Macdonald  College was founded as a school of agriculture for men and domestic science for girls. Middle class girls who were destined to marry could take Home Ec courses to be better home-makers and poorer girls could learn house-keeping, that is keeping house for rich people who were finding it harder and harder to get qualified help.

Ironically,  Margaret McLeod was a brilliant homemaker, who could sew up a storm and won awards for her bread making and crafts at country fairs - and she learned it all at home in the 1860's.  All this talent didn't do her any good: she still couldn't earn her own living. That's why she valued traditional education so highly for her daughters. "An education is something they can never take away from you," she told her grandchildren.  Even into her eighties, she was interested in the world around her, keeping clippings about female achievement, (first woman aviator, women inventors) politics and the arts, dragging her grandchildren to Chautauquas - and in 1931 attending a production of THE APPLE CART, at His Majesty's Theatre a play by George Bernard Shaw about politics in the year 2000.

Helen M. Day (Professor of Home Economics, Bradley Institute Peoria).
From Food and Cookery Magazine, July 1910

I feel that the women who have been engaged in the study of home-making have grown to feel that it is a profession, a thing of great importance that calls for years of careful preparation, and earnest study, not an thing that can be entered upon at any time by any person without the slightest training… Women always have kept house - hence the conclusion that homemaking is women's natural province, for the duties of which no special training is necessary.  In colonial times, the girl's opportunities for what we now speak of as 'an education' were severely limited. There was not much for a girl to do but stay home and learn and practice home-making. Since that time a great change has taken place in the position of women, due partly to increased educational opportunities, and partly to changed economic and social conditions until today woman stands on an equality with man and practically economically independent from him. She may enter any profession or engage in any trade or occupation that is open to men except those requiring to great physical strength. She may be a doctor, a lawyer, a minister, a teacher, a clerk, a bookkeeper, a stenographer, a factory hand, dentist or farmer - but notwithstanding all those possibilities, what she really does in nine of ten cases is to marry and become a home-maker, just as she did in times when there was nothing else for her to do.