Chronology.

1828 - Boston-based Ladies’ Magazine established by Sarah Josepha Hale. By being active participants and contributors to the magazine, women become the makers of their own gender ideology (Source).

1841 - Catharine Beecher publishes A Treatise on Domestic Economy (Source).

July 19-20, 1848 - The first Seneca Falls Convention is held.

July 2, 1862 - The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862 goes into effect, providing states around the United States with land to create public institutions of higher education. This paves the way for a number of new universities to open which both include domestic science as an academic field and are more accepting of women than their predecessors (Source).

1865 - Vassar College for Women opens in Poughkeepsie, NY (Source).

1866 - Malinda Russell’s A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen is published. This is the first known cookbook by an African American author, and the first book to offer culinary advice by an African American woman (Source).

1869 - The first shipment of fresh fruit grown in California reaches the east coast, signaling significant advances in railroad transportation which led to a reduction in seasonal consumption and decreased food prices (Source).

1871 - Ellen Richards is accepted to MIT as its first ever woman student (Source).

1873 - Ellen Richards graduates from MIT with a Bachelor of Science in chemistry, making her the institute’s first female graduate (Source).

1876 - Ellen Richards persuades MIT to open a women’s laboratory, where she teaches chemistry to women who wish to pursue graduate work (Source).

1877 - Maria Parloa opens Miss Parloa’s School of Cooking in Boston (Source).

1882 - Ellen Richards publishes The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning: A Manual for Housekeepers. In this roughly 90 page book, Richards describes the science behind baking bread, cooking nutritious meals, removing stains from clothes and tarnish from silver, and other topics of “interest to the housekeeper” (Source).

February 16, 1883 - First issue of Ladies’ Home Journal is published.

1883 - The women’s lab at MIT is torn down and women are permitted to join the men in MIT’s classrooms for the first time. Ellen Richards becomes the first female faculty member at MIT (Source).

May 2, 1885 - The first issue of Good Housekeeping is published (Source).

1886 - Lucy Craft Laney opens the Haines Normal and Industrial Institute (Source).

1887 - The Women’s Educational and Industrial Union is founded in Boston by Harriet Clisby (Source).

1889 - Margaret Murray Washington begins working at The Tuskegee Institute. She is later promoted to Lady Principal and Director of the Department of Domestic Service (Source).

1892 - The Food Show of 1892 is held at Madison Square Garden, with one main goal being to raise public interest in the problems of food adulteration (Source).

1893 - World’s Fair takes place in Chicago, where celebrated cooking teachers Juliet Corson, Maria Parloa, Mary Lincoln and Sarah Tyson Rorer give cooking demonstrations in The Women’s Building. Significantly, Black women are not allowed to exhibit (Source).

1895 - The National Federation of Afro-American Women is founded, with Margaret Murray Washington as its President (Source).

1897 - Ellen Richards establishes the Boston School of Housekeeping (Source).

1899 - The first Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics is held; 11 women attend, and the conference is led by Ellen Richards. Domestic science is renamed ‘home economics’ (Source).

1904 - Ellen Richards tries, unsuccessfully, to change the name of ‘home economics’ to ‘euthenics’, inspired by her book Euthenics: the Science of a Controllable Environment (Source).

1904 - Ladies Home Journal becomes the first American magazine to reach a circulation of 1 million readers (Source).

1906 - The Pure Food and Drug Act is passed to regulate food safety, prohibiting the adulteration of foods for sale. Ellen Swallow Richards’ Food Materials and Their Adulterations, passed in 1885, helped develop this legislation (Source).

1908 - 700 women attend the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics - a marked increase from its original attendance of just 11 people in 1899 (Source).

1909 - Ellen Richards founds the Journal of Home Economics (Source).

1909 - American Home Economics Association is founded (Source).

1915 - Janie Porter Barrett opens and is the first superintendent of the Virginia Industrial School for Colored Girls, an educational institution dedicated to helping young black women learn agricultural and household skills to not only support themselves as domestic servants or farm workers but to establish homes of their own. In 1948, two years after Barrett’s death, the school is renamed the Janie Porter Barrett School for Girls (Source).

1920 - Vassar College allows home economics to enter its curriculum (Source).

1922 - Margaret Murray Washington is a founding member of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races (Source).