Home Economics: Status and Expertise

The home economists’ enhanced wartime reputation as food experts enabled them to secure postwar places in higher education, in agricultural research establishments, and in industrial corporations. In the Midwest, state land-grant colleges had supported women’s education in home economics as a counterpart to the education of male farmers as early as the 1870s, and after 1910 federal legislation provided additional funding for the expansion of home economics departments at these schools. Intended to train home economics teachers, agricultural extension agents, and a new generation of modern homemakers, the expansion of home economics in the land-grant colleges and some private universities also created opportunities for ambitious women to serve as professors and administrators. Within the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the establishment of the Office of Home Economics in 1915 and a Bureau of Home Economics in 1923 further supplied home economists with an institutional context for building a research program around consumption, with a considerable emphasis on food.