Creating Consumers: Home-Economists in Twentieth-Century America by Carolyn M. Goldstein (review)

Over the last two decades, historians have moved past earlier, feminist critiques of home economics to reveal it as a complex movement that often served multiple agendas. Yet we have had no comprehensive survey of the movement that integrates it into the burgeoning literature on American consumer capitalism and business history that has emerged since the 1990s. Carolyn Goldstein’s Creating Consumers takes up that challenge and fulfills it admirably.

Creating Consumers covers a vast scope, from the origins of the American Home Economics Association (AHEA) at the turn-of-the-century Lake Placid conferences to the decline of the movement in the 1970s and its eventual rebranding as “family and consumer sciences” in the 1990s. Goldstein focuses her narrative on two institutional sites: the Bureau of Home Economics (BHE) in the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the home economics departments established in many American companies from the 1920s into the postwar era. Yet her account stretches beyond these locations, encompassing the growth, shifts, and debates within the AHEA and the place of home economics in the broader American culture.

Goldstein’s decision to concentrate on the BHE and home economists in business reflects her emphasis on home economists’ roles as mediators in the new world of twentieth-century consumer capitalism. On the one hand, home economists aimed to help Americans, especially women, navigate the transformations in daily life wrought by the rise of mass production and mass distribution, as well as novel technological infrastructures such as electrical systems or natural gas. For home economists, that meant not only teaching women how to evaluate and use new kinds of products (such as washing machines, mechanical refrigerators, gas ovens, or electric stoves) but helping them embody what Goldstein calls “rational consumption” (p. 3) – bringing finances, purchasing decisions, and domestic chores under rational control as informed by scientific knowledge. In this regard, Goldstein argues, home economists played a central role in forming white, middle-class, consumer culture in the United States.

At the same time, even as home economists sought to educate housewives, they also positioned themselves as representatives of those women in government and business. Drawing on their specialized training, their contact with housewives, and their status as women, home economists claimed a particular form of gendered expertise that allowed them to be both distinct from other women and yet to speak on their behalf within male-dominated spheres of civic and economic life. That move enabled home economists to construct professional niches for themselves in realms where other women were often excluded, but it carried its own inherent limitations.

The tensions within and between these roles drive Goldstein’s narrative. Her opening chapter tracks the rise of home economics in the early twentieth century through its “watershed moment” (p. 46) during World War I as home economists secured a place in American public consciousness by collaborating with Herbert Hoover in efforts to promote voluntary rationing and to help families cope with shortages. The next two chapters explore the formation of the BHE in 1923 and its work during the interwar years. Created to improve the lives of rural families and to bolster American agriculture, the BHE embarked on an ambitious program of research and education encompassing nutrition, textiles, household appliances, child-rearing practices, and finances. Led and staffed primarily by women, the BHE gave home economists an institutional base within the federal government and connection to a network of extension offices throughout the country. Yet the agency had an official focus on rural families at a time when the rural population was declining; it tested products to inform consumers but was barred from mentioning specific brands; and its mission rested on the assumption that the interests of consumers and the goals of American agriculture would always coincide. After World War II, those tensions would undermine the...