Thinking Consumers

Images of home economists have vacillated between the hilariously spiteful Sue Ann Nivens of The Mary Tyler Moore show and the staid white-aproned high school teacher who relentlessly instructs groups of disaffected students. In Creating Consumers: Home Economics in Twentieth-Century America, Carolyn Goldstein offers us a third model: the interwar career woman fighting male-dominated businesses, institutional bureaucracy, and budget constraints to craft powerful institutions at the heart of America's emerging consumer society. She was energetic, she was ambitious, and she was, above all, thoroughly modern.

Creating Consumers reframes home economists as crucial players in burgeoning consumer society. They built new career paths for women, encouraged independent thought and decision-making among women consumers, and worked to spread their powerful discourse of "rational consumption" (p. 17) to buyers, sellers, and indeed virtually all the players in the new consumer economy. Goldstein locates home economics in the histories of science, business, agriculture, higher education, the modern state, and most firmly in the histories of women and gender. This book should reinforce the significance of home economists' vision of assiduous consumption amidst competing messages of women's gullibility and marketers' persuasiveness. Creating Consumers successfully establishes the significance of home economics and neither simplifies the field nor elides its contradictions.

Goldstein's first chapter details the creation of home economics as a field. A key theme is the catalyzing effects of federal policy. Home economists emerged from the progressive movement but differed from other reformers in two ways: their focus on a middle-class audience and, most importantly, their efforts to reach rural families. In one of the central contributions of the book, Goldstein shows how the federal "agricultural establishment" sought out consumers long before other parts of the state did. Government efforts to modernize farm life in the years before World War I resulted in new funding for agricultural extension agents, for USDA research, and for educational programs that would train professionals for these positions. This surge in government activity around consumption created career paths for the first generation of professional home economists. Further government efforts to mobilize Americans around food during World War I meant that home economists' achieved more visibility and authority in the late 1910s. In the postwar years, their efforts towards standardization and efficiency, their promotion of healthful consumption, and their faith that producers would learn to respond to consumers' desire for these things dovetailed with Herbert Hoover's inclinations to modernize the economy without imposing legal regulation.

The book's central chapters establish home economists' accomplishments in government and business in the interwar years. In Goldstein's words, home economists worked "to correlate supply and demand" (p 80). They envisioned that correspondence emerging as Americans encountered home economists' research and began using it to inform buying and selling. When Henry Wallace remade the Office of Home Economics into a Bureau in 1923, he was responding to home economists' strategic position as scientists of consumer goods who could also claim insight into women's practical concerns. Home economists were an important presence in these years; under strong female administrators, the Bureau emerged as the single largest employer of female scientists in the U.S. (Among other things, the biographies of these researchers offer valuable examples of the professional possibilities for women in science during the 1910s and 1920s.) They conducted research on everything from the nutritional value of foods to the strength of various fabrics to the relative fuel costs of home appliances. Mainstays of interwar consumer life such as nutritional charts were developed and disseminated in this setting. During the Depression, the Bureau's activities grew to encompass studies of basic household economics, family budgeting, and consumer spending.

Goldstein is careful to note that the prescriptions of home economists did not necessarily transform consumers' desires or the practices of companies. Indeed, it was often difficult to demonstrate that home economists' idealized model consumer actually existed, let alone that firms should change what or how they manufactured...