Home Economics: Children, Consumption, and Montessori Education in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Understood Betsy

Targeted for young girls, Dorothy Canfield Fisher's 1917 novel, Understood Betsy, examines the overlap between Montessori schooling and economics, becoming a treatise on how specific educational approaches may be used to thwart new attitudes concerning consumption and childhood. Recognizing that American children early in the twentieth century were particularly vulnerable in a cultural moment of crass materialism, Canfield Fisher imagined a way to employ Montessori-based schooling to redirect the orientation of children before they became co-opted by the consumer culture. In the novel, Canfield Fisher links fiscal responsibility to physical and mental health, calling for a pattern of spending that benefits both the individual and the community.