Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Home Economics - Challenge of Home Economics [PAGE 36]

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and wonderful world for us. While this new age has enriched our way of life in many ways, it has, at the same time, produced profound changes. At the turn of the century, our world was our neighborhood. Today our neighborhood has become the world. Our homes have been made sanitary, beautiful, and easy to live in. Our food has taken on new characteristics, and changes with each year that passes. Many items have become standard household possessions — labor-saving equipment, television, radio, automobiles. But in creating all this, technology also has brought about changes in our industrial, economic, and social systems. Our population has become mobile; there has been migration from farm to city; "suburbia" may be defined as a new pattern of living. And war engendered through technology also has left its imprint. Ways of living developing from our adaptation to it and its aftermath have bounded and rebounded against our home and family structures shattering old values and not always giving rise to new. But out of this a new America is emerging and out of the new America, a new American home. In this new American home lies the challenge of home economics research today. Always the heart of the home economics profession has been its interest in home and family life. But understanding and solving the problems confronting families of today and anticipating those of families of tomorrow is a task of no mean magnitude. Indeed, we might even compare our job to a battle — a battle waged in this world of changing technology for a good and stable family life. And as we look ahead, it is clear that this battle must be fought on several fronts. Of these, there are at least four.1 The first front is well defined; its attack is centered against factors that work against the health of people. Medicine and sanitation have been campaigning here for a relatively long time. More recently, home economics has sent up a gallant little company to help fight the battle. It found that it had, not only methodologies that might serve as machine guns and ammunition, but also soldiers with special skills and training that it could move to the front, ready and able to broaden the objective for which the battle was being waged — a total health defined as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease and infirmity.* Defined thus, health represents the end point of the various forces, influences, and reactions that converge upon each member of the family in whatever phase of the life cycle he may be in — infancy, childhood, adolescence, maturity, adulthood, or old age. Nutritional 36