Chuck

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.

And at one of these meetings, they chose the term home economics, like you said, to basically point out, not to kind of latch their field on economics, to point out that domestic work was a huge part of economics.

And up to this point, economists had basically just been looking at production.

They weren't looking at the demand side.

And one of the things Homek introduced was the idea of consumer sciences, like studying consumption as well as part of the larger economy, which is you can't do economics without that now.

But that's what one of the things Homek introduced.

They dropped the old timey mic at this point.

Yep.

So you want to take a break and come back and talk about how, like you said, home ec starts to take off?

Let's do it.

Dad had the strong belief that the devil was attacking us.

Okay, so when we left off, home ec was starting to take off.