For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women

by Barbara Ehrenreich

  … believed in the family home with a roof of its own and a plot of ground of its own so firmly that she considered its importance beyond argument. The only question was how to preserve it.…66

  “Right Living” in the Slums

  When domestic science leaders like Ellen Richards spoke of the endangered home, their first concern was with the middle-class home. It had to be rationalized, sanitized, and, above all, stabilized through the efforts of its resident domestic “scientist,” the scientific homemaker. But anyone with a minimum of social awareness could see that the gravest threat to the home, and hence to “civilization,” lay in the urban slums.

  Professor C. R. Henderson, a former president of the Conference on Charities and Corrections, aroused the 1902 Lake Placid Conference to the slum issue. The danger, he said, came not from foreign ideologies or unionists, but from the very way the people lived. “A communistic habitation [by which he meant a tenement house], forces the members of a family to conform insensibly to communistic modes of thought.”67 Worse still, slum living conditions led to evolutionary retrogression:

  It would be unworthy of us to permit a great part of a modern population to descend again to the animal level from which the race has ascended only through aeons of struggle and difficulty.

  In the long run the only solution was to disperse the poor and house them in individual private homes, but in the meantime domestic science leaders believed that creeping communism and bestiality could be stemmed by teaching them “the science of right living.” In the slums, proclaimed Ellen Richards, “there is ready at hand a field for the Home Economics teacher.”68

  This “field” was, at the time, already being intensively cultivated by a variety of urban reformers, charity organizations, and settlement workers. Philosophies of slum reform ranged from the conservative view (shared by most of the domestic science leaders) of the poor as a threat to be subdued or Americanized as quickly as possible, to the liberal perception of the poor as victims of a corrupt and inhumane society. But from both philosophical perspectives, domestic science was a valuable tool. To conservatives, who blamed poverty on the individual short-comings of the poor, domestic science instruction was an obvious solution to thriftlessness, intemperance, and general disorderliness. To liberals, it represented a way of helping the poor cope with the debilitating environment of the slums—the substandard housing, filthy streets, and unscrupulous merchants. And to both liberals and conservatives, there was a pragmatic value to teaching the poor to live within their wages. If you could feed a family on ten cents a day, as some domestic scientists proposed, higher wages would be unnecessary.

  In fact, domestic science did have a core of useful information for the hard-pressed and frequently bewildered urban slum-dweller. It was clear to reformers like Jane Addams, at any rate, that the poor needed whatever help they could get in making the difficult adjustment to city life. Most of the poor were recent immigrants from rural villages, and many came expecting to re-create their old patterns of life—to raise chickens in the streets, keep livestock in the basements of their tenements, and bake bread on the pavements.69 But the old ways of life were unworkable in the crowded slums, if not simply unhygienic. Women who were used to raising their own food had to shop; they had to master the technology of the gas or coal stove and the tactics of laundering in tiny kitchens that lacked running water. And there was nothing to prepare them for the dangers of the turn-of-the-century city: uncol-lected garbage piling up in the streets and courtyards, unreliable water supplies, unsafe milk. For many immigrant women and their daughters, domestic science instruction was a welcome bit of assistance in the struggle for survival.

  Wherever there were efforts to uplift, Americanize, or just plain assist the urban poor, domestic science found a ready forum. Public schools and settlement houses offered courses in domestic science. Charity organizations like the New York Association for the Improvement of the Condition of the Poor dispatched trained domestic scientists into poor women’s houses. Some domestic scientists set out on their own to establish courses in cooking or household management in the slums.

  But along with the useful survival tips which domestic science had to offer came some dubious kinds of messages. First, simply in form, much of the domestic science missionary work was carried out in an arrogant and punitive manner. This was especially true of the voluntary charity organizations, which used domestic science instruction as a substitute, or prerequisite, for more concrete forms of aid. “Friendly visitors” (the charity agency volunteers who were later replaced by trained social workers) were instructed to avoid giving charity at all costs: it corrupted the character of the recipients and destroyed the “friendly” relationship between the classes:

  The visitor should go as a personal friend, to enter into the household life, to discover its needs, its weak points and possibilities; to advise, encourage, and suggest; to lend a hand where it is needed, but never to hinder or hamper his [most visitors were women] work by doling out money, food, or raiment.70

  Not everyone was won over by the friendly approach. Calhoun quotes this sarcastic satire on the role of the charity worker, from a Catholic reformer:

  If the wives of the unsuccessful grow discouraged and become slack before the everlasting problem of how the family can live, cook, eat, sleep, marry, and take in boarders, all in two rooms, let the agents or better still, the wives and aesthetic daughters of the successful go down and investigate and see if the family be worthy: and if they are worthy, let them give—not money (let them never give money to the poor), but let them pour forth good advice, how to economize, how to save, how to make bone soup, how to make something out of nothing, how to save, save, save, till at last worn out by saving, they can go to a better world in a pine coffin.71

  Friendly visitors typically began a “case” with an appraisal of the family’s standard of housekeeping. In her report, “Forty-three Families Treated by Friendly Visiting,” Miss Eleanor Hanson described the “filth” and “disorder” of the “untreated” families, and said of successfully treated cases: “… order and thrift had been introduced in the house.”72 It was not an easy task—as one sensitive friendly visitor confessed to the 1896 National Conference of Charities and Corrections:

  Before I went to live so near these people, I must confess I sailed often into a home and told them to “clean up” in a most righteous manner …[now] We see the dirt and feel sorry for it, and we hope it will be cleaned up and in better condition next time. I have been very discouraged about myself, and my inability to tell people to clean up. I can’t do it.73

  A more impersonal method was proposed at the 1908 Conference on Charities and Corrections (later the social workers’ professional organization) by Rev. W. J. Kerby: charity organizations could set up neighborhood housekeeping contests. The whole thing would be inexpensive he added, because the prizes “need not be important or costly.”74

  Even when offered in a context free of degrading associations with charity, as in the congenial setting of a settlement house, domestic science instruction represented an effort to discipline and Americanize the urban poor. The useful information—on cooking, shopping, etc.—that attracted neighborhood women necessarily came packaged with the entire ideology of “right living.” And right living meant living like the American middle class lived, or aspired to live. It meant thrift, orderliness, and privacy instead of spontaneity and neighborliness. It meant a life centered on the nuclear family, in a home cleanly separated from productive labor (chickens and lodgers would have to go!), ordered with industrial precision—and presided over by a full-time housekeeper.

  Thrift, an obvious virtue, came with a host of assumptions about what represented worthwhile expenditures: soap, yes, but wine, the customary dinner beverage of many European immigrants, was outrageous intemperance. Cleanliness, a necessary virtue in the epidemic-ridden slums, was equated with Americanism itself: the housewife who wished her family to succeed would find a way to send t
hem out in freshly laundered and ironed white shirts each day. Orderliness meant adherence to a family schedule: definite times to eat, to sleep—all necessary to prepare the children for the world of work ahead. Even cooking lessons had a patriotic, middle-class flavor: emphasis was on introducing the poor to “American” foods like baked beans and Indian pudding and weaning them from “foreign” foods like spaghetti. With so much ideological freight, even a little domestic science instruction could go a long way. As Jane Addams wrote, “an Italian girl who has had lessons in cooking at the public school, will help her mother to connect the entire family with American food and household habits.”75

  Within the domestic science movement, many activists were not satisfied with conveying simply the habits and techniques of “right living” to the poor. The rubric of domestic science was broad enough, they believed, to include many less tangible aspects of middle-class domestic culture. A Miss Talbot mused at the 1905 Lake Placid Conference:

  I wonder if it wouldn’t be worthwhile to sacrifice half a dozen lessons in cooking for the sake of having the child report what they do in the way of strengthening the life of which they are a part, what is thought right in the family, what they have for diversion, what art galleries they go to, how they spend their money, what their church relations are, what their moral and spiritual life is.…76

  A pioneer in the endeavor to transmit “culture” itself was the Louisa May Alcott Club, a Boston settlement located in an Italian and Russian-Jewish ghetto. Isabel Hyams, Alcott Club charity worker/domestic scientist, reported to the 1905 Lake Placid Conference that her staff’s friendly visiting (always “unexpected”) had revealed few cases of gross intemperance or extravagance to work on, but:

  We did find, however, in most cases untidy homes, filled with unhygienic furnishings, and the food which was good never served in an appetizing manner. So we decided that for us the serving of the food, housekeeping, house furnishing, and decoration, and last but not least, manners were the most important, for, as Thomas Davidson says … “It is to a large extent, the lack of the refinement of manners that unfits the uncultured man for mingling with cultivated people … There is no reason in the world why men and women who have to earn their bread by manual labor should not be as refined in manners and bearing as any other class of people. [Final quote marks missing in original.]77

  Seeing that “it is the duty of cultured men and women to try to arouse within these people a desire for right living,” the Alcott Club presented itself to the neighborhood as “an idealized home” where “all activities of a natural home are taught.”78 The neighborhood kids were invited in for afternoon lessons in tidiness, tasteful home decorating, table setting, manners, and the giving of tea parties. Hyams admitted that the lessons were not wholly practical for children from two-room slum flats, but argued that they shaped the children’s aspirations for the future:

  While it may be impossible for them at present, owing to poverty-stricken conditions, to make practical use of all they learn, we are teaching for the future and the world, and when the opportunity does present itself they will be able to embrace it intelligently.79

  Few settlements were as innovative in the teaching of “home values” as the Louisa May Alcott Club but as Jessica Braley of the Boston School of Housekeeping said, “Every settlement has, of course, as a principal aim, to make better homes.”80 As middle-class enclaves in the slums, they were bound to succeed by the force of example: “The settlements are in themselves attractive houses and thus are always an example to the neighborhood.” In her autobiography, anarchist leader Emma Goldman described the effects of “successful” settlement work:

  “Teaching the poor to eat with a fork is all very well,” I once said to Emma Lee [a nurse who worked in Manhattan’s Lower East Side], “but what good does it do if they have not the food? Let them first become the masters of life; then they will know how to eat and how to live.” She agreed with my view that, sincere as the settlement house workers were, they were doing more harm than good. They were creating snobbery among the very people they were trying to help. A young girl who had been active in the shirtwaist-makers’ strike, for instance, was taken up by them and exhibited as the pet of the settlement. The girl put on airs and constantly talked of the “ignorance of the poor,” who lacked understanding for culture and refinement. “The poor are so coarse and vulgar!” she once told Emma. Her wedding was soon to take place at the settlement, and Emma invited me to attend the affair … It was very painful to behold, most of all the self-importance of the bride. When I congratulated her on choosing such a fine-looking fellow for her husband, she said: “Yes he’s quite nice, but of course he’s not of my sphere. You see, I really am marrying below my station.”81

  The schools too provided an outlet for the more straightforwardly propagandistic aspects of domestic science. A widely used grade-school syllabus prepared by Ellen Richards and Alice Norton and distributed by the Home Education Department of the New York State Library, began as follows:

  Ideals and standards of living

  I. Historic development of the family

  a. The darkest ages of history

  b. The beginnings of human society

  c. The psychology of races—expression of the home ideal in races other than the Anglo-Saxon

  d. Early social life of the Anglo-Saxon people

  1. The home life of the Anglo-Saxon vs. the communistic family system82

  Children began in the first grade with a “comparison of the child’s home and mode of living with that of lower animals and primitive peoples.” By the third grade, the children had progressed to building model houses and decorating them. Despite the ethnocentrism of the subject matter, one public school domestic scientist reported that “the large proportion of pupils of foreign parentage is not a disadvantage as has been claimed.”83

  In the years that followed, domestic science continued to be an important vehicle for the transmission of middle-class “home values” to ethnic minority groups and the working class generally. The number of high school courses on the “household arts” increased dramatically in the nineteen twenties and thirties. Through “home ec” courses, high schools, YWCAs, and other community agencies, girls were introduced to “higher ideals,” “appreciation and culture,” in addition to such esoteric skills as how to prepare “eggs à la goldenrod” for breakfast. Completely furnished “practice cottages” and model homes were used in some cases as laboratory settings. For example, in the twenties the Douglass Community House in Cincinnati set itself up as a homemaking “practice cottage” for “a thousand Negroes”:

  The aim is to affect standards of living by making this a model house used by everyone in the community. The girls do all the work in the house … The girls love the work, and it is not to be wondered at, when one sees the pleasant home atmosphere and the perfect freedom with which they pursue their various duties.84

  Most of the recorded descriptions of domestic science courses come, like this one, from professional educators or domestic scientists themselves. There is no real way to judge the impact of domestic science education on the hundreds of thousands of young woman who have been exposed to it. But this story, told to us by Elinor Polansky, the daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, is suggestive:

  I had domestic science classes in my junior high school in the Bronx in 1949. I remember it very well. They taught us table setting for fancy dinner parties. I can remember the smell of ammonia—they were teaching us to clean rugs. Who had rugs? …

  What came across was this idea that your home environment was no good and you had to make it different. For example, we learned that the only right way to cook was to make everything separately … that was the good, wholesome way. Things all mixed together, like stews, that was considered peasant food. I would never have admitted to my teacher that my family ate its food mixed together. There was something repulsive about food touching. The string beans weren’t supposed to touch the mashed potatoes
and so forth … Only later did I realize that I hate that kind of cooking. But then I can remember even asking my mother to buy plates with separations in them.

  The domestic science class taught us to make the beds a certain way, with “hospital corners” … While at home you just took the sheets and shoved them under. At school they took the things we hated to do at home and sort of made them fun. Then I would criticize my mother and she would really get mad at me and say, “this isn’t a fancy house.” Now that I think back, that’s more or less what my mother and I fought about all the time. We were fighting about how life should be in the home.

  Domesticity Without the Science

  Ellen Richards and her colleagues never doubted the eventual success of their movement. Once she fantasized about “the college woman in 1950”:

  She will be so fair to look upon, so gentle and so quiet in her ways, that you will not dream that she is of the same race as the old rebels against the existing order, who, with suspicion in our eyes and tension in our hearts, if not in our fists, confront you now with the question, “What are you going to do about it?85

  By the fifties, something had long since been done about “it”—the haphazardly managed, endangered home—though not entirely through the direct efforts of the domestic science experts. In fact, domestic science itself had become almost unnecessary. There was no more need for crusading writers and lecturers to set the standards and dictate the tasks of homemaking. By the mid-twentieth century, the exhortations of the domestic scientists—the principles of “right living”—had been, for a growing proportion of women, built into the material organization of daily life.