The Secret History of Home Economics Quotes

“Richards had found her life’s work: to improve the home, and thus society, through science.”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

“She had chosen chemistry over astronomy in the first place because it was more relevant to everyday life. Testing wallpaper for arsenic for an insurance company and co-analyzing the entire water supply of Massachusetts, she saw the good that science could do in the world.”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

“Freed African Americans hungered for education, and every teacher mattered.”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

“At last her effort paid off. In one of the magazines she got for the store, Godey’s Lady’s Book, Swallow learned that a new college for white women was opening just over the state line in New York: Vassar. Tuition and board cost $400; remarkably, at a time when teachers were lucky to earn $15 a month, she had saved and borrowed $300, and there were scholarships. Several thousand women took the Vassar entrance exam for one hundred places. Swallow made the cut. As she unpacked in her dorm room, dusty from the train, she wrote home, “Am delighted even beyond anticipation.”7 Swallow spent her two years at Vassar in a rapture.”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

“The young or old gentleman has not yet made his appearance who can entice me away from my free and independent life,” she wrote her cousin in 1866.”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

“Always she kept a book open on the table to study in idle moments. For Ellen Swallow, there was never, nor would there ever be, an idle moment.”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

“To underline the intelligence of such work, she gave housework education an intellectual-sounding name: “domestic economy.” And she made an argument that would create jobs for countless women: domestic economy was too important and complex to be left to amateurs—that is, mothers. It had to be formally taught by professional educators.”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

“Beecher, a quick-witted but lazy student, attended school for about six years before leaving to care for the family after her mother died. By our standards, Beecher was religious. Even so, when her father pressed her to have a deep religious conversion experience and submit to God—else, he believed, she would not be saved—she resisted, deciding that she would follow Christian doctrine but not act excessively humble herself. She refused to sing a hymn with the lyrics “I am nothing, Lord,” because, she said, “I am not nothing.”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

“Home economics has been a back door for women to enter science; part of a surprisingly large government-backed movement; a guilt trip for women left cold by the household arts; a trapdoor or a springboard for women of color; a sometimes ironic, sometimes nostalgic preoccupation of third-wave feminists; a conservative calling card; an aesthetic obsession for the Instagram set; a feminist battlefield; and the locus for countless anxieties about women’s lives.”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

“Home economists instructed and inspired waves of women who built science careers helping people live better lives. Together, they built an empire of jobs and influence. They originated the food groups, the federal poverty level, the consumer-protection movement, clothing care labels, school lunch, the discipline of women’s studies, and the Rice Krispies Treat. They were the first to measure the economic value of housework and the amount of physical effort it took. They enabled millions of people around the world to survive harrowing deprivation.”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

“They did not want to overwrite local cultures with American ways. “Unless one is extremely careful there can be great danger from foreign teachers and missionaries trying to impose their way of living from a different civilization,”
― Danielle Dreilinger, The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live