Published: October 08, 2009 09:06 pm      

Bad memories of home ec still persist

My mother couldn’t sew worth a darn — and she couldn’t do that either. I think it was an act of rebellion against her time when all women were expected to spend half their time sitting around with needles and such. She had a sister-in-law who made beautiful clothes from scratch, including some lovely little dresses for me, and Mother was duly appreciative.

I remember feeling princesslike in them, not a common feeling in those days, when most young girls looked more like witches. That may sound exaggerated but check out the old class pictures. The only makeup we wore was lipstick, few of us had bodies, and sex was something we mostly postponed into the distant future. (It wasn’t such a bad world, really, but that’s a subject for a different article.)

I still have those old dresses, and the stitches are exquisite. I’m sure Mother admired them from a safe distance, and that is probably why she was happy enough for me to take home economics, in seventh and eighth grades, when sewing was scheduled for the first year, and cooking, the second.

I was lukewarm about the sewing part, but, as usual, I couldn’t wait for the cooking part, because all the older girls reported back that they were allowed to eat their schoolwork. I couldn’t wait.

First, though, I had to get through the sewing portion of my education, and, being Mother’s daughter, for me that wasn’t easy. To begin with, the home ec teacher was a humorless type, who had considerable autonomy in the school system and didn’t have to kowtow to anyone. As far as I know, there were no board of education standards she had to follow, and this led to a curriculum that was individualized to her needs rather than ours.

Of course, that may be guesswork on my part. All I know is that for the first month of seventh grade home ec, we spent our time sewing along the lines of notebook paper with sewing machines, learning to sew straight whether we wanted to or not. And if you protested, you spent another month sewing along the lines of notebook paper, with the result that some of us spent a considerable part of that year sewing along the lines of notebook paper. Presumably our sewing was straight as an arrow from then on, but don’t count on it.

Eventually, after everyone else had done their straight seam duty, and made an apron into the bargain, we slow learners came along just in time to join in the big project of the year — a blouse. I chose blue cotton for mine, which might have been okay, except that it turned out we were required to sew the seams in a contrasting color, so as not to strain Miss-Whatever-Her Name-Was’s eyes. I chose white thread, proud that she would notice how straight they were.

As it turned out, the blouse looked something like a building with all the ductwork on the outside, which later became fashionable, like contrasting seams, and patches and tears on your jeans, but not in those days. Actually, it looked awful. I never wore it, and have no idea what my grade was, but I’m sure it wasn’t good.

Of course, all year we had been tantalized by the smells wafting from the eighth Grade Home Ec classes. Mary Hensel, of Cumberland, remembers her Home Ec Cooking class very well: she says she learned to make cocoa and creamed cabbage. But I’m sure that was because Cumberland begins with C. I grew up in Wheeling, W.Va., and I’m sure we would have learned to make, oh, wasabi wings and walnut wassail — something like that.

No such luck. We all gathered in the Home Ec room the first day of eighth grade, giddy with anticipation, Miss What’s-Her-Name-Again? walked in, looked at us coldly, and pronounced our fate. “You were all so bad last year,” she said with a smirk, “I have decided to give you another year of sewing this year.” And she did.

I made a dress out of green rayon with red seams, and wouldn’t have been caught dead in it.

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her columns appear on alternate Sundays in the Times-News.