Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Struggles
and Strategies Until 1940. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1982.
ILR Library (Ives Hall), Olin Library, and Uris Library - call
number Q130.R83.
Mann Library - call number Q130.R83 1982.
Rossiter places home economics in the context of American women
in science. Throughout the book she demonstrates how stereotypes
of "woman" and "scientist" were considered irreconcilable.
In this encyclopedic book, she examines womens early efforts to
receive a scientific education, their contributions to scientific
knowledge, and their struggles to gain entry and develop professional
careers in chemistry, physics, biology, psychology, geology, and
botany. Rossiter illustrates how women, in response to discrimination,
created career fieldssuch as home economicsthat incorporated their
scientific knowledge and served womens needs. She also discusses
professional societies and shows how they kept women out both formally
and informally. In her discussion of home economics at Cornell,
she analyzes interactions between the home economics department
and the university administration, stressing the low status accorded
to professorships in home economics. Some of the charts and texts
also reveal information about Cornells role in educating women in
other scientific fields, such as psychology, in the early twentieth
century.
Scanlon, Jennifer, Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies' Home
Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture. New York
and London: Routledge. 1995.
Olin Library - call number HC110.C6 S28 1995.
Uris Library - call number HC110.C6 S27x 1995
In this cultural history based on evidence from the Ladies'
Home Journal, Scanlon offers a new and provocative perspective
on the magazine, the advertising industry, and womens lives during
the early twentieth century. Because the book explores the contradictions
of a social agenda for women that promoted both traditional roles
and the promises of a growing consumer culture, it is extremely
relevant to the history of home economics. The title is a phrase
coined by Lois Ardery of the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency
in 1924. Ardery and others hoped consumer goods would satisfy womens
deepest dreams and desires. Scanlon shows that the magazines domestic
ideal focused on white, middle-class women readers, but that it
failed to meet the needs of this target audience. Scanlon argues
persuasively that the advertising proffered did not satisfy "inarticulate
longings for personal autonomy, economic independence, intimacy,
sensuality, self-worth, or social recognition.
Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad. New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1986.
Hotel Administration Library (Statler Hall) - call number TX173.S44
1986.
This book takes a critical view of goals and activities in home
economics. Shapiro, who writes for Newsweek magazine, focuses on
the early cooking school connection and a cast of characters (such
as Fanny Farmer) who had little of the Progressive Era reformist
zeal of the founders at Cornell or the women in the American Home
Economics Association. American cookery and cuisine are central
to Shapiros interpretation, and she mocks them, as well as the women
who thought that better food was the way to a better America. The
title is taken from a 1905 recipe, for a salad that suspended shredded
cabbage and pimentos in lime gelatin.