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Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture. By Megan J. Elias. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 226 pp. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4079-5.)
Having been forced as a young girl to attend classes where we made aprons, assembled cheese soufflés, and learned how to wash dishes in the proper order, I scorned home economics during the feminist 1970s. My scorn was misplaced, according to Megan J. Elias, the author of Stir It Up. There was a mismatch between what actually happened in school classrooms and the pro-woman visions of the early founders of the field, such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology-educated bacteriologist Ellen Swallow Richards, who ushered in the American Home Economics Association in 1908: an organization that sought both to elevate homemaking into a modern scientific profession and to provide professions...