The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live

The Secret History of Home Economics promised to be interesting, but I had no idea how radical this history was, ot how pervasive its impact on society and politics. Danielle Drelinger's history is full of surprises. 

When I was in junior high, girls were required to take a semester of Home Economics classes. In cooking, I learned how to use displacement to accurately measure shortening. In sewing, we used the Bishop method to make an apron and an A-line skirt. 

I admit, I thought that Home Ec was pretty lame and meant for future housewives. And yet...I taught myself to cook from scratch and to sew, how to organic garden and bake bread, and how to follow a pattern and to make quilts. 

It turns out that there was a reason I felt that way. In the 1960s when I had those classes, the concept of home economics had been diminished from it's roots when scientists and feminists founded home economics studies. I was unaware of the impact on society the home economics had during wartime or in promoting social and advancing racial equity. And I certainly did not know that home economics also enforced a middle class, American, white life style on immigrants, people of color, and the rural poor.

As society changed, the use of home economics reflected the times. 

Drelinger introduces us to a series of intelligent women who were barred from male-dominated careers. Their used their skills in science to study nutrition to help the war effort, support government control to enforce pure foods and temperance, and they created the first nutritional guidelines.

They worked with business to promote new electronic appliances and created recipes for food companies. They wrote pamphlets to support food conservation and the remaking of clothes during the war.

On the dark side, some supported Eugenics and immigrants traditional heritage was ignored as they were pressured to assimilate.

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley. My review is fair and unbiased.

The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live
by Danielle Dreilinger
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub Date May 4, 2021   
ISBN: 9781324004493
hardcover $27.95 (USD)

from the publisher

The surprising, often fiercely feminist, always fascinating, yet barely known, history of home economics.

The term “home economics” may conjure traumatic memories of lopsided hand-sewn pillows or sunken muffins. But common conception obscures the story of the revolutionary science of better living. The field exploded opportunities for women in the twentieth century by reducing domestic work and providing jobs as professors, engineers, chemists, and business-people. And it has something to teach us today.

In the surprising, often fiercely feminist and always fascinating The Secret History of Home Economics, Danielle Dreilinger traces the field’s history from Black colleges to Eleanor Roosevelt to Okinawa, from a Betty Crocker brigade to DIY techies. These women—and they were mostly women—became chemists and marketers, studied nutrition, health, and exercise, tested parachutes, created astronaut food, and took bold steps in childhood development and education.

Home economics followed the currents of American culture even as it shaped them. Dreilinger brings forward the racism within the movement along with the strides taken by women of color who were influential leaders and innovators. She also looks at the personal lives of home economics’ women, as they chose to be single, share lives with other women, or try for egalitarian marriages.

This groundbreaking and engaging history restores a denigrated subject to its rightful importance, as it reminds us that everyone should learn how to cook a meal, balance their account, and fight for a better world.

About the Author: Danielle Dreilinger is a former New Orleans Times-Picayune education reporter and a Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow. She also wrote for the Boston Globe and worked at the Boston NPR station WGBH.

***** 

In this book I learned about an item in my collection, a J. C. Penney's publication Fashions and Fabrics that was sold for home ec teacher's use. Read about it here.

I have written about recipe books published by corporations to promote their products

• 1954 Sealtest Recipes
• American Advertising Cookbooks
• Coconut Dishes Everyone Loves
• Big Boy Barbecue Book
• Pies Men Like

The Truth About Baked Beans: An Edible History of New England by Meg Muckenhoupt

The history of food has interested me for a long time. I wrote a paper at Temple University on the roots of American cooking, how the first Europeans adapted their traditions to the foods available in the New World.

Meg Muckenhoupt's The Truth About Baked Beans: An Edible History of New England caught my eye a looked like a fun read. I expected it to cover regional and social history and regional foods and cooking.

I was pleasantly surprised to discover that the author goes further--considering the wide variety of immigrants whose contributions to American cooking have been overlooked and eclipsed.

The first European settlers did not have sweeteners available. They imported honey bees! Later, maple syrup and molasses were added to the kitchen basics, and plain recipes using cornmeal and baked beans became sweetened--and sweetened!

Corn, squash, and beans are considered essential New England foods...and they all came from Central America.

Mythic idealizations of historical New England cooking arose during the Centennial and 'scientific' movements promoted non-ethnic foods in favor of white, bland foods.

Readers learn of the real first Thanksgiving foods and how the traditional eating holiday developed over time. And, finally, settled the question of what are 'real' New England foods; would you believe it includes Marshmallow Fluff and Whoopie Pies?

The book includes recipes for those mentioned in the book, including historic, updated, regional favorites, and restaurant favorites.

I found the book to be as enjoyable to read as I had hoped.

I was given a free egalley by the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Truth about Baked Beans: An Edible New England History
by Meg Muckenhoupt
NYU Press
Pub Date August 25, 2020 
ISBN: 9781479882762
hardcover $29.95 (USD)

Meg Muckenhoupt begins with a simple question: When did Bostonians start making Boston Baked Beans? Storekeepers in Faneuil Hall and Duck Tour guides may tell you that the Pilgrims learned a recipe for beans with maple syrup and bear fat from Native Americans, but in fact, the recipe for Boston Baked Beans is the result of a conscious effort in the late nineteenth century to create New England foods. 

New England foods were selected and resourcefully reinvented from fanciful stories about what English colonists cooked prior to the American revolution—while pointedly ignoring the foods cooked by contemporary New Englanders, especially the large immigrant populations who were powering industry and taking over farms around the region.

The Truth about Baked Beans explores New England’s culinary myths and reality through some of the region’s most famous foods: baked beans, brown bread, clams, cod and lobster, maple syrup, pies, and Yankee pot roast. 

From 1870 to 1920, the idea of New England food was carefully constructed in magazines, newspapers, and cookbooks, often through fictitious and sometimes bizarre origin stories touted as time-honored American legends. 

This toothsome volume reveals the effort that went into the creation of these foods, and lets us begin to reclaim the culinary heritage of immigrant New England—the French Canadians, Irish, Italians, Portuguese, Polish, indigenous people, African-Americans, and other New Englanders whose culinary contributions were erased from this version of New England food. 

Complete with historic and contemporary recipes, The Truth about Baked Beans delves into the surprising history of this curious cuisine, explaining why and how “New England food” actually came to be.

Stories of The Immigrant Journey

In Journeys: An American Story, seventy-three contributors from across the American spectrum share the story of their immigrant ancestors, demonstrating the greatness of America's roots in diversity.

The stories are grouped into categories:

The Changers, including Marlo Thomas, Gabrielle Giffords, Cory Booker, and Linda Hills the great-granddaughter of Andrew Carnegie.

The Lovers, including Alan Alda, Deborah Norville, and US Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao.

The Originals with an essay by Ray Halbritter representing the Oneida Indian Nation.

The Rescuers, including Marine Corps officer Zach Iscol and retired police officer Matt Tomasic.

The Seekers, including Dr Mehmet Oz, Rhodes Scholar Ahmed Ahmed, Governor of Rhode Island Gina Raimondo, and US Senator Barbara Boxer.

The Strivers, including Michael Bloomberg, Andrew Cuomo, Professor Joseph Bower of Harvard Business School, US Senator Tim Scott, and Hemings family descendant Ben Freeman..

The Survivors, including oncology nurse Nataliya Denchenko, Prof. Jorge Dominguez of Harvard, KIND founder Daniel Lubetzky, and Florida congresswoman Stephanie Murphy.

The Trailblazers, including Tony Bennett, Nancy Pelosi, author Lisa Birnbach, first Mainland China trustee of an Ivy League university Prof. Mao Ye, and investment banker and financial historian Eugene Dattel.

The Undocumented, including Dr. Richard Uscher Levine, Harvard student Erick Meza, and garment worker Helen Polychronopoulos.

The Institutions, including the American Ballet Theater, Monticello, and UJA/Catholic Charities.

The authors contend that the image of the American 'melting pot' should be replaced by the concept of a mosaic, "tiles of different colors and shapes indistinguishable from afar but quite distinctive the closer you get. A mosaic is only as good as its grout...used to bind and fit between the distinct stones...and hold it in place."

40% of Fortune 500 companies were founded by  immigrants or their children, including AT&T, Procter & Gamble, US Steel, DuPont, Craft, International Paper, Nordstrom, and more recently Goggle, eBay, GE, IBM, McDonald's, and Apple.

The stories are inspirational and uplifting, and will make readers consider their own immigrant roots and the social, political, and economic factors that inspired them to leave their homeland.

All profits from the sale of this book will be donated to the New-York Historical Society and the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation.

People are invited to share their family journey at www.journeysamericanstory.com

I found this book interesting on several levels: as a composite of American experience, a political statement, and, as a family genealogy researcher, as family history.

My own immigrant family history includes stories of fleeing persecution, seeking religious freedom, and hoping for a better life.

My Gochenour Swiss Brethren ancestors sought religious freedom, moving across Europe before settling in the Shenandoah Valley by 1742. My Becker ancestors were Baptist German Russians who fled increasing hostility against German nationalists in Russia--and to avoid being recalled into the Czar's army. My Ramer ancestor was a Palatine German who fled the continual warfare that decimated their homeland, settling in Pennsylvania, and then fought in the Revolutionary War. And my Greenwood great-grandparents left Britain a hundred years ago, my great-grandfather wanting a better life than working in a mine or the cotton mills of Lancashire.

What is your family journey?

I received a free ebook from the publisher through Edelweiss in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Journeys: An American Story
by Andrew Tisch, Mary Skafidas
Publication Date: July 3, 2018
ISBN: 9781948122016, 1948122014
Hardcover $27.99 USD

from the publisher:

Every family has a story of how they arrived in America, whether it was only a few months, years, decades, or centuries ago. Journeys: An American Story celebrates the vastness and variety of immigration tales in America, featuring seventy-three essays about the different ways we got here. This is a collection of family lore, some that has been passed down through generations, and some that is being created right now.

Journeys: An American Story captures the quintessential idea of the American dream. The individuals in this book are only a part of the brilliant mosaic of people who came to this country and made it what it is today. Read about a Governor’s grandfathers who dug ditches and cleaned sewers, laying the groundwork for a budding nation; how a future cabinet secretary crossed the ocean at age eleven on a cargo ship; about a young boy who fled violence in Budapest to become one of the most celebrated players of American football; the girl who escaped persecution to become the first Vietnamese American woman ever elected to the US congress; or the limo driver whose family took a seventy-year detour before finally arriving at his original destination, along with many other fascinating tales of extraordinary and everyday Americans.

In association with the New-York Historical Society, Andrew Tisch and Mary Skafidas have reached out to a variety of notable figures to contribute an enlightening and unique account of their family’s immigration story. All profits will be donated to the New-York Historical Society and the Statue of Liberty Ellis Island Foundation.

Featuring Essays by:
Alan Alda
Arlene Alda
Tony Bennett
Cory Booker
Michael Bloomberg
Barbara Boxer
Elaine Chao
Andrew Cuomo
Ray Halbritter
Jon Huntsman
Wes Moore
Stephanie Murphy
Deborah Norville
Dr. Oz
Nancy Pelosi
Gina Raimondo
Tim Scott
Jane Swift
Marlo Thomas
And many more!

Janesville: An American Story

"History. Vision. Grit."  Janesville City Hall Mural

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein has won many accolades, including 100 Notable Books in 2017 from the New York Times Book Review and the McKinsey Business Book of the Year. 

Goldstein presents the story of a town and its people coping with the closing of the GM factory and how the town and families worked to reinvent themselves. 

Janesville, WI was a tight-knit community with a successful history of factories beginning with cotton mills in the late 19th c, including Parker Pens and the GM auto assembly plant and the factories that supplied it.

The book covers five years, beginning in 2008 with Paul Ryan, a Janesville native, receiving the phone call from GM informing him of their decision to close the Janesville plant. Goldstein portrays the impact on employees and their families: the cascading job losses, the ineffectual retraining programs, the engulfing poverty, the men who take employment at plants in other states and see their families a few hours a week, teenagers working to help keep food on the table while preparing for college.  

This is one of those non-fiction books that is engrossing while being informative, bringing readers into the struggles, successes, and failures of individual families. If you want to know about the people who have lost the American Dream, the impact of business and political decisions, and what programs 'work' and which have not delivered, then Janesville is for you.

Janesville: An American Story by Amy Goldstein
Simon & Schuster
$16 paperback
ISBN 9781501102264

Getting Personal

I married into a GM family. My father-in-law had a white-collar job at Fisher Body in Flint and ordered supplies to be sent to Janesville, WI. My husband worked as a welder on the line several summers while in college.

My father-in-law's Fisher Body pins

In 1931, my thirteen-year-old father-in-law lost his father to TB. His mother soon remarried and a year later was divorced. She had a Fourth Grade education and was sixteen when married. She had two sons to support. That is when she went to work for GM in Flint.

I noted her family all called her Girl. I learned the nickname dated to when she was the only woman on the floor and when the men wanted her help, they would call, "Girl!"

Girl was part of the Woman's Emergency Brigade and delivered food during the 1936-7 sit-down strike and was a proud Union member.

Girl's oldest boy, like his dad, had TB. Her youngest son worked for the CCC, took classes at Baker College, and got a job as a clerk at the auto factory where his mother was a machine operator. Together, in 1940, their income was $2,228.

When my husband and I would visit his folks sometimes they would take us on a drive to see the old factories. And over the years we were very aware of how, briefly, the auto industry offered our families great opportunities. My father-in-law sent three boys to college and had a comfortable early retirement. My own father had relocated to Metro Detroit for a job in the auto industry, and we had a good working-class life and important benefits as my mother suffered from chronic health issues. 

from the publisher's website:

* Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year * 800-CEO-READ Business Book of the Year * A New York Times Notable Book * A Washington Post Notable Book * An NPR Best Book of 2017 * A Wall Street Journal Best Book of 2017 * An Economist Best Book of 2017 * A Business Insider Best Book of 2017 *

“A gripping story of psychological defeat and resilience” (Bob Woodward, The Washington Post)—an intimate account of the fallout from the closing of a General Motors assembly plant in Janesville, Wisconsin, and a larger story of the hollowing of the American middle class.

This is the story of what happens to an industrial town in the American heartland when its main factory shuts down—but it’s not the familiar tale. Most observers record the immediate shock of vanished jobs, but few stay around long enough to notice what happens next when a community with a can-do spirit tries to pick itself up.

Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter Amy Goldstein spent years immersed in Janesville, Wisconsin, where the nation’s oldest operating General Motors assembly plant shut down in the midst of the Great Recession. Now, with intelligence, sympathy, and insight into what connects and divides people in an era of economic upheaval, Goldstein shows the consequences of one of America’s biggest political issues. Her reporting takes the reader deep into the lives of autoworkers, educators, bankers, politicians, and job re-trainers to show why it’s so hard in the twenty-first century to recreate a healthy, prosperous working class.

Sharon Bala's Debut Novel, The Boat People, Explores The Refugee Experience

We may have all come on different ships but we're in the same boat now. Martin Luther King Jr.

Who leaves their home unless under duress? The place of one's nativity, where one's ancestors are buried, the house that contains so many memories are not given up lightly. To be a refugee, an immigrant, means to be cast off freewheeling into the unknown mists of the future, without mooring or a known destination.

The Boat People is Sharon Bala's debut novel.

Mahindan fled Sri Lanka with his son Sellian when there was nothing left. The Tamil Tigers had been fighting for their rights under the Singhs for years, turning both the willing and the unwilling into terrorists. The United Nations had pulled out and there was no protection. His wife dead, his village bombed, Mahindan and his son join the stream of refugees, ending up in a camp. Their suffering becomes unendurable, the dream of Canada enchanting. Mahindan raises money for a boat out of Sri Lanka.

Arriving in Canada, the 503 refugees are secluded in holding places, women and children in one place and the men in another, families broken apart. Mahindan is on trial to prove he is not a Tiger terrorist, while his son goes to a foster home and becomes Westernized.

Priya represents the legal counsel for the refugees, sidelined into the work because of her Tamil heritage. She is resentful as she wanted experience in corporate law, and because she identifies as Canadian whose grandparents happen to be from Sri Lanka. The refugee work is exhausting and disturbing. Then her uncle reveals the truth of her family's past.

Grace is a temporary government assigned lawyer. Canada is immersed in xenophobia and fear. All Tamils are considered possible terrorists and she is to do everything possible to find reasons to deport the boat people back to Sri Lanka.

Grace's grandmother in suffering the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, which brings old memories to the forefront. An Issei, first generation Japanese Canadian, she becomes an activist for the Japanese Canadians who were interred during WWII, losing their homes and businesses which now have become valuable real estate. She warns Grace that she is participating in the same kind of racism experienced the Japanese--everyone in a group considered an enemy until proven innocent.

I learned about Canada's parallels to American fear of foreigners as potential terrorists and about the history of Sri Lanka in modern times.

The Boat People is similar to other books I have recently read, such as This Is How It Begins by Joan Dempsey, warning about the implication of current events through the lens of our admitted past mistakes, and involving a courtroom setting.

Sharon Bala's book is interesting and thoughtful, a fine addition to recent novels addressing timely issues in immigration, post 9-11 fears, and learning how to connect our past mistakes to our current policy. Read an excerpt at http://sharonbala.com/excerpt

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

The Boat People: A Novel
by Sharon Bala
Doubleday Books
Pub Date 09 Jan 2018
ISBN: 9780385542296
PRICE $26.95

The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist

He spent his later life living in a cave, a vegetarian and animal rights activist who made his own clothing and traveled by foot. Yet his estate at his death in 1759 was valued at $117,000 (in today's dollars).

He was an early convert to abolition, causing disturbances that drove his Quaker meeting house to remove him from membership.

He was a dwarf who married another Little Person, Sarah, a well-liked Quaker preacher, while he himself was reviled for his extremism.

The Fearless Benjamin Lay by Marcus Rediker resurrects the forgotten man who dared to stand up to wealth and power with the message that all creatures are God's children, and that to own a slave is to be steeped in sin.

Lay went to extremes to get his message across. Lay had been pressuring a neighbor Quaker in Abington, PA over their owning a slave girl. One day Lay encountered the couple's son and invited him to his cave. When the distraught couple found their son with Lay, he chastised them saying, "You may now conceive of the sorrows you inflict upon the parents of the negroe [sic] girl you hold in slavery, for she was torn from them by avarice."

Without a formal education, Lay wrote a book that was printed by Benjamin Franklin. It was Deborah Franklin who commissioned a portrait of Lay, a gift for her husband. It resides in the National Portrait Museum.

Lay's book printed by Benjamin Franklin

This vivid portrait of a unique personality is interesting as history, but Lay's vision transcends the years, for his concerns remain with us to this day and are more relevant than ever. As society struggles with issues of wealth trumping morality, consumerism and its impact on the environment and human health, and the continual fight against hate groups that devalue certain human lives, Lay's life stands as an example of how to live according to one's values and one's faith.

I received a free book from the publisher through LibraryThing.

Read an excerpt at http://www.marcusrediker.com/books/benjamin-lay-detail.php

The Fearless Benjamin Lay
by Marcus Rediker
ISBN: 978-080703592-4
Publication Date: 9/5/2017
Price:  $26.95