Adulting 101: It Used to Be Called Home Ec

Balancing checkbooks? Cooking healthy food? Raising kids and diapering babies? Building healthy friendships? A lot of those basic skills we call "adulting"?

There used to be a name for the class that taught them. It was called "Home Economics." Or, if you grew up more recently, "Family and Consumer Sciences."

I should know—all three of my Cornell degrees come from the College of Human Ecology—what was founded as the College of Home Economics. My undergraduate degree is in Design and Environmental Analysis—what most people would call "Interior Design." My graduate degrees are in Human Development and Family Studies.

Design and environmental analysis taught me how to design spaces that support and uplift the people working in them. Although many people think of interior design as moving furniture around the living room, it’s much more than that. Designers arrange hospital floors so that nurses can work together and easily monitor their patients. They design safe, bright nursery schools that facilitate play and prisons that maintain the safety of both inmates and staff. One of my first jobs as an "interior architect" was working on a team that put the 4,000 employees of a large company into a 72-floor New York City office building. As we all know, some offices work well, others not so much. The difference is design. Where does the copy machine go? How should the administrative assistant be placed? And how many wastepaper baskets and bathrooms do you need for 4,000 people?

Human development and family studies became my life's work. I fell into it by accident. I needed a course to meet a distribution requirement, and Adult Interpersonal Relationships seemed like a good bet. In fact, it was. We learned about the family sociology and developmental psychology involved in the science of friendship and romantic relationships. (I got an A+—my only A+—and if there’s one course that should set you up for a happy life, that’s probably the one to ace.) That one undergraduate requirement led me to a career studying parenting, child development, and adolescents lying to their parents.

Home Economics as Feminist Ideology

I bring all this up, because Home Ec is often the butt of a running joke—the '50’s June Cleaver stay-at-home mom. The retro "trad wife" skillset.

It developed, however, from something radical: the idea that the traditional work of women is important, meaningful, and economically significant. Home economics began as a movement in the 1850s in Scotland teaching foundational skills to poor women. In pre-industrial cultures, both men and women worked in the home. Labor was often divided, but both men and women were involved in socializing children from age 5, children were heavily involved in family labor, and home and business were often merged. A candlemaking shop or farm was a family endeavor.

After the Industrial Revolution, gender roles bifurcated. In married families, men often worked outside the home, leaving women with most of the childrearing, food gathering and preparation tasks, cleaning, and what is now called "women’s work." Women's unpaid labor in the home was what allowed men to earn the money needed to purchase goods that she turned into the stuff of daily living—food and clothes.

Catherine Beecher, sister to Harriet Beecher Stowe, was one of the first advocates for systematically teaching core homemaking skills in school. Abraham Lincoln created "land grant" universities in all states, giving land to establish institutes of higher education to spread knowledge and make higher education accessible to a broader economic range of people.

Ever wonder why every state has a state university system? Ohio State? University of Wisconsin? Louisiana State University? All of them are land-grant institutions. Part of their mission was to take science and make it accessible to all people, teaching agriculture, mechanical arts (including homemaking), and military science. Cooperative extension—including 4H—was established in every county in the United States and its territories. The goal of cooperative extension was to give away the science underlying agriculture and home economics. With "shop," this made up the core of high school vocational training. Cornell University, an Ivy League school that is part land-grant institution and part private, had one of the earliest and most progressive colleges of home economics in the United States. Founded by nutritionist Flora Rose, it included departments of consumer economics, design and environmental analysis, health and human services, family and child development, nutrition, and textile science.

Studying Child Development

Although developmental psychology is often associated with departments of psychology, much of the best and earliest work in the field was done within home economics. Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the most prominent developmental psychologists of the 20th century, was first offered a position in Cornell’s Psychology Department, but quickly moved to the Department of Child Development and Family Relations in Home Economics. Why? Because psychologists tended to focus on the individual, and he felt that one couldn’t understand a developing child without understanding them within relations with their parents, siblings, family, and community. The interconnection between different spheres was core to the home economics paradigm.

Women’s Work

It is interesting that home ec is so disparaged, as are many of the skills studied within its disciplines. Yet fashion and architectural design are considered high art. Nutrition is core to well-being. Parenting has become a national obsession. Budgeting and financial management are core to long-term economic success.

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Want to know the value of these skills? Try buying them. The typical cost of center-based childcare in the United States is approximately $15,000 a year. Think of the cost of dining out for all meals, compared to the cost of eating in.

Why then are they devalued? All of the disciplines in home economics and consumer sciences are traditionally skills employed by women. If we devalue those skills, perhaps it’s because we devalue the often unpaid labor that women have contributed to keeping us going.

For an interesting talk on the incredibly dynamic and revolutionary history of home economics, watch
Danielle Dreilinger: The Secret History of Home Economics or read her book (reference below).