Home Economics Movement

Home Economics Movement, a social movement, discipline, and profession, crystallized in the writings of Catharine Beecher, a leading mid‐nineteenth‐century educator.Beecher stressed that women needed scientific knowledge to fulfill their socially sanctioned roles of wife, mother, and homemaker. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, universities and land‐grant colleges, as well as elementary and secondary schools, institutionalized these principles as domestic science, domestic economy, or household science. The most significant force behind home economics in this period was Ellen Swallow Richards, a graduate of Vassar College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At ten conferences Richards convened at Lake Placid, New York, between 1899 and 1908, educators and social reformers debated the role of the growing movement. The last conference established the movement's professional organization, the American Home Economics Association (later renamed the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences).

Richards and her followers believed that the application of science to domestic problems could save society from the social disintegration they saw at the turn of the century. This program of science education for women had benefits and limitations. On the positive side, women could pursue science degrees in higher education. Moreover, the movement's social‐reform impetus encouraged women to apply this knowledge in the wider arena of public life. For example, nutrition was not only the healthful feeding of one's family; it was also educating other women, constructing healthful dietaries for schools and institutions, generating the knowledge base underlying these efforts, and more. Thus, professional avenues such as dietician, nutritionist, and extension specialist opened for women. On the negative side, the existence of home economics departments enabled schools to direct women interested in science into a sex‐segregated educational track and sex‐segregated occupations, with relatively low prestige and limited resources.

Through the twentieth century, home economics was closely associated with public school education and cooperative extension service. These affiliations and federal legislation, namely the Smith‐Lever Act (1914), which created home economics extension, and the Smith‐Hughes Act (1917), which funded home economics education in the elementary and secondary schools, had similarly contradictory effects on the path of home economics. While bringing in additional resources, they also deflected attention from scientific research, further separating home economics from more prestigious science departments.

Throughout the twentieth century, home economists were employed in academic, educational, governmental, and business settings. Greater occupational opportunities expanded the field, but also fragmented it. As the century ended, home economics, also labelled family and consumer sciences and human ecology, was struggling to construct a clear identity for itself.
See also Domestic Labor; Education: The Public School Movement; Education: The Rise of the University; Feminism; Food and Diet; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Margaret Rossiter , Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, 1982.
Sarah Stage and Virginia Vincenti, eds., Rethinking Women and Home Economics in the 20th Century, 1997.

Rima D. Apple