Rethinking Domestic Science: A Historical Essay

Written By Stefanie Goldberg

Written by Stefanie Golberg

 

Introduction

The domestic science movement is one that has been controversial among those involved in it and those on the outside looking in. Historians, especially, have found themselves divided in their historical analysis, looking at how the movement helped and hurt women versus the greater underpinnings of the how and why behind the movement. In considering the many strengths and failures of the movement, this historical essay and the database at large will explore the greater obstacles that stood in the way of women, and how they both did and did not navigate those challenges to gain legitimacy or affirm the status quo respectively. These women and their work was incredibly complicated and fraught, making it hard to identify as either “good” or “bad”. Through an intersectional lens and consideration of racism, sexism, and classism, we seek to: a) understand this movement and these domestic scientists as women of their time, b) celebrate their mammoth achievements and their legacy, and c) question the damaging and lasting impacts of their failures and short-sightedness.


The Victorian Era's ‘Separate Spheres’ and the Origins of Domestic Science

Through the 17th and 18th centuries, social roles were fluid and “imperfectly defined,” and women experienced family, the home, and work as part of an integrated and stable whole (Morantz 492). There was a true value suggesting a woman’s place was in the home. The 19th century brought with it the advent of separate spheres that emerged with industrialization and urbanization, with men in the public and political sphere and women in the private and domestic sphere, paralleling a belief in biologically determined gender roles; this is where the institutionalization of the “woman’s sphere” first began. There was a shifting of time and attention, as women who used to be responsible for the family economy could now focus their time and energies on being wives and mothers (Morantz 493). 


This corresponded to the more Victorian concept of domestic science, or rather domestic economy, first emerged with Catharine Beecher’s 1841 novel A Treatise on Domestic Economy, identifying women as emblems of divinity, devout Christians, their work in the home their divine mission to “domesticate the new world” (Shapiro 16). There was a strong desire here to educate and train women, part and parcel of instilling Enlightenment theorists’ belief that a woman’s responsibility was to perform their motherly duties and rear the nation's young (Morantz 493). Compared to other early moralists like Catharine Maria Sedgewick and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Beecher strove to “put housekeeping on an intellectual level that would match it’s moral loftiness” (Shapiro, 25). Domestic labor was not to be the drudgery and dirty work of servants but “refined housekeeping” to be pursued by all young women, rich or poor. Beecher valued housework in this way for two reasons: firstly, every woman (most notably white women of means) should be able to properly train her servants and secondly, an educated woman’s knowledge of and ability to assume all household chores would secure the welfare of her entire family (Shapiro 30). A woman’s mastery of the home was on par with mastering the way to live, and a respectable woman could “enjoy domesticity and still control her own days and destiny” (Shapiro 32).


Expansion of Domestic Science into Women’s Higher Education and Beyond

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, women studied domestic science at college as an actual science, taking courses in bacteriology, nutrition, public health, and nursing (Miller 4); “scientific cookery” was a term used define cooking skills based on systematized training, a definite link between science and domesticity. With the emergence of land-grant institutions and The Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, higher education institutions were formed that were more accepting of women students than established institutions; a gendered curricula was created for students, offering agriculture for the men and domestic science for the women. By 1905, “home economics programs appeared at almost all of the country’s land-grant schools” and an increasing number of American women were attending college (Miller 11).  The field of home economics was determined to create an academic and scientific reputation, honoring dressmaking and cooking, marriage and motherhood, yet looking further by offering a curriculum that prepared students for other career opportunities mostly in government, industry, and schools. Domesticity and home economics provided women with influence and value within the home and beyond.


The emphasis on the balance between domesticity and independence was not lost on those that followed within the movement, who sought to keep the women's sphere but redefine it. The concept of domestic science and the movement that followed is most closely associated as coming to fruition with Ellen Richards, the woman identified as “the ‘engineer’ of the modern home economics movement” (Stage and Vincenti 5). The term “domestic science” was a way to weave together the kitchen and the chemical laboratory, emphasizing nutrition and sanitation; Richards in particular viewed domestic science as a way to “move women trained in science into employment in academics and industry” (Stage and Vincenti 5). This new conception of domestic science provided an avenue to social reform and employment outside the home, something making 20th century domestic science distinctly unique from the former and latter parts of the movement. Women sought more public roles in education, professional careers, social reform, and domestic science was a popular strategy for women to achieve this objective. It is important to note that this time in the movement, however, was harmful in many ways, “designed to reproduce social hierarchies and differences among women,” especially minority groups who received radically different domestic education (both the content and incentive) from the middle and upper-middle class white women (Miller 5).


The Early 20th Century and Growing Domestic Disenchantment

In the early 1900’s, it became clear that great friction existed between “book-knowledge” or academic training and “housekeeping knowledge” or domestic training (Harkness). The understood value of and wealth of knowledge within domestic science and the growing concern with the manual education of domesticity infringing upon academia were in growing friction with one another. In a 1911 issue of The Atlantic, Mary Leal Harkness wrote a scathing critique of domestic science, “The idea that every woman needs practical instruction in housekeeping as a part of her education is as absurd as would be the claim that every man needs to be taught in school to plant corn or milk a cow...Everywhere are proofs that the woman with educated brain can use her hands skillfully and profitably if occasion arise; corresponding proofs are not forthcoming that the woman with skillful hands can do the like with her brain” (Harkness). If we move beyond the harsh and biting criticism here, we can see the more important underlying concern with the education and intelligence of women, a great fear that domestic science stripped women of that small but mighty power they had to think outside of the kitchen. Many women felt adamant that domestic science was a hindrance, not an improvement to education or the female sex, that taught women to know nothing but the home and the kitchen, to elevate things above thoughts. Even during their heyday, the women of the domestic science movement and movement itself were heavily contested. This is likely because it fell right in the middle of first-wave feminism, a movement where women (specifically white women) fought tooth and nail for equal rights, the most notable being the right to vote; contemporaneous to this was the abolitionist movement, where women of color were working for not just women’s suffrage but universal suffrage. It stands to reason that thoughts from the aforementioned Mary Leal Harkness and other women of that era emerged at a growing rate, standing in dissonance to domestic science yet harmonious with the greater feminist movement. 


Domestic Science: Revisionist Views

If we think about the first framework surrounding domestic science, it is rooted in the aforementioned Catharine Beecher, espousing divinity, morality, and the home as a woman’s rightful place. Historians have looked negatively at these primary principles of the then emerging movement, and “judged home economics as part and parcel of the 19th century cult of domesticity” (Stage and Vincenti 1). Historians and feminists of the 1960s-1990s viewed these women of domestic science as derogatory; in many ways they condemned the domestic scientists and the movement they created, adamant that a woman’s place was not in the home. Laura Shapiro’s Perfection Salad was the first major book to criticize these women of domestic science, arguing that there was no desire or intention to “jettison the signs and privileges of middle class femininity” but rather that these women enjoyed the notion of “a perfectly refined lady with a brisk, manly mind” (Shapiro 9). Her scathing criticism continues to state that “the blind faith that characterized the domestic scientists and undermined their idealism is still with us” (Shapiro 9). Feminist scholars like Betty Freidan and Robin Morgan echoed this denunciation,  identified the kitchen and the home as directly linked to sexism, the attributes of the work that happened within those spaces unmistakably gendered. When Morgan spoke at the American Home Economics Association convention in 1972, she cited their reinforcement of “the institution of marriage, the institution of the nuclear family, and the incredible manipulation of women as consumers” as an enemy and an area for destruction (“What Robin Morgan Said at Denver”). Morgan and her contemporaries wanted to see work in the public sphere instead of the private, incredibly disparaging to those within the home in their present moment and all those that came before. 


The 1990s saw a shift in scholarship and a rethinking of this criticism of domestic science. Historians and scholars like Carolyn Goldstein, Margaret Rossiter, Nancy Tomes, Elisa Miller, Paula Baker, and Anne Firor Scott looked at how race, class, and gender influenced women’s options, digging into the complexities of the dynamics that allowed for the professionalization of domestic science and “the strategies they employed to gain legitimacy as the field developed in the twentieth century” (Stage and Vincenti 2). This scholarship also delves into the politicization of domesticity, and domestic science’s encouragement of progressive reform, urging women to take the skills of the home into the greater home of the city. Compared to the rather sharp and blistering criticism of the 1960s-1980s, the 1990s delved into the how and why of the domestic science movement, looked at the use of politics and professionalization to expand the overall scope of women’s activities, and urged us to take stock of the successes and failures of these women and the movement.


Our Database

From the Victorian Era until today, women have had to, consciously or unconsciously, declare their allegiance to a particular view of women’s roles in the public and private spheres. Our focus in our 21st century analysis within the domestic science and feminist discourse is one that considers more specifically the intersections of food, race, class, and sex within the domestic science movement. We can acknowledge and celebrate the deep and lasting impacts of domestic science while analyzing and naming the shortcomings and the many problematic pieces of the puzzle. They can, and they do, exist in the same space. 


These women were significant in their day, and certainly remain so today. We aim to broaden the landscape by sharing the stories of those deeply connected to the domestic science movement and those who have deliberately been unacknowledged or written out of that history. As such, we know a great deal about many of these women including Ellen Swallow Richards and Catherine Beecher Stowe, but possess limited information about Abby Fisher and Malinda Russell, for example. It is imperative, however, to know about all of these women. Without a doubt, there are other women yet to be discovered. We hope this database will function as a living breathing document that expands as our knowledge grows, shifts, and changes.


It is interesting to study these women because they are always controversial, no matter whether in their own time or from a historical distance. The domestic science movement is a fraught history, although one could argue that most history is fraught. That is part of what makes this work so exciting. Through this database, we seek to understand these individuals as women in their place, constricted to their gender roles, trying to make the most of their situation. We recognize that the continued assessment of all these leaders within the domestic science movement is a reflection of moments in time, and the ideas on domestic roles, women’s work, and food work within those unique moments.

Sources:

Stefanie Goldberg
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