Home Work: Earn an A, save your marriage
field reports from my book in progress The Secret History of Home Economics
I’ve been wrestling with one of the central conundrums of my book: how a field founded by strong, brilliant career women as a means to empowerment became the tool of patriarchal oppression we think of today. I think I’ve found a piece of the puzzle: the marriage course. Not sociological or anthropological classes that studied marriage as a societal institution but college classes that taught you how to be married. By 1961 more than 1,200 U.S. colleges and universities offered this. And the textbooks—including Robert O. Blood Jr.’s Marriage, Henry Bowman’s Marriage for Moderns, Evelyn Millis Duvall and Reuben Hill’s When You Marry, Meyer Nimkoff’s Marriage and the Family—said that a woman’s place was in the home.
Professional home economists were doing better than ever before after World War II, traveling the world and climbing to new heights on the corporate ladder. But the field was crumbling from below as a large percentage of home economics college majors married and dropped out before graduation. In 1954, for instance, U.S. colleges had more than 65,000 home economics majors but granted only 8,000 home economics degrees.
The core problem, as I see it, is that while the founding women home economists could reinvent caring for the home as a way to build careers and change the world, could flip oppression into empowerment, the men in power didn’t have to buy it. They could just as easily say that girls should learn housekeeping because they were meant to be housewives. And they were still in charge. Before World War II, we see home economics as oppression mostly in K-12 education, which had to respond to the general public and had men at the top. In colleges, women created departments of their own.
After World War II, however, men started to impinge upon that female ivory tower. Pragmatically, home economics administrators were under pressure to hire more faculty with doctoral degrees, which men were more likely to have. And these men usually specialized, ironically, in the new and hot focus area of child development, also called “family life.” Moreover, because the marriage course was so popular, when it was in the home economics department, as at UC Berkeley and Cornell, it drew a lot of non-majors, particularly young men, which enhanced the department's reputation.
Even when the marriage course was home economics–adjacent—in the sociology or social work department, perhaps required for home ec majors but perhaps not—I think we can’t ignore the extent to which these messages about women’s role amplified each other. Even Cornell, birthplace of home economics graduate degrees and big careers, was intoning “homemaking is not only woman's most usual occupation but also, for the majority, her most important life task” in its promotional brochure.
At least Cornell’s home ec leaders thought they were preparing women for dual roles as working mothers. The marriage course authors? As if. They promoted a model of marriage that was middle-class, companionate, deeply fulfilling emotionally and sexually, and lifelong. Which sounds nice. Except that though they said marriages were becoming more democratic—well, let's just hear it from the anonymous person who annotated a copy of Marriage in the HathiTrust online library: “This book is totally and completely SEXIST.”
A woman should think twice before marrying an older man, Henry Bowman wrote, because “it is probable that her widowhood will begin when she is too young to stop living and too old to start over.” How about a younger man? He might find her ugly after menopause. How about an agemate? Later on he might lose his head over a fresh young thing, and it would probably be at least partly his wife’s fault due to her “neglect of appearance, absorption in housework and child rearing, stoppage of personal growth, loss of enthusiasm and spontaneity, sexual coldness, lack of affection.” Why marry at all? Well, Bowman wrote, a woman in those modern times did have the option to “voluntarily prepare [herself] for a lifelong celibate career.”
Despite a social-science veneer, these professors described anything outside the nuclear model, including premarital sex, as “deviant” or “immoral.” They mustered reams of data showing that “mixed” marriages usually failed. Never mind racially mixed, which Robert Blood didn’t even mention. Marriages where one partner was Catholic and the other Protestant, or where the woman was taller than the man. “Many women like a man to be slightly masterful,” Bowman wrote, but “they could not accept it in a much shorter man.”
Let’s laugh so we don’t cry. How about some fun mating rituals? The books went into intense detail about that as well. Duvall and Hill recommended as group date that teens stamp cotton with potato halves to make a tablecloth. Blood said the honeymoon must be taken immediately after the wedding, without even a few days’ delay: “This is one of the few now-or-never situations faced in marriage.” To prepare for the big event, most engaged women got their hymens medically stretched, he wrote, because in only 10 percent of cases was the membrane sufficiently elastic on its own for honeymoon sex to be “comfortable”—and “for many couples the honeymoon is the peak period of sexual activity of their entire married lives.”
Perhaps most relevant for our purposes was how these books addressed women’s careers. They worked overtime to remind women that there was fulfilment, management and variety, not just drudgery, in homemaking; that though you might think you’d have time for work outside the home thanks to technology such as the washing machine, in fact there were new, more intellectually demanding tasks at home to take their place; that careers were frequently boring too; that most people who longed for an outlet for self-expression didn’t have much of a self to express; that many women thought their family needed a second salary because Madison Avenue had snowed them into wanting to keep up with the Joneses; and that our society’s elevated respect for wage-earning occupations did not mean that they were more worthwhile than housekeeping. Besides, it’s not like the husband would pick up the slack at home, Blood wrote: Working wives still did 75 percent of the housework compared to homemakers’ 85 percent. He suggested volunteering.
Bowman spent 20 pages listing the problems when mothers worked, even knocking down such straw men as the argument that it gave women an incentive to keep up their appearance. (I guess the threat of spousal abandonment was incentive enough.) Meyer Nimkoff wrote approvingly of a couple that got married after the man took his fiancée’s job. That hilarious cartoon just above is a chapter divider in When You Marry.
Judiciously, Bowman concluded that young women should still train to work. “Preparation for a vocation is a sort of insurance policy. The girl’s fiancé may die or disappoint her, so that she will remain single. Her husband may die or become incapacitated.” Of course, she must simultaneously prepare for homemaking. How about home economics? he concluded.
So, stamp your tablecloth, cross your legs, stretch your hymen and sacrifice any career ambitions you might have, and you would be happily married. That was the promise. Would it work? Who knew, Bowman said. He freely admitted that there was no research evidence that the marriage course improved students’ marriages. But who cared, he wrote: There was no research evidence that most of the liberal arts curriculum did anything for us either.
Recipe of the Month: Aspic Salad Pie
At this point in the holidays, we think about lighter fare while still eating sweets. (Especially in New Orleans, where king cake season is about to start.) What better solution than this terrifying and time-consuming monstrosity? “Looks like a pie. It’s really a salad,” exclaimed the 1959 Journal of Home Economics ad from which I take this recipe.
1 10-oz. pkg. frozen mixed vegetables, cooked and drained
1/4 c. Good Seasons Exotic Herbs Salad Dressing*
2 pkgs. lemon gelatin mix
2 c. hot water
1 t. salt
Dash pepper
2 T vinegar
1/2 c. cold water
1 8-oz. can tomato sauce
1 c. large-curd cottage cheese
1 baked 9” pie shell.
Marinate vegetables in salad dressing for 2 hours. Drain.
Dissolve gelatin in hot water. Stir in salt, pepper and vinegar. To one half of mixture, add cold water. To the rest, add tomato sauce. Chill both until slightly thickened.
Combine cottage cheese and veg. Reserve 1 c. for garnish. Fold remaining into the clear lemon gelatin and spoon into pie shell. Chill until set but still sticky. Spoon tomato mixture over lemon layer. Chill until firm, about 2 hours. Garnish with remaining cheese/vegetable mixture. Yield: 6-8 servings, if you can stomach it. Maybe I should have given you guys my grandmother’s Jello mold recipe instead.
* I omitted brand names except for the salad dressing, which is a specific set of seasonings. Given the word "marinate," I think you’re supposed to mix up the dressing, not combine the vegetables with the dry herb packet. Someone from the internet says the “exotic herbs” variety was Italian: “thyme, oregano, sage, onion powder, garlic powder, black pepper, salt and (crucial) crushed celery seed.” A different clone calls for dehydrated carrot, ditto red bell pepper, lemon pepper, dried parsley, salt, sugar, black pepper, dry pectin, oregano, garlic powder and onion powder. Now I want ... salad.
The real question is whether my friend Kate will serve aspic salad pie at her annual 4th of JuPie party. I think you should be able to read and share this post online at this link. Learn about piglets, feminist muffins and more in the Home Work archives.
Header photo: Advertisement, General Foods, in The Journal of Home Economics, 1959. Marriage book graffiti image via HathiTrust. Cartoon from Duvall and Hill, When You Marry, 1953.
Written content © 2019 Danielle Dreilinger. All rights reserved.