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77 4 A SCHOOL FOR WIVES Home Economics and the Modern Housewife Cooking is an art, and should be a labor of love. —Mrs. Ada Buxton, 1917 On Valentine’s Day in 1912, a West Virginia farmer sat down and wrote a letter to the president of Cornell University. “My Dear Professor, I have red of your women students,” he wrote. “I would like to correspond with One . . . For the purpose of Matermonial.” The farmer provided his economic prospects as well as a physical inventory: “I am 44 years old weig 210 pounds, high 5 ft. 10 in. Never was sick, nor never was married. Please give this your student.”1 There is no record that Cornell staff replied. Six years later, in 1918, a surgeon in New York wrote to the Cornell home economics department to inquire about hiring a graduate as a cook. “I am establishing a ‘Rest Cure’ for patients,” he wrote, “and wish to obtain a good reliable woman who has taken a course in domestic science to do the cooking and take charge of the kitchen end of the house.”2 This time a member of the Cornell staff did reply, but she wrote a discouraging response . The founder and co-chair of Cornell University’s home economics department, Martha Van Renssalaer, reminded the doctor that her students were college women, and the “position as cook as it is generally understood does not seem to satisfy them after they have spent so much time and money on a professional course.”3 Both the West Virginia farmer and the New York surgeon misunderstood what exactly a woman studying home economics might hope to do with her life. But of the two, it was the farmer who was closest to the 78 / Home Economics and the Modern Housewife mark. For these college-educated women, servant work was unthinkable . But marriage and housework, precisely because of the preprofessional study they had undertaken, were the very futures many of them sought. It had not always been the case that highly educated, relatively privileged women were eager to take on full-time housework. Nor had such women always conceived of such work as a profession. On the contrary, it is hard to grasp now just how closely middle-class Americans at the turn of the twentieth century associated housework with servitude. When most people today think about American families in the past, they tend to assume that from this country’s earliest days up through the 1950s, virtually all women were housewives, performing the bulk of their families’ housework by themselves and not working for pay outside the home. But the “housewife” has never been as homogenous or as unchanging a role as popular culture suggests. American women in significant numbers have always worked outside the home, and in the first two decades of the twentieth century, about a quarter of American women had paying jobs.4 Furthermore , even those women who did not work for wages did not necessarily spend their days cooking and scrubbing; domestic servants allowed a significant minority of American women freedom from the physical demands of housework. Through the late nineteenth century, indeed, domestic servitude had been the practical basis upon which elite U.S. womanhood was defined. There had been efforts throughout the nineteenth century to ennoble housekeeping and to call attention to its social value, especially in popular books like Lydia Maria Child’s 1829 The American Frugal Housewife or Catharine Beecher’s 1841 Treatise on Domestic Economy.5 Yet even as some nineteenth-century Americans had exalted women’s moral and managerial oversight of the domestic sphere, they generally deemphasized the physical work that went into housekeeping. If the wife was to make the home a haven, the husband should not observe her toiling, if possible. The labor that went into producing middle-class homes was supposed to be done with discretion, ideally by servants or slaves. The middle-class devaluation of housework was linked to general Victorian devaluations of physical labor, and new definitions of the middle-class family came to be based in part upon the idea—and it always was more an idea than a fact—that middle-class women and children did not work. On a practical level, servitude’s centrality to middle-class culture was made possible by a steady supply of people, many of them recent immigrants , willing to do other people’s housework for money. By the 1880s, [3.141.24...

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