05 Nov / The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live by Danielle Dreilinger [in Booklist]
Journalist Danielle Dreilinger resurrects, elevates, and applauds the superwoman, subversive history of “home economics,” a field now more unjustly lampooned than deservedly lauded. Dreilinger’s preface, “Everything You Know about Home Economics Is Wrong,” promises – and veteran narrator Rachel Perry splendidly delivers – 150 years of immersive storytelling that includes the pioneering advances of MIT’s first female student, Ellen Swallow Richards, a chemist “who believed fervently in the power of science to free women from ‘drudgery,’” and Margaret Murray Washington (Booker T.’s second wife), who “thought improving the home would end racial inequality.”
Home economics provided “a back door for women to enter science”; once there, women originated the food groups, the federal poverty level, the consumer-protection movement, clothing-care labels, school lunches, women’s studies, and the Rice Crispies Treat. For over a century, until the 1950s, home economics put women in charge of changing the world through the household.
Perry readily embodies the gravitas of Dreilinger’s reclamatory research, deftly spinning inspiring, necessary stories of women’s tenacity and resilience.
Review: “Nonfiction,” Booklist Online, October 22, 2021
Readers: Adult
Published: 2021