In Praise of Home Economics
I took Home Economics from 7th grade through my senior year. We actually had two different home ec classes – one was for cooking, and the other focused on things like managing a family (I remember a fascinating unit on how birth order impacts personalities), paying bills (and which bills you definitely need to pay first if you can’t pay them all), and sewing (somehow the shorts I was sewing came out with one leg longer than the other – I blame the pattern).
Anyway, all through my years of taking Home Ec, which was required, I made fun of it. I got detentions because I made fun of how we had to eat our open faced sandwiches. I almost started a fire in the oven. I thought the whole thing was one big exercise in hilarious time wasting.
But then I became a grown up and lived on my own, and realized that almost every day I use something that I learned in home ec. What to do if there’s a gas fire on the stove (cover it with a lid, don’t put water on it). How to follow a recipe (the amount of people I see on amateur baking shows who can’t tell the difference between tsp and TBSP is mindblowing). How to balance a checkbook (okay, so that part isn’t needed so much in the age of online banking – I haven’t written a check since around 2005).
I recently came across this book: The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live (on Amazon here) and realized just how radically feminist home ec is. When I took home ec in jr high and high school, I was participating in this radical sisterhood, where women my great grandmother’s age found ways to move into boardrooms and the business world through their expertise in food preparation. By turning “home making” into a science, women fought their way into the business world as executives and marketers at companies like Proctor and Gamble. Home Ec as a field was founded by the first woman graduate of MIT, Ellen Swallow Richards!
The field is also filled with pioneering women like Margaret Murray Washington, the wife of Booker T Washington, and Dr. Flemmie Kittrell, the first Black woman to have earned a doctorate in nutrition and was a professor at Howard.
The women who became Home Economists used their work to become leaders in some of the first fields open in the business world to women. It was their entry point into corporate America, and also provided a starting point for learning all of the STEM skills.
So really, I need to rethink home ec. My husband never took home ec, and it shows. It’s not that I’m somehow more intrinsically smarter when it comes to baking a cake – it’s that he doesn’t have any clue what the batter is supposed to even look like before he puts it in the oven. I know how to tell when chicken is done without a meat thermometer. He doesn’t. I know how to take out stains from clothing that he would have previously just thrown away and given up on. It’s not that I’m a natural when it comes to this stuff. I’m not. I’m absolutely awful at a lot of what we would call homemaking and keeping house. But I took home ec, which gives me a huge advantage in the business of day to day living in the home.
Today only about 6,000 schools nationwide teach home ec – a decline of about 40% since the late 90’s. I think that’s quite sad, and while it’s important to offer AP classes, and courses that will help a student get into college, it’s just as important to make sure that while she’s in college she understands how to eat a balanced diet, and doesn’t blow all of her money because she can’t budget.
Basically, now that I’m older, I think Home Ec is probably the most useful class I ever took in school, something that 16 year old me would have laughed at. The same way she laughed at the way she was graded on manners while eating an open faced sandwich.
