"The Home Economics Story" is one of my favorite MST3K shorts. Partially because it's funny, but also, I think, because of my complicated view of the field. I'm a GenX feminist, so I grew up when Home Ec was both fading from view and seen as a way to keep women in the kitchen. And, well, I'm not fully domesticated. I'm a disaster at housework, a decent but often uninspired cook (cooking for a party for fun; cooking for myself is why I have eggs for dinner at least once a week), an excellent baker, an expert knitter, and someone who's been meaning to learn how to sew since adolescence. However, I'm aware of the fact that the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from MIT, Ellen Swallow Richards, was one of the inventors of the field.
In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, Home Economics was a field in which women were able to have careers. Margaret Murray Washington, who was born at the end of the Civil War and educated at Quaker schools and became a faculty member at Tuskegee where she met and married Booker T. Washington. Lillian Moller Galbraith saved her business and engineering career by designing the modern step-saving kitchen (despite the fact that she had a cook her entire life and never cooked on her own). Partners Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose ran the home economics department at Cornell as a team, with Van Rensselaer adding scientific rigor and Rose applying it to real life. Add in women who wrote, produced, and broadcast home economics radio programs; women doing outreach programs; women in government service ensuring food purity and creating food programs; and women teaching home economics to middle and high school students. If you were a woman interested in chemistry, home economics let you study and apply that science with less friction from outside groups. The home appliance track one of the women in "The Home Economics Story" followed at Iowa State was electrical engineering applied to consumer items. Home economists developed safe, practical, and attractive jumpsuits for women working WWII defense factories and ration-friendly menus. They created appliance safety standards and RDA requirements. The discipline of child development came under home economics so it's thanks to them that we know the importance of the early years.
That's not to say the discipline doesn't have an uncomplicated history. The founders were white and middle class, not accepting of immigrant traditions and foods (flavor wasn't a priority among the early home economists), and with racist and even eugenic outlooks. African Americans were barred from professional societies and created their own. And, of course, there's the 50s "please a man" aspect to the classes taught to teenagers.
As that went out of fashion, home economics faced another threat - women who had chosen home economics because it was a way to be a chemist or engineer or psychologist when those fields were unwelcoming could (as I did) major in one of those fields. While this was happening, the discipline was also under attack from the right. Home Ec textbooks were among the first to be challenged for "promoting secular humanism" because they taught tolerance. Then the fear that US students were falling behind the rest of the world (or failing outright) pushed home ec (along with art, music, and to some degree social studies and foreign languages) down the list of educational priorities.
Fast forward to 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic had people making sourdough bread and sewing masks - very home ec projects. That follows on years of people claiming that universal home economics would solve obesity and young people's financial problems. While that may be a bit of a stretch, I agree with Danielle Drelinger's suggestion that home ec should again be required, but with the more practical and rigorous outlook of the women who led the field for over a century rather than the mediocre muffins and throw pillows image that we've had of the field.
