Domestic sciences at Bradley Polytechnic Institute and The University of Chicago

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

When curricula of colleges where domestic economy was taught in the mid to late 1800s are examined, Catherine Beecher's Domestic Economy is frequently listed as a central text. Her writings must have had an influence on those who were just starting to teach this new uncharted subject.

Catherine Beecher and her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, wrote a coherent theory of household management and a complete guide to nineteenth-century housework. The Beechers' mission was to assert that women could and should find self-respect within their traditional sphere. They devoted considerable effort to domestic economy, based on the Christian family state, in which the housewife (minister of the family state) fulfilled her most important duty owed to God by doing her housework and teaching her children to work together for the good. According to Kathryn Kish Sklar, "Much of Catharine Beecher's lifework can be seen as a bridge across the growing gap that separated the rising expectations of early nineteenth-century women from the social, political, and economic realities of their culture. In many ways her ideology of domesticity was an effort to overcome the relative deterioration in the status of women that occurred when economic production was transferred from the household to the factory."12

Understanding the difference between the middle class and the upper class of this era may also help in understanding important foundations of the beginning domestic science. Acceptance of females into higher education was most difficult. Publications such as Sex in Education by Edward Clarke claimed that physical strain of exhaustive study in college would permanently damage women's health.13

Household management was quite different for upper class women who might be afforded the opportunity to attend college, particularly in urban areas where household help was expected in every well-run household. On the other hand, self-sufficient farm households would more likely be run solely by the farmer's wife with help from older children. Since part of this discipline was developed in rural areas where assistance to homes and families in rural areas was vital, students from those roots needed to learn why (the theoretical science basis) as well as how to do, since homemakers were primarily responsible for the actual "doing." The knowing "how" was less important than the "why" for students from urban areas who became homemakers who directed others who did the actual household work.

In 1862 the Morrill Land Grant Act provided land endowment so that education for the common man and woman was possible on a large scale. There were several institutions that pioneered domestic economy during that time, including many in states of the Midwest and West such as Iowa (1869) and Illinois (1874-1880), presented plans of coeducation and departments of domestic science. In 1860 what began as Bluemont College, later became Kansas State Agricultural College as a land grant for Manhattan when Kansas became a state. Its first land grant president continued Bluemont College's commitment to coeducation. It was one of only eight state universities open to women by 1870.14 President of Kansas State Agricultural College John Anderson rejected Edward Clarke's thesis that the physical strain of exhaustive study in college would permanently damage women's health. He saw women as co-laborers with men. His successor, President George Fairchild, supported Anderson's philosophy and moved the program to the next level. In 1882 Nellie Sawyer Kedzie was hired as the new Superintendent of Sewing and Cooking. Kedzie built the department to one of national reputation. She added a domestic economy class for sophomore girls who had passed chemistry and applied science in lecture and laboratory (or industrials) class. Nellie Kedzie was made the first Professor of Household Economy and Hygiene at Kansas State. She was respected nationwide as she developed a master's degree in Household Economy and a teacher-training program.15 By 1880 Mary Welch's work at Iowa State had also attracted national reputation. Most historians would agree that it is land grant universities, such as the Kansas State and Iowa State programs, where the discipline flourished through the bulk of the latter part of the 1800s. In 1895 there were ten departments of domestic science in land grant colleges; five years later, there were thirty.16