Much More Than Muffins: The Women Scientists Who Invented Home Ec
Students in a home economics class in Daytona Beach, Fl., in 1943. “Home economics was far more than baking lumpy blueberry muffins, sewing throw pillows or lugging a bag of flour around in a baby sling to learn the perils of parenting,” Danielle Dreilinger writes. “In its purest form, home economics was about changing the world through the household.”Credit.Gordon Parks/Library of Congress
Buy Book ▾
THE SECRET HISTORY OF HOME ECONOMICS
How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live
By Danielle Dreilinger
Save this story for later.
Of all the paradoxes in the paradoxical field known as home economics, perhaps the most peculiar is the practice house, with its practice baby. Colleges and universities that offered home-ec majorsâand there were many in the twentieth century, including historically Black colleges, land-grant universities, and Ivy League institutionsâoften had a cottage or an apartment on campus where female home-ec students could keep house. Some of them were preparing for careers in education or industry, but most saw home ec as training for their inevitable futures as wives and mothers. Often, practice-house life entailed caring for practice babies, actual human ones, lent by adoption agencies, orphanages, or sometimes the mothers themselves. At Cornell University, the students called their first practice babyâborrowed in 1920, when he was three weeks oldâDicky Domecon, for âdomestic economy.â Couples looking to adopt were eager to get thei
WCU women create local branch of University Women smokymountainnews.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from smokymountainnews.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.