How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live
By Danielle Dreilinger
In 1972, I was the overeager student who always raised her hand and preferred reading the encyclopedia to doing “something creative.” So I was not happy to be told that my seventh-grade courses would include home economics. It sounded dumb.
“There are not enough elements of intellectual growth in cooking or housekeeping to nourish a very serious or profound course of training for really intelligent women,” M. Carey Thomas, the president of Bryn Mawr, declared when the college rejected the field in 1893. Twelve-year-old me would have agreed.
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
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THE SECRET HISTORY OF HOME ECONOMICS
How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live
By Danielle Dreilinger
If you’re black or American Indian and considering taking courses at Bryn Mawr College, your scales for pros and cons may be in for a tilt.
The school’s reportedly set to provide funds for books and even therapy if you fit either of the two identity groups.
The reason? Call it a “reparations fund;” its proponents do.
As relayed by The College Fix, last year, students organized a “racial justice strike.”
From the Fix:
The students’ demand called for “the implementation of a ‘reparations fund’ towards a yearly allocation of funds and resources to Black and Indigenous students in the form of grants for summer programs, affinity groups, multicultural spaces, and individual expenses such as books, online courses, therapy, and any and all financial need beyond the scope of racial justice work.”