“What you need is housewife school.” This from a friend observing my efforts to replicate traditional Icelandic recipes and to learn how to crochet. He was referring to Reykjavík’s Hússtjórnarskóli, which loosely translates as “house management school,” but is often referred to as “Housewife School.” 
The school was actually called the Húsmæðraskóli (“house-mothers’ school,” hence the lingering nickname) when it opened in 1942, and enrolled a class of 48 students for a nine-month program. Today, 24 students are accepted (15 are boarded at the school) for a single semester, either in the fall or spring.
A range of domestic subjects have been taught since the school’s inception 71 years ago, many of which are still offered: textile weaving (using looms to create scarves and floor rugs), sewing (both practical clothing construction and embroidery), knitting and crochet, cooking, and cleaning. Each semester’s courses have an underlying holiday theme. If you enroll in the fall, your sewing and cooking projects will center around Christmas; in the spring, the seasonal focus is on Easter.
In addition to hands-on classes, students take academic courses on nutrition and food production and safety. Subjects like infant care and pedagogy used to be regular facets of the program, but these aren’t offered now, due to time constraints more than anything.
If it seem perilously retro for a school like this to exist in the 21st century, consider how many crafts and hands-on skills we’ve lost over just a few generations. In my late 20s, I belong to a generation which doesn’t really know how to make anything. My great-grandmother raised her own chickens, trooping out to wring their necks with compassionate efficiency just before dinner. My grandmother can tell you off the top of her head such tricks as how to substitute for buttermilk in recipes. My mom hated sewing, but she learned well enough to make dresses that I still wear now.
Growing up, clothes and food just appeared before me, ready-made, like they did before so many young Americans, and I never thought much about it. Perhaps worse is that when I did think about the origins of such necessities, I mostly felt disdain. As a teenager, the idea of sewing buttons on shirts, of knowing the best tricks for cleaning burned-on gunk out of the bottom of a scorched pot, or how to iron was repulsive to me. I was an intelligent feminist, damn it, and I wasn’t going to waste my time cooking and cleaning.
(I should mention that while the competencies which I winkingly refer to as “homesteading skills” skipped my generation, they have been at least partially reinstated for my little sister’s—she’s 17 years younger than me. Her fourth grade class built a coop and raised chickens in science class.)
My mom did try to teach me this stuff. When I turned six, she attempted to capture my interest with a meticulously stocked sewing box. She wanted to teach me to cross-stitch. My first project was a pillow in the shape of a cat: very “me” at the time. But while I loved the idea of having made something myself, I hated the precision required for needlepoint, the necessity of sitting still for so long. I also hated having to ask my mother to thread the needle when I wanted to change floss colors, which was, I must add, much more frequently than she felt like threading needles.
We came to an impasse pretty quickly—I was impatient with her teaching methods, and she was impatient with my impatience, and we were both just fed up with each other. This scenario replayed itself when she tried to teach me how to drive, plus or minus ten vividly memorable episodes of mother-daughter roadside rage. (Thanks, dad, for
stepping in: I’m not sure mom and I would still be talking if you hadn’t helmed the driving lessons.)
It wasn’t vital that I be able to needlepoint cat pillows, but I had to learn to drive. And while my father could teach me the latter, there wasn’t anyone else who thought it worth teaching me needlepoint, particularly since I wasn’t thrilled by the prospect.
Is this why so many young women didn’t learn this stuff? Maybe my claim that it was “anti-feminist” to learn handcrafts and how to clean properly was just convenient bluster, when the truth—or at least part of the truth—is that it’s really hard to be taught how to do something by your mom. My great-gram knew how to raise and wring chickens’ necks because she had to. But I’d guess that learning wasn’t much fun (for many reasons), and I’m almost positive that her mom would have been frustrated with Gram’s technique and made some off-hand comments which sparked an argument, and they probably stood in the front yard arguing about correct neck-wringing strategies until they were both blue in the face.
When learning how to do anything, it helps to have an objective teacher.
Of course there is nothing remotely anti-feminist about having mastery of traditionally “female” crafts and skills. Even well-educated feminists need—and sometimes want—to sew buttons and clean pots. In fact, the educated-types seem to be the primary demographic at the Hússtjórnarskóli. According to the school’s principal, Margrét Sigfúsdóttir, the majority of enrolled students are young women who have completed at least menntaskóli, the highest level of pre-college education in Iceland, which ends at age 20. Frequently, students hold a college degree. The women (and occasionally men) who enroll in Hússtjórnarskóli do so simply because they are interested in learning the crafts and skills taught there.
I’d like to go to Housewife School, but why stop there? I never learned how to change a tire. I can’t gut a fish. There’s got to be a demand for other skills-and-crafts programs, and surely ones which cater to all the would-be Ron Swansonsof the world. Someone find me (Handy) Man School while we’re at it, where students are taught to rewire electrical outlets and build rocking chairs and brew beer!
~Larissa
Larissa blogs about expat life and language-learning atEth & Thorn.