2.1 The Household and Home Economics.

This porch has been completely deconstructed and reconstructed since the photo.

When I was in high school the girls got to take a course called Home Economics. It was unclear to me why they were studying economics. It turns out that economics is a derivative of two Greek words, oikos, which is household, and nomos, which means management (or ironically, law). Hence, the study of home economics, or household management. The ancient French words expand this to include material goods. Your household is your house, your family, and your stuff. 

Statistics Canada defines a household as “a person or group of persons who occupy the same dwelling.”  A household can be a single person, a family, or families, or a group of unrelated people living together. If a family has more than one house, those other houses are not counted as a household.

 

We tend to set hard boundaries on what a family is; mother, father, sister, brother. In other times and cultures, a family might include servants and other unrelated members of the household family, those that otherwise might be homeless. A family was kith and kin, which extended beyond the household. 

When considering the household conceptually, we need to realize that it pretty much includes everything. Our house, our people, our possessions, and sometimes our workplace. Notably, all of these are related to our public and self-image. It should be simple to determine a goal to reflect on related to our household — we are setting household goals all of the time; things that need to get done. The difficulty might be in confronting our values, and changing our practices when home and family are things that we cherish. We need to reflect on the fact that the under-housed are a growing number, as are the over-housed. This may also mirror trends in food in/security. It is possible that the households we are innocently building are destroying the households of others. So, I consider this my opportunity to finally study Home Economics for one week.