Creating Consumers

Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America

Carolyn M. Goldstein

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780807872383
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business History
• Index: Business

Home economics emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a movement to train women to be more efficient household managers. At the same moment, American families began to consume many more goods and services than they produced. To guide women in this transition, professional home economists had two major goals: to teach women to assume their new roles as modern consumers and to communicate homemakers' needs to manufacturers and political leaders. Carolyn M. Goldstein charts the development of the profession from its origins as an educational movement to its identity as a source of consumer expertise in the interwar period to its virtual disappearance by the 1970s.
Working for both business and government, home economists walked a fine line between educating and representing consumers while they shaped cultural expectations about consumer goods as well as the goods themselves. Goldstein looks beyond 1970s feminist scholarship that dismissed home economics for its emphasis on domesticity to reveal the movement's complexities, including the extent of its public impact and debates about home economists' relationship to the commercial marketplace.

1 Envisioning the Rational Consumer, 1900–1920

“The consumer who desires to be economical,” Teachers College professor Mary Schenck Woolman and Ellen Beers McGowan advised in Textiles: A Handbook for the Student and the Consumer, a textbook they coauthored in 1913, “should not make a practice of wandering about the shops to get ideas, for in that way her desires increase and are apt to become confused in her mind with her needs.” A mother should consider her family’s needs from all angles “before she does any shopping at all.” She should obtain samples of materials and take them home for testing before purchasing them. Only the most informed shoppers should shop for bargains, as “the thoughtless shopper is apt to buy more than she needs.”¹ Building on the efforts of Ellen Swallow Richards and other first-generation home economists, who in the 1890s founded their educational movement around principles of wise consumption, Woolman and McGowan’s book taught women to be careful consumers of fabrics and ready-made garments. In the first two decades of the twentieth century, home economists developed dozens of textbooks like these, as well as courses and academic programs, to teach female students to appreciate their economic power and use it responsibly.

Because home economics emerged at a moment when women’s work in the home was changing from making things to buying them, many women in the field, including Mary Schenck Woolman, began their careers emphasizing household production and gradually shifted to a focus on consumption. Woolman entered home economics with an interest in vocational education and manual work, devoting her early years as a teacher to providing working-class women with skills for their roles as factory workers or domestic servants. Born in 1860, she received a diploma from Teachers College in 1895 and a B.S. degree in 1897. As a member of the Teachers College faculty beginning in 1892, Woolman taught household arts, sewing, and domestic science and introduced the study of textiles in the school’s Department of Domestic Arts. In 1902, she helped organize the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, an institution that taught sewing and clothing construction as part of an industrial education program to prepare girls for work in the garment trades.²

In 1910, when the trade school was absorbed into the city’s public school system, Woolman returned to Teachers College’s newly reorganized School of Household Arts. As a textile professor and director of the Domestic Arts Department, she developed courses for the school’s growing body of middle-class students, instructing would-be homemakers and teachers in how to make purchasing decisions about ready-to-wear garments and household furnishings. The school’s uniquely outfitted textile laboratory enabled students to conduct “chemical and microscopic studies of textile fibers and fabrics” and to carry out experimental work in dyeing.³ Two years later, Woolman moved to Boston to become the acting head of the Home Economics Department at Simmons College and president of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union, an organization devoted to assisting women workers throughout the city. During World War I, Woolman put all of her teachings into action in her capacity as textile specialist for Massachusetts under the War Emergency Fund of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Although most home economists spent the war years promoting food conservation on behalf of the U.S. Food Administration (USFA), Woolman organized a Clothing Information Bureau to encourage homemakers to consider the “economic, social, and industrial connections” involved in choices about textiles and clothing. From a temporary structure located on Boston Common, Woolman worked to “increase intelligence” in the making of new clothing and the renovating of old garments, by emphasizing the selection of textiles and clothing, “clothing economy,” and more “efficient” and “healthful” manners of dress. Woolman’s Clothing Information Bureau was devoted to “training” the consumer to make “intelligent” choices in the selection of clothing based on such criteria as health and thrift. The ideal trained consumer’s civic duty, according to Woolman, was not only to be knowledgeable about the goods she purchased but also to live on a budget and within her family’s means.⁴

Woolman’s notion of the trained consumer who had a thorough understanding of both commercial goods and the priorities of her family’s budget typified home economists’ educational initiatives launched between 1900 and 1920. Like many women in the field, Woolman shifted to a new focus. By 1920, she was directing her energies toward educating middle-class women in university programs about their identity as consumers, reflecting the changing thrust of home economics toward the education of the “rational consumer.” In the course of these two decades, Woolman and her home economics colleagues transformed a series of disparate ideas and exponents, college programs, and publications into a full-fledged academic discipline and national community of practitioners. Through the formation of a professional association, the development of educational programs for disseminating their messages, and the application of their expertise to domestic food conservation during World War I, these early home economists placed themselves at the center of public discussions about the meaning of consumption in twentieth-century American culture and framed these discussions in terms that compelled would-be modern homemakers to interact with a new group of women experts.

Reforming the Middle-Class Consumer: Lake Placid Conferences, 1899–1907

“The young woman of today is besieged on every side by allurements in the shape of cheap and fantastic ornaments. To steer one’s course amid these complicated temptations and purchase wisely and prudently is no easy task.” With these words in 1896, Ellen Swallow Richards and a group of women educators in Boston summarized their concerns about women consumers in the United States at the turn of the century. Richards, a pioneering women scientist, had spent more than two decades investigating sanitary science and other public health matters, and advocating for reform of the nation’s eating habits. Now in her mid-fifties, she sought to integrate science with social change by helping prepare American homemakers to assume their new responsibilities as consumers. Convinced of “the power of the woman as an economic factor in the home, and the imperative necessity that she be so educated as to understand her task,” Richards and her fellow members of the Women’s Education Association (WEA) argued for domestic science instruction in Boston’s public high schools. This group assumed that the home was “the chief of all factors in the making of the citizen,” but Richards and her colleagues proposed to use the city’s public education system to encourage women to take control of domestic consumption by teaching them the principles of “wise expenditure.”⁵

A series of ongoing economic and technological developments placed the functions of the home and women’s domestic work in a state of flux at the turn of the century. To a greater or lesser extent, Americans of all classes witnessed a broad array of changes not only in the way goods were produced but also in how they were bought and sold. These changes altered patterns of daily domestic life, especially for urban middle-class women who saw the production of many household goods move into the factory. For generations, women had made soap in their homes with lye and fats; now homemakers with disposable income could purchase it in mass-produced bars. An expanding array of foodstuffs, such as bread, canned goods, and packaged meats, came into industrial production as well. Ready-made clothing was available for purchase by middle-class women in new retail environments such as department stores. Personal relationships with neighborhood merchants became less common, as women in smaller towns and rural areas relied less on the recommendations of trusted sellers and more on mail-order catalogs, brand-name identification, and advertising in mass-circulation magazines. With food and clothing constituting a large part of most family budgets, the changing structure of the marketplace presented uncertainties for American homemakers, who faced not only a steadily rising cost of living but also a real public health crisis that seemed to stem from domestic sanitary practices. As houses and apartment buildings in urban areas became connected to public utility systems, elite and middle-class women were beginning to enjoy modern plumbing as well as gas and electric appliances. Once prized as the source of a family’s independence, the home—especially the middle-class home—was now more intertwined than ever before in an expanding national market, a growing network of new technological goods and systems, and an emerging culture of consumption.⁶

The identity of the female consumer was a central theme for Richards as she forged alliances throughout the 1890s with a diverse group of reformers, educators, and scientists to launch their educational reform movement. By 1900, a first generation of home economists commanded an ambitious project to transform American homemakers into rational consumer citizens while at the same time establishing themselves as experts in the developing consumer society.

Ellen Swallow Richards’s career, in which she integrated scientific research with social service and reform, served as an important point of reference for how the new academic discipline of home economics would define a standard of living for American families. After graduating from Vassar College in 1870, Richards became the first woman to receive a B.S. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). With support from the WEA, a catalyst for many educational innovations for women beginning in 1873, she established a Women’s Laboratory at MIT. For the next two decades, she investigated the adulteration of food products and the contamination of water, as well as the chemical processes involved in cooking and digesting food, while training a cohort of younger women in methods of chemical analysis. In the 1880s, Richards emerged as a leading expert in the fields of sanitary science and nutritional science, and a vocal advocate for applying scientific solutions to public health conditions in the urban home environment.⁷

Beginning around 1890, Richards’s interests became increasingly focused on food and sanitation as avenues of reform. In a major effort to change the eating habits of workers and immigrants, she launched the New England Kitchen, a distribution center for healthy, low-cost meals to families in Boston. At the 1893 Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a great celebration of European and American technological developments and the consumer durables they generated, Richards received national attention for planning the Rumford Kitchen exhibit, in which she demonstrated principles of “scientific cookery.” The following year she contracted with the Boston public schools to provide nutritious school lunches. While many of Richards’s early reform initiatives sought to improve the standard of living of working-class families based on middle-class values, by the late 1890s, as urbanization and industrialization disrupted the closing century’s understandings of class distinctions, Richards sought as much to influence her socioeconomic peers as to draw on middle-class standards for uplift among the lower classes.⁸

Richards’s approach to reform reflected her ambivalence about the social impact of economic and technological changes under way at the turn of the century, and in particular of their effect on American homes. Like many contemporary politicians, social scientists, community activists, and industrial leaders, she worried that the expanding working-class population and the continued influx of immigrants into white Anglo-Saxon culture would result in social fragmentation. Turn-of-the-century reformers were also troubled by the place of the individual citizen in a society where distant market forces and interactions with large, powerful corporations replaced face-to-face relationships. Richards feared that values associated with industry—individualism and personal isolation—would undermine the home as a place of refuge and destabilize it as a cornerstone of civilization, hence threatening the nation’s moral order. Lamenting the loss of production in the home, she wrote: “Gone out of it are the industries, gone out of it are ten of the children, gone out of it in large measure is that sense of moral and religious responsibility which was the keystone of the whole.”⁹

At the same time, Richards viewed the economic and social transition under way as a moment of great promise, one that presented opportunities to control the emerging urban industrial order. Like many reformers of her day, Richards assumed that physical environments shaped social relationships and conditions, and she embraced surveys and other types of fact-finding endeavors by experts as strategies for shaping domestic consumption in the United States.¹⁰ Specifically, she proposed that women draw on science and engineering to navigate the new world of consumption and create homes that would be “unhampered by the traditions of the past” and modeled instead on business and industry. New technologies and new values of efficiency offered the possibility of liberating women from much drudgery. “All science and engineering stands ready to help [the homemaker] to easier conditions,” Richards announced confidently in 1900.¹¹

By the end of the nineteenth century, Richards’s experience at the School of Housekeeping in Boston led her to envision a professionalized home economics that would apply modern technological advances to the needs of American homes, while at the same time carve out a productive place for scientifically trained women. In 1899, as she formulated a new women’s field in public life, Richards organized a meeting of ten other educators at the home of Annie Godfrey Dewey and Melvil Dewey in Lake Placid, New York, to further “the improvement of living conditions in the home, the institutional household and the community.” Richards invited professors and instructors from a range of academic fields to attend the first of what became known as the Lake Placid conferences. While made up mostly of women, this group also included two men in addition to Dewey: USDA nutrition researcher Wilbur Olin Atwater and his assistant Alfred C. True. The group met annually for ten years between 1899 and 1908, and eventually expanded to include more than 200 meeting participants and a total membership list of over 350. The group’s composition was concentrated in the northeastern and midwestern states. Most attendees were white, middle-class individuals who identified themselves as teachers, writers, scientists, or reformers. The meetings provided a chance to bring under one umbrella the broad array of activities the participants had under way. During this ten-year period, the group forged an ambitious agenda for a new academic discipline that embraced the study of a wide range of issues related to the home, issues which together addressed a larger, central purpose: to shape the material conditions in American households by reforming women’s role as consumers in modern industrial society.¹²

Richards and her cohort proposed home economics as a subject of study to guide homemakers through the dramatic transition they identified as taking place in the American home, and the home economists framed domestic consumption in terms characteristic of Progressive Era reformers. As a group, they shared Richards’s critiques of urbanization and industrialization, her belief in scientific and technological progress, and her faith in the ability of experts and educators to improve social conditions. These common values shaped the group’s understanding of who consumers were, what problems they faced, and how the new field of study would address these problems.

The Lake Placid attendees shared a moral conviction about the centrality of middle-class culture (informed by a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity) to American life. At least since the publication of Catherine Beecher’s Treatise on the Domestic Economy in 1841, domestic advisers had prescribed the norms of middle-class culture in terms of material conditions and women’s responsibilities for maintaining them. Now, as industrialization and the rise of a consumer society threatened to disrupt these norms, the reformers, scientists, and educators convened at Lake Placid used the terms “right living” and “standard of living” to articulate concerns that American identity might be at risk. They feared that changes in the economic function of the home would lower women’s status—and along with it, the status of the middle-class family—in American society. Like Richards, many attendees had focused their reform efforts on urban low-income families, but by the late 1890s they found that their reform messages (particularly about food) did not resonate with working-class concerns. As other groups such as social workers and settlement-house leaders increasingly addressed the needs of working-class women, the Lake Placid participants focused on a new target audience: young middle-class women in cities, and those in rural areas who wanted to learn about the cosmopolitan ways of their urban sisters. The industrialization of the home presented Richards and her cohort with a chance to redefine middle-class domestic life, and to do so in ways that put their group at its center. As new consumer goods and ways of buying them became available to middle-class families, home economists seized on the opportunity to interpret the meanings of those goods—and of consumption itself—for a social group in formation. For home economists, defining the parameters of “right living” was a way of compensating for the loss of woman’s traditional position in American life and reinventing an identity for her as a public citizen in the context of modern consumer capitalism.¹³

Even as the first generation of home economists proposed a new field of study that would prepare homemakers to perform domestic work efficiently and manage household budgets economically, they also sought to characterize middle-class culture as a hallmark of a “comfortable” American standard of living. At the first meeting in 1899, Richards articulated a special concern for middle-class families, those with a total annual income of between $1,500 and $2,500, “whose character and principles demand more than the necessitie...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Creating Consumers
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Envisioning the Rational Consumer, 1900–1920
• 2 Creating a Science of Consumption at the Bureau of Home Economics, 1920–1940
• 3 Reforming the Marketplace at the Bureau of Home Economics, 1923–1940
• 4 Selling Home Economics: The Professional Ideals of Businesswomen, 1920–1940
• 5 Product Testing, Development, and Promotion: Corporate Investment in Home Economics, 1920–1940
• 6 From Service to Sales: Utility Home Service Departments, 1920–1940
• 7 Mediation Marginalized: Home Economics in Government and Business, 1940–1970
• 8 Identity Crisis and Confusion: Home Economics and Social Change, 1950–1975
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index