Domestic sciences at Bradley Polytechnic Institute and The University of Chicago

Journal of the Illinois State Historical Society, Autumn 2002 by Collins, Nina

Some men were also interested in education for women during this century. Matthew Vassar intended for domestic economy to be part of the curriculum when he provided the endowment to establish Vassar College in 1861. However, the first president and the board of trustees objected on grounds that it could not be successfully incorporated into a system of liberal education. The compromise plan announced that domestic economy would be taught theoretically by textbooks and lectures. "Although visible illustrations would be furnished by the college kitchen, larder, and dining room; personal instruction would be given to everyone who needs it as to care of her clothing and room and there will be regular hours for sewing."5 After three years this compromise plan was dropped. Horace Mann, upon becoming president of Antioch College in 1852, also argued for and was a supporter of coeducation.

It was Catharine Beecher whose work Ellen Richards herself spoke of as "the true beginning of the Home Economics movement."6 Catharine Beecher established a private school for girls in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1823. She rented a room above a harness shop in the center of Hartford where her school was an enormous success. By 1831, when Beecher left the school, the Hartford Female Seminary maintained a staff of eight teachers and enjoyed trustees from the leading citizens in Hartford. Some historians argue that Catharine Beecher's school constituted one of the most significant advances made in early nineteenth-century education for women. In 1840 Catharine Beecher wrote the Treatise on Domestic Economy, which was an important textbook for much of what was taught in the way of domestic economy or domestic science for many years. She campaigned for an educated approach to household chores and to get her proposed domestic economy courses into seminaries and to establish a practical arts college for women. This Treatise promoted a practical as well as theoretical base for standardization and systematization of American domestic practices, including rules for health care, formulas for household management, and prescriptions for infant care. What set Beecher apart from earlier movements is that she believed this should be a branch of study rather than miscellaneous activities to teach housewifery.7 The Treatise appeared at a time when there was great societal need for such a text. Many cultural indicators point to a heightened concern over the quality of domestic life in the 1840s, a concern that grew more emphatic when increasing geographic mobility removed many families from traditional sources of domestic knowledge. Just when Americans began to expect more from their domestic lives, the ability of the average American woman to meet this expectation diminished as she moved away from communal and familiar ties that might have fortified her skills.8

Scholars of the history of technology have confirmed the technological rigor of Catharine Beecher's household designs and have credited her with the beginning of household automation. Her innovations were meant to fill the gap she perceived between the society's expectations of women and the resources at their disposal for fulfilling those expectations. She, more than anyone else, may have made domesticity workable. Catharine Beecher's philosophy was an interesting contrast. Even toward the end of her career in her last writings in 1872, she continued to identify herself as "conservative" and was an outspoken critic of female suffrage. She argued that women should unite to establish their economic independence and insist that their domestic labor be granted the dignity and respect accorded to male labor outside the home.11 In earlier writings, Beecher insisted that the real wrongs of women were their domestic shortcomings. She disapproved of women's entering the business, financial, and political worlds. She also disapproved of the movement of opening colleges and universities for men to women, as she believed that women should be educated separately and that education was not to be purely intellectual but for the duties peculiar to women.