It's Not Your Mother's Home Economics

A misunderstood discipline celebrates its centennial and ponders its future

By ALISON SCHNEIDER

When it comes to fighting for respect in the cerebral world of academe, home economics has always had an arm -- or is it an apron? -- tied behind its back.

Ask people in the field for a reason to take home economics seriously, and they'll give you a litany -- social reform, bacteriology, nutrition, ergonomics, rural electrification, women's rights. Home economists led the charge on all of those fronts. And the list of their endeavors rolls on.

But mention home economics to the average person and you'll hear another list entirely, one that includes white gloves and white sauce. That's a side of the field, too -- or, at least, it was. And it's still the side the public knows best.

That irks today's home economists. They're not Fannie Farmers with fancy home-ec degrees, they insist. In fact, they're not home economists at all. They're human ecologists, family-and-consumer scientists, education-and-human-services specialists, human environmentalists, and a dozen other variations on the theme. Most of them don't even have degrees in home ec -- an issue of concern to traditionalists in the field. They come from chemistry, psychology, history, public health, and a host of other disciplinary backgrounds instead.

Whatever their title, modern-day home economists argue, one thing is clear. They're serious scholars with a progressive past, a promising future, and an array of accomplishments worthy of celebration.

Lucky for them, the time for celebrating is at hand. Home economics just turned 100 years old.

Actually, at least on a couple of campuses, it's a few years older. The most senior home-economics program at a land-grant institution -- where home ec was set up as a complement of sorts to agriculture colleges -- is at Iowa State University, where the program recently turned 125 years old. But the bulk of institutions either just wrapped up a centennial (Michigan State University, Ohio State University, Texas Tech University, the University of Nebraska at Lincoln), are blowing out the birthday candles this year (Cornell University, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, the University of Missouri at Columbia, New Mexico State University), or have festivities in the offing, like the University of Wisconsin at Madison, in 2003.

Here at Cornell -- the only Ivy League institution with a College of Human Ecology -- a whirlwind of receptions, exhibits, conferences, and galas is barely under way. But already, the agenda is clear, right down to the upbeat slogan: "Value Our Past, Create Our Future!"

And what a past it's been. Legend has it that when Melvil Dewey, father of the Dewey Decimal System, supported a bill in 1900 to establish a home-ec department at Cornell, Jacob Gould Schurman, Cornell's president at the time, hit the roof. "Cooks on the Cornell faculty?" Schurman thundered. "Never!"

Never, of course, is a very long time. The bill failed, but Dewey won. In 1900, Martha Van Rensselaer was hired to run a reading program for farm wives and became Cornell's first home economist. By 1919, she'd founded a college.

Today, the Martha Van Rensselaer Building is home to more than 1,300 undergraduates, 200 graduate students, and nearly 100 professors -- nutritionists, developmental psychologists, fiber scientists, policy analysts, public-health specialists, and facility planners, among them. "We span the gamut from the most-molecular life and physical sciences to social sciences to design and fine arts," says Patsy M. Brannon, dean of the human-ecology college and a nutritionist by training. The only problem, she adds, is nobody knows it. "There still are a lot of stereotypes that have nothing to do with what we're about."

What are the stereotypes? Lack of intellectual rigor. Too vocational. All women. Socially conservative. "Those stereotypes die hard deaths," Ms. Brannon says. "There's a lot of misunderstanding about what human ecology is."

Here's a working definition: Human ecology (a.k.a. human sciences, family and consumer sciences, human-environmental sciences) is the study of the physical, cultural, economic, social, and aesthetic environment that surrounds human beings from birth to death. Its lofty mission is to improve the human condition and to empower people to better their situation for themselves.

Today's home economists are designing better desk chairs for offices and safer fabrics for fire fighters. They're studying connections between cancer and food, and using biodegradable fibers to repair human joints. They're analyzing social-welfare programs, and helping to set up community health coalitions. They aren't cooking and cleaning any longer.

"We're dedicated to making life better for people," says Virginia B. Vincenti, a professor of family and consumer sciences at the University of Wyoming and a co-editor of Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Cornell University Press, 1997). "But we have to struggle for respect and recognition. People complain about teen pregnancy and violence, but don't make the connection that that's what we're about." Ms. Vincenti pauses, then asks plaintively, "Why are you so down on us?"

The writer Barbara Ehrenreich has an answer: eggs a la goldenrod.

She still remembers that lesson from her eighth-grade home-ec class, back in the 50's. "Want to hear it?" she asks. "Boil eggs. Separate the whites and the yolks. Loosely chop the whites, and mash the yolks. Make a white sauce. Mix the chopped whites into the sauce. Pour over toast. Sprinkle the mashed yolks on top. Serve."

She pauses for breath, then asks incredulously, "You're going to make this for breakfast? We learned the stupidest things. And things like that scar a person. I don't know how representative some of the things we learned in home economics were of the profession, but they did not engender warm feelings in girls of my generation."

No kidding. In 1972, Robin Morgan, an editor of Ms. magazine, kicked off her speech at the annual meeting of the American Home Economics Association with the line, "As a radical feminist, I am here addressing the enemy." Betty Friedan accused the field of fostering the myth of the "happy housewife heroine."

Ms. Ehrenreich has landed a few punches, too. In 1978, she and Deirdre English published For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women. It includes a blistering critique of home economists, who, the authors argued, used pseudoscientific theories about germs and cleaning to keep women trapped in the home.

The so-called "enemy" has a rejoinder to the jabs: Home economists have more in common with Betty Friedan than with Betty Crocker -- and they have from the start.

Here's how they tell it: Home economics was an outgrowth of the Progressive era, in the early 1900's. Its early leaders were scientists and suffragettes -- people like the chemist Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to earn a degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She conceived of home economics as a way to open professional possibilities for women, not foreclose them. Central to her plan was the concept of "municipal housekeeping" -- the notion that the home was bigger than the hearth, extending into all sorts of social, political, and cultural spheres.

Home economists "brought the world into the home," says Nancy Tomes, a historian at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. And the field brought women into the world. "It was the women's studies of its era," she says. "It represented a radical insertion of women into domains where they had not been welcomed before."

Home economics represented "a force through which women could transform the world," adds Rima D. Apple, a professor of human ecology and women's studies at Madison. And the world needed transforming, these women believed. Immigrants were flooding into the country. There was labor unrest. "From their perspective, they're seeing the world fall apart," Ms. Apple says. Home economics would save it -- one healthful meal at a time.

That's not as silly as it might sound. Think about what it takes to make a healthy meal. You need to understand what to eat and how to prepare it. Food must be stored at the correct temperature, which requires refrigeration, which demands electricity. Kitchens have to be properly cleaned to prevent bacteria from spreading. That requires clean water, which means making sure the septic tank is separate from the well. Then there's the issue of kitchen design. What height should the countertop be, and how should the appliances be set up, for maximum efficiency and minimum discomfort?

From a 21st-century perspective, that doesn't sound like rocket science. But turn the clock back 100 years -- before electricity, indoor plumbing, and an understanding of germs were commonplace in country kitchens. Thanks in no small part to home economics, historians maintain, they now are.

Then there are eggs a la goldenrod. Home economics did have its froufrou side. Cooking-school teachers glommed onto the movement. Bridge-playing society ladies opened training schools for servants. Betty Crocker wannabes parlayed home-ec degrees into positions as corporate shills.

To make things more difficult, states would dole out dollars only to those home-economics programs that attended to farm wives and teacher education. Serious scientific research didn't get nearly the same support.

During the Depression and World War II, home economists were told to teach families how to conserve food and plant victory gardens. Pragmatic work, to be sure, but not the kind that gets accolades from the intelligentsia.

Things really bottomed out in the 1950's. It was a socially conservative time, and home economics reflected that. Secondary education and basic-skills training hijacked the field. There were practice apartments on college campuses, complete with orphan babies for students to care for on a temporary basis. And the more-intellectual side of the discipline? It went unnoticed and underfinanced. No wonder feminists reviled the field.

"There was a piece of home economics that was deadly for women," says Joan Jacobs Brumberg, a professor of women's studies and human ecology at Cornell who has written extensively on anorexia, adolescent girls, and body image. "It could be conventional, trite. It socialized some women into hyperfeminity." She walks past a display case in the Rensselaer building containing two dresses from the 1950's design program -- a floor-length green-satin gown and a pink sequined cocktail dress. "But there was so much more."

It's up to her to prove it. She and the students in her upper-level seminar are hitting the archives this fall, amassing evidence about the history of home economics and preparing an exhibit come spring to show the world what they've learned.

"This is a scholarly revision," Ms. Brumberg explains. "We're saying, 'Hey, wait a minute. These were not all kitchen drones.'"

Certainly, the 13 women in her class aren't. They want to become fiber scientists and lawyers, psychologists and social workers. But most of their fellow students think they're "dumb chicks," says Chris Payne, a women's-studies student in the class. The fact that the student body in human ecology is 70 percent female doesn't do much to undermine that image.

Shayna Lustig, a junior in the class who is part of the college's human-development program, agrees. "A guy would rather come out with a psychology degree than a degree in human development," she says. "It's stigmatized."

It always has been. Home economics gave women a road into academe, but at times it was a dead end.

"You pay a real price for being ghettoized," says Sarah Stage, a professor of women's studies at Arizona State University West and a co-editor of Rethinking Home Economics. "Home economics is sort of a cautionary tale. Its lack of legitimacy hounded it regardless of what people in the field did to raise standards."

In fact, they did quite a bit. University programs cut teacher education and got rid of those practice apartments to improve their reputation for serious research. They encouraged men to enter the field and wooed faculty members from the arts and sciences. They even changed the name of the discipline. Too bad they couldn't agree on one name. "Ecology" smacked of tree-huggers to some. "Family" sounded too frilly to others.

"The moment you fracture your original identity, you've got a problem," says Shirley L. Baugher, human-ecology dean on Minnesota's Twin Cities campus. "And that's what we've done. We've fractured our identity."

From the looks of things, the fracture isn't going to heal anytime soon. "There are still wounds over all the name changes in the 80's and 90's," Ms. Baugher says. "If you bring up name-changing, people go rigid and head to their corners."

Names aren't the only thing that people in the field can't agree on. The influx of scholars from other disciplines created a rift within home economics. Some professors still identify with the synthetic notion of a home economist. Most do not.

"A home economist was a generalist," says Cornell's Ms. Brumberg. Or, in today's hyperspecialized world, "a dinosaur." She, on the other hand, is a member of a discipline; her discipline is history.

At times, Ms. Brumberg has had to struggle to get historians to take her work in human ecology seriously. Despite having a slew of publications and awards to her credit, for the first 10 years she was at Cornell she wasn't allowed to cross-list her human-ecology courses or advise graduate dissertations in history. She worried that that would happen when she took the human-ecology job: "My reservations were about status, and I believe my reservations were correct."

Kinsey B. Green, dean of Oregon State University's College of Home Economics and Education, has some reservations of her own -- but about the rise of disciplinarity within home economics, not the disciplines' disregard for home ec. "People are satisfied to run a federation of specialization. But you can't fragment the field. You can't teach nutrition without caring about family-resource management. You can't talk about shelter without talking about space utilization."

But when home economists talk, is anybody else listening? "We have a substantive body of knowledge," says Beverly J. Crabtree, former dean of the College of Family and Consumer Sciences at Iowa State. "But when you're dealing with issues that relate to families and food and clothing, people think they don't need a body of knowledge." They assume they already know everything that a home economist can teach.

And who in the elitist halls of research universities really cares about the people whom home economists -- or for that matter nurses, teachers, or social workers -- serve: single parents, troubled teens, the poor, the elderly? "If you follow the path of money, it's not in the fields that address the human condition," Ms. Baugher notes. It's certainly not in fields that focus on applied instead of basic research. Look at the data from the latest faculty-salary survey of the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources (formerly known as the College and University Personnel Association). In 1999-2000, home-economics professors at public institutions earned an average of $53,316. Professors in public health, a field in which many home-economics professors earned degrees, raked in $62,460.

Frankly, more than a few people in the field are sick of the lack of respect and tired of fighting for recognition. After years in the business, Oregon's Ms. Green has decided to "hang up my cleats." She announced her retirement in September, a few years ahead of schedule. After watching resources dwindle and administrative support shrivel up, she says the sense of being "consistently disadvantaged" finally got to her. Ms. Green, president of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences, wishes her unchosen successor better luck.

Sheila Mammen, head of the consumer-studies department at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, could use some of that luck. The university has cut off admissions to her department and may abolish it altogether.

"This is the one department that allows female graduates into the corporate suites of America," Ms. Mammen says, noting that one of her graduates is the president of Burberry's American stores. And yet her department might be shut down. "It makes no sense," she says.

The situation, she adds, "has us thinking. Are we devalued because we're mostly women? Are we being devalued because women's occupations and interests are not seen as important to the university? Clearly, this goes back to our place in the academy."

Bryan C. Harvey, an associate provost on the Amherst campus, disagrees. This is an issue of resources, not respect, he says, pointing out that money is tight all over the university. Consumer studies has lost half of its faculty members to attrition, he adds, and other departments have been closed in the past for similar reasons.

"The decision is not whether consumer studies is worthy of support," he argues. "Obviously, it is. We've been supporting it for years. The question is whether it's possible to pry resources from other departments for consumer studies. That's a different proposition."

It doesn't sound that different to Wyoming's Ms. Vincenti. Two years ago, her department almost got the ax. What saved it, she says, were 1,200 letters from outraged alumni.

"It hasn't been easy to be here," Ms. Vincenti says. "It's been downright painful at times." She's still rankled by the fact that she couldn't get an adjunct appointment in the women's-studies program, and that its professors refused to review the book she co-edited, Rethinking Home Economics.

"You can't dismiss the bias in the whole thing," she says, "even though that's not the whole story."

Janice H. Harris, a former director of women's studies at Wyoming, has a different story to tell. Face it, she says: Joint appointments for people who don't work in arts and sciences are a tough sell. And scholars don't review books outside their area of expertise. "I wouldn't review it," she notes, "because I didn't know enough about it."

She still doesn't, Ms. Harris acknowledges. "It's a question of not quite knowing what they do."

It's time for people to learn, says Cornell's Ms. Brannon. She hopes that the centennial will help.

The College of Human Ecology here kicked off the academic year with a barbecue, and Martha Van Rensselaer's recipe for "northern johnnycakes" was the highlight of the menu. No one was embarrassed that the founder baked cornbread, Ms. Brannon says. After all, she also advised the suffragette Carrie Chapman Catt, fought to improve the lives of farm wives, and was named one of the 12 greatest women in America by the League of Women Voters in 1923.

Besides, Ms. Brannon adds, the cornbread was delicious.

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