Useful Resources

Useful resources on the history of home economics are provided on this page (not exhaustive).

Websites/Databases

  • HEARTH Digital Collection (Home Economics Archive: Research, Tradition, History), Cornell University Library: Link here
  • Apron Strings and Kitchen Sinks: The USDA Bureau of Home Economics (Digital Exhibit): Link here
  • “What was Home Economics?” – Cornell Library: Link Here

Selected Bibliography on the History of Home Economics

Books

  • Apple, Rima D, Joyce Eleanor Coleman, et al. 2003. The Challenge of Constantly Changing Times: From Home Economics to Human Ecology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1903-2003. Madison: Parallel Press, University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries.
  • Becchio, Giandomenica. 2020. A History of Feminist and Gender Economics. New York: Routledge. see chap. 2, pp. 86-121.
  • Dreilinger, Danielle. 2021. The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way we Live. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
  • Elias, Megan J. 2008. Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
  • Goldstein, Carolyn M. 2012. Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
  • Hayden, Dolores. 1982. The Grand Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities. Boston: MIT Press.
  • Kilgannon, Anne Marie. 1985. The Home Economics Movement and the Transformation of Nineteenth-Century Domestic Ideology in America. PhD Thesis, University of British Columbia. https://open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0096458.
  • Le Tollec, Agnès. 2020. Finding a New Home (Economics): Towards a Science of the Rational Family, 1924-1981. Paris: Université Paris-Saclay. https://www.theses.fr/2020UPASN006.
  • Leavitt, Sarah A. 2002. From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
  • Rutherford, Janice W. 2003. Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
  • Shapiro, Laura. 2009. Perfection Salad: Women and Cooking at the Turn of the Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  • Stage, Sarah, and Virginia B. Vincenti (eds). 1997. Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
  • Velzen, Susan van. 2001. Supplements to the Economics of Household Behavior (PhD thesis). Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam.

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Credit (painting): Edith Walker Cook, Lake Placid at Twilight (1868), Oil on Canvas. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth.