A couple months ago, I was sorting a small pile of clothes my husband and I had set aside to bring to the dry cleaner and the tailor. I picked up one of his shirts and inspected it for the reason it wound up in this lot of misfits. There was no apparent stain or rip, and I didn’t recall any fit problems that would have called for a nip or tuck. Then I saw it: The bottom button was missing.
“Babe, we can easily fix this,” I said holding out the shirt, a decidedly not-small tinge of judgement in my tone. But I checked my eye roll as quickly as I’d dished it out. I realized it was unreasonable for me to assume he’d ever learned—or even been taught—the basics of mending. I only know them through a bit of happenstance.
The few skills I have are thanks to a friend’s mother, who, when I was in elementary school, gave me a small quilting kit for my birthday and offered to show me how to use it as part of the gift. I took her up on it and learned the hand-sewing basics: threading needles, attaching buttons, applying patches, hand-stitching a fallen hem, some simple embellishments like embroidery. I still reach into this bag of tricks as an adult.
Ever since I started at one5c, and deepened my understanding of the impacts of our “make-take-use-discard” mentality on the planet, my fix-it itch has only grown stronger. But it’s also an urge that can give me the ick. Why? Because there’s something about breaking out the sewing kit that feels like I'm telling us to go back in time.
Things used to be made to last. Home economics and shop classes were a fixture through which students learned how to fix and mend and remake what was already in front of us, rather than rushing out to replace every shirt or gadget the second it shows any sign of imperfection or wear. Sure, that slice of education isn’t totally gone, and social media and Youtube are full of people sharing tips and demoing basic skills and repairs. A growing chorus is even calling for home-ec to make a comeback as a key pillar of K-12. And yet I still cringe at how old-school it feels—and at the sexism that can seem so inextricably tied to the concept.
Why take an hour to fix a problem when two-day shipping can plop the answer right on your doorstep?
In the late 1930s, 90% of schools in towns with more than 2,500 people had a home-ec class, and 90% of those districts required seventh and eighth grade girls to enroll. Today, only about 6,000 of the U.S.’s more than 125,000 schools offer classes in Family and Consumer Sciences, which is how home-ec was rebranded in the mid-1990s. The number of students taking shop classes, similarly recast as Career and Technical Education, dwindled right alongside them.
Experts attribute the decline to the education system’s emphasis on test scores and college acceptance. But there’s also an ecosystem of convenience that goes alongside that—and even enables it. The careers our college educations lead to can keep us locked in a cycle of busyness in which we’re too wiped to cook, clean, or simply enjoy life. Add on a tranche of small fix-it tasks, and the expectations start to feel absurd.
So what do we do instead? We shop, we toss, we replace. The average American purchases 53 new pieces of clothing a year, four times as much as we did in 2020—and significantly more than decades ago. The majority of us upgrade our smartphones every two or three years, even when swapping out a flagging battery or busted screen can stretch their lives to seven years or more. The typical online shopper places 73 Amazon orders every year. Between 2016 and 2021, humankind consumed 75% of the resources we did in the entire 20th century.
We prioritize convenience over self sufficiency. Why take an hour to fix a problem when two-day shipping can plop the answer right on your doorstep? Now, let me be clear: The challenge here is to not conflate sufficiency with being some kind of trad wife. Whatever's going on in that particular corner of the internet is, if you ask me, sufficiency cosplay—performatively doing arduous tasks like making breakfast cereals from scratch. Watching the hoops popular zero-waste influencers jump through can also make living self-sufficiently feel like a full-time job, though to a lesser degree.
What gets lost in these kinds of trends (and, yes, in my own head) is that the origins of home economics weren’t necessarily about drudgery and painstakingly manual tasks. They were often about finding the best, most-efficient (and cost effective!) ways to get things done—about applying a scientific approach to everyday life. These lessons were a way for women to slice themselves into academia at a time when, say, enrolling in chemistry classes was largely off the table.
A return to home economics isn’t what’s regressive. What’s regressive is hanging onto the type of “othering” that comes along with it, or buying into a social-media-perpetuated ideal of what taking a step away from the “add to cart” button looks like. No one should be implicitly included or excluded from the type of knowledge and skills that enable a more sustainable life. Thankfully, though data on how commonly home-ec-style classes are required in schools is sparse, there are still positive signs that the gender split is exponentially better than it was decades ago.
Besides, in a world where everyone in a household is increasingly taking on a share of the domestic work, it seems like we could all use a little help learning how to repair a busted laptop keyboard, cook a pot of beans, or, ahem, re-attach a button.
