Creating Consumers

Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America

Carolyn M. Goldstein

Publication Year: 2012

Home economics emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a movement to train women to be more efficient household managers. At the same moment, American families began to consume many more goods and services than they produced. To guide women in this transition, professional home economists had two major goals: to teach women to assume their new roles as modern consumers and to communicate homemakers' needs to manufacturers and political leaders. Carolyn M. Goldstein charts the development of the profession from its origins as an educational movement to its identity as a source of consumer expertise in the interwar period to its virtual disappearance by the 1970s.

Published by: The University of North Carolina Press

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As a young girl in New York State in the 1960s, I always looked forward to visiting the State Fair in Syracuse, where my grandmother, Helen Bull Vandervort, directed the women’s building. Art displays and cooking demonstrations filled the halls, and I took pride in my grandmother’s command of this exciting...

Introduction

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pp. 1-20

In the late nineteenth century, as the economic function of American homes shifted from producing goods and services to consuming them, a group of middle-class women—and a few men—launched an educational reform movement to guide homemakers in this transition. Widely known as “domestic...

1. Envisioning the Rational Consumer, 1900–1920

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pp. 21-61

“The consumer who desires to be economical,” Teachers College professor Mary Schenck Woolman and Ellen Beers McGowan advised in Textiles: A Handbook for the Student and the Consumer, a textbook they coauthored in 1913, “should not make a practice of wandering about the shops to get ideas, for...

2. Creating a Science of Consumption at the Bureau of Home Economics, 1920–1940

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pp. 62-97

When Secretary of Agriculture Henry C. Wallace decided to create a Bureau of Home Economics (BHE) in 1923, he chose as its director Louise Stanley, a prominent home economist at midcareer with a broad vision of the field’s potential and a commitment to using research into the quality of household...

3. Reforming the Marketplace at the Bureau of Home Economics, 1923–1940

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pp. 98-135

In late 1927, Frederick J. Schlink, consumer activist and assistant secretary of the American Engineering Standards Committee, wrote to Ruth O’Brien, who directed the Division of Textiles and Clothing in the Bureau of Home Economics (BHE), inquiring about the existence of the old-time “thrifty buyer.” He...

4. Selling Home Economics: The Professional Ideals of Businesswomen, 1920–1940

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pp. 136-173

In June 1936, a group of home economists performed a play at an afternoon meeting during the convention week of the American Home Economics Association (AHEA). Representatives of the AHEA’s Business Department and Student Club Department took time from a busy annual meeting to attend a...

5. Product Testing, Development, and Promotion: Corporate Investment in Home Economics, 1920–1940

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pp. 174-207

As a girl growing up in Tennessee in the 1910s, Marye Dahnke aspired to a career that would combine her interest in food and nutrition with her attraction to the world of business. “I decided that I wanted to be, first and foremost, a business woman,” she later recalled. “And secondly, to be a factor, however...

6. From Service to Sales: Utility Home Service Departments, 1920–1940

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pp. 208-241

In 1917 the Public Service Electric and Gas Company of New Jersey hired Ada Bessie Swann to develop an ambitious program to educate homemakers about the benefits of gas and electricity. In less than a decade, Swann—playing a dramatic translating role between utility companies and consumers—transformed...

7. Mediation Marginalized: Home Economics in Government and Business, 1940–1970

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pp. 242-281

“What [home economists] are called on to do today is what they have been doing for years, but now they have a flag to carry,” declared Jessie McQueen, home economist at the American Gas Association, in 1942. With the entry of the United States into World War II, concern for the strength of the defense...

8. Identity Crisis and Confusion: Home Economics and Social Change, 1950–1975

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pp. 282-295

As home economists’ institutional bases in the public and private sectors eroded in the decades after World War II, the rise of second-wave feminism and the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s placed home economists’ field under harsh public scrutiny and criticism. Betty Friedan’s landmark book...

Epilogue

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pp. 296-302

Notes

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pp. 303-362

Bibliography

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pp. 363-390

Index

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pp. 391-412

E-ISBN-13: 9781469601700
E-ISBN-10: 1469601702
Print-ISBN-13: 9780807835531
Print-ISBN-10: 0807835536

Page Count: 456
Illustrations: 2 line drawings, 1 map
Publication Year: 2012