Stern, Frances (1873–1947)

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Stern, Frances (1873–1947)

American social worker and dietitian. Born on July 3, 1873, in Boston, Massachusetts; died on December23, 1947, in Newton, Massachusetts; daughter of Louis Stern (a dealer in boots and shoes) and Caroline (Oppenheimer) Stern; graduated from Garland Kindergarten Training School, 1897; studied food chemistry and sanitation at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1909, 1911, 1912; took economics and politics classes at London School of Economics, 1922; never married; no children.

Founded Boston Dispensary Food Clinic (1918), now known as the Frances Stern Nutrition Center; wrote a number of books and articles on diet and health, including Food for the Worker (with Gertrude T. Spitz, 1917), Food and Your Body: Talks with Children (with Mary Pfaffman, 1932, revised under the title How to Teach Nutrition to Children, 1942), and Applied Dietetics (1936).

Frances Stern was born in 1873, the youngest of seven children in an orthodox Jewish family of German immigrants. From her religious, community-minded family, Stern inherited a sense of social responsibility which informed her career in nutritional education, mostly based in her hometown of Boston. Her education took place in several staggered phases throughout her life, reflecting her developing sense of vocation. After completing grammar school, she taught Sunday school at Congregation Beth Israel at a young age, and in 1890 began teaching at the new Hebrew Industrial School in the North End. Stern's experiences there, witnessing the physical and emotional effects of poverty on children, set the course of her career. In 1895, with her friend Isabel Hyams , Stern opened the Louisa Alcott Club in a tenement building in Boston's South End, teaching homemaking to young people living in the neighborhood's slums. At the same time she attended courses at the Garland Kindergarten Training School in Boston, graduating in 1897.

Isabel Hyams introduced Stern to her former teacher Ellen Swallow Richards , a distinguished instructor in sanitary chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and founder of the home economics profession. Stern became her secretary and research assistant until Richards' death in 1911. Inspired by Richards' work and eager for a deeper understanding of the relationship between nutrition and social problems, Stern took courses in food chemistry and sanitation at MIT in 1909, 1911 and 1912.

In 1912, Stern developed a visiting housekeeping program for the Boston Association for the Relief and Control of Tuberculosis, later devising a similar program for the Boston Provident Association. Her work as an industrial health inspector for the State Board of Labor and Industries between 1912 and 1915 gave her important firsthand knowledge of the effects of diet on workers as well as children. Inspired by idealism yet informed by realism, Stern envisioned neighborhood centers that would provide practical nutritional education, expounding on her beliefs in Food for the Worker, written with Gertrude T. Spitz and published in 1917. The following year, at the request of Michael Davis, director of the Boston Dispensary, Stern established a food clinic, which was to become her major lifework.

World War I and its aftermath drew her away from Boston, first to Washington, D.C., to work in the Division of Home Conservation of the U.S. Food Administration and then as an industrial investigator for the Department of Agriculture, assessing the adequacy of workers' food. Stern spent the period between 1918 and 1922 in Europe, working for the American Red Cross and the Child and Family Welfare Association in France. While there, she studied economics and politics as a special student at the London School of Economics.

Returning to Boston, Stern threw herself into work at her clinic, creating an inviting atmosphere for her largely Russian, Italian, and Syrian clientele, and dispensing a variety of dietary advice to suit low budgets, medical needs and national tastes. In 1925, she set up a Nutrition Education Department to train doctors, dentists, social workers and nurses from all around the world in dietetics, undertaking further research into the impact of social environment on health. Stern's life also encompassed work on numerous committees and boards, writing and publishing, and caring for an invalid brother. Outgoing, attractive and vivacious, Stern made her comfortable home an open house for young people interested in educational, economic and welfare issues. One of the initial members of the American Dietetic Association, she was the first chair of its Social Services Section. She was an active member of the Welfare Committee of the Federated Jewish Charities, the American Public Health Association, and the American Home Economics Association. She also taught nutrition or dietetics at the Simmons College School of Social Work, Tufts College Medical School, MIT, and the State Teachers College at Framingham.

Although physically incapacitated by congestive heart disease in old age, Stern remained mentally alert and involved in the running of her clinic to the very end. After she died at home in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1947, a memorial service was held at Temple Israel in Boston and her ashes were placed in the Chapel of Peace at the Forest Hills Cemetery. The clinic, renamed the Frances Stern Food Clinic in her honor in 1943, is now known as the Frances Stern Nutrition Center.