The Case for Home Ec

I was not good at home ec. I hated it. I would have failed it had I not smuggled my sewing home to my mom to do so I was able to scrape up a C. My peers were not that much better. OUr two sewing projects took us so long that they ended up dominating the enter semester-long course and we didn't even have time to start the cooking unit. It didn't mattter. The next year my independent girls' school cancelled the program all together and I never had to take home ec again. My school cancelled the class because they wanted us to focus on more "educational" classes. Our bother school, however, kept their home ec class and still have it to this day. It is mandatory. Other boys' schools in my city have popular clubs that teach "life lessons (eg, how to make scrambled eggs and hem your pant legs). The message to boys is clear: one day you will have to take care of yourself. You CANNOT just rely on other people. The messsage to girls is: progress means relying on others to feed and clothe yourself.
Now, at the age of 21, I cannot sew. I can cook only because I would starve while living on my own at university without that ability, but it took me a long time to get there. When I moved out on my own at 19, I didn't even know how to boil an egg. Today, my cooking is a bit more advanced. Indeed, I have boiled eggs every day! I can also make spaghetti, chicken, brownies, oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, and anything that can be prepared using a George Foreman grill. I can sort of (not well) feed myself, but if a button were to fall off my shirt, I'd be screwed.
I'm part of a new generation of women who were told not to learn how to cook or clean or sew (or do anything useful, for that matter), because we'd all be CEO's, important UN officials and fashion magazine editors running the world. Why did we need to know how to take care of ourselves? NO, all we needed to know was how to take care of the 1st quarter profits of a Fortune 500 company or solve an ethnic dispute involving oil in some Middle Eastern country.
Meanwhile, my male counterparts seem to be ever more domestic. I have never dated a guy who was not a better cook than I am. Most men I have dated also own sewing kits and know how to use them should they need to patch or reattach something. I don't even know where one would go to BUY a sewing kit. These men have learned how to do the traditionally domestic things necessary to sustain one's life because their mothers and schools taught them. Why? Because I guess they thought their domestically incompetent but financially gifted CEO wives wouldn't have time to do the traditionally girlie things; however, this proficiency in the kitchen does not render these men useless in traditionally masculine areas. Their dads are still teaching them to DIY and stuff like that, while I have no clue how to put my IKEA furniture together. These are supermen capable of doing anything necessary to survive. If they were lost on a desert island, they could hunt for the food, cook it and build you a shelter to eat it in. If I were lost on a desert island, I'd have to hope my fellow cast-aways thought I was cute and kept me around because of that, because my knowledge of post-modern feminist theory and current events wouldn't make up for the fact that I couldn't boil the boar we'd just taken down.
While women are showing up at universities in greater and greater numbers, young men are acquiring far more useful skills than sociology degrees.; they are learning how to take care of themselves. Just walking around the Queen's Student ghetto, it is evident that the stereotype of "messy" boys' houses and "clean and pretty girls' houses that smell of baked goods" are no longer true. The boys I know care far more about keeping their rooms tidy, making sure they're nicely decorated, and cutting up at least three vegetables to go into the salad, than I do. This does not mean, however, that they don't like to go out to a keg party after enjoying their salads to play beer pong and refuse to drink cocktails because they're too "girlie." There are still loads of gender stereotypes to be found on my university campus, but they no longer cripple men's abilities to develop basic survivor skills. Unfortunately, "empowering girls" means robbing them of the ability to take care of themselves. There is no reason I can't be top of my class and aspire to a great career AS WELL AS knowing how to cook and sew. Really, would an extra semester of home ec or my mom making me cook with her a couple of nights a week crippled my ability to earn good grades or taken too much time away from learning how to take over the world? Would it have told me all I was supposed to do with my life was commit myself to domestic drudgery while my husband relaxed and drank a martini after work? No! No! No!
Our society is perfectly capable of developing a way to teach girls house-keeping without making them think it is their only purpose in life. After all, if the boys develop a monopoly on cooking skills, soon they'll be able to hold hot chicken dinners for ransome to get their jobs as CEO's back from the generation of girls trying to usurp them. Girls are multi-talented. We can cook AND arrange corporate-takeovers.