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Home Sweet Home EC

From feminist roots to gender-role reinforcement and back again: this history of home economics might suprise you

Everyone has an idea about what home ec entails. Maybe yours includes learning to make pancakes from Bisquick in a junior-high classroom or sewing a pillow only your mother could love. But even that’s better than the vision most people conjure up: a ’50s panorama of aproned and full-skirted Stepford-wives-in-training, obediently tending to their mixing bowls before a row of vintage ovens.

That has certainly been the historical perspective of feminists like second-wave activist Robin Morgan, who declared home economists “the enemy” in her unexpectedly vicious speech at the 1972 Home Economics Convention. But like most people today, Morgan was probably ignorant of the discipline’s origin as a social movement, founded by a group of ladies advocating for women’s employment and empowerment in and outside of the home. The foremothers of home economics were scientists, not homemakers, and their lessons are not only still being taught today, but they’re also enticing an influx of young, hip women who are recognizing the importance of the field. Yet home ec continues to hold an undeserved reputation as the champion of an outdated ideal of femininity, thanks to the diluted version that pervaded the school system.

“It’s still going on, the idea that it was a program to brainwash women into being good wives for husbands and that it was a way to keep women down, which it wasn’t,” says Megan J. Elias, author of Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture. In her book, Elias chronicles home ec’s evolution from its progressive late-19th-century beginnings through the product- driven and gender-repressive ’50s to the watered-down reputation that continues in the public imagination today.

The idea of applying scientific information to domestic work first became widespread with the popularity of Catharine Beecher’s 1869 tome, The American Woman’s Home, which offered practical and sound advice, such as maintaining adequate ventilation in the home, and how to eat healthfully (including the value of eating less meat). Despite an emphasis on traditional gender roles and Christianity, the book, coauthored by Beecher’s younger sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, intended to elevate the image of homemakers so that they were “as much desired and respected as are the most honored professions of men.” This provided the groundwork for an even more radical movement to emerge.

The term “home economics” originated from the organized meetings of a group of scientifically and reform-minded women who started gathering in 1899 at Lake Placid, NY. The goals of these women, who expanded from 11 to 700 over 5 years of conferences, were to professionalize domestic work and create careers for women by applying scientific theory to practical tasks. In 1909, they formed the American Home Economics Association (AHEA), the objective of which was “to improve the conditions of living in the home, the institutional household, and the community.”

In contrast to the happy homemaker ethos often associated with home ec, the founders of the field were actually among the first women to receive college educations—only to find themselves barred from most professions upon graduation. “Many of them were trained in science with limited opportunity to use it because of prejudice against women,” says Virginia Vincenti, Family and Consumer Sciences professor at the University of Wyoming and co-editor of Rethinking Home Economics. “So they decided to create their own field.” One of these women was Ellen Richards, chairwoman of the Lake Placid conferences, who graduated from Vassar College in 1870 with an advanced science degree but was rejected by every chemical firm she approached. Although the newly founded Massachusetts Institute of Technology didn’t admit women, she managed to convince its powers that be to grant her status as a “special student”—charged no tuition but barred from receiving a Ph.D.—and became the institution’s first female graduate, in 1873. After marrying a young metallurgy professor (they spent their honeymoon on a mining expedition with his students), she persuaded MIT to open a women’s laboratory, where she taught chemistry as its first female instructor. Throwing herself into the simultaneous roles of homemaker and research chemist, she developed an interest in applying scientific principles to domestics, such as nutrition, clothing, physical fitness, sanitation, and home management. Her ideas, projects (she’s credited with founding school lunch programs), and books (one is The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning) became the basis for the home-economics movement.

“Their perfect version of the world was that every time you would make a cake, you would see yourself as doing a science project and a history project and making art,” says Elias. “And on top of that, [you would] value all that stuff, like looking at cleaning the house as an engineering project rather than what the ’60s feminists call the shit work that women get stuck with.”

With these ideals in mind, Richards and her colleagues envisioned an academic program on the college level that would value nutrition and food science over cooking, textiles and clothing construction over sewing, and bacteriology and germ theory over household cleaning. By viewing the personal environment through a scientific lens, they hoped to not only stamp out drudgery by giving women the information to understand the meaning behind their work and to perform it as efficiently as possible, but also to create opportunities for women to find employment outside the home—instead of training homemakers, they would be training professionals.

Even after founding departments at several universities, though, female faculty still struggled to frame home economics as a scientific program in the eyes of male instructors and the world at large. As described in Stir It Up, when Martha Van Rensselaer, who developed Cornell’s home-economics department, attempted to take a bacteriology course in order to explain the importance of kitchen cleanliness to students, the male professor told her, “Oh, they do not need to know about bacteria. Teach them to keep the dishcloth clean because it is nicer that way.” Despite such assumptions, home-ec students were more likely to be found in lab coats than aprons, since the college-level programs covered the subject areas of sanitation, bacteriology and germ theory, food science and nutrition, economics and budgeting, interior design, textile science, and clothing design and construction. There was a class in household management too, in which assignments might include divvying up responsibilities in a “practice house” that sometimes even included “practice children” borrowed from local orphanages.

The skills learned in these programs were really first embraced by the public in 1917 during World War I, when home economists joined the war effort to educate people about nutritional substitutes for rationed foods. They came to the forefront again in the ’30s during the Great Depression, when these women worked with relief organizations to teach families about emergency nutrition and also ran canning centers and “victory” gardens to sustain communities with fresh fruits and vegetables.

But in the postwar consumer craze, as women began to purchase more mass-produced goods, home economists hoped to apply their knowledge to facilitate the relationship between shoppers and corporations, by helping women make informed decisions about what to buy and why. Home economists’ newfound authority, however, made them perfect candidates for major companies’ consumer relations, product development, marketing, testing, and demonstration departments. Some, like Elias, believe this development undermined home economists’ scientific authority even as it created more professional opportunities for women. “What happens is, consumer culture explodes, and all these home economists get to work for advertising and marketing firms,” explains Elias. “If you work for Campbell’s as a nutritionist, you can’t entirely tell them what to do, whereas if you’re working in a lab, you just make the most nutritious soup.” Others argue that while underpaid and undervalued, women like Lucy Maltby, who ran the test kitchen at Corning Glass and helped perfect Pyrex based on feedback from the women who used it, or Mary Engle Pennington, the chemist and bacteriologist who helped promote the new Household Refrigeration Bureau, were able to use their unique viewpoints to create positive effects. “They were arguing for the perspective of the consumers, particularly women consumers,” says Vincenti.

What most agree on as detrimental to the movement’s aims, however, was home economists’ push for funding under legislation like the Smith Hughes Act (passed in 1917), which earmarked federal funds for vocational learning, thereby making the education of home-ec teachers for the primary and secondary levels a new priority for college-level home ec. At the same time that home economists were struggling to establish themselves as science professionals, the act was linking the field closer to vocational training. Home ec’s leaders thus unwittingly traded a shortterm financial solution for the long-term goals of the movement, which would ultimately spread a watered-down version of home ec to middle and high schools. By 1938, 76 percent of girls in the 7th and 8th grades attended home ec, where bureaucratic interference and a focus on traditional gender roles diluted the message until middle and high school classes almost primarily taught the vocational skills necessary to run an individual household (the cooking and sewing almost every home-ec professional takes pains to disassociate from).

Of course, far more students were indoctrinated with the secondary version of home economics as opposed to studying it in college. And so the “Becky home ec-ies” (as one professor refers to the cooking and cleaning enthusiasts who gravitated toward teaching home ec at the K-12 levels) of the world quietly but thoroughly redefined an entire field in the eyes of the public. It was this version of home ec that feminists responded to when it came time to cast off their aprons. Sweetly unaware of the disconnect between the equality strategies of the two movements, home economists invited feminist activist Robin Morgan to speak at that 1972 convention, where she shocked them by declaring, “As a radical feminist, I am here to address the enemy.” And feminist Betty Freidan’s remarks as a convention speaker a few years later were so incendiary, no record of them remains. “We consider ourselves feminists too, but then we got slammed by them,” explains Vincenti, who says she has experienced hostility from feminists who assumed home economists were preparing women to be trapped in the home. “A lot of them wanted to run as far as possible from anything related to what had traditionally been considered women’s roles,” she says.

But the AHEA took feminists’ complaints seriously; president Marjorie East responded, “If home economics does indeed perpetuate this traditional and limited concept of women, we have some rethinking to do.” That rethinking eventually led to the curriculum-wide name change to Family and Consumer Sciences (FCS) in 1992, which Carol Kellett, long-time American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences (AAFCS, previously the American Home Economics Association) member and Kansas State University professor, describes as a bid to change the program’s reputation more than a philosophy change.

Today the AAFCS reports that over five million male and female students were enrolled in FCS education programs in 2002 – 2003. Still, the majority of states suffer from a shortage of qualified teachers. New York is one of three states requiring all students to take a home- and career-skills course, but only two colleges train instructors. Amanda Docherty, a 34-year-old former chef living in Brooklyn, recently enrolled in one of them, the Family and Consumer Studies Specialization at Queens College, NY. If you’d asked her a few years before she started studying to teach FCS what she thought it entailed, she would have said cooking and sewing, but she’s now excited to take classes in nutrition, textiles, clothing construction, and financial planning. Her assignments run the gamut from presenting a fi shnet stitch how-to, to class discussions about renewable fibers. “I think it’s important that kids know that not only should they have certain numbers on test scores, but they should also know how to balance a checkbook,” she says.

Alison Fasano, a recent graduate of the program, signed on as the Family and Consumer Sciences teacher at a middle school in Port Chester, NY, last year. “There were no supplies, so I kind of started the program with nothing,” she says. “We collected about 300 T-shirts from teachers, and the kids cut them into squares, and I taught them how to sew these really cool-looking scarves. We donated half of the scarves to a shelter for women and children who were victims of domestic violence, and the other half we sold for $5 around Christmas time,” she recalls. They then funneled half the proceeds back into the class budget, and the students competed in an essay contest to choose an organization to receive the rest. (It ended up going to a local clinic for free mammograms.) Today’s version of home economics, while surprisingly in line with the movement’s origins, may sound unfamiliar to those who associate the field with repressive gender conformity. “Everybody just assumes I teach little girls how to sew and cook and iron, and it has nothing to do with what I actually teach,” says Fasano. “I’m not teaching my kids how to make macaroni and cheese. I’m teaching my kids if they want to eat macaroni and cheese, how they could make it healthier. Instead of teaching kids how to sew a pillow, [the class is] giving them the idea that you can do something small and give back to the community.”

But for every program like Fasano’s, there are plenty of teachers at the K-12 levels who still subscribe to a simplified curriculum not in line with the current mission statement. According to Kellett, “Many people in our field who graduated from college in the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s have continued to hold the perceptions that they learned while they were in school. The field has changed, and some of the people in it have not.” So perhaps the best way for family and consumer sciences to live up to home ec’s potential is one teacher at a time. Kellett calls today’s college students “our greatest hope” for the future of the field. “It’s time to forgo teaching what I call the ‘hobby skills,’” she says. “The Martha Stewarts and Rachael Rays of the world can do that, but I think if we stick to what I call the basic life skills, that’s the most important. So we teach cooking techniques, but we teach them around nutrition and what’s good for your family and how you can make shortcuts in terms of time and cost.” Docherty is just one of those future teachers Kellett is referring to. “I think the preconception is that home-ec teachers are older ladies sitting quietly at their sewing machines,” says Docherty. “So if women in their 60s are retiring, I’ll be very happy to go in and take their positions. Because I don’t want this to be something that people think only their grandmothers do. I want it to keep on going.”

Photograph from Getty Images