The story of Ellen Richards’s evolution from chemistry to domestic science probably explains as much about her followers—the millions of women who would eventually try to practice “scientific housekeeping”—as it does about herself. She had always struggled to find a wider range for her own abilities than the home, but was hemmed in at every point by the sexual anxieties of male colleagues. As a student, for example, she had to counter her professor (and future husband’s) argument that co-education “introduces Feelings, interests [that are] foreign to [the] lecture room.”24 The final outcome of her career—to be honored for founding the science of homemaking—was not so much a triumph as a concession.
As a girl, Ellen Richards had had firsthand experience of the skills which industry had “robbed” from women. The daughter of a stern New England farmer and an invalid mother, Ellen had learned to keep house, cook, sew, garden, and nurse the sick. When she was thirteen, her bread and embroidery won two grand prizes at the county fair. But she had no desire to follow these interests to their usual conclusion in matrimony. From Worcester, where she had gone to study and support herself by tutoring, she wrote a friend that “the young or old gentleman has not yet made his appearance who can entice me away from my free and independent life.”25 Called back from this independence to nurse her mother, Ellen fell into a two-year-long depression. The Woman Question—what does a woman do with her life?—weighed down on her, almost crushing her, like her mother, into permanent invalidism.
The answer, for Richards, came with the improbable news that a New York brewer named Matthew Vassar had endowed a college for women. (There were no colleges open to women in New England at the time.) She shook off her depression, scraped together her savings, and set off for Poughkeepsie. From then on, she never paused long enough for depression to catch up with her again. At Vassar she crammed insatiably, even making a practice of carrying a book open in front of her so she could study as she walked between classes. Her hard work and passion for detail (she recorded in her diary the number of steps she climbed each day) endeared her to Vassar professor Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, who encouraged her to crack the male citadel of science.
Ellen (still Swallow at this point) decided to penetrate the inner sanctum: to study chemistry at MIT. It was much more difficult at the time for a woman to become an experimental scientist like a chemist, than to be an astronomer or naturalist whose business was to observe nature passively and from a respectful distance. Women might be meticulous observers and note-takers without totally compromising their gender. But the laboratory—chemical or bacteriological—was a scene of action, where men backed Nature into a corner and beat her secrets out of her.
The faculty of MIT debated for weeks whether to admit Ellen Swallow and finally did so only under the kind of conditions with which a group of surgeons would have invited Typhoid Mary to join them in the operating room. She could only be a “special” student. She had to study separately from male students and work in her own segregated laboratory. She could not earn a graduate degree no matter what she accomplished. And, finally, to make sure she hadn’t become “unwomanly” as a result of her studies, the professors would ask her to sort their papers and mend their suspenders: “I try to keep all sorts of such things as needles, thread, pins, scissors, etc., around.…” She wrote with some satisfaction, “they can’t say study spoils me for anything else.”26
When Ellen Richards graduated from MIT—with a second bachelor’s degree—there were still no places for her in the male world of chemistry. MIT graciously lent her a lab where she could train women high school teachers in basic chemistry. But this was not a job, with position and pay, it was just the kind of “good work” that an intelligent faculty wife like Mrs. Richards might be expected to perform. She could assist the male scientists, befriend them, sew for them, even funnel a little of their knowledge off to women teachers, but she could not be one of them.
Barred from chemistry, Richards turned her formidable energies toward the creation of a new science in which she would have a place on an equal footing with men. In 1873 she announced, in an address to a high society gathering, the birth of the new science of “oekology.” One admiring biographer has interpreted this as the premature birth of ecology, in the contemporary environmentalist sense, but what she was actually unveiling was the infant version of the “science of right living”; or as she put it then “the science to teach people how to live,” which was to blend chemistry, biology, and engineering principles into practical guidelines for daily life. The scientific establishment was not, however, taken in by Richards’s stratagem, and dismissed “oekology” as a kind of “hokum” like faith healing and patent medicine. Later Richards tried to launch the “science of right living” again under the new label of “euthenics”; and was again rebuffed. The scientific community which had rejected her for trying to be a scientist now turned against her for not being scientific enough.
None of these experiences overcame Richards’s antipathy to feminism. As a young woman she criticized the early feminist movement for not having “… a higher standard of knowledge and responsibility.” Neither of her biographers mentions her having any interest in women’s rights (or in the abolition of child labor, or any of a dozen of the burning social issues of her lifetime). She did devote considerable energy to expanding higher educational opportunities for women, but her basic stance on the Woman Question was elitist and masculinist: women did not need to struggle collectively; individual women would be “let in” as they proved themselves ready. Thus, despite her own role as the female “first” in MIT, she strongly disapproved when in 1878 MIT decided to start admitting women on the same basis as men. Some of the reasons she listed were obviously contrived: Would the girls be exempted from military drill? If they were, they would be getting a “special privilege” and they would not really be in on the same basis as men. “Finally, and to my mind the most fundamental [reason] of all,” she concluded:
though it grieves me to say it, the present state of public opinion among women themselves does not give reason to believe that, of one hundred young girls of sixteen who might enter if the opportunity was offered, ten would carry the course through. It is demoralizing to have such results in the early stages of scientific education for women.27
Decades later, she declined an invitation to serve on the women’s board of the World’s Columbian Exposition along similar lines:
Twenty years ago I was glad to work on women’s boards for the education of women. The time is now some years past when it seemed to me wise to work that way. Women have now more rights and duties than they are fitted to perform.28
But in the end, Richards had to overcome her aversion to working “that way,” i.e., with and through women’s groups. Domestic Science became the final receptacle for all her ideas of community and household sanitation and “right living” in general. It was a strange place for Ellen Richards to end up, according to Caroline Hunt:
Considering her passionate desire for equality of educational opportunity for men and women, the preference which she often expressed for working with men and women together and not woman alone, and her vigorous protests against special concessions to women, it may seem strange that Mrs. Richards should have interested herself … in the home economics movement, which is often thought to interest women chiefly.29
In fact, it took a man to convince Richards to try once again to carve out her own distinctive field of human endeavor. No one could have been a better advisor than Melville Dewey, whose life work had consisted of dividing all human knowledge into that system of categories and subcategories known as the Dewey Decimal System. If the period around the turn of the century was characterized by what one historian called “the search for order” on the part of the middle class,30 then Melville Dewey must have been leading the way with a high-beam searchlight. In addition to inventing the decimal system, he was president of the New York Efficiency Society, whose aim was to spread industrial managem
ent techniques into every backwater of human existence. For example, he cut down on waste time in his own life by streamlining his name to Melvil Dewey, and then finally to Melvil Dui. It was Dewey (or Dui for the speedreaders) who finally convinced Richards to give up her efforts to create a new natural science and to be content to launch “right living” as a hybrid between the social and natural sciences; “home economics” was the name he suggested.† He encouraged her to organize the new discipline, and it was near his summer home at Lake Placid in the Adirondacks that the domestic scientists convened every year from 1899 to 1907.
The top domestic science cadre, the few dozen professional men and women who gathered each year at Lake Placid to assess the progress of the new field, were perfectly clear about where they stood on the Woman Question: it was the mission of domestic science to fill the domestic void and thus preserve the home. Ellen Richards often stated her worry that “the family group is in the process of disintegration.”31
Mrs. Alice P. Norton, a University of Chicago professor and a frequent speaker at the Lake Placid Conferences, told her fellow conferees in 1904:
Many of us are afraid for the future of the home. So many centrifugal forces are working against it, life outside the home is becoming so attractive that there is danger of the center of social interest losing its normal position in the home. The study of the household arts, if taught in the right spirit, must inevitably tend to make the home a more interesting place.…‡32
When Mrs. Linda Hull Larned, then president of the National Household Economics Association, reported at the 1902 conference on the spread of the domestic science movement among clubwomen, she was able to say:
Fortunately there are a few thinking, progressive persons in the world besides ourselves and they are just as firm as we are in the belief that homemaking is the most natural and therefore the most desirable vocation for women.34
Physicians hastened to support these sentiments with medical arguments. In 1899, the AMA endorsed the need for domestic science education on the grounds that it would lead to reduced “infant mortality, contagious diseases, intemperance (in eating and drinking), divorce, insanity, pauperism, competition of labor between the sexes, men’s and women’s clubs, etc.”35
But, as the domestic science professionals knew, it would take much more than a few exhortations on the sanctity of the home to transform homemaking into a career of deep and abiding interest. In the new age of industrial progress, everything had to be justified in the name of an activist, forward-looking science. As one advocate of domestic science education proclaimed to a women’s conference in 1897:
When the grand meaning and hidden power of her ordained sphere dawn upon her in their full force thru [sic] scientific study, then she [woman] will not sigh because Nature has assigned her special duties which man has deemed safe to be trusted to her instincts, yet in reality need for their performance the highest scientific knowledge.36
The Crusade Against Germs
The domestic scientists hoped to forge a direct pipeline between the scientific laboratory and the average home. They seized any science, any discipline, any discovery, which could conceivably be used to upgrade a familiar task. Richards believed that biochemistry could eventually transform cooking into a precise laboratory exercise; economics could revolutionize budgeting and shopping; and so forth. As for cleaning, there was now a new, firm scientific foundation to build upon—the bacteriologists’ Germ Theory of Disease.
Germ Theory, which became known to the public in the eighteen nineties (though in a somewhat distorted fashion) set off a wave of public anxiety about contagion. Any public place or object was suspect, as these popular magazine titles from the period 1900 to 1904 suggest: “Books Spread Contagion,” “Contagion by Telephone,” “Infection and Postage Stamps,” “Disease from Public Laundries,” “Menace of the Barber Shop.” Middle-class people were especially fearful of contagion from the “lower” classes. In her household hygiene book, Women, Plumbers and Doctors, or Household Sanitation, Mrs. Plunkett warned:
A man may live on the splendid “avenue,” in a mansion plumbed in the latest and costliest style, but if, half a mile away, in range with his open window, there is a “slum,” or even a neglected tenement house, the zephyrs will come along and pick up the disease germs and bear them onward, distributing them to whomsoever it meets, whether he be a millionaire or a shillingaire.…37
Not only “zephyrs,” but garments, cigars, etc., manufactured in tenement-house factories could carry germs from the poor to the middle-class home, it was feared. Most frightening of all was the possibility that the servants or part-time help could be a kind of fifth column, bringing disease into the family. The case of Typhoid Mary, the Irish-American cook who left a trail of fifty-two typhoid cases, three of them fatal, in the homes of her employers, stood as a grim warning to the unwary.
In the face of this ubiquitous bacterial menace, who was to be responsible for the public’s health? The answer, according to the medical profession, was the housewife. In a speech often quoted by American domestic scientists, the president of the British Medical Association declared that “it is the woman on whom full sanitary light requires to fall.” He confided that whenever he made a house call he checked out “the appointments and arrangements and management of the house,” since the chances that the disease would spread depended “on the character of the presiding genius of the home, or the woman who rules over that small domain.”38 Along the same lines, the AMA saw the scientifically trained housekeeper as a nurselike ally in the battle against contagion:
Medical men who know the value of a trained nurse can readily appreciate the value of a training which will not only make American wives prudent, economic and thrifty, but which will establish a sanitary regime in every room in the home as well as in the kitchen and dining room.39
For the Domestic Science experts, the Germ Theory of Disease pointed the way to their first victory: the transformation of cleaning from a matter of dilettantish dusting to a sanitary crusade against “dangerous enemies within.” Here at last was a challenge suitable to the energy and abilities of educated women. In her book Household Economics Helen Campbell described how the old domestic crafts had gradually been taken over by men, but cleaning “can never pass” from women’s hands. “To keep the world clean,” she exulted, “this is one great task for women.”40
In the light of Germ Theory, cleaning became a moral responsibility. Mrs. H. M. Plunkett, one of the early popularizers of Germ Theory in relation to household matters, wrote in 1885:
There is nothing in hygiene she cannot comprehend, and too often does she realize this and begin to study it when, too late, she stands beside the still form of some previous one, slain by one of the preventable diseases that, in the coming sanitary millenium, will be reckoned akin to murder.41
This warning was echoed throughout the growth of the domestic science movement: neglect of housecleaning is tantamount to child abuse. Manufacturers of soap and cleansing agents picked up on the theme, with ads which played directly to maternal fears and guilt. Stuart Ewen reports on ads in the twenties:
… Hygeia baby bottles were “safe” and would not “carry germs to your baby.” Fly-tox bug killer was presented as the one line of defense for an otherwise “defenseless” child … Women were told to follow the dictates of “health authorities” who tell us that disease germs are everywhere.” Lysol divided the house into an assemblage of minutely defined dangers, so mothers were told that they should be aware that “even the doorknobs threaten [children] … with disease.”42
And, at a time when infant mortality (due largely to infectious diseases) ran five times as high as it does today, mothers were likely to listen to anyone who seemed to offer a way to combat disease.
Unfortunately, the scientific content of “scientific cleaning” was extremely thin. The domestic scientists were right about the existence of germs, but neither they nor the actual scientists knew much about the trans
mission and destruction of germs—which are of course the major issues in domestic disease prevention. For example, the domestic scientists believed that the major household germ carrier was dust and attributed germ-killing qualities to the “damp duster.” Helen Campbell ominously described an experiment in which “3000 living organisms” were cultivated from a “pinpoint of dust.” “The dry duster had never reached them. The feather duster had no power save for distribution. A damp one alone could render them harmless.…”43 Actually, dust is quite innocent, except as a source of allergies. And the damp duster, whatever its other virtues, would be a perfectly comfortable habitat for microbes.
In the twentieth century the damp duster was succeeded by the modern housewife’s latest weapon, the ubiquitous household sponge. Then for decades, professional home economists seemed to glean very little from the emerging fields of bacteriology or epidemiology to answer the questions of what to clean and how to clean it, while an array of heavily advertised cleaning products made their way into kitchens and bathrooms. (An informal survey of home economists we conducted in 1976 only disclosed confusion and evasion as to whether science was actually improving housework.) It was not until 2004, that studies reported in The New York Times revealed, as news, that “warm, moist crevice-filled sponges are also breeding grounds for bacteria.” The Times article quoted a professor of environmental microbiology at the University of Arizona who conducted studies of bacteria in home kitchens. He found that “… people who had the cleanest-looking kitchen were often the dirtiest.” The explanation? “Because ‘clean’ people wipe up so much, they often end up spreading bacteria all over the place if they don’t disinfect their sponges very frequently. The cleanest kitchens,” he said, “were in the homes of bachelors, who never wiped up and just put their dirty dishes in the sink.” At around the same time, dust came in for a startling reappraisal. Studies reported in The New England Journal of Medicine added credence to the “hygiene hypothesis”—meaning the theory that too much cleaning can make children more susceptible to allergies and asthma. Farm children, for example, who have much higher levels of exposure to germs, are much less likely to have asthma and hay fever than urban kids. Wiping off the counter bad for you? Household dust and pet dander good for your kids? It is amazing that after so many years this important part of women’s work—and public health—is still dictated by guesswork, tradition, and standards set by commercial advertising.44
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women Page 19