“Not Enough…for Really Intelligent Women”: Domestic Science and the Elite Women’s Colleges, 1890-1920

• In Event: A Theoretical Toolbox: Using Theories of Gender and Sexuality to Uncover New Histories of Education

Abstract

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the elite American women’s colleges engaged in an extended and often heated debate over the proper nature and components of a woman’s college course, including experimenting with, and ultimately rejecting, the nascent discipline of Domestic Science—later known as Home Economics. This little-studied debate had profound consequences for the colleges’ subsequent development and undermined their reputation, at least temporarily, among the general public. In a period fraught with anxieties over women’s changing social, political, and economic role, as well as more particular concerns that middle-class, native-born white women—the same demographic from which the colleges overwhelmingly drew their students—were not doing their part to maintain and extend American hegemony, the colleges’ aversion to anything that savored too strongly of a “feminine” curriculum raised more than a few eyebrows.

Most studies of the elite women’s colleges, such as Patricia Ann Palmieri’s In Adamless Eden (1995), or of women’s higher education more broadly, like Barbara Miller Solomon’s In the Company of Educated Women (1985), focus on their path-breaking liberal arts curricula and make little mention of Domestic Science. Lynn D. Gordon’s Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (1990) treats the subject in more depth, but emphasizes the colleges’ rejection of the subject more than the process and motivations that led to it. Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz’s Alma Mater (1984) examines in detail Vassar’s halfhearted 1920s experiment with “Euthenics,” a vague and dressed-up version of Home Economics, but not the colleges’ critical curriculum debate of the previous generation. Along with seeking to give the curriculum debate its due, this paper places it within the broader contexts not only of the history of education and the emergence of the “New Woman,” but also of turn-of-the-century nativist sentiment, fears of “race suicide,” and popular social evolutionary theories that held, first, that highly-differentiated gender behavior was the bedrock of an advanced civilization, and second, that non-normative gender behavior could actually undermine these critical sex differences, placing an entire civilization in danger of decay.
Drawing on a variety of primary sources—the papers of college presidents, faculty, administrators, students, and alumnae, newspaper articles and editorials, course catalogues, and publications such as the Journal of the American Association of University Women and the Journal of Home Economics—this paper examines the complex factors that contributed to the colleges’ rejection of Domestic Science and the long term consequences of that decision. By the early twentieth century, growing numbers of critics had singled out the women’s colleges as bastions of social elitism—ill-suited to the nation’s democratic ethos—or as institutions hostile women’s traditional, domestic role, intent on poisoning students’ minds against marriage and motherhood and turning them into neurotic and dangerously masculinized creatures. In both cases, the refusal to develop a specific “womanly” and domestic course of study was the colleges’ primary offense, and the hostility and ridicule this engendered contributed directly to the national backlash against them in the 1920s.

Author

• Caroline Hasenyager, College of William and Mary