Domestic Science

A dear friend had a note pad in her apartment that read " the only domestic thing about me is that I live in a house." It is a pretty funny line.

Amazon.com Widgets

For most of us who grew up in the 1960's and 70's we saw the teaching of home economics in the schools as a dreadful retrograde tool to keep women out of the marketplace and tied to home.

For some perverse reason I have been reading books on the teaching of what used to be called Home Science, Home Economics or Domestic Science since I was in my early teens. I was fortunate that my local library had a pretty good collection if such books in

the stacks. I still don't quite understand why I was so drawn to those musty books on child rearing and home care from the earliest years of the 20th century. In my teens I loved seeing how the world depicted in those books seemed so different from my own.

What I have come to learn in my reading over the years is that rather than being a tool of suppression of women Home economics was founded by feminists to elevate the position of women and to improve their education. Home economics was an offshoot of what we might think of as Life Sciences as applied in the home setting. I have come to admire the women who founded the Good housekeeping Institute to ensure that all milk sold is healthy and does not spread disease. (TB was often spread through milk from contaminated cows). I admire the women who worked to make sure that all women, including poor ones, had the ability to earn an income.

The women who were the pioneers of the Home Economics movement started the movement that helped to eventually create the FDA and the EPA. Standards for healthy foods, truth in food labeling, truth in drug labeling all comes from these women.

Yesterday I found this truly excellent essay about the history of the Home Economics movement in the United States. You will recognize some of the cast of characters from the abolitionist movement and from the women's suffrage movement.

Enjoy the read.

Comments

Connecting with the past

A few months ago I had a craving for my father’s chicken fricassee. If my father were still alive I would have called him up and he would have talked me through the process of making it. My father is no longer alive so I turned to my cookbooks and the recipes I found for chicken fricassee were nothing at all like the stew of chicken necks, gizzards and wings in a watery sweet and sour tomato sauce that I enjoyed as a kid. I assumed that the dish was an invention of my father’s. I then attempted to replicate the dish from my memory of it and failed. A couple of weeks ago I saw an article on the internet, and I can’t remember where, that talked about Jewish fricassee and it sounded an awful lot like the dish I was hankering after. This afternoon I went to the butcher and picked up all of the chicken elements of the dish, a couple of packages each of wings, necks and gizzards. My father never cooked directly from a cook book. He used to re...

The light themed tallit has been shipped!!!

I had begun speaking to Sarah about making her a tallit in the middle of August. It took a few weeks to nail down the design. For Sarah it would have been ideal if the tallit were completed in time for her to wear it on Rosh HaShanah., the beginning of her year as senior rabbi of her congregation. For me, in an ideal world, given the realities of preparing for the High Holidays I would have finished this tallit in the weeks after Sukkot. So we compromised and I shipped off the tallit last night. I would have prefered to have more time but I got the job done in time. This tallit was made to mark Sarah's rise to the position of senior rabbi but it was also a reaction to this year of darkness. She chose a selection of verses about light to be part of her tallit. 1) אֵל נוֹרָא עֲלִילָה God of awesome deeds ( from a yom kippur Liturgical poem) 2) אוֹר חָדָשׁ עַל־צִיּוֹן תָּאִיר May You shine a new light on Zion ( from the liturgy) 3) יָאֵר יְהֹ...

A Passover loss

My parents bought this tablecloth during their 1955 visit to Israel. It is made out of linen from the first post 1948 flax harvest. The linen is heavy and almost crude. The embroidery is very fine. We used this cloth every Passover until the center wore thin. You can see the cloth on the table in the background of this photo of my parents and nephew My Aunt Sheva bought my mother a replacement cloth. The replacement cloth is made out of a cotton poly blend. The embroidery is crude and the colors not nearly as nice. The old cloth hung in our basement. We used the new cloth and remembered the much nicer original cloth. I loved that my aunt wanted to replace the cloth, I just hated the replacement because it was so much less than while evoking the beauty of the original. After my father died my mother sat me down and with great ceremony gave me all of her best tablecloths. She also gave me the worn Passover cloth and suggested that I could mend it. I did. Year after year ...

sarah in nyc

Search This Blog