May 25, 2020 • 40 mins
For a time, the U.S. Department of Agriculture had a whole bureau of home economics, which was run by and for women, and was a huge part of the response to crises like the Great Depression and World War II.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Uh. It
may not surprise people when I get to the end
of this sentence, but I have been thinking a lot
(00:23):
lately about my maternal grandmother, who grew up during the
Great Depression. After that, she went on to raise five
children while also working full time at the mom and
pop furniture store that she and my grandfather started together
and before before that really got off the ground, she
had also graduated from college in nine with a degree
(00:45):
in home economics. By the time I was in high school,
a lot of school systems were phasing out their home
met classes, and by that point those classes, a lot
of the time focused mostly on the basics of things
like cooking and sewing, But whole economics, says a field,
was a lot broader than that, and for a time
the U. S Department of Agriculture had a whole Bureau
(01:07):
of Home Economics, which was run pretty much by and
for women, and was also a huge part of the
response to crises like the Great Depression and World War Two.
So thinking about my grandmother led me to this episode,
So we're gonna start by talking about the development of
home economics as a field. People who do domestic work,
(01:28):
whether in their own home or someone else's, have always
had to learn how to do it, but before the
middle of the nineteenth century in the United States, almost
all of that learning was informal. It was just handed
down from person to person, usually from one woman to another,
possibly supplemented with things like books and magazines. In general,
education for women and girls was limited and often most
(01:51):
accessible to white, relatively affluent students. So one of the
first people to start thinking about homemaking and do mess
dick work as a formal course of study with Catherine Beecher.
She was the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Beecher was
a proponent of education for women, and she also thought
that a woman's sphere was the home, so a lot
(02:13):
of her educational ideas were really focused on teaching women
domestic skills. She started implementing her Beacher Plan to that
end that Milwaukee Normal Institute and High School, which was
founded in eighteen fifty one. More home economics courses came
along in the eighteen sixties. In conjunction with the Moral
Land Grant College Act of eighteen sixty two, or an
(02:35):
Act donating public lands to the several States and territories
which may provide colleges for the benefit of agriculture and
the mechanic arts. This act granted land to the states,
with the amount of land based on how many seats
the state had in Congress. The states then sold the
land and used the proceeds either to fund new colleges
(02:56):
or to fund the creation of agriculture and mechanics schools
and exist ssting colleges. The first formalized home economics programs
got their start at land grant colleges including Iowa State College,
Kansas State Agricultural College, and Illinois Industrial University. Today those
are now Iowa State University, Kansas State University, and the
(03:19):
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. These programs described what
they were teaching using several different names, including home ecology,
human sciences, and practical life sciences. In addition to home economics,
some private women's colleges, including Wellesley, also dabbled with the
idea of home economics programs, but that idea didn't really
(03:40):
take off within the realm of private education in general.
The private women's colleges that were established in the nineteenth
century were focused on giving women access to the same
education that men had, not on teaching women what was
already thought of as women's work. The person who started
pulling all of these disparate home economics programs into a
(04:01):
more cohesive movement was Ellen Swallow Richards. Richards was the
first woman to be admitted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
which was a land grant school. She also became one
of the first women to work as a professional chemist
in the United States. Richard's time and m i T
followed a similar trajectory to other women that we've talked
(04:22):
about on the show. She completed PhD coursework, but was
not granted that degree because m i T did not
award doctoral degrees to women Because of her gender, Her
first year's teaching chemistry were unpaid, but she also focused
on opening doors for women in m i T, including
advocating for the establishment of its woman's laboratory, which was
(04:42):
funded by the Woman's Education Association of Boston in eighteen
seventy six. Most of Richard's work as a chemist was
focused on water quality but she also studied the chemistry
of homemaking. In eight nineties, she oversaw the establishment of
the New England Kitchen, which provided food to low income
families while also offering instruction and food preparation and food safety,
(05:05):
and they also conducted scientific research into cooking and nutrition.
In eighteen ninety one, she published The Chemistry of Cooking
and Cleaning, a manual for housekeepers, and she did demonstrations
of these concepts at the Chicago World's Fair in eighteen three.
In eighteen ninety nine, Richards convened a summer conference at
the Lake Placid Club in New York to discuss the
(05:26):
latest advancements in the field and where it was going.
Eleven people attended the conference in its first year, and
they agreed to standardize the name of the field as
home economics. The annual Lake Placid conferences grew over the
next decade, and the conference hung onto that Lake Placid name,
even when the meeting itself took place somewhere else. In
(05:48):
nineteen o two, attendees agreed on this definition of home
economics one. Home economics, in its most comprehensive sense, is
the study of laws, conditions, principles, and ideals which are
concerned on the one hand with man's immediate physical environment
and on the other hand, with his nature as a
social being, and is the study specifically of the relation
(06:11):
between those two factors. Two. In a narrow sense, the
term is given to the study of the empirical sciences
with special reference to the practical problems of housework, cooking,
et cetera. More than seven hundred people attended the final
Lake Placid Conference in nineteen o eight. That year, attendees
established the American Home Economics Association, and Richards served as
(06:34):
its first president. The following year, she established a journal
of home Economics and provided its initial funding. Some of
the other people who were heavily involved in the early
years of the home economics movement included Melville Dewey, who
developed the Dewey decimal system and his wife Annie. In
the early twentieth century, attendees of the Lake Placid conferences
(06:56):
actually lobbied very hard but unsuccessfully, to change how home
economics was classified within the Dewey decimal system. They tried
to move material that was more related to economics and
sociology under three hundred sociology instead of six hundred useful
arts basically sociology was a more prestigious number. Today, those
(07:20):
Dewey decimal classes are social Sciences and Technology. Two other
important figures were Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose, who
were the first two women to become full professors at
Cornell in nineteen eleven. They served as co directors of
Cornell's newly established Home Economics Department, which eventually became its
own school. Rose and Van Rensselaer were partners at work
(07:43):
and at home for more than twenty years, and they
were described as inseparable until Van Rensselaer's death in ninety two.
Together they were affectionately named Miss Van Rose, and they
advocated for home economics programs across the US. In addition
to their work at Cornell. Home economics programs got another
boost with the Smith Lever Act of nineteen fourteen. This
(08:06):
established the Cooperative Extension Service to provide outreach services, especially
to rural communities through the land Grant Colleges. There were
also more land grant colleges by this point thanks to
a second Moral Act passed in eighteen ninety that established
funding for schools for black students in the South. The
(08:26):
first Moral Act back in eighteen sixty two had allowed
states with segregated education systems to establish schools for black students,
but almost none of them had done so. Within a
year of the Smith Lever Act being passed, there were
more than eighteen hundred extension workers in the US who
conducted lectures, demonstrations, and classes through cooperative extension programs. In
(08:48):
nineteen seventeen alone, more than twenty seven thousand women took
home economics classes through cooperative extension services. That year, the
Smith Hughes Act also established funding for teachers for industrial, agricultural,
and home economics courses. A year later, home economics programs
were actively involved in relief efforts during the nineteen eighteen
(09:10):
flu pandemic. Home economists and home ex students cooked meals
for the sick and for healthcare workers. They sewed masks
and gowns for medical personnel, and they assisted with patient care.
Some colleges converted their home economics schools, which were already
equipped with kitchens and other necessary facilities, into field hospitals.
(09:30):
By this point, the field of home economics was well established,
with people, mostly women, learning domestic skills through classes taught
in public schools. Colleges and universities and cooperative extension programs.
Home economists were also involved with public health policy, community outreach,
and advocacy. The field also had a lot of crossover
(09:51):
with other progressive era movements, including labor activism, the settlement
house movement, and the women's suffrage movement. The field of
home econom mix also involved a lot of research. Home
economists studied subjects like food science, nutrition, textile science, child development,
and design. They evaluated newly introduced consumer products and services,
(10:15):
and they were really instrumental in public acceptance as some
of these new products, including things like prepackaged, canned, and
frozen foods. All of this research folded back into the
fields practical instruction arm as schools established graduate programs in
home economics. People with those degrees were also hired to
direct public health and school nutrition programs, as well as
(10:38):
food programs during times of hardship. Women with home economics
degrees also went on to work in hotel and restaurant management,
interior design, and other related fields. So the field of
home economics recognized that the work women were expected to
do to run a home was work, and that there
was a huge amount of it. As a few old.
(11:00):
It was dedicated to studying that work and its outcomes
into finding solutions to problems to try to make that
work easier, which would improve the quality of life for
homemakers and their families, and by extension, society as a whole.
So among its advocates, the field of home economics gave
women access to education that they would not have otherwise
(11:21):
and tools that they could use to make their own
lives better and their work easier and more effective. But
critics argued that the existence of these programs was just
reinforcing the expectation that the only thing women could or
should do was to become homemakers. There have been other
criticisms as well. Even as colleges and universities for black
(11:43):
students established home economics programs, the most vocal invisible people
in the field and the people hired to lead government
programs continued to be predominantly white. Because the field was
so focused on what was thought of as women's sphere,
some of its proponents were opposed to various well rights
measures for women, including the right to vote. Many college
(12:04):
programs and home economics included practice houses or practice apartments,
where students lived together to get practical experience in domestic skills.
Many of these programs also had practice babies that were
on loan from local orphanages, and these babies were basically
cared for by a rotating assortment of students. I may
(12:25):
be doing an episode on this soon, depending on where
the research takes me. The home economics movement also had
some overlap with the earlier years of the eugenics movement
and things like better baby contests. One of the early
names for the field was even euthenics or better living,
which was coined as a companion to Sir Francis Galton's
(12:49):
term eugenics were better breeding. We have a prior episode
on the eugenics movement in the archive for folks who
want more information on that. All that said, for a time,
offices and program ms within the federal government also recognized
the massive amount of labor involved with homemaking and how
critical it was to the nation, and they took steps
to help. We're going to talk more about that after
(13:11):
a sponsor break. The U s Department of Agriculture was
established in eighteen sixty two, and by the start of
the twentieth century it had various programs and offices that
were related to the field of whome economics in one
(13:32):
way or another. Then, in nineteen fifteen, the Office of
Home Economics was formally established as part of the State's
Relations Service. Those existing programs that had been kind of
spread through the U. S d A Were consolidated under
the newly established office, and that office started up new
projects as well. In the words of various appropriations bills,
(13:53):
the office would allow the Department of Agriculture to quote
investigate the relative utility and economy of agriculture real products
for food, clothing, and other uses in the home, with
special suggestions of plans and methods for more effective utilization
of such products for these purposes, and to disseminate useful
information on the subject. So it was a department that
(14:14):
did a lot of outreach and created educational programs and materials,
as well as doing a lot of research, including analyzing
data that was being gathered by other departments. A lot
of this research was about food it's digestibility and its nutrients,
including analyzing vitamin content. Vitamins at that point were still
(14:35):
a really new discovery. The office managed studies that used
a respiration calorimeter and that to assess the caloric content
of different foods. All of this led to the nation's
first government nutrition guidelines, and this was not just about
how much food it took to sustain a person, but
also about how much money a family needed to be
(14:55):
spending on food and how to prevent food waste. Experiments
in a test hitchen looked at questions like the best
ways to need bread, how to conserve fuel in stoves
and ovens, how to get bigger yields in homemade jellies.
Researchers studied various methods of home canning to figure out
how to preserve food safely while maintaining its quality. Other
(15:17):
projects involved studying different fats and frying methods to reduce
the waste of oil. The Office of Home Economics also
surveyed women about the problems they faced in their lives
and what the office might do to help them. For example,
a nineteen fifteen survey on the domestic needs of farm
women revealed that women living on farms had concerns about
(15:38):
pest management and efficient kitchen design, and fashionable a dresses.
The women who were surveying talked about really wanting clothes
that they felt good about wearing. And that were easy
enough to make that they could get it right the
first time without wasting fabric on doovers. So the Department
of Home Economics started drafting functional attractive dress pattern They
(16:00):
had a lot of features, like having three quarter length
sleeves so that you were less likely to get your
sleeve caught in the cooking fire. Like that kind of
a mindset. They also made patterns for women's work clothes,
since the surveys also revealed that farm women did not
like having to work in their husbands altered cast offs.
The Office of Home Economics also published material for educational programs.
(16:24):
For example, in nineteen seventeen bulletin by Louis Stanley outlined
all the topics that should be covered in a complete
first year home economics course. They were food selection, both
in homegrown and purchased food, as well as food preparation
and planning and serving meals. Shelter including home sanitation, planning, decoration,
(16:45):
furnishing and care. Clothing including selection making, keeping in good
repair and laundry. Care and training of children including infant care,
addressing problems in young children, and amusement for children. HW
gene and sanitation including knowledge of diseases and ways to
preserve health, caring for the sick at home, household management
(17:08):
including budgeting and training for the enjoyment of leisure time.
I like the idea that that sort of reads as though, uh,
you've got so much to do that you might need
a little help figuring out how to enjoy it when
you have leisure time. Uh. In the Association of Land
(17:29):
Grant Colleges started advocating for the Department of Home Economics
to become its own full fledged bureau. Congress authorized the
creation of the Bureau of Home Economics on July one.
Of the chief of this newly created bureau was Dr
Louise Stanley, author of that bulletin that we just mentioned.
(17:49):
Stanley was the third woman to head a federal bureau,
and the first to head one that was considered major.
The two that were ahead of her where Grace Abbott,
who was chief of the Children's Bureau of the Department
of Labor, and Mary Anderson, who was chief of the
Department's Women's Bureau. Stanley had earned a PhD in chemistry
from Yale in nineteen eleven, and she had served as
(18:10):
professor and chair of Home Economics at the University of
Missouri before joining the FDA in nineteen fourteen. For most
of the nineteen twenties, she made her home in Washington,
d C. With Annabelle Matthews, a solicitor with the Department
of the Treasury. Mabel Walker Willow Brandt and her adopted daughter,
Dorothy joined the household in the mid twenties, and when
she and her daughter moved to Georgetown in ninety nine,
(18:33):
Stanley adopted a baby girl named Nancy, who had previously
been a practice baby. The news article about that is
how I learned about practice babies, and almost abandoned this
entire episode to just focus on that, but I did
not did not have time to be changing the horse
in the middle of that stream. When the Bureau of
Home Economics was first established, it had a budget of
(18:56):
seventy two thousand dollars and a staff of about five people.
Stanley's salary was about five thousand dollars, and that made
her the highest paid woman in the federal government at
that time. By the nineteen thirties, the bureau had grown
to a staff of seventy one and a budget of
more than a hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars. The
main areas of focus for the Bureau of Home Economics
(19:17):
were food and nutrition, textiles and clothing, and the economics
of the home. The Respiration Calorometer was transferred to the
Bureau of Animal Industry, but the Bureau of Home Economics
still did a lot of research into vitamins, diet, the
nutritional content of foods, and food preparation and storage methods.
This included research into using diet to treat and prevent pellagra,
(19:39):
which is caused by a nyasin deficiency and was widespread
in the South. The Bureau of Home Economics built on
a lot of the research that the Office of Home
Economics had previously been doing studies in food and nutrition,
including cooking times and temperatures, storage temperatures, and shelf life,
along with continuing to refine home canning practices. The Bureau
(20:01):
also studied preparation methods for reindeer, which had been introduced
into Alaska as a food source for Alaska natives over
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Bureau did
similar work with rabbits during times when people were encouraged
to raise rabbits as a food source, which included during
World War Two. As home refrigeration became more common in
(20:22):
the nineteen forties, the Bureau used a microbiology lab to
determine temperature ranges for safe refrigeration. When it came to textiles,
there just had not been a lot of formal study
into how to best care for different fabrics. The Bureau
studied had a care for different fibers and how those
fibers could most effectively be used. They also researched home
(20:43):
laundering things like water temperatures and the efficacy of different detergents,
including how much soil was really removed and how the
textiles themselves were affected. The Bureau also researched ironing, stain removal,
and hygiene. The Bureau also continued to design and extribute
patterns for clothing and household articles. They really focused on
(21:04):
items that were sturdy and practical with easy construction and
easy laundering, and Chouldren's clothing. They focused on durability, ease
of care, and designs that allowed children to learn to
dress themselves. When ready to wear garments became more widely
popular and widely available, the Bureau shifted its focus away
(21:24):
from home sewing and onto how to select and care
for store bought garments, as well as on advocating for
standardized sizes and ready to wear clothing. The department's focus
on the economics of the home came from a lot
of directions. One aspect was how people were using their incomes.
A lot of this research focused on food and clothing,
(21:44):
since those are the two major expenses in most households.
The bureau studied what people actually bought, with the goal
of matching production in the US to what consumers were
going to consume. The bureau also studied mother's pensions, which
were payments to mothers of newborn to encourage them to
stay home, which had been implemented in most states by
the mid nineteen thirties. The Bureau wanted to determine whether
(22:08):
the payments really were enough to allow a new mother
to stay at home. The bureau also focused on the
more intangible idea of homemaker's workloads, including asking women to
keep really detailed records of their days. Hilda guard Neiland
was the head of the Economics of the Home team, and,
in her words from a publication called is the Modern
(22:29):
Housewife a Lady of Leisure? Quote five six of these
homemakers spent over forty two hours a week in their homemaking.
More than half spent over forty eight hours, and one
third spent over fifty six hours. The average for all
is slightly over fifty one hours a week. If this
be part time work, what one may ask would be
(22:51):
full time. This economic study wasn't just about documenting how
much work it took to manage a home. The bureau
also researched time and labor saving techniques to try to
make the work involved in keeping a home more efficient.
All of the research that the Bureau was doing informed
a wealth of publications that were distributed through public schools, colleges,
(23:12):
and extension programs, as well as home economics clubs. The
bureau's outreach also went straight to consumers through pamphlets, cookbooks,
radio addresses, and other materials. In nineteen forty three, the
Bureau of Home Economics became the Bureau of Human Nutrition
and Home Economics. Hazel Catherine Steebling became its chief in
nineteen four. Like Louise Stanley, she had a PhD in chemistry.
(23:37):
The Bureau continued with this efforts to quote develop through research,
new knowledge about efficient household management and ways to make
best consumer use of food, fiber, and other products of
the country's farms. In the nineteen forties, this included research
into the most efficient kitchen design, concluding that a U
shaped kitchen could allow enough space for two women to
(23:58):
work while keeping cross traffic from the rest of the
house from getting in the way. As expectations and roles
for women shifted in the nineteen sixties, the federal government
started to scale back the bureau, and the Bureau of
Human Nutrition and Home Economics was disbanded in nineteen sixty two.
Some of the research that had been going on continued
(24:18):
through the U. S d A's Agricultural Research Service, and
some of the same types of research in some areas
do continue today, both through the Agricultural Research Service and
through the Economic Research Service. The fields of home economics
and home economics education were also changing. From its beginnings,
homec had been thought of as a subject for women,
(24:39):
and in many public schools, girls automatically took home economics
while boys took shop or industrial arts. Title nine of
the Education Amendments of nineteen seventy two outlawed this type
of discrimination, which led to questions about whether these classes
were still legal if they were open to all, but
if only girls enrolled. Of course, there are also other
(25:01):
conversations about like what kinds of education were necessary and useful,
and what schools and school systems should be paying for,
which is one of the reasons that by the time
I came along, like the home mech at school and
a lot of places, was not as big of a deal.
In the American Home Economics Association became the American Association
(25:22):
of Family and Consumer Sciences, and in places where these
types of classes are still part of the curriculum and
where college programs still exist, Family and Consumer Sciences is
the more common name. The cooperative extension service that was
such a big part of home economics education still exists,
and Family and Consumer Sciences continues on as this interdisciplinary field,
(25:44):
incorporating a lot of the same specializations that were previously
thought of as part of home economics. We hadn't really
talked about the Bureau of Home Economics role in times
of crisis, which is a big reason behind doing this episode,
and it also touches on some topics that we have
gotten a lot of quest for lately. So we're gonna
get to all that, but first we'll take a quick
sponsor break. The Office of Home Economics and the Bureau
(26:14):
of Home Economics. We're both instrumental in helping American families
cope during some hard times. The Office of Home Economics
was already in place when the United States became involved
in World War One, and the Bureau of Home Economics
had programs that were meant to address the hardships that
accompanied the Great Depression and World War Two, So we're
going to spend a few minutes talking about them. During
(26:36):
World War One, the Office of Home Economics was a
huge part of food conservation programs in the United States.
The overall goal was not just to make sure households
were able to make do with what was available, but
also to allow the United States to provide food support
to its allies in the war. In the words of
the Day's Food in War and Peace, the situation has
(26:58):
become critical. Is not enough food in Europe? Yet? The
soldiers of the allies must be maintained in full strength,
Their wives and children at home must not face famine,
The friendly Neutrals must not be starved. And finally, our
own army in France must never lack a needed ounce
of food. There is just one way in which all
(27:18):
these requirements can be meant. North America must furnish the food,
and we must furnish it from our savings, because we
have already sent our normal surplus. The Day's Food in
War in Peace was published by the Department of Agriculture
and the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense,
and it was created in part with the government's home economists.
(27:40):
It was a teaching tool meant as a guide for
things like club programs or community demonstrations, and it also
directed women to their local university's home economics departments as
well as the local branches of the American Home Economics
Association for support. This publication really focused on reducing the
use of wheat, meat, fat, and shower and strictly portioning
(28:02):
other foods to eliminate food waste, but it also stressed
not to hoard food. It also called for women's support
in the food conservation effort, not just for the sake
of their nation and their families, but also out of
empathy for the women of Europe, especially France. It noted
that most French women bought their bread from bakers, and
that if bakers didn't have the wheat they needed. Even
(28:23):
after making substitutions, French women had to turn to making
porridges and cakes that weren't already part of their cooking repertoire,
while also caring for the sick and wounded and living
in constant wartime peril. Quote. Not one slightest additional burden
should be laid on the women of France. Far less
should they be forced to add another hour to their
(28:44):
long day of toil because we failed to send them wheat.
The day's food and War in Peace includes a lot
of recipes. There are victory breads, which were any breads
that contained a wheat substitute in place of at least
twenty five percent of the wheat that was normally called for.
Substitutes included barley flour, rolled oats, corn flour, and buckwheat.
(29:05):
There are also quick breads made entirely from wheat substitutes,
and meatless recipes, including bean soups and stuffed cabbage, as
well as sponge cakes that didn't require wheat or fat.
This publication also includes information about the calorie content of
different foods, as well as the calories needed to support
an eight hour work day in different occupations, depending on
(29:27):
how strenuous those occupations were. There's also a cost breakdown
based on the price of foods versus how many calories
they provide. One of the later chapters encourages people to
buy as much as they can locally and to research
the farms and other resources in their own area. Throughout
it is full of information about how wheat, meat, fat,
and sugar work in food and in the body, and
(29:50):
the why behind the directions to conserve them. The Day's
Food and War and Peace was aimed at people who
would be teaching this material to others, but the Office
of homeak and on X was also involved in informational
pamphlets for consumers. These pamphlets included directions on how to
prepare food in an economical way, how to make limited
(30:10):
ingredients stretch, and how to prepare foods that might not
have been pantry staples and other circumstances. Titles from this
series included make a Little Meat Go a Long Way
instead of meat, Vegetables for Winter, Save sugar dried peas
and beans, and wheatless bread and cakes. The Office of
(30:30):
Home Economics also contributed to thrift leaflets that were published
in conjunction with the Savings Division of the Department of
the Treasury. By the start of the Great Depression, the U.
S d A had developed a character called Aunt Sammy,
who was Uncle Sam's wife and who gave advice and
answered women's questions. Aunt Sammy's Radio Recipes was a collection
(30:51):
of recipes that had first come out through weekly housekeeper's
chats that were aired through the radio. This became the
first cookbook in the US to be printed in braille.
From the start, the Aunt Sammy Recipes were intended to
be pretty economical, and during the Great Depression, the Department
of Home Economics went even further with a series of
publications about low cost meal preparation and recipes. This included
(31:15):
titles like Getting the Most for Your Food Money, The
Families Food at Low Cost, and a weekly newspaper column
called Market Basket. Some of the advice in these publications
was similar to what had been in the Day's Food
and More in Peace when it came to conserving food,
avoiding waste, and incorporating cheaper ingredients, but the Depression era
publications also included a lot more about incorporating canned and
(31:39):
frozen foods, as well as enriched food products. The cost
of many foods had dropped, but people also had less money,
so along with tips about getting the most for your money,
there were tips about using cuts of meat that some
families had previously found too expensive, but we're now priced
lower than other alternatives. A lot of these depression error
(32:00):
recipes were cheap and filling, and they were nutritionally complete
based on the knowledge of the day, but they were
not necessarily appetizing. In general, they tended to be both
mushy and bland. For example, a low cost menu from
a nineteen thirty three edition of The Market Basket goes
like this, prunes and hot cereal or toast for breakfast,
(32:21):
along with tomato juice for young children, milk for older children,
and coffee for adults. A dinner of mashed dried beans,
stewed tomatoes, brown bread or grand muffins and tea for adults,
with milk for children, and a supper of cottage cheese, salad,
bread and butter, cocoa and canned fruit. I'm having a
(32:42):
kitchen related sad trombone in my I mean, we've been
eating a lot of dried beans during the pandemic that
we have been living through, but they have not been
prepared in a mushy, bland way. No, I feel like,
because we're cooking at home all the time, we've kind
of been eating like kings because yeah, I love a
(33:04):
little kitchen experiment action and I love to invent things.
So uh. Some of this mushy blandness, though, that we're
talking about, was because of a belief that overly seasoned
foods were too invigorating to the digestive system and would
make people feel hungrier. As an aside, this breaks my heart,
but there was probably some prejudice at work here as well.
In general, the bureau's recipe writers did not approve of
(33:27):
spices that recent immigrants often relied on. During World War Two,
the Bureau of Home Economics again focused on food conservation,
including cooking with rationed ingredients. As I read a whole
pamphlet that was about how much sugar you could get
for canning with the ration system. It also published materials
to help women process and store vegetables that were grown
(33:51):
in victory gardens, although information about the gardens themselves typically
came from other parts of the U. S d A
and the War Food Administration. One aspect of this included
a December three radio broadcast reminding women that if they
got canned vegetables or preserves as Christmas presents, they should
(34:12):
carefully save those canning jars and lids for the following
growing season. The Bureau also published material to help women
who were entering the workforce during wartime. Publication called Work
Clothes for Women listed these chapters in its table of contents.
Know your job and dress for it Field suit, mechanics suit, jumper,
(34:34):
slack suit, protect all food preparation dress, divided skirt, dress,
belted overall apron, surplus overall Apron, laboratory dress, surplus house
dress cover itt Princess overall Apron, Nurses uniform, utility aprons.
(34:56):
The Bureau also published patterns for these and other work
garments for women. After the end of World War Two,
President Harry S. Truman established the President's Famine Emergency Committee
to fight against World famine. The Bureau of Home Economics
was ready with publications advising Americans again to cut back
on wheat, fats, and oils to contribute to the overall
(35:18):
aid effort. One pamphlet advised people to quote reach for
a potato instead of bread, and offered suggestions for using potatoes, cornmeal, oatmeal,
and other substitutes in place of bread. This particular publication
also noted that people should conserve rice and not throw
it at weddings. And since this was all government produced work,
(35:40):
it is in the public domain today and a lot
of it is available online. If you google Bureau of
Home Economics publications, you can go down a real rabbit
hole patterns here. I come, yeah, there's patterns is also,
I mean, just so many different recipes, some of which
I was curious to try, like various victory breads or
quick breads that are including wheat substitutes. Um, Like, I
(36:03):
know some people have had a hard time getting wheat
and used during the pandemic, and like, I was very
curious about trying some of those. Some of them I
found a little more uh questionable. Like I found, um
a broiled fish recipe that advised cooking the fish um
at a temperature like three fifty or something like that
for like twenty minutes and then putting it on the
(36:26):
broiler for another fifteen more minutes. And I was like,
this does not sound like a good number of total
minutes for some fish to me. I suspect, like the
broiler had to be less powerful than what we're used
to has to be because otherwise you're gonna have fish
jerky fish charcoal. Do you have listener mail to go
(36:50):
with this delightful adventure? I already found a pattern I'm
gonna make. Um. I have listener mail from Maggie. Maggie
says Hello, Holly and Tracy as one of perhaps many
people who have written episode requests for Anything bee Keeping.
When I opened today's podcast and saw a brief history
of beekeeping, I think the neighbors could hear my shriek
(37:11):
of delight. After eight years of being a beekeeper, member
of our local hobby Beekeepers Association, and editor of the newsletter,
I know a bit about the subject, but you did
not disappoint with new and fun facts. I loved hearing
about what Samuel Peeps had to say upon seeing an
observation hive and quote the bees making their honey and
colmbs mighty pleasantly. Their comments of agreement with his feelings
(37:34):
were a surprise. I thought it was only nutty beekeepers
who fell in love with their little charges. A while back,
I had an MRI I type scan and before going
into the tube, the technician advised me to go to
my happy place when I emerged, I commented to her,
I bet not a lot of people tell you their
happy place is watching bees. She said, indeed not. Maggie
(37:57):
goes on to say that she doesn't have any hives
this year and missed is that the bees terribly so
thanks for that little buzz, and then in parentheses beekeepers
are a penny lot. UM. Maggie also sent some pictures
of of a bear proof a biary UM, which I
looked at and I was like, I bet a bear,
really determined bear might still get through that UM, and
(38:21):
then also donned outfit for UM treating with some vapor
to try to control baroa mites in the beehives. UM.
So this email ends with thanks again, and stay out
of those crowded hives, Maggie, Thank you so much, Maggie. UM.
(38:41):
I said in that episode, I really like bees. UM. Lately,
I've been playing a lot of animal crossing, like I
know a lot of other people have also. And when
a friend of mine UM found the d i y
recipe for bee hives, she immediately may multiple bee hives
(39:02):
and I sent her more waspness to make more beehives
out of so now I have like three bee hives
on my animal crossing Island. I've also been playing a
lot of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, where I very recently needed
to go find a beehive out in the world, and
I got really excited about that because I was like, Okay,
I just learned all these various things about bee hives
(39:22):
and beekeeping doing that that episode of the podcast what
beehive design is going to be in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Um,
the answer was spoiler alert, stacked horizontal tube hives that
were um longer than I expected them to be. Um,
(39:43):
but still pretty cool. So anyway, thank you so much
Maggie for this lovely email. We got it a couple
of other emails about bees this morning, so be keeping
might make another appearance in future listener mail. If you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast or his podcast at i heeart radio dot
com and you can find us all over social media
(40:04):
at missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, counterest, Twitter,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, and anywhere else you
get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
(40:26):
i Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Uh. It
may not surprise people when I get to the end
of this sentence, but I have been thinking a lot
(00:23):
lately about my maternal grandmother, who grew up during the
Great Depression. After that, she went on to raise five
children while also working full time at the mom and
pop furniture store that she and my grandfather started together
and before before that really got off the ground, she
had also graduated from college in nine with a degree
(00:45):
in home economics. By the time I was in high school,
a lot of school systems were phasing out their home
met classes, and by that point those classes, a lot
of the time focused mostly on the basics of things
like cooking and sewing, But whole economics, says a field,
was a lot broader than that, and for a time
the U. S Department of Agriculture had a whole Bureau
(01:07):
of Home Economics, which was run pretty much by and
for women, and was also a huge part of the
response to crises like the Great Depression and World War Two.
So thinking about my grandmother led me to this episode,
So we're gonna start by talking about the development of
home economics as a field. People who do domestic work,
(01:28):
whether in their own home or someone else's, have always
had to learn how to do it, but before the
middle of the nineteenth century in the United States, almost
all of that learning was informal. It was just handed
down from person to person, usually from one woman to another,
possibly supplemented with things like books and magazines. In general,
education for women and girls was limited and often most
(01:51):
accessible to white, relatively affluent students. So one of the
first people to start thinking about homemaking and do mess
dick work as a formal course of study with Catherine Beecher.
She was the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe. Beecher was
a proponent of education for women, and she also thought
that a woman's sphere was the home, so a lot
(02:13):
of her educational ideas were really focused on teaching women
domestic skills. She started implementing her Beacher Plan to that
end that Milwaukee Normal Institute and High School, which was
founded in eighteen fifty one. More home economics courses came
along in the eighteen sixties. In conjunction with the Moral
Land Grant College Act of eighteen sixty two, or an
(02:35):
Act donating public lands to the several States and territories
which may provide colleges for the benefit of agriculture and
the mechanic arts. This act granted land to the states,
with the amount of land based on how many seats
the state had in Congress. The states then sold the
land and used the proceeds either to fund new colleges
(02:56):
or to fund the creation of agriculture and mechanics schools
and exist ssting colleges. The first formalized home economics programs
got their start at land grant colleges including Iowa State College,
Kansas State Agricultural College, and Illinois Industrial University. Today those
are now Iowa State University, Kansas State University, and the
(03:19):
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. These programs described what
they were teaching using several different names, including home ecology,
human sciences, and practical life sciences. In addition to home economics,
some private women's colleges, including Wellesley, also dabbled with the
idea of home economics programs, but that idea didn't really
(03:40):
take off within the realm of private education in general.
The private women's colleges that were established in the nineteenth
century were focused on giving women access to the same
education that men had, not on teaching women what was
already thought of as women's work. The person who started
pulling all of these disparate home economics programs into a
(04:01):
more cohesive movement was Ellen Swallow Richards. Richards was the
first woman to be admitted at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
which was a land grant school. She also became one
of the first women to work as a professional chemist
in the United States. Richard's time and m i T
followed a similar trajectory to other women that we've talked
(04:22):
about on the show. She completed PhD coursework, but was
not granted that degree because m i T did not
award doctoral degrees to women Because of her gender, Her
first year's teaching chemistry were unpaid, but she also focused
on opening doors for women in m i T, including
advocating for the establishment of its woman's laboratory, which was
(04:42):
funded by the Woman's Education Association of Boston in eighteen
seventy six. Most of Richard's work as a chemist was
focused on water quality but she also studied the chemistry
of homemaking. In eight nineties, she oversaw the establishment of
the New England Kitchen, which provided food to low income
families while also offering instruction and food preparation and food safety,
(05:05):
and they also conducted scientific research into cooking and nutrition.
In eighteen ninety one, she published The Chemistry of Cooking
and Cleaning, a manual for housekeepers, and she did demonstrations
of these concepts at the Chicago World's Fair in eighteen three.
In eighteen ninety nine, Richards convened a summer conference at
the Lake Placid Club in New York to discuss the
(05:26):
latest advancements in the field and where it was going.
Eleven people attended the conference in its first year, and
they agreed to standardize the name of the field as
home economics. The annual Lake Placid conferences grew over the
next decade, and the conference hung onto that Lake Placid name,
even when the meeting itself took place somewhere else. In
(05:48):
nineteen o two, attendees agreed on this definition of home
economics one. Home economics, in its most comprehensive sense, is
the study of laws, conditions, principles, and ideals which are
concerned on the one hand with man's immediate physical environment
and on the other hand, with his nature as a
social being, and is the study specifically of the relation
(06:11):
between those two factors. Two. In a narrow sense, the
term is given to the study of the empirical sciences
with special reference to the practical problems of housework, cooking,
et cetera. More than seven hundred people attended the final
Lake Placid Conference in nineteen o eight. That year, attendees
established the American Home Economics Association, and Richards served as
(06:34):
its first president. The following year, she established a journal
of home Economics and provided its initial funding. Some of
the other people who were heavily involved in the early
years of the home economics movement included Melville Dewey, who
developed the Dewey decimal system and his wife Annie. In
the early twentieth century, attendees of the Lake Placid conferences
(06:56):
actually lobbied very hard but unsuccessfully, to change how home
economics was classified within the Dewey decimal system. They tried
to move material that was more related to economics and
sociology under three hundred sociology instead of six hundred useful
arts basically sociology was a more prestigious number. Today, those
(07:20):
Dewey decimal classes are social Sciences and Technology. Two other
important figures were Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose, who
were the first two women to become full professors at
Cornell in nineteen eleven. They served as co directors of
Cornell's newly established Home Economics Department, which eventually became its
own school. Rose and Van Rensselaer were partners at work
(07:43):
and at home for more than twenty years, and they
were described as inseparable until Van Rensselaer's death in ninety two.
Together they were affectionately named Miss Van Rose, and they
advocated for home economics programs across the US. In addition
to their work at Cornell. Home economics programs got another
boost with the Smith Lever Act of nineteen fourteen. This
(08:06):
established the Cooperative Extension Service to provide outreach services, especially
to rural communities through the land Grant Colleges. There were
also more land grant colleges by this point thanks to
a second Moral Act passed in eighteen ninety that established
funding for schools for black students in the South. The
(08:26):
first Moral Act back in eighteen sixty two had allowed
states with segregated education systems to establish schools for black students,
but almost none of them had done so. Within a
year of the Smith Lever Act being passed, there were
more than eighteen hundred extension workers in the US who
conducted lectures, demonstrations, and classes through cooperative extension programs. In
(08:48):
nineteen seventeen alone, more than twenty seven thousand women took
home economics classes through cooperative extension services. That year, the
Smith Hughes Act also established funding for teachers for industrial, agricultural,
and home economics courses. A year later, home economics programs
were actively involved in relief efforts during the nineteen eighteen
(09:10):
flu pandemic. Home economists and home ex students cooked meals
for the sick and for healthcare workers. They sewed masks
and gowns for medical personnel, and they assisted with patient care.
Some colleges converted their home economics schools, which were already
equipped with kitchens and other necessary facilities, into field hospitals.
(09:30):
By this point, the field of home economics was well established,
with people, mostly women, learning domestic skills through classes taught
in public schools. Colleges and universities and cooperative extension programs.
Home economists were also involved with public health policy, community outreach,
and advocacy. The field also had a lot of crossover
(09:51):
with other progressive era movements, including labor activism, the settlement
house movement, and the women's suffrage movement. The field of
home econom mix also involved a lot of research. Home
economists studied subjects like food science, nutrition, textile science, child development,
and design. They evaluated newly introduced consumer products and services,
(10:15):
and they were really instrumental in public acceptance as some
of these new products, including things like prepackaged, canned, and
frozen foods. All of this research folded back into the
fields practical instruction arm as schools established graduate programs in
home economics. People with those degrees were also hired to
direct public health and school nutrition programs, as well as
(10:38):
food programs during times of hardship. Women with home economics
degrees also went on to work in hotel and restaurant management,
interior design, and other related fields. So the field of
home economics recognized that the work women were expected to
do to run a home was work, and that there
was a huge amount of it. As a few old.
(11:00):
It was dedicated to studying that work and its outcomes
into finding solutions to problems to try to make that
work easier, which would improve the quality of life for
homemakers and their families, and by extension, society as a whole.
So among its advocates, the field of home economics gave
women access to education that they would not have otherwise
(11:21):
and tools that they could use to make their own
lives better and their work easier and more effective. But
critics argued that the existence of these programs was just
reinforcing the expectation that the only thing women could or
should do was to become homemakers. There have been other
criticisms as well. Even as colleges and universities for black
(11:43):
students established home economics programs, the most vocal invisible people
in the field and the people hired to lead government
programs continued to be predominantly white. Because the field was
so focused on what was thought of as women's sphere,
some of its proponents were opposed to various well rights
measures for women, including the right to vote. Many college
(12:04):
programs and home economics included practice houses or practice apartments,
where students lived together to get practical experience in domestic skills.
Many of these programs also had practice babies that were
on loan from local orphanages, and these babies were basically
cared for by a rotating assortment of students. I may
(12:25):
be doing an episode on this soon, depending on where
the research takes me. The home economics movement also had
some overlap with the earlier years of the eugenics movement
and things like better baby contests. One of the early
names for the field was even euthenics or better living,
which was coined as a companion to Sir Francis Galton's
(12:49):
term eugenics were better breeding. We have a prior episode
on the eugenics movement in the archive for folks who
want more information on that. All that said, for a time,
offices and program ms within the federal government also recognized
the massive amount of labor involved with homemaking and how
critical it was to the nation, and they took steps
to help. We're going to talk more about that after
(13:11):
a sponsor break. The U s Department of Agriculture was
established in eighteen sixty two, and by the start of
the twentieth century it had various programs and offices that
were related to the field of whome economics in one
(13:32):
way or another. Then, in nineteen fifteen, the Office of
Home Economics was formally established as part of the State's
Relations Service. Those existing programs that had been kind of
spread through the U. S d A Were consolidated under
the newly established office, and that office started up new
projects as well. In the words of various appropriations bills,
(13:53):
the office would allow the Department of Agriculture to quote
investigate the relative utility and economy of agriculture real products
for food, clothing, and other uses in the home, with
special suggestions of plans and methods for more effective utilization
of such products for these purposes, and to disseminate useful
information on the subject. So it was a department that
(14:14):
did a lot of outreach and created educational programs and materials,
as well as doing a lot of research, including analyzing
data that was being gathered by other departments. A lot
of this research was about food it's digestibility and its nutrients,
including analyzing vitamin content. Vitamins at that point were still
(14:35):
a really new discovery. The office managed studies that used
a respiration calorimeter and that to assess the caloric content
of different foods. All of this led to the nation's
first government nutrition guidelines, and this was not just about
how much food it took to sustain a person, but
also about how much money a family needed to be
(14:55):
spending on food and how to prevent food waste. Experiments
in a test hitchen looked at questions like the best
ways to need bread, how to conserve fuel in stoves
and ovens, how to get bigger yields in homemade jellies.
Researchers studied various methods of home canning to figure out
how to preserve food safely while maintaining its quality. Other
(15:17):
projects involved studying different fats and frying methods to reduce
the waste of oil. The Office of Home Economics also
surveyed women about the problems they faced in their lives
and what the office might do to help them. For example,
a nineteen fifteen survey on the domestic needs of farm
women revealed that women living on farms had concerns about
(15:38):
pest management and efficient kitchen design, and fashionable a dresses.
The women who were surveying talked about really wanting clothes
that they felt good about wearing. And that were easy
enough to make that they could get it right the
first time without wasting fabric on doovers. So the Department
of Home Economics started drafting functional attractive dress pattern They
(16:00):
had a lot of features, like having three quarter length
sleeves so that you were less likely to get your
sleeve caught in the cooking fire. Like that kind of
a mindset. They also made patterns for women's work clothes,
since the surveys also revealed that farm women did not
like having to work in their husbands altered cast offs.
The Office of Home Economics also published material for educational programs.
(16:24):
For example, in nineteen seventeen bulletin by Louis Stanley outlined
all the topics that should be covered in a complete
first year home economics course. They were food selection, both
in homegrown and purchased food, as well as food preparation
and planning and serving meals. Shelter including home sanitation, planning, decoration,
(16:45):
furnishing and care. Clothing including selection making, keeping in good
repair and laundry. Care and training of children including infant care,
addressing problems in young children, and amusement for children. HW
gene and sanitation including knowledge of diseases and ways to
preserve health, caring for the sick at home, household management
(17:08):
including budgeting and training for the enjoyment of leisure time.
I like the idea that that sort of reads as though, uh,
you've got so much to do that you might need
a little help figuring out how to enjoy it when
you have leisure time. Uh. In the Association of Land
(17:29):
Grant Colleges started advocating for the Department of Home Economics
to become its own full fledged bureau. Congress authorized the
creation of the Bureau of Home Economics on July one.
Of the chief of this newly created bureau was Dr
Louise Stanley, author of that bulletin that we just mentioned.
(17:49):
Stanley was the third woman to head a federal bureau,
and the first to head one that was considered major.
The two that were ahead of her where Grace Abbott,
who was chief of the Children's Bureau of the Department
of Labor, and Mary Anderson, who was chief of the
Department's Women's Bureau. Stanley had earned a PhD in chemistry
from Yale in nineteen eleven, and she had served as
(18:10):
professor and chair of Home Economics at the University of
Missouri before joining the FDA in nineteen fourteen. For most
of the nineteen twenties, she made her home in Washington,
d C. With Annabelle Matthews, a solicitor with the Department
of the Treasury. Mabel Walker Willow Brandt and her adopted daughter,
Dorothy joined the household in the mid twenties, and when
she and her daughter moved to Georgetown in ninety nine,
(18:33):
Stanley adopted a baby girl named Nancy, who had previously
been a practice baby. The news article about that is
how I learned about practice babies, and almost abandoned this
entire episode to just focus on that, but I did
not did not have time to be changing the horse
in the middle of that stream. When the Bureau of
Home Economics was first established, it had a budget of
(18:56):
seventy two thousand dollars and a staff of about five people.
Stanley's salary was about five thousand dollars, and that made
her the highest paid woman in the federal government at
that time. By the nineteen thirties, the bureau had grown
to a staff of seventy one and a budget of
more than a hundred and sixty eight thousand dollars. The
main areas of focus for the Bureau of Home Economics
(19:17):
were food and nutrition, textiles and clothing, and the economics
of the home. The Respiration Calorometer was transferred to the
Bureau of Animal Industry, but the Bureau of Home Economics
still did a lot of research into vitamins, diet, the
nutritional content of foods, and food preparation and storage methods.
This included research into using diet to treat and prevent pellagra,
(19:39):
which is caused by a nyasin deficiency and was widespread
in the South. The Bureau of Home Economics built on
a lot of the research that the Office of Home
Economics had previously been doing studies in food and nutrition,
including cooking times and temperatures, storage temperatures, and shelf life,
along with continuing to refine home canning practices. The Bureau
(20:01):
also studied preparation methods for reindeer, which had been introduced
into Alaska as a food source for Alaska natives over
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Bureau did
similar work with rabbits during times when people were encouraged
to raise rabbits as a food source, which included during
World War Two. As home refrigeration became more common in
(20:22):
the nineteen forties, the Bureau used a microbiology lab to
determine temperature ranges for safe refrigeration. When it came to textiles,
there just had not been a lot of formal study
into how to best care for different fabrics. The Bureau
studied had a care for different fibers and how those
fibers could most effectively be used. They also researched home
(20:43):
laundering things like water temperatures and the efficacy of different detergents,
including how much soil was really removed and how the
textiles themselves were affected. The Bureau also researched ironing, stain removal,
and hygiene. The Bureau also continued to design and extribute
patterns for clothing and household articles. They really focused on
(21:04):
items that were sturdy and practical with easy construction and
easy laundering, and Chouldren's clothing. They focused on durability, ease
of care, and designs that allowed children to learn to
dress themselves. When ready to wear garments became more widely
popular and widely available, the Bureau shifted its focus away
(21:24):
from home sewing and onto how to select and care
for store bought garments, as well as on advocating for
standardized sizes and ready to wear clothing. The department's focus
on the economics of the home came from a lot
of directions. One aspect was how people were using their incomes.
A lot of this research focused on food and clothing,
(21:44):
since those are the two major expenses in most households.
The bureau studied what people actually bought, with the goal
of matching production in the US to what consumers were
going to consume. The bureau also studied mother's pensions, which
were payments to mothers of newborn to encourage them to
stay home, which had been implemented in most states by
the mid nineteen thirties. The Bureau wanted to determine whether
(22:08):
the payments really were enough to allow a new mother
to stay at home. The bureau also focused on the
more intangible idea of homemaker's workloads, including asking women to
keep really detailed records of their days. Hilda guard Neiland
was the head of the Economics of the Home team, and,
in her words from a publication called is the Modern
(22:29):
Housewife a Lady of Leisure? Quote five six of these
homemakers spent over forty two hours a week in their homemaking.
More than half spent over forty eight hours, and one
third spent over fifty six hours. The average for all
is slightly over fifty one hours a week. If this
be part time work, what one may ask would be
(22:51):
full time. This economic study wasn't just about documenting how
much work it took to manage a home. The bureau
also researched time and labor saving techniques to try to
make the work involved in keeping a home more efficient.
All of the research that the Bureau was doing informed
a wealth of publications that were distributed through public schools, colleges,
(23:12):
and extension programs, as well as home economics clubs. The
bureau's outreach also went straight to consumers through pamphlets, cookbooks,
radio addresses, and other materials. In nineteen forty three, the
Bureau of Home Economics became the Bureau of Human Nutrition
and Home Economics. Hazel Catherine Steebling became its chief in
nineteen four. Like Louise Stanley, she had a PhD in chemistry.
(23:37):
The Bureau continued with this efforts to quote develop through research,
new knowledge about efficient household management and ways to make
best consumer use of food, fiber, and other products of
the country's farms. In the nineteen forties, this included research
into the most efficient kitchen design, concluding that a U
shaped kitchen could allow enough space for two women to
(23:58):
work while keeping cross traffic from the rest of the
house from getting in the way. As expectations and roles
for women shifted in the nineteen sixties, the federal government
started to scale back the bureau, and the Bureau of
Human Nutrition and Home Economics was disbanded in nineteen sixty two.
Some of the research that had been going on continued
(24:18):
through the U. S d A's Agricultural Research Service, and
some of the same types of research in some areas
do continue today, both through the Agricultural Research Service and
through the Economic Research Service. The fields of home economics
and home economics education were also changing. From its beginnings,
homec had been thought of as a subject for women,
(24:39):
and in many public schools, girls automatically took home economics
while boys took shop or industrial arts. Title nine of
the Education Amendments of nineteen seventy two outlawed this type
of discrimination, which led to questions about whether these classes
were still legal if they were open to all, but
if only girls enrolled. Of course, there are also other
(25:01):
conversations about like what kinds of education were necessary and useful,
and what schools and school systems should be paying for,
which is one of the reasons that by the time
I came along, like the home mech at school and
a lot of places, was not as big of a deal.
In the American Home Economics Association became the American Association
(25:22):
of Family and Consumer Sciences, and in places where these
types of classes are still part of the curriculum and
where college programs still exist, Family and Consumer Sciences is
the more common name. The cooperative extension service that was
such a big part of home economics education still exists,
and Family and Consumer Sciences continues on as this interdisciplinary field,
(25:44):
incorporating a lot of the same specializations that were previously
thought of as part of home economics. We hadn't really
talked about the Bureau of Home Economics role in times
of crisis, which is a big reason behind doing this episode,
and it also touches on some topics that we have
gotten a lot of quest for lately. So we're gonna
get to all that, but first we'll take a quick
sponsor break. The Office of Home Economics and the Bureau
(26:14):
of Home Economics. We're both instrumental in helping American families
cope during some hard times. The Office of Home Economics
was already in place when the United States became involved
in World War One, and the Bureau of Home Economics
had programs that were meant to address the hardships that
accompanied the Great Depression and World War Two, So we're
going to spend a few minutes talking about them. During
(26:36):
World War One, the Office of Home Economics was a
huge part of food conservation programs in the United States.
The overall goal was not just to make sure households
were able to make do with what was available, but
also to allow the United States to provide food support
to its allies in the war. In the words of
the Day's Food in War and Peace, the situation has
(26:58):
become critical. Is not enough food in Europe? Yet? The
soldiers of the allies must be maintained in full strength,
Their wives and children at home must not face famine,
The friendly Neutrals must not be starved. And finally, our
own army in France must never lack a needed ounce
of food. There is just one way in which all
(27:18):
these requirements can be meant. North America must furnish the food,
and we must furnish it from our savings, because we
have already sent our normal surplus. The Day's Food in
War in Peace was published by the Department of Agriculture
and the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense,
and it was created in part with the government's home economists.
(27:40):
It was a teaching tool meant as a guide for
things like club programs or community demonstrations, and it also
directed women to their local university's home economics departments as
well as the local branches of the American Home Economics
Association for support. This publication really focused on reducing the
use of wheat, meat, fat, and shower and strictly portioning
(28:02):
other foods to eliminate food waste, but it also stressed
not to hoard food. It also called for women's support
in the food conservation effort, not just for the sake
of their nation and their families, but also out of
empathy for the women of Europe, especially France. It noted
that most French women bought their bread from bakers, and
that if bakers didn't have the wheat they needed. Even
(28:23):
after making substitutions, French women had to turn to making
porridges and cakes that weren't already part of their cooking repertoire,
while also caring for the sick and wounded and living
in constant wartime peril. Quote. Not one slightest additional burden
should be laid on the women of France. Far less
should they be forced to add another hour to their
(28:44):
long day of toil because we failed to send them wheat.
The day's food and War in Peace includes a lot
of recipes. There are victory breads, which were any breads
that contained a wheat substitute in place of at least
twenty five percent of the wheat that was normally called for.
Substitutes included barley flour, rolled oats, corn flour, and buckwheat.
(29:05):
There are also quick breads made entirely from wheat substitutes,
and meatless recipes, including bean soups and stuffed cabbage, as
well as sponge cakes that didn't require wheat or fat.
This publication also includes information about the calorie content of
different foods, as well as the calories needed to support
an eight hour work day in different occupations, depending on
(29:27):
how strenuous those occupations were. There's also a cost breakdown
based on the price of foods versus how many calories
they provide. One of the later chapters encourages people to
buy as much as they can locally and to research
the farms and other resources in their own area. Throughout
it is full of information about how wheat, meat, fat,
and sugar work in food and in the body, and
(29:50):
the why behind the directions to conserve them. The Day's
Food and War and Peace was aimed at people who
would be teaching this material to others, but the Office
of homeak and on X was also involved in informational
pamphlets for consumers. These pamphlets included directions on how to
prepare food in an economical way, how to make limited
(30:10):
ingredients stretch, and how to prepare foods that might not
have been pantry staples and other circumstances. Titles from this
series included make a Little Meat Go a Long Way
instead of meat, Vegetables for Winter, Save sugar dried peas
and beans, and wheatless bread and cakes. The Office of
(30:30):
Home Economics also contributed to thrift leaflets that were published
in conjunction with the Savings Division of the Department of
the Treasury. By the start of the Great Depression, the U.
S d A had developed a character called Aunt Sammy,
who was Uncle Sam's wife and who gave advice and
answered women's questions. Aunt Sammy's Radio Recipes was a collection
(30:51):
of recipes that had first come out through weekly housekeeper's
chats that were aired through the radio. This became the
first cookbook in the US to be printed in braille.
From the start, the Aunt Sammy Recipes were intended to
be pretty economical, and during the Great Depression, the Department
of Home Economics went even further with a series of
publications about low cost meal preparation and recipes. This included
(31:15):
titles like Getting the Most for Your Food Money, The
Families Food at Low Cost, and a weekly newspaper column
called Market Basket. Some of the advice in these publications
was similar to what had been in the Day's Food
and More in Peace when it came to conserving food,
avoiding waste, and incorporating cheaper ingredients, but the Depression era
publications also included a lot more about incorporating canned and
(31:39):
frozen foods, as well as enriched food products. The cost
of many foods had dropped, but people also had less money,
so along with tips about getting the most for your money,
there were tips about using cuts of meat that some
families had previously found too expensive, but we're now priced
lower than other alternatives. A lot of these depression error
(32:00):
recipes were cheap and filling, and they were nutritionally complete
based on the knowledge of the day, but they were
not necessarily appetizing. In general, they tended to be both
mushy and bland. For example, a low cost menu from
a nineteen thirty three edition of The Market Basket goes
like this, prunes and hot cereal or toast for breakfast,
(32:21):
along with tomato juice for young children, milk for older children,
and coffee for adults. A dinner of mashed dried beans,
stewed tomatoes, brown bread or grand muffins and tea for adults,
with milk for children, and a supper of cottage cheese, salad,
bread and butter, cocoa and canned fruit. I'm having a
(32:42):
kitchen related sad trombone in my I mean, we've been
eating a lot of dried beans during the pandemic that
we have been living through, but they have not been
prepared in a mushy, bland way. No, I feel like,
because we're cooking at home all the time, we've kind
of been eating like kings because yeah, I love a
(33:04):
little kitchen experiment action and I love to invent things.
So uh. Some of this mushy blandness, though, that we're
talking about, was because of a belief that overly seasoned
foods were too invigorating to the digestive system and would
make people feel hungrier. As an aside, this breaks my heart,
but there was probably some prejudice at work here as well.
In general, the bureau's recipe writers did not approve of
(33:27):
spices that recent immigrants often relied on. During World War Two,
the Bureau of Home Economics again focused on food conservation,
including cooking with rationed ingredients. As I read a whole
pamphlet that was about how much sugar you could get
for canning with the ration system. It also published materials
to help women process and store vegetables that were grown
(33:51):
in victory gardens, although information about the gardens themselves typically
came from other parts of the U. S d A
and the War Food Administration. One aspect of this included
a December three radio broadcast reminding women that if they
got canned vegetables or preserves as Christmas presents, they should
(34:12):
carefully save those canning jars and lids for the following
growing season. The Bureau also published material to help women
who were entering the workforce during wartime. Publication called Work
Clothes for Women listed these chapters in its table of contents.
Know your job and dress for it Field suit, mechanics suit, jumper,
(34:34):
slack suit, protect all food preparation dress, divided skirt, dress,
belted overall apron, surplus overall Apron, laboratory dress, surplus house
dress cover itt Princess overall Apron, Nurses uniform, utility aprons.
(34:56):
The Bureau also published patterns for these and other work
garments for women. After the end of World War Two,
President Harry S. Truman established the President's Famine Emergency Committee
to fight against World famine. The Bureau of Home Economics
was ready with publications advising Americans again to cut back
on wheat, fats, and oils to contribute to the overall
(35:18):
aid effort. One pamphlet advised people to quote reach for
a potato instead of bread, and offered suggestions for using potatoes, cornmeal, oatmeal,
and other substitutes in place of bread. This particular publication
also noted that people should conserve rice and not throw
it at weddings. And since this was all government produced work,
(35:40):
it is in the public domain today and a lot
of it is available online. If you google Bureau of
Home Economics publications, you can go down a real rabbit
hole patterns here. I come, yeah, there's patterns is also,
I mean, just so many different recipes, some of which
I was curious to try, like various victory breads or
quick breads that are including wheat substitutes. Um, Like, I
(36:03):
know some people have had a hard time getting wheat
and used during the pandemic, and like, I was very
curious about trying some of those. Some of them I
found a little more uh questionable. Like I found, um
a broiled fish recipe that advised cooking the fish um
at a temperature like three fifty or something like that
for like twenty minutes and then putting it on the
(36:26):
broiler for another fifteen more minutes. And I was like,
this does not sound like a good number of total
minutes for some fish to me. I suspect, like the
broiler had to be less powerful than what we're used
to has to be because otherwise you're gonna have fish
jerky fish charcoal. Do you have listener mail to go
(36:50):
with this delightful adventure? I already found a pattern I'm
gonna make. Um. I have listener mail from Maggie. Maggie
says Hello, Holly and Tracy as one of perhaps many
people who have written episode requests for Anything bee Keeping.
When I opened today's podcast and saw a brief history
of beekeeping, I think the neighbors could hear my shriek
(37:11):
of delight. After eight years of being a beekeeper, member
of our local hobby Beekeepers Association, and editor of the newsletter,
I know a bit about the subject, but you did
not disappoint with new and fun facts. I loved hearing
about what Samuel Peeps had to say upon seeing an
observation hive and quote the bees making their honey and
colmbs mighty pleasantly. Their comments of agreement with his feelings
(37:34):
were a surprise. I thought it was only nutty beekeepers
who fell in love with their little charges. A while back,
I had an MRI I type scan and before going
into the tube, the technician advised me to go to
my happy place when I emerged, I commented to her,
I bet not a lot of people tell you their
happy place is watching bees. She said, indeed not. Maggie
(37:57):
goes on to say that she doesn't have any hives
this year and missed is that the bees terribly so
thanks for that little buzz, and then in parentheses beekeepers
are a penny lot. UM. Maggie also sent some pictures
of of a bear proof a biary UM, which I
looked at and I was like, I bet a bear,
really determined bear might still get through that UM, and
(38:21):
then also donned outfit for UM treating with some vapor
to try to control baroa mites in the beehives. UM.
So this email ends with thanks again, and stay out
of those crowded hives, Maggie, Thank you so much, Maggie. UM.
(38:41):
I said in that episode, I really like bees. UM. Lately,
I've been playing a lot of animal crossing, like I
know a lot of other people have also. And when
a friend of mine UM found the d i y
recipe for bee hives, she immediately may multiple bee hives
(39:02):
and I sent her more waspness to make more beehives
out of so now I have like three bee hives
on my animal crossing Island. I've also been playing a
lot of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, where I very recently needed
to go find a beehive out in the world, and
I got really excited about that because I was like, Okay,
I just learned all these various things about bee hives
(39:22):
and beekeeping doing that that episode of the podcast what
beehive design is going to be in Assassin's Creed Odyssey. Um,
the answer was spoiler alert, stacked horizontal tube hives that
were um longer than I expected them to be. Um,
(39:43):
but still pretty cool. So anyway, thank you so much
Maggie for this lovely email. We got it a couple
of other emails about bees this morning, so be keeping
might make another appearance in future listener mail. If you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast or his podcast at i heeart radio dot
com and you can find us all over social media
(40:04):
at missed in History. That's where you'll find our Facebook, counterest, Twitter,
and Instagram. And you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, and anywhere else you
get your podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is
a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from
(40:26):
i Heeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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