be made to live again. Yet the repetition is never quite the perfect restaging of the past that its instigators envisaged: the French Revolution may have imagined itself remaking the ancient history of Rome.... Likewise the coup of 1851, a travesty of Napoleon Bonaparte's 55 years earlier, inspired Karl Marx to write famously: 'all great events and historical personages occur, as it were, twice - the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.'
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home