Chuck

And you would start in about the 19th century.

They were on the turn of it.

So they were still wearing tri-cornered hats, but they were looking forward to trains.

Mm-hmm.

And if you were a farm woman at this time, you worked yourself to the bone, right?

Yeah.

And like you would say, that's not even home economics.

That's just home terribleness, right?

Yeah.

When home economics came along, it was based on this idea that, okay, all of these people are working really hard.

There has to be ways to improve this, to make it more efficient.

Yeah.

I suspect, and I'm pretty sure we talked about it, that this all grew out of Taylorism, that obsession with getting things as efficient as possible.

Yeah.

And I think that that kind of grew out of that same vein.

And there were actually a few things that kind of came together to make the fertile soil that Home Ec grew from.

One of them, the big one, was literacy started to spread in the mid-19th century.

And so when literacy spreads, you've got more books and like domestic tips and householding was a whole genre of books.

So were cookbooks.

And then part and parcel of that was this kind of the very beginnings of this idea that maybe women can be educated too, but just in women's stuff.