Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007
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Measuring Up

Home economics and modern domesticity

By Mary Anne Beecher

It wasn't unusual for Martha Van Rensselaer, founder of Cornell University's "Reading-Course for Farmers' Wives," to type hundreds of responses each week to course participants. At the turn of the century, Cornell's home economics program was one of the first of its kind in the northeastern United States. As part of the program, Van Rensselaer created Reading-Course bulletins in 1901, free publications devoted to spreading new knowledge on domestic topics to homemakers. By 1906, more than twenty thousand New York farm women had signed up to receive the mailings, which Van Rensselaer produced at a rate of about five per year. The first issue called Saving Steps introduced what was to become a continuing preoccupation of home economics researchers: the importance of conserving energy by making homemaking efforts more efficient.

But besides providing valuable information, the bulletins included quizzes, which Van Rensselaer asked readers to complete and return so she could evaluate her readers' comprehension of each issue's contents, as well as a section entitled "Plans for Club Study." This section recommended that women form small groups for the purpose of discussing each bulletin's contents in a social setting. Given that most rural women commonly complained of feeling isolated in their rural settings--one of Van Rensselaer's correspondents wrote that "one's soul certainly does starve away out in the country"--the formation of such clubs went beyond the study of domestic improvements and encouraged the establishment of rural social networks among neighbors who might not otherwise spend time together. By the mid-1910s, more than three hundred study clubs of approximately fifteen members each had been established in New York State.

When Congress passed the Smith-Lever Act establishing a nationwide extension service in 1914, land-grant universities received a subsidized mandate to take information based on research directly to each state's general population in order to broaden the impact of modernization efforts related to new scientific, agricultural, and domestic practices. With a combination of state and federal financial support, schools across the nation began to produce free technical advice literature for their citizens to complement sponsored events, such as Cornell's Farm and Home Week, a series of short courses offered to rural men and women on campus during a two-week period each February. Specialists also took their messages into the field, demonstrating techniques and answering questions at grange meetings or home bureau events. Although not all extension activity focused on rural life, its roots in improving agricultural practices meant that the bulk of its efforts benefited rural audiences. Through these types of programs, home economists merged the public and private by embracing the rigors of science and the methods of industry with the intimacy of personal connections. In doing so, shared information about efficient household operations, created community ties, and validated the home as a productive workplace for women.

Home economists' preference for empirical knowledge is evident in the various names for the college-level programs that first emerged in agricultural colleges in Iowa and Kansas in the mid-nineteenth century. Calling them "household economy" or "domestic science," their leaders broadcast their alliance with the already established scientific fields found in such institutions. For instance, as the fourth of its kind in the nation, Oregon State Agricultural College (now Oregon State University) pioneered the presence of home economics in the far west region with the founding of its Department of Household Economy and Hygiene in 1889. At least twenty-five such programs emerged in colleges nationwide by 1915.

New knowledge about household operations was perhaps most efficiently and directly communicated in the free extension bulletins that home economics researchers produced in large numbers to be circulated to women on farms and in small towns throughout the twentieth century. By translating their findings into fictional scenarios, simple charts and graphs, patterns to be imitated, or the rhetoric of common sense to be studied or referenced by women in their own homes, the relevance of complex laboratory studies or field observations could be quickly understood by a widely varied audience. With optimistic titles like Managing the Home with Ease and Satisfaction, or No Space to Waste, these small, concise primers offered hope and appealed to the farm women's senses of frugality.

Most bulletins took the form of a nine- by five-inch pamphlet that ranged in average length from ten to sixty pages, depending on the topic. Because of their uniform size, readers could collect their bulletins together on a shelf or in a binder that allowed them to gradually form a more comprehensive text with advice about all aspects of homemaking. Most featured a descriptive title and a drawing or photograph on the cover to communicate the essence of the general topic. Often illustrated with additional diagrams, drawings, or photographs of real rooms, these texts encouraged readers to picture the improvements they could make to their own less-than-perfect houses. Bulletins on kitchens often also provided charts of standard dimensions and extensive lists of essential supplies and equipment, urging the creation of compact modern rooms lined with compartments and smooth, hygienic surfaces.

Though the first three decades of the twentieth century saw tremendous shifts in the quality of life in rural America, technological improvements for the farmer did not always translate to advancements for farm women. The invention of the combustion engine provided a new and seemingly better source for powering agricultural equipment, but without rural electrification women still had to cope with the challenges of cleaning and cooking by the light of kerosene or gas. With strong crop prices and reductions in the amount of manual labor required in the field, the 1910s and '20s are sometimes referred to as the Golden Age of Agriculture in America. Still, according to a 1919 government-sponsored survey, only 22 percent of all Midwestern farmhouses had electricity and only one quarter had running water, while conditions were even worse in other parts of the country. Before 1935, only 30 percent of Oregon farms had electricity. Most rural women cooked on wood stoves into the forties even though nearly all urban dwellings were electrified by the end of the twenties.

Home economists discovered that prior to the introduction of home economics publications and programs, many farm women coped with the lack of modern conditions by relying heavily on nineteenth-century methods to operate their households. With limited access to formalized education, most women depended on parents, friends, and neighbors to teach them how to care for their children and manage their homes. Poorly arranged, aging farmhouses furthered women's dependence on traditional modes of keeping house because new devices like vacuum cleaners and electric washing machines could not be easily integrated for use.

While the lack modern arrangements and equipment in farmhouses challenged rural women throughout the country, home economists came to see that their constituents were not victimized by their dated surroundings and lack of knowledge. Most still managed to grow and preserve much of their own food. Many also ran small businesses selling eggs or dairy products while aiding their husbands with daily farm operations. Like their urban counterparts, farm women raised children, clothed their families, and kept their houses clean, but the ingenuity and creativity they showed in coping with their challenging circumstances inspired home economists to incorporate these women's ideas and images from their actual houses into their extension publications. Home economics specialists often sent photographers into the field to document model methods so that their bulletins could include real-life examples of the principles they espoused. As a result, they collected images of modern and affordable improvements, such as orderly root cellars built out of used lumber and old-fashioned chests of drawers elevated on little wood blocks to create makeshift kitchen cabinets with work surfaces at an appropriate height.

Alongside their students, professors in the newly minted home economics programs tested and evaluated modern household equipment, such as electric sewing machines and vacuum cleaners, and their various arrangements in their classrooms, laboratories, and practice houses.

Most home economists were concerned with how housekeeping processes affected the health and well-being of the women who conducted them, so they focused on the design of kitchens since most tasks were conducted in that space. University of Nebraska home economist Greta Gray collected nearly nine hundred detailed "kitchen score cards" from rural women in her home management extension classes between 1924 and 1927, which revealed that conditions such as poor lighting and bad arrangements plagued the representative Nebraska farm woman, resulting in Gray's 1928 bulletin entitled The Nebraska Farm Kitchen. Similarly, in the 1930s, home economists at Purdue University demonstrated the inefficiencies of common circulation patterns in kitchens by mapping the movements of 774 Indiana homemakers in their own kitchens to determine the average overall sizes of their kitchens and the relationship of them to the dining areas of the home. Such rational studies of the American kitchen--also conducted in other parts of the country by Iris Davenport, Marion C. Bell, and Mary May Miller--emphasized the importance of creating an efficient relationship between the layout of the kitchen "work centers" and the tasks typically undertaken by the homemaker. While common-sense strategies--such as placing tools and equipment as close as possible to the site where they are used--may seem obvious in the abstract, homemakers who found themselves adapting modern processes to kitchens built for the previous century benefited from seeing examples of how simple affordable changes such as the installation of drawer dividers or the removal of opaque cabinet doors could help them perform domestic tasks more quickly and easily.

While most home economics programs studied general consumer behaviors, house design, homemaking practices, nutrition, and textiles and their uses, some colleges also developed focused efforts on particular areas of research. This was the case at Oregon State Agricultural College, where home economists made their own specific contributions to national efforts to improve rural living conditions by establishing standards for household dimensions and by measuring the time and effort homemakers expended to conduct their tasks. Professors and graduate students systematically measured and documented the physical features of farmhouses across Oregon. They used their results to identify optimum sizes for domestic features and spaces. Led by researcher Maud Wilson, who joined Oregon State in 1925, the home economics department in Corvallis collected records and questionnaires from 562 rural Oregon homemakers who documented how they spent their time. By observing women in their own houses and by asking them to keep track of and report on their activities, Wilson and her students calculated the number of miles traveled per year by rural homemakers within their own homes.

Using data such as these, Wilson produced reports that gave credence to home economics' rural reform efforts across the country, broadening the network of scholarship. From Oregon farm wives' records, she was able to show that rural women spent 95 percent of their time conducting tasks that were directly influenced by the architectural features and equipment in their houses. She asserted that by improving features such as kitchen cabinets to include more compartments and flexibly spaced dividers, rural women could improve the capacity and the fit of their kitchens, ultimately cutting down on the amount of time they had to spend there. She validated that when running water was piped directly into the kitchen, rural women reduced the amount of distance they traveled to do their housework by miles each year, thereby improving efficiency and reducing fatigue. Findings such as these helped establish the credibility of home economists' assertion that having a modern and efficient living environment and using new approaches to its management would directly and favorably impact the quality of rural family life.

Under Wilson's direction, home economics students also measured the bodies of hundreds of Oregon women and identified preferred standard sizes for kitchen cabinets, appliances, and work surfaces based on this data. While cabinet manufacturers worked toward the creation of a "one-size fits all" approach to cabinet design, researchers at Oregon State verified that women came in all different sizes and that being provided with optimum work surface heights and with flexible placements for shelves directly impacted their efficiency and the health of their backs and necks. They tested new cabinet design concepts such as a base cabinet that included an integrated built-in step that pulled out and rested on top of an open bottom drawer so that shorter homemakers could more easily access the contents of their upper-most shelves. Researchers at Oregon State circulated this type of information to homemakers in bulletins like Considerations in Planning Kitchen Cabinets (1947) and encouraged consumers to demand flexibility with their cabinet purchases.

While the production of general measurements and standards informed the research efforts of her colleagues at other schools and improved the quality of manufactured domestic products, Wilson also recognized the importance of regional research that acknowledged the characteristics of particular locations. With that in mind, she produced the 1933 bulletin Planning the Willamette Valley Farmhouse for Family Needs, along with the later House Planning Ideas of Oregon Rural Women (1940), cowritten with home economist Laura Wells. In both of these works, the impact of Oregon's rainy climate and the alternative growing seasons of the western Oregon region factored into the recommendations for domestic tasks such as food preservation and storage found in those circulars. These bulletins included several pages of detailed, scaled line drawings of kitchen cabinet interiors along with the layout of the cabinetry, and the optimum arrangement of their contents based on data that directly related to what actual Willamette Valley farm women did and what their kitchens needed to contain.

Maud Wilson once said that "if the home of today is to be unhampered by the traditions of the past, there must be a body of knowledge developed to take the place of those traditions which do not meet the needs of the modern homemaker." She knew that the work of home economists played a major role in defining methods to replace those that no longer served women well. And like so many other home economists of the early twentieth century, she recognized that this body of knowledge would only be useful if it found its way into the hands of the women who needed it.

In the days before automated e-mail newsletters and without an active support system of women outside of their own family, the arrival of an extension bulletin in a rural homemaker's mailbox must have been the highlight of many days. The introduction of each circular's lesson gave homemakers much needed opportunities to rethink the usefulness of their long-held approaches to keeping house. By explaining potential domestic design trouble spots and placing them into context, the bulletins encouraged readers to see connections between their own circumstances and those of their peers. They also proposed systematic and affordable solutions to problems, thereby empowering rural families to take on the improvement of their own domestic realm. Through these studies, early twentieth-century researchers in home economics strived to debunk the image of the American home as a place of passive refuge and to acknowledge its importance as a productive and efficiently run workplace for women. By invoking the methods of Frederick Winslow Taylor, the American engineer who sought to improve industrial efficiency by analyzing how work was conducted using time and motion study methods that showed, movement by movement, where inefficient actions existed, home economists defined the domestic realm as a small-scale industry with a woman at its helm.

Going into the country to survey rural life also forced home economists out of their laboratories and into the lives of the people they influenced, which added a rich, social dimension to their work. By recommending the formation of clubs and by using interactive techniques, such as demonstrations, to communicate, the home economists abandoned their potentially remote scientific rhetoric in favor of personal illustrations and everyday language. Through these clubs, home economists demonstrated new healthful and rational methods for housekeeping to women at grange meetings and county fairs. Home economists even encouraged women to gather in each other's houses for meetings they called "conferences" to offer constructive suggestions for how to improve participants' inefficient arrangements or insufficient storage using materials and furnishings found on hand.

While these conferences ultimately helped to directly combat the feelings of loneliness that rural women frequently cited as one of their greatest challenges, home economists initially found the idea of home-based conferences a tough sell to rural women, who hesitated to allow their neighbors in to see the condition of their kitchens. Some doubted that their peers were capable of offering the useful advice they were used to getting from university-based specialists while others simply feared that perceived flaws in their housekeeping might cast doubt on their general capability to run their rural homes.

However, home economists' reports document high levels of activity within county groups, and letters from the rural women showed home economics' influence on establishing a new modern domesticity in the early to mid-twentieth century. Participants expressed their appreciation for the information provided in the bulletins and for the formation of local learning communities. Some also explicitly acknowledged an ascending self-esteem as their fear of the prospect of "measuring up" lessened when their trust in their neighbors' ability to provide constructive criticism grew. For these rural homemakers, interactions with home economics specialists and with each other provided much needed opportunities to rethink the usefulness of their long-held approaches to keeping house.

Although the number of participants alone demonstrates the popularity of providing rural homemakers with up-to-date homemaking information, a July 9, 1920, letter from May Abbuhl to Cornell's Martha Van Rensselaer provides a more personal testimony of the importance of the reading course in their lives. In the letter, Abbuhl writes that Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose, who served as co-department heads when Cornell's home economics department was initiated, "created a new heaven and a new earth" for the farm women who practiced the homemaking methods espoused in the bulletins. She claimed that by educating rural women who were often faced with less-than-modern living conditions, Van Rensselaer's spirit "entered the lonely desolate farm homes" and spoke words that gave farm women a new idea of the importance of their work. "You have given them visions of better living," Abbuhl added, "and new joy and hope has come to them."

Published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities