The Home Economics Story

The Home Economics Story

Rejissyor: Iowa State Teachers' College. This idealized story of four years in the life of Kay, Jean, Helen, and Louise evokes the lost world of Iowa State's Home Economics Division in the fifties. When an assembly speaker at the high school talks of girls who studied home economics in college, Kay is smitten. But it is a big thing for someone in her family to attend college. She convinces her parents to make the sacrifice and is so eager to leave that she is packing her bags just minutes after receiving her acceptance letter. There is more than a hint here that she wants something more than her family or high school can ordinarily offer. "What is home economics?" the narrator asks, hinting at the field's complexity: it is an interdisciplinary field that unites the arts and sciences with traditionally female activities, thus feminizing many otherwise neutral activities. In home economics, physics classes teach toaster-testing, and women chemists study the interaction of tomato soup and milk. Says the narrator: "All the classes seemed to fit together. Even the physics class was what a girl would like. It was about physics in the home. This course helped you to understand just what makes things run. Then, in household equipment, you could study the practical side: the use of an appliance. In turn, there were courses in foods and nutrition where you learned the why as well as the how." As a discipline, home economics looks both forward and backward. Although it enables women to leave the home and play essential roles in institutions, corporations, and schools ("She could see herself at the center of a world made up of large ovens and mixers manned by professional cooks"), home economists' work, seen as "women's work," has not been valued as highly as less essential work that happens to be performed by men. Even the professionalization of the home economics sphere has not kept its activities from being taken for granted. Historically connected to social movements like progressivism, to the empowering of women

https://archive.org/details/0159_Home_Economics_Story_The_E00036_01_16_28_00 · Public domain (Internet Archive)