Chuck

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.

Like, what if your grandmother was a dipstick, right?

So cooking schools also emerged.

And this is important because your grandmother might also, in addition to being a dipstick, might not have been that great of a cook.

Now there's a place you can go to learn to cook well and nutritiously.

That was a big one, too.

And then also, this was a new career path that a woman could take to become a cook in, like, say, a wealthy household.

So they were training now people to work outside of the house doing domestic stuff.

Exactly.

And women were open, or these colleges were open to women as well, too.

So these three things come together.

And one of the other reasons that really made home mech kind of come to life, start sprouting from that fertile soil,