Lisa WoodruffCEO and founder, Organize 365

The Secret History of Home Economics Part 2 (1940 - Now) - #494

22 Jul 2022 · 1 min

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In this segment of her YouTube video, Lisa Woodruff discusses a passage from the book The Secret History of Home Economics and relates it to her own grandmother’s attitude toward domestic labor. She describes her grandmother as a college‑educated woman who supported her husband, continued to work after his death, and raised children while maintaining household duties. For her grandmother, there was no distinction between "housework" and "work"—both were simply work, whether paid or unpaid. Woodruff uses this anecdote to illustrate a pragmatic, semantics‑free view of women’s labor that challenges contemporary debates about the categorization of domestic tasks.

Chapters

And in reading the book, The Secret History of Home Economics, I now see why I would say things to my grandmother and she'd be like, I don't know what you're talking about. Just go do the job. She was a woman who went to college and supported her husband in his job. And when he died and she had these kids still, she just kept doing the books and she just kept working. She's like, what do you mean, are you going to do housework or working? Yes, it's all work. Yes, you do all of it because Her understanding and her childhood growing up was that women worked at home, at work, for money, not for money. You just worked. Like, you just did things. Like, why do we have to discuss the semantics? It just is.