“When the income is over $1,200,” Mrs. Bruere adds, “the family has passed the line of mere decency in living and entered the realm of choice.  Their budget need not show how the entire income must be spent, but how it may be spent to gain whatever special end the family has in view.”

That any estimated schedule for any income will fit exactly the needs of any family of father, mother, and three children in any given town in the United States no one supposes, but it is at least a basis upon which to work.  And perhaps the main point from an educational standpoint is that it is a schedule at all.

The happy-go-lucky, spend-as-you-go style of housekeeping does not constitute efficiency.  The homemaking expert we are training will have a better plan.  She will have been long familiar with the idea of apportioning incomes.  She will have applied the tests of efficient decision to her personal income before she has to attack the problem of spending for a family.  The ideal homemaker of the future will be a woman who has had a personal income, and preferably one that she has earned herself and learned how to spend before she enters upon matrimony and motherhood.

By the less scientific plan of merely recording what one has spent, when the spending is over, it is more than likely that some departments of home expenditure will gain at the expense of others.  If we can afford only $150 for rent, and we pay $200, it is evident that we must go without some portion of the food or clothing or advancement that we need.  If we dress extravagantly, we must pay for our extravagance by sacrificing efficient living in some other direction.  The budget is not entirely or even in large measure for the sake of saving, but rather for the sake of spending wisely.  When women become as businesslike in the administration of home finances as they must be to succeed in business life, or as men usually are in their business relations, home administration will be placed upon a secure financial footing and will gain immeasurably in dignity thereby.

Feeding and clothing a family are perhaps the fundamentals of the homemaker’s daily tasks.  And upon neither of them will the application of scientific principles be wasted.  It is not enough that we merely set food before our families in sufficient quantity to appease the clamoring appetite.  Children and adults may suffer from malnutrition even though their consumption of food is normal in quantity three times a day.  No housewife is properly fitted for her task unless she has some knowledge of dietetics.

[Illustration:  Photograph by Brown Bros.  Teaching housewives food values.  No housewife in these days need lack the knowledge of dietetics which will fit her for her task]

Many a notable housewife who has perhaps never even heard of dietetics has nevertheless a practical working knowledge of some or many of its principles.  There are traditions among housewives that we should serve certain foods at the same meal or should cook certain foods together.  Often these time-honored combinations rest upon the soundest of dietetic principles.  On the other hand, many cooks feed their families by a hit-or-miss method which as often as not violates all the laws of scientific feeding, and which farmers long ago discarded in the feeding of their cows.