Repository: UIHistories Project: Dedication - Home Economics - Challenge of Home Economics [PAGE 42]

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of the problems researchers in this area must face. What is the significance, for example, of early marriages, more children in the home employed mothers, suburban living? There is the ever mounting problem of women freed from the dominant mother role early in life fired from her job so to speak —, changes in roles of husbands and wives, relations to aged parents. What arc these things and others doing to people? Home economics must not fail to make its contribution to this basic understanding of the family and of its members. It can spearhead the kind of research that is needed, but this in turn can be enriched by close cooperation with the allied sciences, sociology, anthropology, economics. We should not proceed alone. A team can pull much more than the lone horse. And now our strategists in home economics are moving us to another front — good management of family resources. Although we can spot our objective in the distance, there are blockades and entanglements ahead. For what does good management mean, particularly when we must think of it in terms of money, of time, of energy, and of human resources? This new world is one of changing standards. It is making available goods and services of which our mothers and grandmothers never dreamed. It has taken production out of the home. It is producing changes in time-honored roles of both men and women in our society. No wonder that management has become a complex thing. What are family goals under these conditions? What kind of decisions must be involved if these goals are to be reached? What are standards for improved management within the family? The use of consumer credit offers a good illustration of problems in this area. In the United States today, consumer credit amounts to more than 37 million dollars.7 A great deal is known about the sources of this credit, items for which it is used, and its relationship both to total national income and family income. But very little is known about the decision-making in terms of family goals and family welfare that entered into these commitments. We need to know also what effect fixed installment buying has on important family values such as the adequacy of the food coming into the household, kind and amount of clothing purchased, recreation potentials, medical services needed, and provision of educational opportunities. But there is still another front on which home economics research must wage its battle for a good and stable family life. The family is a tremendous consuming group in providing for its food, shelter, and clothing. What it spends its money for, as well as how much it spends, determines not only its own but the national economy.

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