The scientific approach to home economics began as a result of the domestic science movement of the mid-19th century. "Home economics—also known as 'scientific housekeeping' 'sanitary cookery' and 'domestic science'—is one of the most influential and far-reaching movements in women’s labor history. From the mid-1800s to the present, the leaders of domestic science have sought to reshape the fundamental nature of women’s unpaid work in the home—in essence, the food production, cooking, cleaning, sewing, and child rearing that have occupied women since the beginning of written history. Though home economics has had many factions and phases, its overarching theme has been to free women from “drudgery," mainly by educating them to go about their domestic labors with scientific knowledge. Once properly educated, the theorists believed, women would apply order, up-to-date technology, cleanliness, labor-saving efficiencies, and higher standards of health to their homes. In the process, they would improve themselves, their families, and the nation at large" (Schenone, 2015).
Catharine Beecher is considered the pioneer of the domestic science movement. “Most historians consider Catharine Beecher to be the first great visionary of domestic science. In her enormously popular household guides … Beecher derided the irrational methods of housekeeping taught by old-fashioned mothers and grandmothers. Instead, she called for the professionalization of housework, with dramatically higher standards of cleanliness, order, and beauty—all achieved by a dogged devotion to details aided by enlightenment of science” (Schenone, 2015).
Science was used as an instrument to fix social problems, as well as simplify tedious tasks. “During this era, Americans were in love with science and its possibilities for improving the world, and women wanted to share in the trend. By the 1840s and 1850s, cookbooks and household guides were appearing with increasingly intellectual and scientific content, such as the biological functions of the body, detailed charts showing chemical analyses of food, and diagrams of mechanical systems in the family home, including stoves, furnaces, and chimneys” (Schenone, 2015).
Beecher, who had opened the Hartford Female Seminary, also used education as a tool to teach young women of any means home management, scientifically. “Such high levels of performance approximated those previously attainable only by the wealthy. Now, Beecher suggested that all women in the United States could achieve fine homes if they sought professional instruction in schools. And so she set about establishing several seminaries where women could learn such skills and gain social status as competent housewives and managers of their own homes” (Schenone, 2015).
As industrialization and urbanization progressed in the late-19th century, the domestic science movement became more developed. By now, more women had also entered the movement, one being Fannie Farmer. Based off of Beecher’s work, Farmer and her colleagues, accomplished things that had never been done before. “The concepts of “domestic science” and “home economics” were in their infancy, but these factors — bolstered by the work of women like Farmer, her colleagues Mary Lincoln and Maria Parloa and Ellen Swallow Richards, the first woman to be admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — were already shaping the field” (Moskin, 2018).
Farmer and her colleagues continued to apply scientific principles and techniques to homemaking in order to make it more achievable for the common housewife. However, cooking seemed to be the main aspect that received most of their attention because of its importance. They also continued to use education as a tool to advance home economics. “During the 1870s, three hugely successful cooking schools opened, providing early training grounds: the New York Cooking School, the Philadelphia Cooking School, and the Boston Cooking School. The original mission of all these enterprises was to teach poor and working-class girls about proper nutrition and cleanliness and how to cook with scientific rigor. But eventually, all of them offered classes to middle-class women as well. Many housewives and young women wanted to do a better job at their daily labors and sought self-improvement. Others wanted to become teachers of the subject” (Schenone, 2015).
Overall, “Beecher’s prescriptions (and those of other domestic writers of the era) codified housework for the masses and held wide appeal for a new generation of women seeking to leave behind traditional rural life and enter the middle class. And so, as industrialism transformed the world, domestic science transformed women’s work—from that which met the biological and economic needs of a family to that which achieved social and emotional goals, such as middle-class respectability, upward social mobility, morality, personal happiness of children and husbands, and in some cases, morality, Christianity, and ideal womanhood” (Schenone, 2015).
By the early-20th century, many schools and universities offered home economic classes, as a result of the work of Beecher, Farmer, and other women. “Fannie Farmer’s work laid the foundation for home economics courses that soon became the standard high school fare” (Birth, n.d.). It wasn’t until the late 20th century (1960-70’s), that the modern women’s liberation movement began to take place and influence women to start working outside the home.