Resources
We’ve found the below books, articles and databases helpful in the creation of this project. It’s ever-evolving; if you’ve created or come across a source that we should include here, please let us know.
Domestic Science 101
Cohen, Ruth Schwartz. More Work for Mother: The ironies of Household Technology From the Open Hearth to the Microwave. Basic Books, 1983.
Danovich, Tove. “Despite A Revamped Focus On Real-Life Skills, 'Home Ec' Classes Fade Away.” NPR The Salt. 14 June, 2018. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2018/06/14/618329461/despite-a-revamped-focus-on-real-life-skills-home-ec-classes-fade-away
Dreilinger, Danielle. The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live. W. W. Norton & Company, 4 May 2021.
“Easy A: The SuperRad Story of Home Economics.” GastroPod, 13 April 2021. https://gastropod.com/easy-a-the-superrad-story-of-home-economics/
Goldstein, Carolyn M. Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America. University of North Carolina Press, 2012, https://doi.org/10.5149/9780807872383_goldstein
Reiger, Kerreen. “All but the Kitchen Sink: On the Significance of Domestic Science and the Silence of Social Theory.” Theory and Society, vol. 16, no. 4, Springer, 1987, pp. 497–526, http://www.jstor.org/stable/657592
Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. University of California Press, 2009.
Stage, Sarah, and Virginia B. Vincenti, editors. Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession. Cornell University Press, 1997, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv2n7jkd
Food & Cooking
Biltekoff, Charlotte. “ ‘Strong Men and Women are not Products of Improper Food’: Domestic Science and the History of Eating and Identity.” Journal for the Study of food and Society, voll 6, no. 1. 27 April, 2015. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2752/152897902786732635?casa_token=3ohXPLV1L9cAAAAA%3Adqhc1XbHxehgNU8kYjUUC2z4f8gJHds88J0hceiUwngxCl1pcfrm92b5yg8EO-_CeCpXmfWZLxhKcw&
Evans, Meryle. “The Egg Beater.” Gastronomica, vol. 1, no. 2, University of California Press, 2001, pp. 16–19, https://doi.org/10.1525/gfc.2001.1.2.16
Veit, Helen Zoe, editor. Food in the American Gilded Age. Michigan State University Press, 2017, http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.14321/j.ctt1m3p30r
Literacy + Education
Aronson, Amy Beth. “Domesticity and Women's Collective Agency: Contribution and Collaboration in America's First Successful Women's Magazine.” American Periodicals, vol. 11, 2001, pp. 1–23., www.jstor.org/stable/20771136.
Miller, Elisa. In the Name of the Home: Women, Domestic Science, and American Higher Education, 1865-1930. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2004. https://www.proquest.com/openview/c65411ab134d16feb45d1b136cd1f2be/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=18750&diss=y
Radke-Moss, Andrea G. Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West. University of Nebraska Press, November 2008.
Tsank, Stephanie. "The Ideal Observer Meets The Ideal Consumer: Realism, Domestic Science, and Immigrant Foodways in Willa Cather's My Ántonia (1918)." American Studies, vol. 57 no. 3, 2018, p. 39-56. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/ams.2018.0046.
Abby Fisher
Fisher, Abby. What Mrs. Fisher Knows About Old Southern Cooking: Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc. San Francisco, Women’s Cooperative Printing Office, 1881.
Mejia, Paula. “Celebrating Abby Fisher, One of the First African-American Cookbook Authors.” Atlas Obscura, 8 Dec. 2017, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/abby-fisher-african-american-chef-cookbook.
Wagner, Tricia Martineau. “Abby Fisher (1832 - ?).” BlackPast, 9 Jul. 2007, https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/fisher-abby-1832/.
Walden, Sarah. Tasteful Domesticity: Women’s Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.
Wright-Ruiz, Kiera. “6 Black Chefs (and 1 Inventor) Who Changed the History of Food.” The New York Times, 28 Feb. 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/28/dining/black-chefs.html.
Zafar, Rafia. “What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking.” Gastronomica, vol. 1, no. 4, 2001, pp. 88-90.
Janie Porter Barrett
Muth, Bill et al. “Janie Porter Barrett (1865-1948): Exemplary African American Correctional Educator.” Journal of Correctional Education, vol. 60, no. 1, 2009, pp. 31-51.
Scott, Anne Firor. “Janie Aurora Porter Barrett (1865-1948).” Library of Virginia,https://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.php?b=Barrett_Janie_Porter.
Wenger, Étienne. Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity. Cambridge University Press, 1998.
Louisa Knapp Curtis
Brazeau, Alicia. Circulating Literacy: Writing Instruction in American Periodicals, 1880-1910. Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. muse.jhu.edu/book/48581.
Curtis Bok, Mary Louise. “Louisa Knapp Curtis.” Notable Women of Pennsylvania edited by Gertrude Bosley Biddle and Sarah Dickinson Lowrie. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1942, pp. 255-257. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv4v336k.167
Damon-Moore, Helen. Magazines for the Millions: Gender and Commerce in the Ladies' Home Journal and the Saturday Evening Post, 1880-1910. State University of New York Press, 1994. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Magazines_for_the_Millions/ewxK0hXgOGsC?hl=en&gbpv=0
Damon-Moore, Helen and Carl F. Kaestle. “Gender, Advertising, and Mass-Circulation Magazines.” Literacy in the United States: Readers and Reading Since 1880 by Carl F. Kaestle, Helen Damon-Moore, Lawrence C. Stedman, Katherine Tinsley and William Vance Trollinger, Yale University Press, 1991, pp. 245-271. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt32bm2w?turn_away=true
Patterson, Martha. The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894-1930. Rutgers University Press, 2008. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhxr8?turn_away=true
Scanlon, Jennifer. Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies' Home Journal, Gender, and the Promises of Consumer Culture. Routledge, 1995. https://www.google.com/books/edition/Inarticulate_Longings/6fuWGqKn7k4C?hl=en
Malinda Russell
Burton, Monica, Osayi Endolyn, and Toni Tipton-Martin. “The Legacy of Malinda Russell, the First African-American Cookbook Author.” Eater, 23 Feb. 2021, https://www.eater.com/22262716/malinda-russell-author-a-domestic-cookbook.
O’Neill, Molly. “A 19th-Century Ghost Awakens to Redefine ‘Soul’.” The New York Times, 21 Nov. 2007, https://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/21/dining/21cook.html.
Russell, Malinda. A Domestic Cookbook: Containing a Careful Selection of Useful Receipts for the Kitchen. Paw Paw, 1866.
Maria Parloa
Elias, Megan J. Food on the Page. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.
Lincoln, Mary J. “The Pioneers of Scientific Cookery.” Good Housekeeping, October 1910, pp. 470-4. http://reader.library.cornell.edu/docviewer/digital?id=hearth6417403_1337_004#page/109/mode/1up
“Miss Parloa’s Cookery School.” The New York Times, 1 November 1882. https://www.nytimes.com/1882/11/01/archives/miss-parloas-cookery-school.html
“Our Good Housekeeping Family.” Good Housekeeping, May 1882, pp. 25-6. https://digital.library.cornell.edu/catalog/hearth6417403_1295_001
“Parloa, Maria, 1843-1909.” Michigan State University Libraries Digital Repository: Feeding America Collection. https://d.lib.msu.edu/content/biographies?author_name=Parloa%2C+Maria%2C+1843-1909
Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. University of California Press, 2009.
Shintani, Kiyoshi. “Cooking Up Modernity: Culinary Reformers and the Making of Consumer Culture, 1876-1916.” University of Oregon Scholar’s Bank, 13 December 2008.https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/9493/Shintani_Kiyoshi_PhD_Fall2008.pdf;sequence=1
Marion Harland
Harland, Marion. Common Sense in the Household: A Manual of Practical Housewifery. New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884.
Harland, Marion. Marion Harland’s Autobiography: The Story of a Long Life. Harper & Brothers, 1910.
“Marion Harland, Author, Dies at 91.” The New York Times, 4 Jun. 1922. https://www.nytimes.com/1922/06/04/archives/marion-harland-author-dies-at-91-mrs-mary-virginia-terhune-writer.html
Smith, Karen Manners. “Mary Virginia Terhune (Marion Harland): Writer, Minister's Wife, and Domestic Expert.” American Presbyterians, vol. 17, no. 2, 1994, pp. 111-122.
Databases
Cornell University HEARTH Archive.
Michigan State University Feeding America Project.
Ladies Home Journal Digital Archive.
Good Housekeeping Digital Archive.
The Marion Nestle Food Studies Collection at NYU.
Race & Identity
The literature surrounding the women of color in this project is underdeveloped, and there are many women of color we don’t know about or whose names were never recorded. We are also not the first to write about these women. There is an existing body of literature surrounding these women of the domestic science movement and related subjects, and these authors' work has informed and inspired much of this project. Some include:
Toni Tipton-Martin
Michael Twitty
Frederick Douglass Opie
Jessica B. Harris
Psyche Williams-Forson
Adrian Miller
Tonya Hopkins
Marcia Chatelain
Edna Lewis
Kyla Wazana Tompkins
Thérèse Nelson
Rafia Zafar
Judith Carney
Jennifer Jensen Wallach
Traki L. Taylor
Sharon Harley
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Stephanie J. Shaw
Additionally, below are specific books and articles we have relied on:
Driskell, Jay Winston. “‘Respectable Militants’: The Neighborhood Union and the Transformation of the Politics of Respectability, 1908–1913.” Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics, University of Virginia Press, 2014, pp. 106–47, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt9qhb0p.7.
Harris, Paisley Jane. "Gatekeeping and Remaking: The Politics of Respectability in African American Women's History and Black Feminism." Journal of Women's History, vol. 15 no. 1, 2003, p. 212-220. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/jowh.2003.0025.
Perkins, Linda M. “‘Bound to Them by a Common Sorrow’: African American Women, Higher Education, and Collective Advancement.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 100, no. 4, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, 2015, pp. 721–47, https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.100.4.0721
Ibid. (1983), The Impact of the “Cult of True Womanhood” on the Education of Black Women. Journal of Social Issues, 39: 17-28. https://doi-org.proxy.library.nyu.edu/10.1111/j.1540-4560.1983.tb00152
Vernese Edghill-Walden, et al. “We Speak Their Names: Counter Narratives of Black Women Liberators.” Black History Bulletin, vol. 81, no. 1, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, 2018, pp. 5–14, https://doi.org/10.5323/blachistbull.81.1.0005
Walden, Sarah. “TASTE AND RACE: Revisions of Labor and Domestic Literacy in the Early Twentieth Century.” Tasteful Domesticity: Women’s Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018, pp. 143–65, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv6p4ph.10.
Wallach, Jennifer Jensen. Every Nation Has its Dish: Black Bodies & Black Food in Twentieth-Century America. The University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
Health & Sanitation
Morantz, Regina Markell. “Making Women Modern: Middle Class Women and Health Reform in 19th Century America.” Journal of Social History, vol. 10, no. 4, Summer 1977, pp. 490-507. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3786765.
Tomes, Nancy. “Spreading the Germ Theory: Sanitary Science and Home Economics, 1880-1930.” Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, edited by Sarah Stage and Virginia B, Vincenti, Cornell University Press, 1997, pp. 34–54. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5448304.
Catharine Beecher
Burstyn, Joan N. “Catharine Beecher and the Education of American Women”, The New England Quarterly, September 1974, vol. 47 no. 3, pp 386-403. https://www.jstor.org/stable/364378
Gardner, Catharine Villanueva. “Heaven-Appointed Educators of Mind: Catharine Beecher and the Moral Power of Women.” Hypatia, vol. 19 no. 2, Indiana University Press, Spring 2004, pp. 1-16. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/170247
James, Edward T et al. Notable American Women, 1607-1950. Belknap Press, 1971. https://books.google.ws/books?id=7DcotQEACAAJ&printsec=copyright#v=onepage&q&f=false
Leavitt, Sarah A. From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice. University of North Carolina Press, 2002. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/170247
Walden, Sarah. Tasteful Domesticity: Women’s Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018.https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv6p4ph?turn_away=true
Ellen Swallow Richards
Dyball, Robert and Liesel Carlsson. “Ellen Swallow Richards: Mother of Human Ecology?” Human Ecology Review, vol. 23 no. 2, Society for Human Ecology, 2017, pp. 17-28. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26367977
“Easy A: The SuperRad Story of Home Economics.” GastroPod, 13 April 2021. https://gastropod.com/easy-a-the-superrad-story-of-home-economics/
Shapiro, Laura. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. University of California Press, 2009.
Stage, Sarah. “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement.” Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, edited by Sarah Stage and Virginia B, Vincenti, Cornell University Press, 1997, pp. 17-33. ProQuest Ebook Central,ebookcentral-proquest-com.proxy.library.nyu.edu/lib/nyulibrary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5448304.
Lucy Craft Laney
Feger, H. V. “A GIRL WHO BECAME A GREAT WOMAN.” Negro History Bulletin, vol. 5, no. 6, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, 1942, pp. 123–123, http://www.jstor.org/stable/44246284.
Jones, Ashley. “Lucy Craft Laney (1854-1933)”. BlackPast, 15 November 2017. https://www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/laney-lucy-craft-1854-1933/.
Harris, Sheena. “Margaret Murray Washington.” Alabama Women, edited by Susan Youngblood Ashmore and Lisa Lindquist Dorr, University of Georgia Press, 2017, pp. 129-144. muse.jhu.edu/book/52089.
McCluskey, Audrey Thomas. “‘We Specialize in the Wholly Impossible’: Black Women School Founders and Their Mission.” Signs, vol. 22, no. 2, University of Chicago Press, 1997, pp. 403–26, http://www.jstor.org/stable/3175282.
Perkins, Linda M. “‘Bound to Them by a Common Sorrow’: African American Women, Higher Education, and Collective Advancement.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 100, no. 4, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, 2015, pp. 721–47, https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.100.4.0721
Walden, Sarah. “TASTE AND RACE: Revisions of Labor and Domestic Literacy in the Early Twentieth Century.” Tasteful Domesticity: Women’s Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790-1940, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018, pp. 143–65,https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv6p4ph.10
Margaret Murray Washington
Harris, Sheena. “Margaret Murray Washington.” Alabama Women, edited by Susan Youngblood Ashmore and Lisa Lindquist Dorr, University of Georgia Press, 2017, pp. 129-144. muse.jhu.edu/book/52089.
Ibid. Margaret Murray Washington: The Life and Times of a Career Clubwoman. University of Tennessee Press, January 2021. Patterson, Martha H. Beyond the Gibson Girl: Reimagining the American New Woman, 1895-1915. University of Illinois Press, 2005. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/j.ctt1xcpv3.7Perkins, Linda M. “‘Bound to Them by a Common Sorrow’: African American Women, Higher Education, and Collective Advancement.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 100, no. 4, Association for the Study of African American Life and History, 2015, pp. 721–47, https://doi.org/10.5323/jafriamerhist.100.4.0721
Rouse, Jacqueline Anne. “Out of the Shadow of Tuskegee: Margaret Murray Washington, Social Activism, and Race Validation.” The Journal of Negro History, vol. 81, no. 1/4, University of Chicago Press, Winter-Autumn 1996, pp. 31-46. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2717606.
Wallach, Jennifer Jensen. Every Nation Has its Dish: Black Bodies & Black Food in Twentieth-Century America. The University of North Carolina Press, 2019.
Nannie Helen Burroughs
Bair, Sarah D. “Educating Black Girls in the Early 20th Century: The Pioneering Work of Nannie Helen Burroughs (1879-1961).” Theory and Research in Social Education, vol. 36, no. 1, 2008, pp. 9-35.
Harley, Sharon. "Nannie Helen Burroughs: 'The Black Goddess of Liberty.'" The Journal of Negro History, vol. 81, no. 1, 1996, pp. 62-71.
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “Burroughs, Nannie Helen (1879-1961).” Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Darlene Clark Hine et al, University of Indiana Press, 1993, pp. 201-205.
McHugh, Jess. “Denied a teaching job for being ‘too Black,’ she started her own school — and a movement.” The Washington Post, 28 Feb. 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/02/28/nannie-helen-burroughs-black-teacher/.
Shaw, Stephanie J. What a Woman Ought to Be and to Do. The University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Taylor, Traki L. “'Womanhood Glorified': Nannie Helen Burroughs and the National Training School for Women and Girls, Inc., 1909-1961.” The Journal of African American History, vol. 87, no. 4, 2002, pp. 390-402. The University of Chicago Press Journals, https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.2307/1562472.
Thomas, Veronica G., and Janine A. Jackson. “The Education of African American Girls and Women: Past to Present.” The Journal of Negro Education, vol, 76, no. 3, 2007, pp. 357-372.