I’M WRONG ABOUT CONSUMER SCIENCE: More from Zachary Schrag. This time, I get schooled in a big way!

I am having trouble understanding your strong objection to the term “consumer science” as a synonym for home economics. To be sure, “homemaking is about a lot more than consuming.” But home economics is not.

Home economics was founded in the early twentieth century by Ellen Richards, a talented scientist who would have been very happy as an industrial chemist had male scientists been willing to accept a woman into their profession. They were not, and she turned instead to applying science to the home, so that the old boys would give her

some space in which to work. In 1908 she helped found the American Home Economics Association and became its first president.

Here is what she wrote not long afterward:

“As an economic factor, the influence of the housewife is of the greatest moment . . . . The city and suburban dweller is a buyer, not a producer. In suburban and city life the housekeeper has more temptations to buy needless articles, food out of season, to go often to the shops, especially on bargain days. She thinks her taste is

educated, when it is only aroused to notice what others like.”

…

“The teaching of domestic economy in the elementary school and home economics in the higher is intended to give the people a sense of control over their environment and to avert a panic as to the future.

“The economics of consumption, including as it does the ethics of spending, must have a place in our higher education, preceded in earlier grades by manual dexterity and scientific information, which will lead to true economy in the use of time, energy, and money in the home life of the land. Education is obliged to take cognizance of

the need, because the ideal American homestead, that place of busy industry, with occupation for the dozen children, no longer exists.”

[Ellen Richards, Euthenics: The Sciences of Controllable Environment, 1910, reprinted in A. James Fuller and John Hollitz, eds., Contending Voices: Biographical Explorations of the American Past (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2002).]

In other words, as Americans moved from farms into suburbs and cities, had fewer children, and depended on industrial production for more of their needs, consumption would replace production as the main economic function of the household, and it was in this area that training was needed most. Indeed, by the 1920s, the main employers of home-economics specialists, outside of the schools, were the gas and electric companies. They hired home-economists, mainly women, to teach housewives how to use irons, electric stoves, and other appliances that depended on gas electricity. In other words, how to consume. [Carolyn M. Goldstein, “From Service to Sales: Home Economics in Light and Power, 1920-1940,” Technology and Culture 38 (January 1997): 121-152]

Richards used several terms to describe the new field of rationalizing consumption: human ecology, euthenics, domestic science, and household engineering, as well as home economics. I could not find her using “consumer science,” but I cannot imagine she would have objected very strongly, given her other writings. She certainly wanted to train consumers, and in the Progressive era, the term “science” was applied to any system of rational decision-making, such as political science and library science.

In any event, by the early 1950s, some high schools were teaching courses called consumer science, which seems to have been close to home economics. [David M. Donahue, “Serving Students, Science, or Society? The Secondary School Physics Curriculum in the United States, 1930-65,” History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 33, No. 3. (Autumn, 1993), pp. 321-352.] Thus, your outrage may be a little late.

For myself, I agree that home economics is a better term, just because credit card debt threatens more American households than does salmonella. But I do not think consumer science is far off the mark.