A New American Professional: Home Economists and Their Clients

 

 

Athanasiou Geolas, ajg355@cornell.edu

Ph.D. Program, History of Architecture and Urban Development

 

 

 

Our Nation is in our Home

 

In July of 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Morill Act into law and provided the means for a cash-poor but land-rich US government to support the development of new institutions of higher education. With new institutions like Cornell University’s College of Agriculture, the United States Congress intended “to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life.”[1] Here, the “industrial classes” referred equally to men and women. While re-scripting a divide between the working and the “leisure” class, it was also the first time access to education was gender neutral; at least when it came to a “practical education,” and insofar as the professions pursued were gender appropriate. Husbands learned how to better manage their farms while wives learned how to better manage their homes. However, this conservative tendency toward traditional roles does not lessen the fundamental importance of this parallel development. The “home” was no less important than the farm, and arguably, it was more ideologically significant. The home offered a significant step toward what Hannah Arendt characterizes as “the political sphere” invading “the private sphere.”[2]

 

Four years earlier, Abraham Lincoln delivered his well-known “house divided” speech at the Illinois Republican state convention making explicit a link between American identity and American domestic architecture.[3] This sentiment comes out of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when, as Duncan Faherty writes in the opening chapter of his book Remodeling the Nation, “house building was deployed as a controlling metaphor in novels, short fiction, travelogues, manuals of domestic economy, visual arts, political tracts, speeches, and natural histories.” Domestic science manuals were one among many rhetorical outlets for this metaphor. The rising importance of the house’s interior instigated the institutionalization of “domestic architecture” and eventually its partial transformation into “domestic science.”[4]  This institutionalization of the home elevated what would become the new discipline of home economics and its female practitioners to central importance. The turn to “domestic science” offers a wealth of insight for the history of the professional architect in the United States and deserves further examination. Emerging simultaneously with one another as new American professionals, home economists competed with professional architects for authority over domestic architecture and its role in American identity.[5]

 

The April 1953 cover of Newsweek illustrates the contested territory of this distinction. Claiming that, as Reyner Banham would later write, “The Home is not a House,” this cover features “The White House Grandchildren” in all their normative perfection.[6] Its visual rhetoric delivers the children under the watchful eyes of not only an idealized Eleanor Roosevelt (herself a longstanding supporter of the home economics movement), but also the White House itself.[7] Here, however, the house metaphor is not about the material arrangement of the home; instead, it is played out in the tensions constituting a new American subject–one that is simultaneously the professional home economist and the individuals they educate (E. Roosevelt and the children). These tensions are between (1) the distinctions between house-building to home-making, (2) the conservative and progressive aspects of home economics, (3) the bringing of scientific management practices into the house, and (4) the implicit rivalry between the architect and the home-economist. Thus home economics might argue that if that the White House is responsible for the perfection of these grandchildren, than it is not because the architect designed it, but rather because Eleanor Roosevelt learned her lessons well and made that house into a home.

 

Progressing Our Way Back

 

Industrial Chemist Ellen Swallow Richards joined with Melvil Dewey and his wife Annie Godfrey Dewey to hold a conference on the domestic sciences at the Lake Placid Club in Morningside, NY. In 1908, one year of what has come to be known as the Lake Placid Conferences, leaders in the domestic sciences from around the northeast gathered together and coined the term “Home Economics.”[8] “Who is to have the knowledge and wisdom to carry out the ideals and keep the family up to these standards?” Richards, commonly considered the founder of home economics, replied to her own question saying:

Who, indeed, but the woman, the mistress of the home, the one who chooses the household as her profession, not because she can have no other, not because she can in no other way support herself, but because she believes in the home as the means of educating and perfecting the ideal human being, the flower of the race for which we are all existing; because she believes that it is worth while to give her energy and skill to the service of her country and age.[9]

 

The new woman Richards idealizes here worked to extend these goals by addressing the contemporary conditions of a growing middle class population. Richards would argue that late nineteenth-century industrialization had transformed the house from a center of production into a center of consumption. This change in the home had happened as a result of the removal of the domestic crafts from the home and the democratization of consumer culture. And so, as Carolyn Goldstein claims in her book Creating Consumers, the home economist aligns with “other Progressive Era reformers” who “embraced the promise of new scientific and technical advancement” and who feared “the chaos of the burgeoning consumer marketplace.”[10] In response, home economists emerged as “keen observers of modern consumer society” who “came together to direct and control women’s consumption, and to define a place for consumption in modern, middle-class American life.”[11]

 

With this framework, there are two significant criticisms of home economics; both are entirely accurate and both do not give adequate consideration to the progressive intentions of home economics conceived as a reform movement. The first critical outlook appears most canonically in the twentieth-century critique of consumer culture from Adorno and Horkheimer.[12] Their viewpoint, in its ideological rigor, refuses the possibility of anything positive arising from participation in consumer culture. To agree with Adorno and Horkheimer is to believe that a discipline dedicated to the education of consumers, like home economics, is incapable of any positive effect in the world. As will be shown, such univocal boundary drawing between what has positive and what has negative effects is particularly difficult to maintain in a close look at the home economics movement. The second critical outlook addresses women teaching women how to be “better” wives and mothers. In her analysis of Domestic Science in the United Kingdom, Dena Attar pursued ethnographic research in late twentieth century high-school classrooms with this in mind. From a self-avowed Feminist perspective, Attar understands the invention of domestic science in the late nineteenth century as coinciding “with an uprising of middle-class women seeking access to education.”[13] Attar reminds us that “these events, of course, were connected.”[14] Which is to say, education in domestic science arose as a method of placation rather than of reform. In other words, “for all its rhetoric, home economics has failed to empower the weak and vulnerable and failed to advance women towards greater control of their lives.”[15]

 

Attar’s reservations relate to the fact that, despite the fond memories many women hold of their time in home economics departments, these programs actively reinforced conservative social norms. For Attar, these women re-inscribed themselves in a system from which, they ought to escape. This is certainly true, but it is only one voice in a more nuanced story. According to Linda Marie Fritschner in her doctoral dissertation, “The Rise and Fall of Home Economics,” the entrance of home economics into American universities was “neither an historical accident, nor a simple response to occupational demand, nor an equalitarian reform.” Rather, this new discipline arises as the manifestation of a paradox in American domestic ideology. While subsidized by federal legislation in order to buttress family structure, home economics also “opened a curricular floodgate by creating an escape route from the home for women in the name of tradition.”[16] In terms of both consumer culture and gender norms, the heart of this paradox between social emancipation and social normalization lies in the role of scientific management practices in the production of the home. Through their survey and analysis, the home economist creates a new individual: the homemaker. Fritschner asks, “Women’s education was reform, but reform from whose perspective? Whose future was considered and upheld, whose version of the good life?”[17] Further, the “who” here should be though of this new subject, rather than an already normalized subject currently in power. Home economics may have recapitulated the values of white, middle class women, but it also transformed those values and that class in the process.

 

Critical attitudes towards consumer culture (Adorno and Horkheimer) and the gendered education of women (Attar) were, of course, not yet at work as “the home” grew into its status as a central American figure. In the early 1900s, the scientific “betterment of the home” and the education of “homemakers” to consume more economically and more effectively was associated with reform movements like women’s suffrage, religious revivalism, and prohibition. As part of an educational reform movement, home economists sought to direct and control women’s consumer choices, to “train” them into better mothers and wives. They employed their analytical methods to define the problems and difficulties of the domestic sphere, so that they might offer solutions.

 

Documenting the Problem into Existence

 

The New York State Federation of Home Bureaus was founded in Ithaca, NY in 1919 as yet one more institutional bulwark to support the home economics movement. The Home Bureau mimicked the New York Farm Bureau and raised funds to support extension services throughout the state. “The Home Bureau Creed” written by Cornell University professor of home economics, Ruby Green Smith, expresses their intent and speaks directly to the Progressive Era aspirations of home economics, and the introduction of the management practices of the field into the home. The Home Bureau intends “To maintain the highest ideals of Home Life; to count Children the most important of crops; to so mother them that their bodies may be sound, their minds clear, their spirits happy, and their characters generous.”[18] The Home Bureau Creed reframes the body, mind, spirit, and character of children as a “crop” to be cultivated. Indeed, one of the seven original subjects of home economics at Cornell, child development, was centered on how to rationally and scientifically “mother” children.[19]

 

This rationalizing of the home echoes the application of Taylorist management practices in the construction industry. In his article “The Managerial Aesthetics of Concrete,” architectural historian Michael Osman traces the deployment of contractor Frank Gilbreth’s managerial methods as published in his book Concrete Systems (1908).[20] Gilbreth separated his building crews within every construction site assigning them each specific methods. As they worked, these crews were rigorously documented and timed in order to analyze and perfect (make more efficient and more economic) the process of building in reinforced concrete. Such rigorous observation, tabulation, and consequent redevelopment of the construction process is equally, and more insidiously, present when home economics transforms the home, the homemaker, and the family into crops under managerial scrutiny.[21]

 

Management was the solution, and presented with the problem of family life, home economists, like construction managers, instituted a frenzied array of methods to document and analyze the home. For home economics these methods were expanded to include publications, events, groups, speaking tours, and coursework. The goal was to identify and define problems precisely and to then disseminate solutions to their clients. One example of this process was the production of reports on rural farmhouse kitchens in New York State. Surveyors were sent to document farmhouse kitchens with photographs, scaled plans, and survey forms tabulating everything from the full range of kitchen utensils and supplies, to the amount of time a housewife spent on individual tasks in an average week (Figures 1 and 2).[22]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              

 

 

 

 

A pervasive urge appeared in tandem with these institutional methods. The two fed off one another propelling both into prominence. Husband and wife team Martha and Robert Bruère open their 1912 domestic manual Increasing Home Efficiency with a narrative scene depicting what they termed “the peculiar middle-class problem.” The Bruère’s had moved into a new suburban neighborhood for their research, and one evening as they sat on their front porch, an exasperated neighbor came rushing across their front lawn yelling: “I’m nothing but a family clearing house!”

 

                I run up the family bills one month and pay them the next! I buy what the stores                     have to sell at the price they choose to set, – I pay rent for a house somebody else                 has chosen to build, – I send the children to the sort of school the town has                             happened to establish, – I dress, and come, and go, and read, and see, as other                     people have arranged for me! What have I to do with it all? Merely to pay the bills                 with money I haven’t earned! I don’t control a single thing that goes into my                           housekeeping, and yet I know that unless I see to it that we have what it is best                     for us to have, I am not running my home efficiently.[23]

 

This scene demonstrates an overwhelming sense of anxiety concerning a close relationship between economics and typical expectations of American individualism.

 

To her absolute consternation, this woman is unable to control the endless succession of bills, the merchandise available in the store, the prices of those products, even the physical manifestation of the house she lives in, or the “sort” of school her children can attend. But who could control any of these? Perhaps her exclamation is symptomatic of a new form of anxiety rather than only an expression of a rapidly changing world. Is the sentiment we’re meant to come away from this scene with that each of us ought to be able to limit the appearance of bills, set prices, build houses, and establish schools individually? The anxiety that exasperates her is not only about economics, architecture, or some institution. It seeps all the way into the body’s actions, movements, and even what we wear, where we go, and what we perceive as something that has all been arranged by ominous and unknown others. The Bruère’s end their introduction showing this woman re-inscribe herself with all of this anxiety, back into the site that has been designed for her by the unknown forces she fears. Addressing the reader they write:

This was a considerable jounce to us. Was not our neighbor’s house clean to whiteness? Her children literate and well mannered? Her dress in fashion? Her mind well stocked? Moreover had we not eaten happily at her board? Not efficient indeed! What problem did she find unsolvable?[24]

 

Thus the Bruère’s locate the new problem of home economics. They identify some thing that this woman found unsolvable, despite the fact that she had already done everything expected of a good mother and wife; they rendered this ineffable problem discoverable.

 

Enter Cornell University’s College of Home Economics. In their first step toward developing specific management practices to solve this new problem, they employed the funds allocated for New York State’s extension service to print and disseminate educational pamphlets about the farm and farmhouse. These pamphlets are included among the extensive records of New York State’s home economics programs and extension services extending from 1875 to 1979, all of which are kept at the Kroch Library, Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Taking the form of the “Cornell Reading Course of Farmer’s and Farmer’s Wives,” the pamphlets entered circulation in 1900 under the direction of the beloved Ms. Martha Van Renssalaer, the co-founding director of Cornell’s College of Home Economics (Figure 3). This reading course was widely distributed first in New York State,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

but soon spread at least as far as Montana, and formed a highly effective means of disseminating solutions to the new problems of the home.[25] It was, for Ms. Van Renssalaer, a means “whereby scientific training is brought within their reach at home.”[26] Access to the Reading-Course was free of charge and required only the request be added to the mailing list. Many of these requests (some of which arrived as for more profuse letters) emphatically request multiples or replacements frequently claiming their tremendous value: “I can’t do without them” is a much-repeated phrase.[27] Along with the Reading-Course came a supplement titled called a “Discussion Paper.” These additional booklets inverted the relationship between home economist and reader, and rather than offering useful information, asked a series of questions. Cornell’s “Reading-Course” offered certificates of completion with the successful submission of some number of discussion papers. It is unclear how many pamphlets constituted completion of the course, and it does not appear that there was a standard list of lessons. The pamphlets continued to expand along with the growing knowledge base of the home economics in general.

 

Aside from this certification, these discussion papers were implemented so that home economists could survey their readers. These courses/surveys gathered more data for the home economist while also holding the potential to demonstrate how you, the reader, were wrong or failed to grasp the heart of the lesson. There are two important points to draw from this method of survey: (1) the reader is under a constant pressure of giving the “wrong” answer. The majority (if not all) of the questions prefigure an answer; for instance, in the March 1905 supplement, part of series No.15 “Saving Strength,” they ask: “Is a proper poise as attractive in a woman in a kitchen as to one at a drawing-room reception?” To which one respondent, a Mrs. Edith V. Enders of St. Lawrence, NY wrote, “Yes, entirely equally so.”[28] (2) The process itself requests that members place themselves under scrutiny. Seemingly innocent questionnaires, the anxiety these self-managing documents, or “audit technologies” produce is palpable, and it ranges from shame at not being good enough, to anger at others for not trying hard enough, to pride at having altered one’s behavior appropriately to the betterment not only of oneself, but of the world at large.[29] From the “rural life series” of April 1912: “Do you belong to a rural study club? If not, is there an opportunity to form a club in your neighborhood?” The same Mrs. Enders responds here as well: “No. I hope so. I will try. I have often wished there was one. One for the women and a separate one for the men. The Rev. Chas. Atwood and the Rev. B. Shaw might head the men’s. I, with the help of some more, would not object to head the women’s.” The anxiety in these words is perfectly expressed by the many crossed out phrases and the palimpsest of erased pencil lead beneath them (Figure 4). Many of the

discussion papers are similarly overtaken by markings like this; responding, erasing, and re-drafting seems necessary to ensure one has recognized and supplied the “right” answer.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

              

With their integrated methods of collecting and disseminating information, it becomes more and more difficult to distinguish the professional home economist and the housewife, between who is doing the documenting, who the teaching, and who the learning. These subjects are studying and teaching one another. In April of 1936 the New York State Extension Service in Home Economics sent a “specialist” to Renssalaer County, NY for a “Home Demonstration.” This “Kitchen Conference” lasted from 11am to 11pm and is documented in a “Trip Report.” It states:

 

                Members of the group were interested in observing Mrs. Kellogg [the specialist]                   clear the breakfast table, wash and dry the dishes and put them away. womatook                 notes on one part of the activity. These were the basis of the discussion that                           followed. All joined in giving suggestions for making the kitchen more convenient                 and easy to work in.[30]

 

In this surreal scene a group of women watch and examine the motion of another woman as she “clear[s] the breakfast table.” All are engaged in the hope of identifying how to make this task more efficient and less difficult. Notice that the locally organized group, which had to petition the New York State College of Home Economics to send the specialist for the home demonstration in the first place, is immediately included in the documentation and analysis of the kitchen, the specialist, and each other. The course of this demonstration, whatever else might transpire, has been framed in such way that all action, tools, and behaviors fit within a prescribed framework. Managerial documents like these show that the terms of observation are set by concerns over efficiency. This premise uncritically aligns decreased input and increased output with the improvement of the home. It presumes that productivity equals a better life; a presumption resting on the seemingly self-evident meaning of improvement.

 

While “kitchen conferences” appear to be the site of earnest intent, this is not quite so clear in other applications of the same techniques. The kitchen survey reports mentioned above contain two additional descriptions. On the blank back surface of the formatted pages there appears a brief description of both the “house” and the “housewife.” The surveyor sent to document the rural farmhouse kitchen would fill out the form’s standardized tables and questions with the housewife. However, he or she would presumably inscribe these two additional descriptions away from the housewife and without her knowledge (Figure 5).[31] Bessie Wilcox’s “house” is described as “very clean but not truly tidy” because her children were “badly brought up” and “spoiled.” Likewise, the “housewife” is described as “a pretty, plump, ineffective woman in strange contrast to her efficient, confident, bursting husband.” It remains unclear why the “spoiled” children or the “ineffective” woman are important observations to appear in a kitchen survey report for New York State. At least, it will remain unclear if one does not understand domestic architecture as an object and environment inscribed by the new professional subjects instituted by home economists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bibliography

Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition. Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

Attar, Dena, Wasting Girls’ Time: The History and Politics of Home Economics. Education Series (London: Virago, 1990).

Banham, Reyner, “A Home Is Not a House.” Architectural Design 39 (January 1969): 45–48.

Banta, Martha, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

Bruère, Martha Bensley, Robert W. Bruère, and Mary W. Hinman Abel, Increasing Home Efficiency, (New York: Macmillan, 1912).

Faherty, Duncan, Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858. Becoming Modern. Durham (N.H. : Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press ; University Press of New England, 2007).

Foucault, Michel. Abnormal: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1974-1975. 1st Picador ed. (New York: Picador, 2003).

Fritschner, Linda Marie, The Rise and Fall of Home Economics: A Study with Implications for Women, Education and Change, (Ph.D. Dissertation: University of California, Davis, 1973).

Goldstein, Carolyn M. Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2002).

Osman, Michael, “The Managerial Aesthetics of Concrete.” Perspecta 45: Agency (2012): 67–76.

Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright, “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education.” In Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy, edited by Marilyn Strathern (London ; New York: Routledge, 2000), 57–89.

Smith, Ruby Green, "The Home Bureau Creed," The New York State Federation of Home Bureaus, http://homebureau.sharepoint.com/Pages/default.aspx (accessed April 15, 2015).

Weigley, Emma Seifrit, “It Might Have Been Euthenics: The Lake Placid Conferences and the Home Economics Movement.” American Quarterly 26, no. 1 (March 1974): 79-96.

Whalen, Michael L., “A Land-Grant University.” Cornell University 2 (2001).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

End Notes

[1] Thirty-Seventh United States Congress, SEC. 4, (1861-63). See also Whalen, Michael L. “A Land-Grant University.” Cornell University 2 (2001), 13.

 

[2] See Arendt, Hannah, The Human Condition, Charles R. Walgreen Foundation Lectures. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).

 

[3] For a full discussion of this speech and the rhetoric of the home metaphor see Faherty, Duncan, Remodeling the Nation: The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858. Becoming Modern (Durham, N.H.; Hanover: University of New Hampshire Press; University Press of New England, 2007).

 

[4] Faherty, Rebuilding the Nation, 4-5.

The currency of this image suggests a citizenry attentive to arguments about shaping a national culture… Americans represented their unfolding histories not simply in terms of exterior imagery–the familiar metaphor of the nation as a middle ground between wilderness and European civilization–but in terms as well of domestic architecture and interior design.

 

 

[5] At issue here is the claim home economists have as purveyors of domestic expertise on reshaping not only the built environment in lasting ways, but also–and perhaps more significantly–the perceptions and expectations individuals have of what makes a house (or a home) better, how a building relates to social life, and how to go about manifesting that desire. State licensing makes a professional “Architect” different from any other designer of buildings. State licensure legitimizes, provides privileges, and mandates legal accountability. Michel Foucault speaks about the impact of professional expertise on the formation of new subjects in (among other places) Foucault, Michel, Abnormal: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1974-1975, (New York: Picador, 2003), 21. The professional is legally and publicly accountable for the use and consequences of their expertise. The home economist is not this type of professional and carries no enforceable, accountable, or even institutionalized expectation of responsibility for what they offer as expertise or what results from the actions taken as a result.

 

[6] Banham, Reyner, “A Home Is Not a House,” Architectural Design 39 (January 1969), 45–48. This distinction signals two different objects and two different goals that occupy the same material position. While both “house” and “home” explain what is ultimately the same material in reality, their differentiation points toward the possibility of confusing ways of valuing both the material and the concept of the single family house. Where it is easy to suggest that the material of the house and the mythology of the home could demarcate two distinct professional domains (the architect and the home economist respectively), both professionals work on both objects. Ultimately, that there can be a distinction between the house and the home demonstrates the importance of reconsidering the many valences that domestic architecture can take in the hands of various professionals.

 

[7] Eleanor Roosevelt made an annual trip to Cornell University’s Home and Farm Week in Ithaca, NY and was close acquaintances with the co-director of the College of Home Economics, Martha Van Renssalaer. See the correspondence between them in New York State College of Home Economics records, 1875-1979, #23-2-749. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

 

[8] Weigley, Emma Seifrit, “It Might Have Been Euthenics: The Lake Placid Conferences and the Home Economics Movement.” American Quarterly 26, no. 1 (March 1974), 84.

 

[9] Weigley, “It Might Have Been Euthenics,” 82. My emphasis.

 

[10] Goldstein, Carolyn M., Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 2.

 

[11] Weigley, “It Might Have Been Euthenics,” 82.

 

[12] Horkheimer, Max, and Adorno, Theodor W., Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Cultural Memory in the Present. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002).

 

[13] Attar, Dena, Wasting Girls’ Time: The History and Politics of Home Economics. Education Series. (London: Virago, 1990), 98.

 

[14] Attar, Wasting Girls’ Time, 98.

 

[15] Attar, Wasting Girls’ Time, 148.

 

[16] “Thus Home Economics–originally the guardian of the American family, womanhood, and the wifely role–contributed to the fragmentation and segmentation of the family unit.” Fritschner, Linda Marie, The Rise and Fall of Home Economics: A Study with Implications for Women, Education and Change (Ph.D. Dissertation: University of California, Davis, 1973), ii.

 

[17] Fritschner, The Rise and Fall of Home Economics, iii.

 

[18] Smith, Ruby Green, "The Home Bureau Creed," The New York State Federation of Home Bureaus, http://homebureau.sharepoint.com/Pages/default.aspx (accessed April 15, 2015).

 

[19] For early organizational details of the department of home economics at Cornell University see New York State College of Home Economics records, 1875-1979, #23-2-749. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

 

[20] Osman, Michael, “The Managerial Aesthetics of Concrete,” Perspecta 45, Agency, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012), 71.

 

[21] Or as Martha Banta states in her study of the impact of Taylorism on early twentieth-century American culture:

We do not want to say that even domestic life is affected by the vagaries of the culture of management. Rather, it is especially family living that the ethos of good management wishes to commandeer. The constant cry of reformers intent upon introducing sound management methods to combat social disarray is also “the cry of the children” and fear for “the undermining of family life.

 

Banta, Martha, Taylored Lives: Narrative Productions in the Age of Taylor, Veblen, and Ford, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 10.

 

[22] Household Survey Report of Mrs. Mary E. Sabin, Sherburne, NY, June 30-July 6, 1935. Dept. of Household Economics and Management extension records, #23-18-919. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

 

[23] Bruère, Martha Bensley, Robert W. Bruère, and Mary W. Hinman Abel, Increasing Home Efficiency, (New York: Macmillan, 1912), 1-2.

 

[24] Bruère, Increasing Home Efficiency, 2.

 

[25] For correspondence regarding Reading-Course pamphlets see New York State College of Home Economics records, 1875-1979, #23-2-749. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library. For more on Reading-Course requests see note xxvii.

 

[26] From reprint of first issue. Van Renssalaer, Martha (ed.), Reading-Course for Farmer’s Wives (Ithaca, NY: November 1902). New York State College of Home Economics records, 1875-1979, #23-2-749. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

 

[27] “Reading-Course” request can be found in Dept. of Household Economics and Management extension records, #23-18-919. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

 

[28] Van Renssalaer, Martha (ed.), Supplement to the Cornell Reading-Courses (Ithaca, NY: April 1912). New York State College of Home Economics records, 1875-1979. New York State College of Home Economics records, 1875-1979, #23-2-749. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

 

[29] The earnest intent to help rural farm wives with these questions is not in doubt. Nevertheless, following anthropologists Cris Shore and Susan Wright, “audit technologies” like these discussion papers “are not simply innocuously neutral.” Instead, self-managing documents like these act as “instruments for new forms of governance and power.” They engender “new norms of conduct and professional behavior. In short, they are agents for the creation of new kinds of subjectivity: self-managing individuals who render themselves auditable.” Whether this new regime follows from the introduction of financial management strategies into the University professor’s office, as it does for Shore and Wright in the twentieth-century, or from an act of congress leading to the College of Home Economics and formalizing “the home” as an object of study in the nineteenth-century, what matters continues to be that the application of managerial strategies first and foremost creates auditable individuals. See Shore, Cris, and Susan Wright, “Coercive Accountability: The Rise of Audit Culture in Higher Education,” in Audit Cultures: Anthropological Studies in Accountability, Ethics, and the Academy, edited by Marilyn Strathern (London; New York: Routledge, 2000), 57–89.

 

[30] “Kitchen Conference,” (Renssalaer County, NY: April 1936). Dept. of Household Economics and Management extension records, #23-18-919. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

 

[31] Household Survey Report of Mrs. Mary E. Sabin, Sherburne, NY, June 30-July 6, 1935. Dept. of Household Economics and Management extension records, #23-18-919. Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.