Chuck

For sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There's a whole a whole washout that's happened that will cover for sure.

But one of the people that you have to tip your top hat to is Ellen Swallow Richards, who's probably the most important person in the history or the early history, at least, of home economics.

Now, let's just say it the entire history of home economics.

She was a pretty impressive sort.

She studied chemistry.

She got a bachelor's and a master's from Vassar and then became the first woman to get a degree from MIT and then became the first woman instructor at MIT and set up a sanitary chemistry lab that was for women only.

And this was not really domestic work.

It was figuring out water quality and air quality tests, like essentially the foundations of environmental protection and consumer protection too.

That's what this lab was doing.

And the reason why you associate it with Home Ec is because one of the reasons Home Ec existed also, you said that it started at the college level, was as a way for women, almost a backdoor, a workaround, a loophole,

for women to become scientists, it was okay as long as there was enough of a whiff of woman's work, like clean water, that's woman's work, that academia could put up with it.

That was one of the big ways Home Ec started funneling women into education and into the sciences.

Yeah, and remember also there's a big emphasis on this work is important.

Like this is unpaid labor, but it produces a lot of dividends for any family and hence building upward for civilization, for a nation's civilization, all that.

So like you said, this is starting to become a movement.

And they had a series of conferences called the Lake Placid Conferences started right at the turn of the century.