What We Lost When We Lost Home Ec

0:00This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio

0:15Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh and there's Chuck and it's us today We've got our aprons on, we have our spatulas in hand, we've been spanking each other with them And it's time to go to class with Stuff You Should Know Hey, everybody. Just so you know, there's construction happening next door. So if you hear a saw or a hammer banging, it's not me. No, it's not Chuck. Sometimes you just got to live with the sounds of life. Yeah, I mean, we recorded for a while. And every time we recorded, a fire truck would go by. Oh, yeah. Do you remember? Yeah, yeah. In the old Buckhead office. I think we were near a fire station.

0:54Yeah, but it was like the exact same time. It was really bizarre. It was the Radiolab guys pulling fire alarms all over Atlanta. So, Chuck, we're talking about home ec today. Did you ever take a home ec class? I sure did, buddy. How about you? I did. I have very vague recollections of it. I remember the room and everything, but I don't remember anything I did. It's also possible I'm conflating it with an episode of Saved by the Bell. Yeah, I took it. We had the full kitchen situation in our high school. back then, and I took it because, I don't know why I took it. I think I needed an elective, and, you know, I knew there'd be cute girls in there.

1:37And maybe I had a friend or two that took it, was probably my reasoning. I could see that. I think both of us are the types of dudes who would not have been like, I can't take home, I'm a boy. No, of course not. And there were plenty of dudes in the class. Yeah. Yeah, because Gen X is enlightened. That's right. Right. The thing is, is we were really in the minority, though. All the dudes in your class were in the minority. From what I read, that was pretty uncommon, even at that time. And we were among like the last age group who could elect for home ec pretty much across the country. Like this was a time, this was about the end of the time where you could find a home ec classroom in most high schools or middle schools, but that is not the case anymore.

2:20Although it's still around, It's just not everywhere like it used to be. Yeah, and in fact, I can confirm when I went back to my high school a couple of years ago when they had me back to talk to students as an interesting professional. I remember that. Yeah, it was fun. I took a walk around, and I even remember going by where the home ec room was, and it was definitely not the kitchen anymore. No, I remember you told me they filled in all the sinks with cement. Yeah, it was called the cement glass. So, class would get really boring really fast. Yeah, we should probably say home ec stands for home economics, just in case that's foreign to your tongue.

2:58True, true. I understand that it's called home economics in Australia, and I think maybe Canada, and in the UK they call it food sciences, I think. Yeah. It's all the same thing. And essentially what it is, for those of you who don't know, it was a class in high school where you would learn basic life skills that had a lot to do with being at home. You would learn sewing. You would learn to bake a cake. As time wore on, you would learn to take care of a child. Maybe learn to balance a checkbook. Just basic life skills as a class in high school or middle school. And that is, it turns out, I didn't quite realize the extent of home ec.

3:39One little slice of the whole home ec pie, which is delicious because it was made by home economists. That's right. And there's a whole history to it. And it's actually pretty feminist in nature, too. Yeah. You know, as we'll see, there was a bit of a push-pull at a certain time. And which wave of feminism would that have been? The dose. The dose. Yeah, where, you know, there were certain people saying like, no, this is, you know, you shouldn't be teaching women to stay at home and stay in the kitchen. And other people are like, we're not teaching them saying you have to do that. But we're saying, you know, there are viable careers that you can gain and, you know, industrial engineering and statistics.

4:24And as we'll see, you know, plenty of science careers came out of home economics and food science because it is a science. Right. And that was actually one of the initial points of it. But if you were a home ec proponent and you were arguing with a feminist, you might start by saying, let me give you a little picture of what life used to be like for the average woman in the United States before we came along. And you would start in about the 19th century. They were on the turn of it. So they were still wearing tri-cornered hats, but they were looking forward to trains. And if you were a farm woman at this time, you worked yourself to the bone.

5:04Yeah, I mean, what we know as home ec was not early home ec because early home ec was like you might have seven or eight kids that all worked on the farm and you might have farm hands that you also have to kind of care for and feed. So you're feeding these huge families from stuff that you're growing probably on your land and processing and canning and churning butter and you're hand making clothes and doing laundry by hand. And it's a lot. Yeah. And like you would say, that's not even home economics. That's just home terribleness, right? Yeah. When home economics came along, it was based on this idea that, okay, all of these people are working really hard.

5:45There has to be ways to improve this, to make it more efficient. Yeah. I suspect, and I'm pretty sure we talked about it, that this all grew out of Taylorism, that obsession with getting things as efficient as possible. And I think that that kind of grew out of that same vein. and there were actually a few things that kind of came together to make the fertile soil that Home Met grew from. One of them, the big one, was literacy started to spread in the mid-19th century. And so when literacy spreads, you've got more books and domestic tips and householding was a whole genre of books. So were cookbooks.

6:25And then part and parcel of that was this kind of, the very beginnings of this idea that maybe women can be educated to, but just in women's stuff. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, the books were important because previous to that, it was everything was sort of handed down from, you know, parent to child, as far as any kind of wisdom goes about how to do anything. Right. So if you had books and you had classes, you didn't depend on like your grandmother necessarily being good at, you know, baking a cake or something like that. Like what if your grandmother was a dipstick, right? Yeah, exactly. So cooking schools also emerged.

7:03And this is important because your grandmother might also, in addition to being a dipstick, might not have been that great of a cook. Now there's a place you can go to learn to cook well and nutritiously. That was a big one, too. And then also, this was a new career path that a woman could take to become a cook in, like, say, a wealthy household. So they were training now people to work outside of the house doing domestic stuff. Yeah, for sure. And then one of the biggest ones was the Murill Act of 1862, and that's when land-grant colleges were established. And all of a sudden, there were schools that said, hey, maybe we should offer, you know, it was kind of the beginnings of trade schools, like, you know, teach people how to work in agriculture and industry and things like that, and not necessarily just sit around with your nose in the air reading the classics.

7:55Exactly. And women were open, or these colleges were open to women as well, too. So these three things come together. And one of the other reasons that really made Home Ec kind of come to life, start sprouting from that fertile soil, was the transition that America was going through with industrialization. All of a sudden, you weren't on the farm with your mother and grandmother who were telling you how to do things. Like you were in the city now surrounded by people you've not really ever met before with a husband who now works in the factory rather than the farm. And you're like, I have no idea what I'm doing.

8:31And so Home Ec kind of came in to fill that break that had happened, that intergenerational passage of knowledge from mother to daughter. Home Ec said, hey, forget mothers. We're going to tell you how to do this and we're going to tell you how to do it better. They didn't really say forget mothers. That wasn't the sentiment. That was me being a smart aleck. Yeah. And, you know, initially it was not in high school. It was a college level thing. And there is a Ph.D. named Nancy Darling who kind of backs up this idea that it was a feminist movement to begin with. With this quote, she said it developed, home ec that is, from something radical.

9:06The idea that the traditional work of women is important, meaningful. And here's the key for me, economically significant. And it was economics. They didn't just call it that to make it seem fancy. Um, the, the running of a household is, is big time economics. And if you're not good at that, uh, as we'll see with, you know, younger generations, uh, it can spell trouble. For sure. Yeah. Yeah. For, yeah. There's a whole, a whole washout that's happened that we'll cover for sure. But one of the people that you have to tip your top hat to is Ellen Swallow Richards, who's probably the most important person in the history or the early history, at least of home economics.

9:45No, let's just say it. The entire history of home economics. She was a pretty impressive sort. She studied chemistry. She got a bachelor's and a master's from Vassar and then became the first woman to get a degree from MIT and then became the first woman instructor at MIT and set up a sanitary chemistry lab that was for women only. And this was not really domestic work. It was figuring out water quality and air quality tests. like essentially the foundations of environmental protection and consumer protection, too. That's what this lab was doing. And the reason why you associate it with HOMEC is because one of the reasons HOMEC existed also, you said that it started at the college level, was as a way for women, almost a backdoor, a workaround, a loophole for women to become scientists.

10:37It was OK as long as there was enough of a whiff of woman's work, like clean water, that's woman's work, that academia could put up with it. That was one of the big ways Home Ec started funneling women into education and into the sciences. Yeah, I mean, she was trying to improve the United States. And she thought, and she was, you know, right on the money. She was like, if I'm going to try to improve, you know, the United States and civilization, then I have to start at what she considered. and, you know, I think most people agree is the basic unit, which is a family, the family unit. And if I can each if I can get each household one at a time to practice, you know, more efficient practices, more sanitary practices, safer practices, you know, where you're not, you know, burning kitchens down and things like that.

11:27Right. Then it'll you know, all boats will rise. And it started to become a movement. And, you know, this is like the late 1800s, early 1900s. Yeah. And remember also, there is a big emphasis on this work is important. Like this is unpaid labor, but it produces a lot of dividends for any family and hence building upward for civilization, for a nation's civilization, all that. So like you said, this is starting to become a movement. And they had a series of conferences called the Lake Placid Conferences starting right at the turn of the century. And at one of these meetings, they chose the term home economics, like you said, to basically point out, not to kind of latch their field on economics, to point out that domestic work was a huge part of economics.

12:13And up to this point, economists had basically just been looking at production. They weren't looking at the demand side. And one of the things Home Ec introduced was the idea of consumer sciences, like studying consumption as well as part of the larger economy, which is you can't do economics without that now. But that's one of the things Home Ec introduced. Yeah. And they came up with the name Home Ec at one of those conferences after debating domestic science. And they said, no, that doesn't sound like it's studying consumerism. That's a big part of this. I think household arts was put forward and they said, no, that sounds too artsy fartsy and not academic enough.

12:56So they landed on home economics and an ironic twist that kind of takes it back home because the word economics or economics comes from, I love this word, oikonomia. Oikonomia. I inserted an extra I there, which is ancient Greek for household management. So there you have it. Yeah. They dropped the old-timey mic at this point. Yeah, for sure. And then in 1908, at that same conference, the Lake Placid Conference, they founded the American Home Economics Association, really got the ball rolling. And then shortly after, in 1917, the Hughes Act started funding vocational education, like shop class and home ec, and it was off to the races.

13:41Yep. So you want to take a break and come back and talk about how, like you said, Home X starts to take off? Let's do it.

14:15Word up, Jerry. Okay, so when we left off, Home Ec was starting to take off. And by the 1920s, the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, had created the Bureau of Home Economics. And when you create a bureau dedicated to a new field, that's when the field has arrived. If you're a band and Weird Al has done a cover of your song, that's how you know you've arrived. If you're a field of study and someone opens a bureau dedicated to it, that's how you know your fields arrived. But it became the country's biggest employer of women scientists, which is pretty significant at the time. That's right. Their mission, of course, was education.

14:55And it wasn't just, you know, how to cook. Obviously, it was meal planning. It was budgeting. There was a lot of science behind it because they got into, you know, nutritional values. Like in any, you know, nutritional tag that you read and in fact, any like clothing tag that you read, I'll go ahead and get ahead of that one. That all was born out of the science of this new bureau that was founded. They were testing mildew proofing for fabrics. They were servicing military service members like, you know, trying to come up with better things for the U.S. military to eat. And of course, school lunch programs all over the country were dependent on the science.

15:35Yeah, this is where the square pizza was invented, I suspect. They should have a monument to that. Well, I agree. One of the other things about that, though, in addition to the square pizza, the square pizza is actually an excellent example of this. The pizza, it comes from Italy. And if you've ever seen an actual like Neapolitan pizza, it does not resemble the square pizza. The square pizza at lunch is the Midwestern Americanized, much blander version of it. Although I agree with you, it's quite good. And this is where American food, as we think of it today, was founded. All the ethnic food got pushed out as the immigrants were kind of brought into the home ec world.

16:14And that bland Midwestern American food took over. That's where that came from. And this also coincided with the birth of radio that we've seems like we've talked a lot about that lately. But because of that, of course, you're going to have shows on the radio about this kind of thing. The Bureau of Home Economics in the 20s had a show called Housekeepers Chat. that ran for a couple of decades, started in 1926. Not Uncle Sam, but Aunt Sammy was the host of that one, or I guess not the host, but it featured her. And she would have, like, household tips and recipes and stuff like that. A lot of the brands got in the game.

16:50General Mills and Betty Crocker, Cooking School of the Air. You know, it's another radio show sponsored by General Mills. And, again, the Bureau is, like, helping to get all of these things launched on the airwaves. One of the other examples of what the Bureau of Home Economics was doing that had a huge sweeping impact in addition to founding the mass-produced food movement was they came up with the poverty line. In fact, Molly Orshansky did. She was a statistician who studied how much a house spent to come up with a basic nutritious diet that could keep you alive. They multiplied that by three, and they came up with the federal poverty line that's still in use today.

17:35Yeah, and if you've ever seen, you know, astronauts eating lasagna out of what looks like a toothpaste tube or something like that, you can thank Home Economics and Science for that because a woman named Bea Finkelstein, great name, she was getting food together for the very first astronauts in the Mercury Project, which is pretty great. That's right. And then one of the other things that struck me, too, that I didn't realize is that a lot of those recipes that you find on like a food label, one of the most famous ones is Campbell's cream of mushroom soup labels have a green bean casserole recipe.

18:12And that was created by a home economist who worked for Campbell's, Dorcas Riley. and she's a good example of what was happening at this time, starting in the 20s, 30s, 40s and continuing on. These companies like General Mills and Campbell's were setting up home economics departments and one of the things that these home economists were being paid to do was to figure out new uses for the products made by the companies they worked for so that people would buy more of that stuff and then they'd put those recipes on the label. Yeah, I mean, if you love Rice Krispie Treats, You can thank the Home Economics Program and Matilda Jensen and Mildred Day at Kellogg's there for that.

18:54And Chex Mix, this wasn't sort of an internal team, but Chex Mix was actually a contest. And it was in, I believe, the 1950s when they just had a contest, like, what can you do with Chex cereal? And someone submitted Chex Mix. And, like, it's the same recipe, basically, that everyone enjoys today, like all of these are. Did your family make Chex Mix around the holidays? Not a ton. Emily's family really did, though, so she still makes, you know, that same recipe, that Chex Mix recipe. It must be so high-o then because my family did as well. Yeah. But that's a good example of how, like, these companies farmed out the task of coming up with stuff.

19:35Because Home Ec had become so widespread, the average homemaker out there could do the same thing in a lot of ways that some of the Home Ec workers working for the company could do, too. I think that's pretty neat. Talk about efficiencies. Like if you're baking a cake from scratch or making pancakes or something like that or a gravy from scratch, there were women in home ec departments at companies saying like, hey, we can make this. You know, there's a lot to do. So what if this stuff was all kind of premixed in a box and you could sell them like, well, I was about to say like hotcakes. And they did.

20:12And, you know, these were things that were real time savers in the kitchen. For sure. And that was the point, remember, of home ec is saving time, being more efficient. And then as food companies were concerned, making tons of money off of this stuff, too. So that's kind of going on in the corporate world, the government world. Simultaneously, there's that whole thread of home ec being taught in high school and middle school. And there was a time in the 20th century, up until the 80s and 90s, and I'm sure beyond. Again, these classes are still out there, but nothing like they used to be. Or you could go into a high school or middle school and there was a simulated kitchen in one of the rooms with a bunch of different stoves and ovens and refrigerators.

20:57And people would be in there cooking and learning to sew and maybe taking care of a fake baby. And in some cases, taking care of a real baby, too, because this stuff got intense sometimes. Yeah, the baby thing, I don't remember our high school class ever delving into that. I do remember the egg babies, like where you would – I never had to take part, but I saw other kids in school carrying around the egg. Oh, yeah? Sort of in the 70s and 80s, they would give you a raw egg, you know, in the shell. Because some people would be like, what the heck is he even talking about? They would give you an egg, and the whole idea was you have to care for that egg without breaking it for a couple of weeks.

21:39You've got to carry this thing around. It sounds easy just to not get that egg broken, but it's really not. You know, you have to really think ahead about everything. And that's the whole idea is that when you have a baby, you can't just make decisions on the spur of the moment. You have to kind of pre-plan everything. And the egg came along after they've used real babies from orphanages. Yeah, apparently at some of the colleges that were teaching home ec, Like they would borrow babies from orphanages for the students to just basically practice on. And apparently there's a writer, a historian named Danielle Drellinger, who wrote a book, The Secret History of Home Economics.

22:18And she said that for adoptive parents who would go to a foster home, they'd show up and be like, you got any one of them babies that's been in the home economic classes? Heck yeah, man. Because the reasoning is these babies spent some of their earliest days being cared for just with complete attention and care by women who were working in like the cutting edge of child rearing. So they were much more desirable than the non-homec babies, it turns out. Yeah, for sure. I mean, before I even read that part of this, I was thinking in my head like, oh, man, you want that baby for sure. For sure. Apparently, those eggs would get on custodians' nerves enough that they switch to flour or sugar, which also had the added benefit of heft.

23:03and I saw in like some educational magazine, I can't remember, but they would put pantyhose of different colors to simulate multicultural skin tones over the flower sugar. And that sometimes if you forgot like your kid, whether it was an egg or a sack of flower or something in your locker, you might be forced to like write a paper on child abuse or something like that. So the whole point was to just teach high school kids, you don't want to have a baby at this period in your life, maybe ever. Like if the class was hard enough, maybe they're like, I'm never having a kid, but certainly not through my teen years.

23:40That was the point. Yeah. It's kind of funny. I think they kind of sold it to you as like here, it'll, it'll teach you like how to kind of care for a baby and how much goes into that. But what they were really saying is please don't have sex. Kind of. Well, I mean, one of them in the nineties, they came along with a more of a, like a baby simulator. It was called Baby Think It Over. I mean, they flat out said it at that point. Yeah. Like, I think we all know what think it over means. Sure. And I don't know if it worked or not, but it was a great attempt at the very least. For sure. So by the middle of the 20th century, I think 1959, half of all American girls, half of all the girls in America were taking home ec courses in school.

24:23And then just suddenly it just dried up. It wasn't like a faucet got turned off or a light switch was turned. But it started to go downhill pretty fast in about the early 60s. And let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about where Home Ec went after, well, the break.

25:00and the cannibal runs. Don't explain everything to your brain. Explodes. Chuck and Josh. This stuff you should know. Word up, Jerry. All right, so Home Ec is on the decline, and there's a bunch of reasons for this that kind of all kind of steamrolled together at a certain point. But one of the biggest ones was when the United States really got into standardized testing, which came along mostly with the No Child Left Behind Act, because all of a sudden a school's funding was tied to test scores, and if there aren't any home ec questions on these tests and the testing is tied to funding, then what's the point of even teaching that stuff?

25:41I don't agree with that, obviously, but that was sort of the thought. And so a lot of those classes started to just slowly go away. Yeah, and there was an article on Fatherly written by a guy named Cameron LeBlanc, and he traced it back even further. He traced the origin of where the emphasis on STEM came from to the 80s in the Vocational and Technical Education Act that Ronald Reagan signed, where it said, educators, colleges, you're no longer responsible for figuring out what we want to teach our kids. We're going to hand this over to business and industry so they can tell us what they want us to teach so that we can basically train workers.

26:16That was the point from that point on for school. Train workers as much as you can. And then eventually, universities got in on the act and they're like, let's also make these pipelines to colleges. So, like, that's the point of high school is to get into college and we're going to charge them out the yin yang. So standardization of testing was a huge part of it. But that was not the only part. Like you kind of touched on earlier, Betty Friedan's feminist mystique, which kicked off the second wave of feminism, is very often cited as a huge chilling effect or having a huge chilling effect on home ec classes being taught in high school.