Canning peaches. Sewing a dress. Making perfect
gravy. These are familiar images of home economics, but do they
tell the whole story? So often home economics has been cast as
a "conspiracy to keep women in the kitchen," an interpretation
that has overlooked its impressive and diverse contributions.
New scholarship in American women's history suggests that home
economics was a progressive field that brought science to the
farm home and women into higher education and leadership positions
in public education, academia, government and industry.
At the turn of the 20th century, home economics was a critical
pathway into higher education for American women, largely associated
with co-educational land grant institutions such as Cornell. From
its inception, collegiate home economics was multidisciplinary
and integrative with an emphasis on science applied to the real
world of the home, families and communities.
In the early decades of the 20th century, home economists had
links to the revitalization of agriculture and rural communities,
but also to Progressive Era programs in cities. By the 1920s,
home economists at Cornell were best known for research in human
nutrition and child development, but their work in fields such
as fiber science, design and consumer economics made them central
to the growth of the consumer economy as well. Throughout the
first half of the twentieth century, collegiate programs prepared
thousands of women for public school teaching but many also had
careers in the extension service, state and federal governments,
industry, hospitals, restaurants and hotels. But by the late 1950s
and the early 1960s, broad changes in American women's economics
and social roles made collegiate education in home economics seem
"old fashioned," an image that did not do justice to its rich
history.
In celebration of the New York State College of Human Ecology's
Centennial, this exhibition will emphasize how home economics
at Cornell University, served as a critical bridge from domesticity
in the 19th century to modernity in the 20th century and will
attempt to answer the question: What was home economics?