Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (review)

In Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture, historian Megan J. Elias demonstrates that "home ec" is much more than "casseroles or rolled hems." Elias's engaging book traces the long and complex history of the home economics movement in the United States, exploring the goals of the movement and the ways in which they changed, and were disseminated, misunderstood and co-opted over time. Elias asserts that the first generation of home economists aimed to improve and to expand women's professional and personal opportunities, whether offering them jobs in the new field of domestic science or the skills to be managers of more efficient homes. These important goals, she suggests, should not be eclipsed by the movement's later history or its inability to change the gender politics of domestic work.

Elias introduces her narrative with a nod to the Progressive origins of the movement, outlining some of the earlier manifestations of domestic advice and domestic science in the United States. Her story begins with the 1899 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics (later the American Home Economics Association), a milestone in the development and organization of academic training for the field.

The first chapter, "A Department of One's Own," considers university home economics and domestic science departments in the early years of the twentieth century. Elias details the ways in which these departments incorporated rigorous scientific training in chemistry and engineering into the curriculum. Yet, to outsiders, these laboratory experiments still appeared to be cooking classes. One particularly fascinating aspect of this chapter is Elias's analysis of "practice houses" in which students lived in small groups to implement the new domestic skills learned in various courses. This team approach to domestic work contrasted sharply with the situations students would likely face if they were to marry. As a result, some students advocated for real-world knowledge rather than theory. When home economics courses were introduced into public schools, they focused on the acquisition of simple, practical skills as opposed intellectual inquiry.

"At Home in the World" analyzes the professional roles that home economists played in the United States during World War I and II and the Great Depression. Home economists like nutritionists and textile scientists mobilized for these national crises. Elias details ways in which increased government funding and savvy use of media outlets like radio and popular publications helped spread home economics methods across the country and eventually led to more careers in the field. At the same time, companies that produced domestic goods tried to employ home economists to endorse their products, giving their wares a scientific stamp of approval. Elias interprets this development with ambivalence as it offered new professional possibilities for women, but without the intellectual freedom of a university laboratory.

In chapter three, "Future Homemakers of America," Elias considers the transformation of home economics after WWII in relation to its increasing emphasis on training for family life and marriage. Elias also examines the rise of product-focused television shows that employed the lessons of home economics to sell goods. Rather than fight this company-sponsored domestic training, however, many home economists switched gears and began to study consumer behavior.

In "Burn Your Braisers" Elias looks at what happened to home economics in the 1960s and 1970s, with a particular focus on second-wave feminists' responses to the movement. She argues that feminists viewed the home economics movement as the enemy because it reinforced the connection between gender and domestic work. In spite of her analysis of post-war home economics as training for marriage, Elias interprets this critique as a misunderstanding of the movement's goals, which had aimed to professionalize domestic work and to create new opportunities for women. In short, the movement had not succeeded in raising the status of domestic labor. As a result, university home economics departments, which increasingly included men in positions of authority, began to change their names to "family and consumer sciences" or...