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HOME ECONOMICS. From its beginnings, the profession of home economics, also called family and consumer sciences, closely paralleled the general development of education for women. Home economics developed out of political, economic, and technical conditions in the last half of the nineteenth century. Before then, formal training for women was virtually nonexistent. What did exist was the realization that obligations of the home extended beyond its walls. The discipline was begun by men and women, including Ellen H. Richards, Wilbur O. Atwater, Edward L. Youmans, and Isabel Bevier, who aimed to develop a profession that understood the obligations of and opportunities for women. They wanted to use scientific principles and processes to enhance management of households, and they wanted to make home and family effective parts of the world's social fabric.

Family and consumer sciences or home economics, as taught and practiced in the United States and abroad, has a broad and comprehensive focus. A plethora of names, including domestic science, living science, home science, home science education, human ecology, human sciences, practical life studies, household technology, science of living, family and household education, family and nutritional studies, and nutrition and consumer studies, also have been used to describe the discipline, whose purpose is to meet specific and general needs of individuals and families. Although the names were numerous, a single widely accepted definition was adopted at the 1902 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, one of ten such conferences held annually from 1899 to 1908 devoted to the study of laws, conditions, principles, and ideas concerned with a person's immediate physical environment, his or her nature as a social being, and the interrelationships therein.

Founding Home Economics

Publications, such as Catharine Beecher's A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), and legislation, including the Morrill Act (1862), probably provided the impetus for the Lake Placid conferences. The Morrill Act devoted federal lands to support the development of colleges of agriculture and mechanical arts. This helped shape the field of home economics because women subsequently were admitted to these land-grant colleges, as they were called, and to some private institutions, such as Oberlin College in Ohio.

The first home economics class in an institution of higher learning was offered at Iowa State College in 1871 and was called "domestic economy." Kansas Agricultural College began its domestic economy curriculum two years later, and Illinois Industrial University followed a year after that. These and the others that followed helped women apply theories in arts and sciences to everyday living. As they studied domestic economy along with some classical curricula and as theirs became an academic discipline, educational opportunities for women expanded.

Concurrently the interest in adult education courses expanded. Prior to the last quarter of the nineteenth century, women's work was mostly needlecraft, sewing, and cooking; the work was done at home; and women received little formal educational training for these tasks. Some classes in cookery existed, such as those at the Boston Cooking School begun by Maria Parloa, and Mothers Clubs and Reading Circles developed. In time, all of these organizations had major impacts on communities. Mothers Clubs and Reading Circles became Parent Teacher Associations, and the Society of the Study of Child Nature became the Child Study Association.

Ellen Richards influenced the field of home economics and all of women's work. Considered the founder of the profession of home economics, she became in 1873 the first woman to earn a bachelor of science degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (after earning an A.B. from Vassar in 1870). She published The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning and a manual for housekeepers, both in 1881. Some years later she worked on an exhibit in Chicago for the World's Columbian Exhibition (1890) based on her nutrition experiments. This exhibit was influential in establishing the first school lunch program in 1894.

Academic and adult education courses as well as increased immigration, industrialization, and urbanization added impetus for the development of this discipline, initiated at the first Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics in 1899. Three years later the conference founded a national organization, the American Association of Home Economics (AHEA), which actually began its work in 1909. The goals of AHEA were to improve living conditions in homes, institutional households, and communities. Conference participants selected subject matter that stressed family applications and developed academic requirements in cultural, technical, and vocational venues. These originally included the areas of food, clothing, shelter, and institutional management and shortly thereafter expanded to include child development, personal and family relationships, consumer education, home management, and housing.

Participants at the Lake Placid conferences designed the discipline's educational requirements in natural and social sciences and the arts and humanities for elementary and secondary schools and institutions of higher education. They also developed ways to access funding to implement these goals, including advocating passage of the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 and the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. These two acts established, respectively, the Cooperative Extension Bureau and education in home economics at precollege and college levels. These efforts developed ties between institutions of higher education and teacher preparation.

World War I created demands for professionals trained in institutional management and dietetics, natural situations for home economists. After the war, additional demands arose in public health, community feeding, school lunch supervision, consumer protection, and related areas. These demands expanded the discipline's activities well beyond cooking and sewing. During the depression of the 1930s, home economists were further called upon for advice in managing family needs. These newer roles required that institutions of higher education develop and emphasize research and divide their educational offerings into narrower specialties.

These circumstances, along with a 1930 AHEA report, changed training for professionals. The training kept physiological, psychological, economic, social, and political perspectives; increased emphasis on sociology, economics, and philosophy; and decreased required courses in education, science, and home economics. This shifted the emphasis from home-related skills to those needed in away-from-home situations. Additional changes during and after World War II expanded preparation and broadened professionals' areas of service.

The AHEA suggested ways to strengthen family life, expanding offerings and reducing skills courses for the five largest areas of the profession, that is, home economics education; child development and family relations; textiles, clothing, and fashion merchandising; general home economics; and food, nutrition, and dietetics. Building on the basic disciplines, the AHEA promoted more research relating to nutrition, child development, consumer economics, and home management to increase the discipline's impact on families, homes, consumers, legislation, and technology, and on all types of households and related institutions.

Late Twentieth-Century Developments

No other discipline integrates so many applied and theoretical areas of education or reaches out as far as home economics. Many conferences, committees, and research efforts have kept the AHEA and its constituents current. In the 1960s efforts were expended toward accreditation of all undergraduate programs, achieved in 1967. The eleventh Lake Placid Conference met in 1973 to revitalize values and to develop future directions to broaden home and family life into an ecosystem conceptualization, emphasizing interdependence of people in rapidly changing environments. In the 1980s the organization focused on certification of professionals, which began in 1986.

Reaching out to meet the demands on professionals, AHEA was instrumental in organizing a professional summit to build consensus among five related organizations, including the AHEA, the home economics division of the American Vocational Association, the Association of Administrators of Home Economics, the National Association of Extension Home Economists, and the National Council of Administrators of Home Economics. At a conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 1993 these organizations opted to change the discipline's name from home economics to family and consumer sciences (FCS), for which the memberships favorably voted the following year. In 1997 national standards for middle and high schools were developed and adopted for FCS education, focusing on content, process, and competencies.

Positioning itself for the twenty-first century, the profession developed additional ways to empower individuals and families to take charge of their lives, to maximize their potential, and to function independently and interdependently. To further these means of empowerment, FCS and related professionals work together to create opportunities and options for their diverse constituencies, and they have made strides to increase minority membership and leadership. In addition, they have set standards for integration and application of knowledge among all peoples and constituencies. FCS professionals, with the help of others who share the same goals, have moved women's work toward the center of higher education. They have impacted society and continue to work so all professionals can see efforts in the home and the community increased and gender marginalization reduced.

The national organization, renamed the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences (AAFCS; renaming effective 1994), promotes improvements in individual and family life. Its efforts effect changes in areas such as food, nutrition, textiles, clothing, family relationships, child development, family resource management, design, housing, and consumer studies. Using its unique, integrated approach, it strengthens and empowers individuals, families, and communities, enhancing the quality of life. The profession strives for positive change in the multifaceted environments and ecosystems in which people live, work, and otherwise partake of life.

See also Extension Services; Nutritionists; Professionalization; School Meals; Women and Food.

Jacqueline M. Newman