The Secret History of Home Economics Part 1 (1800-1940) - #493

This week's mailbag comes to us from Sharon. I had been on the fence about whether or not to sign up for the virtual 2022 Embrace Experience because I won't be able to be fully available and would just be going in and out. But after seeing Lisa today in her Swiss Cheese Organizing webinar, it confirmed what I already knew to be true. Whether she is in person or virtual, there is just no substitute for Lisa. Hearing Lisa's voice, watching her speak, soaking up all of her stories and words of wisdom and encouragement are priceless. No wonder her podcast won out over everything else in the Organized 365 March Madness. This is going to be the last embrace ever, and even if I'm not able to be there, I will have the replay and can listen to it when I am able. Let's be honest, how we feel about ourselves and our lives makes all the difference in the world. When we are feeling good, hard things can hit us, but we take them in stride. Criticisms and verbal jabs bounce off of us. Screaming kids and demanding pets suddenly seem cute instead of obnoxious and maddening. Crazy traffic and rude people suddenly don't seem like a huge deal. In short, when we are feeling good, we see the world around us differently and therefore react differently, react in a better way. We can write our own story. Choose our own adventure, chart our own course, paint our own canvas. So more than anything, powering ourselves with positive, enlightening, encouraging, eye-opening stories, feelings, experiences, words, and of course songs is crucial for our own well-being and sense of self. And thus, in turn, this is actually a gift for our families and the people close to us too. Let's make this last push for ourselves. Let's embrace this last embrace. Do you have an Organize365 success story? If so, we would love to hear about it. Please send us an email at customerservice@organize365.com and tell us how you have taken back your home, your paper, and your life with Organize365.

Welcome to the Organized 365 Podcast. I'm your host, professional organizer, productivity expert, and motivational speaker, Lisa Woodruff. This podcast will help you embrace progress over perfection and create lasting, functional organizing in your home. I have so much to share with you, so let's get started. Thank you so much for allowing me last week to give you a little bit better of an in-depth look at my personal history and my family of origin and how that is going to tie into my review this week of the book The Secret History of Home Economics by Danielle Dellinger, which was recommended to me by Melinda, who is a retired family and consumer science teacher. And I told you last week that I got a degree in Family and Consumer Sciences as well. I had no idea why it was called that, but now I know. In this podcast, I am going to share excerpts from the book, and I'm going to give you the history with a little bit of commentary. But let me just start by saying, this is a meaty book. It is so interesting, especially for me, someone who essentially has a home economics degree and whose grandmother and great-grandmother also have home economics degrees. Please, please, please get the book, listen to it on Audible, read it. There is so much packed in here. Secondly, the other overarching thought that I have is that there is nothing new under the sun. We always think that, oh my gosh, this is such a new thing. No, go back 80, 100, 120, 200 years ago. They probably have thought the same things. It blows my mind how much was actually happening in the 1800s that we're now arguing about again today. Like, History repeats itself. There is a cycle to everything. I am still one year later trying to get my brain around the fact that all of the things that we are talking about today, that home economics is essential and it has essentially been taken out of all schools and colleges and it is critical. We definitely need to put it back in, number one. And number two, how different eras can spin what it is we learn of different things. So let's get started. Okay. The history of home economics. So home economics essentially is the path that was created and made available for women to actually enter college and to get college degrees. And that is amazing to me. Like, it's such a powerful field and it was such a powerful movement when it originally started. I told you in the last episode about how my great-grandmother went to Kent Normal School that then became Kent College when my grandmother went there. And it was— this was all started from the home economics movement. So in the 1870s, the average child only went to school 4 months out of the year, and women were educated at home or in dame schools. High schools did not allow women, and colleges were mostly for wealthy white males. Now, Catharine Beecher was born in 1800. She was the sister of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and she was set to be married, but her fiancé died, and he was going to college, and she was able to read all of his math textbooks and other college textbooks that he had. And she used the inheritance that she got from his passing to start a female school in like the 1820s. And then in 1830, she moved to Cincinnati and created a second school for women called the Western Female Institute. She was in her 40s. She suffered from depression and migraines. And in 1841, she wrote the first book that we have about home economics called A Treatise on Domestic Economy. It was 400 pages long. It combined education and religion and cleaning and morality and civics. It wasn't just about how to cook and care for the house. It was about the power of women to glue together a fragile society. And she said, the senselessness of an educated woman doing her own sewing while paying someone else to teach her children instead of teaching the children and farming out the sewing is in that book. And when I heard that in the Audible, this is on page 5, you guys, on page 5 of the book, I was like, Wait, what? Wait, when was this? When was this? When was this that a woman was saying that it would be a better use of her time to educate her children instead of doing the sewing? Like, somebody else can clean the house. I would like to care for my kids. You know, like, I was like, this was not a today statement. No, no. This was 1841. This was in 1841. I was hooked on this book. From that very first statement. And the history of the women who really furthered the movement of home economics is interesting. The first 2 women that really picked up that mantle from Catherine were Ellen and Margaret. So Ellen Swallow was born in 1842. She was educated, and while she was in school, she was also helping run the family store. I found that was very interesting. Like, she was getting an education, but she also was kind of learning business at the same time. And she just really, really, really, really, really, really, really wanted to go to college. And she just read everything she could possibly read. And she basically made it happen. She ended up going to Vassar, and then she ended up getting a second degree from MIT. Again, remember, this is in the 1800s. About the same time, Margaret Murray Washington went to Fisk College. She got herself a way to go to Fisk College. And she wrote for the paper that was edited by E.W. Du Bois. And while she was there, she found out about a job at Tuskegee College. And she became a teacher at Tuskegee College, where she met and became the final wife of Booker T. Washington. So as I was reading and listening to the first parts of this book, what is interesting is that these colleges and the people that these women met along the way really helped further their education. And they even mentioned in the book that a lot of the women who founded home economics and furthered home economics did not have children themselves because it was their ability to pour all their time and effort into the furthering of the cause that allowed it to move forward. So Vassar, MIT, Fisk, and Tuskegee College were all part of an unprecedented expansion in education After the Civil War, so around, you know, the 1860s through 1900s, these 4 colleges really were out doing things that other colleges were not doing. And all the female courses were called domestic science courses. So now we get to the part where, remember I told you in the last podcast that I would spend my summers at Chautauqua in New York, that was an adult learning institute.

Mm-hmm.

Well, there was a conference from 1898 to 1908 at Lake Placid, which is also in New York. And Annie Dewey lived there. She was a hotelier. She went to Vassar. That's where she got her education. She was a librarian and she met her husband, Melvil Dewey. Yes, of the Dewey Decimal System. So they were librarians and they lived in New York and they really wanted to move forward this idea of home economics that was started by Swallow and Washington.

Mm-hmm.

Because as a hotelier, Annie would wanna air out the beds, but the guests wanted their beds made up right away. And she's like, yeah, but with bacteria and everything, like you have to let the beds air out. And she's like, people have to understand why we run a house the way we run a house. Like there's a science to what we are doing. So they had this conference. It was a very small conference of just some influential people. And I'm gonna read to you quite a bit outta the book starting at page 29, just excerpts.

Okay.

So Annie says, there was nothing sentimental about washing clothes, sending it to a laundry, and improving training, work conditions, and sanitations for both of those professional laundresses. They were pragmatic. Both boys and girls should have as much woodworking as well to make them independent in the matter of simple shelves, doors, and bookcases. Home economics, they said, stood for the ideal home life for today. Unhampered by the traditions of the past, the utilization of all the resources of modern science to improve the home life, the freedom of the home from the dominance of things and their due subordination to ideals, and the simplicity and material surroundings in which most free the spirit for more important and permanent interests of the home and society. Or as I like to say it, what you're uniquely created to do. Back to the book. The home was not a retreat from the world. It was the world. As for home economics, connection to general economics was not an invention. The Industrial Revolution had permanently eliminated the home as the site of economic production, relegating the loom to the attic and the soap kettle to the shed. The woman who today makes her own soap instead of taking advantage of machinery for its production enslaves herself to limit her time for study. The advances also made home boring, fully only the dull routine of work never to be done. You cannot make women contend with cooking and cleaning, and you need not try. We are not quite idiots, although we have been dumb because you did not understand our language. We demand a hearing and the help of wise leaders to reorder our lives to the advantage of the country. You guys, this is in 1889. This was not 1998 or 2008. Like, this is 130 years ago. Women were saying, look, other people are making the soap. I don't have to make the soap. Like, if I want to make it a craft or it's my unique gifting, great, but I don't have to make the soap because there are these whole big companies that make soap now. I could just buy soap so I could do these other things that I want to do with my life. So the Lake Placid Group really established home economics. And in 1908, the final conference was held at Chautauqua, New York, which is where I used to spend my summers. By 1910, they had made some good progress, and 900 elementary and high school schools taught home economics, as did 200 colleges and teacher training schools. And here are just a few of the things that they accomplished in those 10 years. Home economics studied calories, Created calorie counters, counted people's steps. I thought that was something we just started doing five years ago. They did experiments with bacteria. They did everything related to food, and Kellogg's was a big benefit to a lot of what they did with food. They created diets for special diseases. They created menus. They said you should drink eight glasses of water. They went through and found all the health benefits of. Avocado and agave. Again, I thought that was just stuff we learned like 10 years ago. They promoted eating more vegetables, shorter shifts in factories, and in the 1910s, they really started focusing on farming because rural isolation created a lot of poverty and lack of resources. Now, little sidebar, I listened to the story of Henry Ford this spring, and one of the most interesting things about listening to the story of Henry Ford and what he created was he did not invent the automobile. He invented the production line for the automobile. But the reason why he created the production line for the automobile was to get the price of an automobile down to $500, because at the time it was like $2,000. And I was like, okay, great. You know, supply and demand, the lower the price, the more people can do it. Well, I did not realize until I listened to his autobiography why, why that amount of money was so important. And the reason why was because farmers could not afford a car if it was $2,000, but if it was $500, farmers could. And farmers were the people who were landlocked. So if you lived in the cities, car, no car, whatever, you could use a horse or you could walk. But if you were a farmer, a horse could only go 8 miles a day. So if you were farther to the city than 8 miles, you couldn't get there because where were you going to go? There's not hotels, people. How are you going to get from the farm to the city and back? You couldn't. You were stuck on the farm. But once you got a car, then all of a sudden you could travel. And another thing in that book that I learned was that in order to travel away from the farm, you had to have proper clothing because, you know, there were all these societal rules and it's just how society was. But a lot of people on farms did not have those clothes that you would have in cities or if you were traveling. And by the time the farm family could get enough money to have the proper clothing to do the travel that they wanted to do, they wouldn't have any money for the transportation. So when the automobile came down in price, then farmers could buy a Ford, and they could then put their family in the car in the clothes that they already owned versus travel clothes that would be appropriate for being out, like, on the train stations and things like that. So they could put their kids in the car and they could drive far away to where their family members were and be in somebody else's family where they could still be wearing the clothes that they're used to wearing and not have to go into the public transportation. Again, it's all about your perspective and understanding different people. So what the home economics group was saying is that we really need to focus on these farm families Because they are in isolation, they are rural, and they have extra poverty and lack of resources. Again, another sidebar, my family, my mom's mom and grandmother were all farmers, but Streetsboro and Kent State University, like, you could get there on a horse. Like, you didn't have to have a car because it was— they had farms, but they were close to the city. They weren't like way out. In the middle of Ohio. They, they were close to the city, so they had more ability to get there. And then my grandmother's second husband, my Grandpa Fitzsimire, he always loved Fords, and it's because he was an Iowa farmer and they were way far away from the city. And now, had I read that book before he passed, I would have talked to him about it, and he probably would have told me that because he, you know, his family— he was born like 1900, 1902, so he would have been this farmer family that was landlocked and not able to get anywhere. Again, nothing new under the sun. Okay, next interesting thing is that home economics really started to have its awareness raised when World War I broke out. So Herbert Hoover had a food conservation pledge that Americans, you know, had to conserve food so that we could send it to the troops that were overseas. And also for the Europeans who were starving due to the war. But people didn't know how to cook without— I mean, it's not like you had the internet or a whole bunch of cookbooks. Like, you made, like, I don't know, probably 5 different meals and that's what you made. So how are you going to cook if you don't have the food that you're used to cook with? So the dietitians, they created dietitians inside of home economics. And the dietitians both worked with homeowners and with the war efforts. They learned how to substitute corn for wheat when they ran out of wheat, and the Americans were the healthiest soldiers in the war, and they helped save Europe from starvation. And that started really the golden age of home economics in 1918. Again, sidebar, as I went to the grocery store the other day, which I haven't done in forever, like I order off the app and I go and I pick up my groceries, but I actually went into the grocery store and I was like, oh, Oh my gosh! What are these prices?

Like what?

What are these prices? I was like, holy cow! And Greg, who does our grocery shopping, had been telling me, Lisa, prices are going up. He goes, this is five dollars. This is five dollars. He goes, everything's five dollars. Everything's this. Everything. And the kids, my kids, have been saying, Mom, like to fill up the gas, it's so much to fill up the gas. And I, I intuitively know these things. Like when I fill up my own gas, I know it's more. But I drive like. I fill up my gas like every other week. Like, I don't fill up very often. As soon as gas prices started going up, like way before it even really hit the news, we have a gas stipend at work. So I give our employees extra money for gas. Like, I know that gas is a really big budget buster. It totally demolished ours in 2008 when I was driving 25 hours a week and I was filling up 2 or 3 times a week. Like, I know how fast increasing gas prices can really Bust Your Budget. And when I was walking through the grocery store, I was just like, oh, this is bad. This is very bad. And the reason why I say it's very bad is for exactly the same reason that this book about the history of home economics says it's very bad. Even though we have the internet today and you have cookbooks today, like you're used to making certain amount of food certain way. One, because really, who wants to reinvent the wheel? Secondly, who wants to take that much time? Or you might not even have that much time. And now you're just seeing your food prices go up, up, up, up, up. Greg and I are middle-aged. Our kids are grown. We're like buying steak. We're having fun. And I said to Greg, I said, this has got to stop immediately. We have to go back to how we used to cook when the kids were little, where I would make things not totally from scratch, but I knew how to stretch a dollar. I knew how to majorly stretch a dollar. And I said, not just because we should do it, but because we have to be a model for Joey and Abby, who have no reference of cooking anything basically from scratch. Because we all know I have not been cooking for the last 6 years. And Greg cooks from scratch, but Greg cooks from scratch by going to Fresh Market, which is not cooking from scratch. It is like a TV show. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. Our kids don't know that, you know, you can make spaghetti for the whole family for $5 and then you add some meat in. Like, our kids don't know, like, We've started eating peanut butter and jelly 4 days a week. Like, that's our lunch now, peanut butter and jelly. It is nutritious on my standards. It hits all the food groups. I mean, the baby is already eating peanut butter and jelly. And when our kids were babies, they couldn't have peanut butter till they were 2. That apparently has changed. Grayson loves peanut butter and jelly. But that is a great example, this real-life example of gas prices rising, inflation rising, the cost of food rising. These are not optional expenses for anyone. The war in Ukraine, which is where most of the wheat in that hemisphere comes from, and I think even the United States, I haven't researched that yet. Like, we are back to those years where we have to figure out how to stretch a dollar, make a meal last. It's been a long time since I have personally been in the situation where I have needed to or wanted to do that for my family. And even though Greg and I could continue to do what we're doing because we're old, It's not to the benefit of society or our kids. And so when we go away at the end of July, Greg and I are going to sit there and we are going to make a whole bunch of meal lists and we are going to start cooking like we did 20 years ago when we needed to make $100, make it for the week. We are not going to be able to do it on $100, but we are going to be able to say, all right kids, here are the meals that will fill you up and will meet your nutritional needs. But not cost a lot of money and give you, you know, you could still get your one meal out, but you really need to be thinking this way during the week. And that, you guys, is home economics. That is home economics. Your house has an economy to it, and you are the CEO of your house, whether you wanna be or not. Like, nobody else is coming in and running your house. Do you really want anybody else to come in and run your house? Do you want the government?

Government. I don't.

I really don't. I'll be in charge of my own house, thank you very much. So that is what home economics is. So now we've got the golden age of home economics starting in 1918. I'm reading from page 66 out of the book. Some of the things that they started doing: they studied the vitamin C content of green tea, how rats responded to thiamine deficiency, how the body processed the calcium in spinach. The best ways to soil fabrics for laboratory stain removal experiments. They roasted 2,400 cuts of meat to determine the best cooking methods. They found that potatoes stored in the cold did not make good potato chips and that honey had valuable food properties, but it's low in vitamins. They began working forward towards standardizing clothing measurements and a simple plan of nutrition requirements based on food groups. And they studied how women spent their time. There's a whole lot of pages in here where they did a whole bunch of time studies, and I love the focus on where time goes and how women spend their time. It's very fascinating. You'll have to read about it. But I also found it interesting there that they standardized clothing measurements. I never even thought about that. Of course, everybody would be making their own sizing garments because everybody was making them as a one-off, right? So that was fascinating to me as well. Then we get to the 1920s and we talk about the colleges training people, but mostly women, in child rearing. So this is the 1920s and they had practice babies. You know how when you were in high school, maybe if you're old, but if you're not, then you might not have done this. Where you'd have to carry around the sack of flour and take care of the sack of flour for a week, and it was supposed to train you to take care of a baby. I was so ticked off that I never got to do that in high school. They didn't have us do that in our high school. And then when I taught middle school, we had the middle school kids do it, and I was so jealous. Like, I almost wanted to carry around a sack of flour all week just to do it with them because I loved that idea, even though I already had my own children. Like, I knew what we were training. We also, when I taught middle school, we had those babies that would just cry During the week. It was, it was so, so fun. I love this so much. Well, even better, in the 1920s, you actually got to do it with a real baby. And, and part of me is like, oh my gosh, you put real babies in colleges? And the other part of me is like, oh, I wish I was going to college during those years. So they were called practice house babies. Obviously not around today, people, but babies who were in the foster care system would go and they would literally live at colleges. From the time they were 3 weeks old until they were 6 months or a year, and then they would be adopted into families. And you would be in charge of a baby. You would be their baby manager. And anyways, that was something that was done at colleges. And then we got to the Depression era in 1929. And here's where Eleanor Roosevelt steps in. And she wrote the book, It's Up to the Women. It's Up to the Women was a home ec book through and through, advocating household budgeting, smart spending, training children to follow routines and keep house, and treating maids, if you had one, with the same regularity and dignity as a worker in a factory. I'm starting at page 91, reading you a few different excerpts. So when Roosevelt came into office, he found, of all ironies, a disastrous surplus looming in the hog market. Midwestern farmers had bred too many pigs, gluttening the market, and they didn't have enough corn feed due to the ongoing drought. So the government combined food donations with monetary support and started the school lunch program as we know it. The program was a major success. It nourished children, supported farmers, and even created jobs. By the time the Depression ended, federally funded school lunch programs operated in every state, served more than 2 million lunches per day, and employed more than 64,000 people. So if you've ever wondered where school lunches came from, that is where school lunches came from. And then the book goes into some of the stories of World War II. This is the second war that we're going through where we have this home economics support, and the stories are just gut-wrenching. But those you'll have to get if you are reading inside of the book. Now, what is interesting at this point— so now we're getting through World War II, right? And we have home economics and they're stepping in. As the war ends, there is a seismic shift in what happens in home economics. So up until this point, this is the domestic economy. This is in the sciences field. Back when the Deweys were doing the Dewey Decimal System and they were running that Lake Placid Conference, Alice was like, oh no, no, no, no, don't you dare put any of my home economics books over in the knitting section. I want to be over in sociology. She's like, this is real science stuff. We are not, we're not over in like crafts. And that, you know, she was able to make those decisions because her husband was the one that labeled everything. I mean, these are really movers and shakers, women who are like, look, we are running full-fledged businesses here at home. We have an economy and our economy affects the other economy. And when the big economy needs us, we're the ones that can You know, tighten, tighten up and use what we have in different ways to allow the food to flow back into the main economy. We can go into war with you and make sure all the soldiers are fed. Like, they were a true partner in society. And this would have been the environment that my great-grandmother and my grandmother went to school in. My great-grandmother went to college in 1910. My grandmother would have been going to college during the war. And they— that's the home economics degree that my great— grandmother and my grandmother got. They got the degree as in, you are a, a force inside of the American economy. What you do at home impacts the American economy. Running your household like a business is a true thing. That is the understanding that they had. And then we come out of World War II and everything totally changes. Okay, I'm gonna stop this one and we are gonna come back And find out what happened to home economics after World War II in the next episode. The series that we're in right now, where I explore the secret history of home economics, both the book and my own personal family history of women getting a college degree in home economics. And actually, that's what my college degree in as well. I am amazed and frankly astounded at how different home economics was viewed in the 1800s and the early 1900s, how that changed in the 1940s, and how now again today in the 2020s, we're starting to go back to that original view of how important it is to have a good foundation at home, that there is an economy that is happening at home, that there is work to be done at home, and that work is valuable and it is important. And I'm so excited That over the last 10 years, Organized 365 has really worked hard at figuring out what is the work that needs to be done? What is housework? What is the definition of organization? How can we eliminate Swiss cheese organization and actually get organized once and for all so we can live an organized life and we could be more productive? Organization is a learnable skill. 87% of those surveyed in Organized 365 surveys agree. Organization is a learnable skill. I have a degree in home economics and education, and I love teaching. I can teach you the skill of home organization, reducing the amount of housework that you do and making the invisible work that is done at home visible. I would love for you to join us in learning how to learn the skill of getting organized at home. It starts with the Sunday basket. After you've got your Sunday basket going, Go all in with the Productive Home Solution and then take that success into your work with the Friday WorkBox. You can find out all of the Organize365 products that help you learn how to get organized over at organize365.com under the program tab.