Home Economics and Nutrition Education

 

​With the help of her friends Melvil and Annie Dewey, Richards created her second scientific field, home economics, in 1899 (14).  Home economics, as defined by Sarah Stage, co-editor of the book Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession,​ was an interdisciplinary profession “that enabled and encouraged women to expand their activities beyond the home and the kitchen” (29).  In order to successfully move beyond the kitchen and help improve society, Richards’s believed that women must receive a college education. Furthermore, she also believed that college educated women were essential leaders in the fight against nutritional illiteracy. However, in 1900 only 2.8% of women in America went to college (25).  Following this logic, the remaining 97.2% of women were incapable of maintaining a true home, which Richards defined as source of refuge from the grim of the city streets and the polluted city air (5).  In addition to being incapable of protecting their children from the dangers of the world around them, the 97.2% of uneducated American women did not meet Richards’s standards of food literacy. As a result, these women, if they were mothers, could not pass down a sufficient knowledge of nutritional principles to their children (3). 

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​Richards’s lack of confidence in the ability of uneducated mothers to provide their children with nutritious meals and nutritional knowledge was just one of her many criticisms regarding people’s parenting abilities. She also believed that fathers should be instructing their sons in woodworking and mothers should teach their daughters how to cook and clean, but parents were no longer active in the practical education of their children (3, 4).  She discovered that for the majority of children, this education was not and could not take place at home because their parents numbered among the ignorant individuals (9).  Therefore, in order to ensure that children were taught practical and necessary life skills, Richards argued that the nation’s schools must take over all aspects of education- both academic and practical (3, 4). 

 

 

Her fellow progressive era educational reformers, such as John Dewey, held similar beliefs. Joel H. Spring, author of The American School, 1642-1985, states that in the late nineteenth century, educational reformers considered “[t]he school [to be the] logical institution to prevent [social] problems by providing social services, teaching new behaviors, and creating a community center” (28). Like Richards, her contemporaries were arguing that the school needed to take the place of the home (28).  They also were unified in their belief that following the American Civil war, the industrial boom and the influx of immigrants from southern Europe radically altered the outward appearance and values of their nation.  By the time Richards re-launched euthenics in 1910, she had come to believe that, “The public school is the natural medium for the spread of better ideals,” and, “if it is maintained as a progressive institution and a defense against predatory ideas, [it] is the people’s safeguard from being crushed by the irresistible car of progress" (5).

 

 

In order to save children from the “car of progress” and safeguard them from their parent’s ignorance, she developed lessons in nutrition for young students (5).  In 1904 she published First Lessons in Food and Diet in order to demonstrate to children how food was related to science, and in turn related to people’s level of health and efficiency (6).  In this textbook, Richards provided lessons and activities to demonstrate how to scientifically plan meals for a family, why cheap food is not bad food, and why non-nutritious food makes people ill. 

While Richards attempted to fight nutritional illiteracy through the educational courses she designed for home economics programs, such as First Lessons in Food and Diet, she never fully accepted the term home economics as Stage claims (6).