Home economics emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as a
movement to train women to be more efficient household managers. At
the same moment, American families began to consume many more goods
and services than they produced. To guide women in this transition,
professional home economists had two major goals: to teach women to
assume their new roles as modern consumers and to communicate
homemakers' needs to manufacturers and political leaders. Carolyn
M. Goldstein charts the development of the profession from its
origins as an educational movement to its identity as a source of
consumer expertise in the interwar period to its virtual
disappearance by the 1970s.
Working for both business and government, home economists walked a
fine line between educating and representing consumers while they
shaped cultural expectations about consumer goods as well as the
goods themselves. Goldstein looks beyond 1970s feminist scholarship
that dismissed home economics for its emphasis on domesticity to
reveal the movement's complexities, including the extent of its
public impact and debates about home economists' relationship to
the commercial marketplace.