Home Economics.

Nineteenth-century writers on women's role in the home had stressed the sanctity of the household domain as an escape from and an alternative to the hurly-burly of public and commercial life; twentiethcentury educators and organizers, in contrast, saw the home as a vital part of the larger society. Not only did they maintain that the household performed functions important to public life — the education of children, the caretaking of workers, the production of food and clothing — but they further argued that those who managed the home should employ the same efficiency methods that were modernizing economic activity in American business. At the turn of the century, a new home economics movement gradually coalesced in the atmosphere of progressive reform, with the result that, in the 1910s, large numbers of American housewives were learning to run their households as...