University Place

>> Today, we are pleased to introduce Erika Janik as part of the Wisconsin Historical Society's History Sandwiched In lecture series. This series is supported by Dane Arts with additional funding from the Evjue Foundation, the charitable arm of the Capital Times. The opinions expressed here today are those of the presenter and are not necessarily those of the Wisconsin Historical Society or the museum's employees. Erika Janik is a freelance writer and the executive producer and editor of Wisconsin Life at Wisconsin Public Radio. She is the author of several books, including A Short History of Wisconsin,

Odd Wisconsin

Amusing, Perplexing and Unlikely Stories from Wisconsin's Past, and her newest publication is Marketplace of

the Marvelous

The Strange Origins of Modern Medicine. Here today to share how a radio program helped turn rural women from farm laborers into full-time housewives and consumers, please join me in welcoming Erika Janik.

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the Marvelous

>> Well, thank you so much for braving the weather and coming. I only had to walk two blocks but the sidewalks were so slippery.

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the Marvelous

So, I can understand it would be hard to get here. So I'm going to be talking about homemaking on the radio, and, in particular, the Homemakers Program that ran on WHA. So, six days a week, starting promptly at 10 o'clock, Aline Hazard would greet women across

Wisconsin with

good morning, homemakers. She was the announcer for the WHA Radio Homemakers Program. Now, she didn't start the program. It actually began in 1929, but she became its guiding force and its more recognizable voice over her more than 30-year career as the head of the program. Now, homemaking programs like this were not unique to Wisconsin or even the Midwest. They existed all over the country, but they were particularly popular in the Midwest where we had a largely rural population. The Homemakers Program brought the ideas and lessons of university-trained home economics to women all over the state. Now, I'm going to talk a bit about home economics, and I don't know about you, but what's the image you have when you think about home economics?

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Wisconsin with

I think home economics stirs up memories of sewing an ill-fitting dress or making a cake from a mix or this.

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Wisconsin with

Flour sack babies. So I think that there's a very common view as really dull and kind of conservative, restricting women to domestic roles rather than preparing them for professional careers. But it might actually surprise you to learn that home economics actually had pretty progressive beginnings. It really opened up opportunities for women in higher education and to find jobs out in the public world. Collegiate home economics was multidisciplinary and integrative with a heavy emphasis on science. And most importantly, perhaps for women, is that it was a field for women designed by women. Now, it's certainly true that American culture changed. Between the early 20th century and even the mid-20th century, our perceptions of what women's role should be and housework definitely changed, and home economics did not necessarily change along with it. And I think that's why we have that idea of home economics as being kind of retrograde. So I'm going to talk a little bit about where home economics comes from. So, from the very beginning, in the 19th century, there was a lot of disagreement about what home economics is and what it should be for. Are we training women to be better mothers and homemakers? Are we improving women's lives with technology so it will take some of the drudgery out of their household chores? Or are we creating economical and educational opportunities for women to get outside of the home? So there were all of these questions kind of swirling around the origins of home economics in the 19th century. And one of the most influential people behind the beginning of home economics is this woman that you see here. It's not he most flattering photo. That is Catharine Beecher. If you're unfamiliar with her, you might be more familiar with her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin. But Catharine Beecher was very famous in the 19th century as an educator and activist, and she argued for the importance of applying science to homemaking. Beecher believed that women needed training on actually how to do their household tasks because women were basically acting as managers of their home. Just as a manager would run a business, they needed training, women needed training in order to manage their homes more effectively. She also advocated for increasing women's access to education. She really thought that scientific homemaking was the way to do this. She hoped that this would give homemaking a kind of professional status so people wouldn't think of it as menial and degrading but would actually want to do it. And times were changing. This is the mid-19th century. Industrialization and urbanization are really remaking everyone's lives, and there's a whole new class of people, the middle class, where there's women who don't really need to do as much of the domestic work anymore. They're living urban lives. There's all kinds of new entertainment in the city. They're going out shopping. They're getting involved in social organizations and charitable groups. They're not spending their time sewing and cleaning and cooking. And so Catharine Beecher is kind of responding to this. She's worried that people are going to lose their ability to do these skills. And so she's hopeful that by publishing things like this, diagrams about how to organize your home and how to design it, this is something she actually wrote with her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, she thought that she could help stem that tied. Now, Catharine Beecher was a big proponent of promoting opportunities for women, but, interestingly, she was actually opposed to suffrage. Now, this wasn't an uncommon position at the time. She thought that politics was not any where that women needed to be. Now, interestingly, again, talking about other members of her family, her other sister was Isabella Beecher Hooker, who was one of the most famous suffragettes of the era. So, if you can imagine the Beecher household, and I haven't even told you about her famous father or famous brother. But the Beechers are all over the 19th century. And so you can just imagine the interesting dinnertime conversations this family must have had. So Beecher puts out all kinds of books about the home and how to run it, and it really inspires and creates a whole market for domestic manuals as well as the formation of cooking schools. The most famous of these cooking schools, they were private cooking schools that opened all over the country, was the Boston Cooking School. And at first, they offered classes in low-cost, healthy meals just for professional chefs. But there was a lot of clamor for these classes. People wanted to take them, and so they eventually opened them up to any woman who wanted to be involved. And the Boston Cooking School also began publishing cookbooks, and one put out by one of its most famous teachers, that's who you see here. This is Fannie Farmer, on the left. You've heard of her. And so she worked at the Boston Cooking School and wrote the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, which was a compilation of recipes from that cooking school. And so there's all of these voices, Catharine Beecher, Fannie Farmer, other women like this, that are talking about applying science to the home. Now, there's one other thing that kind of leads to the development of home economics, and that's the passage of the Morrill Act in 1862. This is the government act that created land grant colleges. Now, up until this point, most colleges had been kind of private schools that were mostly training young men for careers in medicine, the law, the ministry, but the Morrill Act really mandated that universities have more practical classes, and this included agriculture. And unlike most of these private colleges, land grant schools were also open to women. This was big stuff in the 1860s. It was still pretty challenging, though, for women to actually attend college. Women couldn't necessarily afford college tuition, and even if they did manage to get into that school, it was still kind of looked down upon as inappropriate. Women didn't really need higher education. But by the late 19th century, this view is beginning to change. There's more of a movement, more of a cultural idea that it's a good thing for women to be educated, even if we're still just going to keep them in the house. So you start seeing more opportunities for women to pursue higher education. There's also, science is really ascended at that time. Anything you can apply science to is bound to appeal to Americans. They're really looking for answers in science. And so home economics, or domestic science as it was also called, was the application of science to the home. And so that was bound to prick up a few ears of people that were interested in pursuing this. So this woman here is Ellen Richards, and she is a very major figure in home economics. She was a chemist and a professor at MIT, and she really helped make, kind of define the field as home economics as an academic pursuit. She helped found the Women's Laboratory at MIT, which really helped to advance scientific education for women. And she, in particular, was interested in making home life more efficient. She thought women could use science to free themselves up so they would have time to do something other than cooking and cleaning. And she hoped that one of the things they would use all that free time to was to learn, was to go to school and be better educated. And she thought that the way that people were currently practicing cooking and cleaning and sewing was really just wasting time and that we needed to apply science to it. So, she and other home economists started doing things like this. This is actually a chart from the 1950s, but it's not unlike what starts happening in the 19th century of home economists are tracking the time and walking distance between appliances in your kitchen. They're actually watching women baking things and counting how many steps it takes for them to get from their pantry over to their stove, and they're trying to figure out where your appliances should be located in order to make that most efficient. So, because of the work of these home economists, you have smaller kitchen spaces. You also have the work triangle, which probably governs your kitchen right now. I know it governs mine. Where the placement of your refrigerator is, your sink, and your oven all comes from these time and motion studies that early home economists were doing. And there was a really emerging view amongst these people that wasted labor was really what was holding women back. They didn't really address some of the other things that were holding women back. But they really came to believe that because women were doing all of these things that were kind of inefficient and wasting their time that they just didn't have time to pursue other things that would actually get them ahead. I don't know if any of you have read the book Cheaper by the Dozen? I loved this book. So, if you remember from that book, the parents, Lillian and Frank, are efficiency experts. And so I think if you've only seen the movie version, they get really caught up on the fact that they have 12 children rather than, what to me is the more interesting part in the book, that they're basically in a nonstop experiment to make their lives as efficient as possible. And so Frank, the father, did all these studies in industry, and Lillian, the mother, also did industry work, but she also was very invested in figuring out how to make the home the most efficient space possible. So let's go back to Ellen Richards. So, Ellen Richards is all about home economics. Figuring out how to apply science to the home. And in 1899, she starts gathering with a bunch of other progressive educators in Lake Placid, New York, and over the next decade, they really come to define what home economics is. They come up with a curriculum. They even decide on the name. There was, of course, a lot of debate about what the name should be. There were people that wanted to call it homemaking. There were people that wanted to call it domestic science. They finally decided on home economics because they thought it still had that kind of homey touch to it, as implied in the name, but also implied science that this was actually a science that people had to learn and use. So graduates of home economics programs, they start, graduate programs start appearing all over the country. These early activists are very successful in lobbying schools to start having home economics programs. And so graduates, of course, become homemakers. But they also find jobs in public life. They get jobs in public health, social work, housing, the food industry, hotel management, and, of course, many of them become home economics educators themselves. And it was a real opportunity for women to pursue higher education, and, as I mentioned before, that they got to actually define the field for themselves was also a big thing. So home economics come to the University of Wisconsin in 1903. This is actually a home economics classroom. This is one of the labs. I believe it's from 1906, though. So this is a cause that had really been promoted at the UW since the 1890s. Women's clubs were lobbying the university. We really need home economics, and they found a champion in a kind of unlikely place. They managed to get economics professor Richard Ely behind their cause. And he really pushed it at the university level. Another person who was really behind home economics was a

favorite of mine

Belle La Follette. There she is over there. Aw, I love her. So all of these kind of big name people were promoting home economics, and they are finally successful in 1903. And the first woman who becomes head of home economics, her name is Caroline Hunt. And remember how I said at the beginning that there was lots of disagreement about home economics was for and what it should be for? And Caroline Hunt had her own particular perspective on what home economics should be. She insisted that it was very scientifically rigorous. She required all students, before entering the program, to have a year of college chemistry, and in order to graduate, you needed to have 47 science credits. There was no sewing and there was no cooking. She thought the point of home economics was about social justice. She was going to teach all of the women in her program about poor labor conditions so that they would make smarter buying choices. And so this carried on for a number of years, and they finally decided in 1908 that, unfortunately for poor Hunt, her vision was not the direction that the university wanted to go. And so they reorganized the department, and they put it in the College of Agriculture and really shifted its focus to homemaking and rural families. And this was the view that kind of came to dominate home economics in the early part of the 20th century And they also brought in a new director, this woman here. Her name is Abby Marlatt, and she really transformed the department into a national model that included the creation and support of radio programs for homemakers around the state. Now, the idea of reaching women and rural families had become kind of a pet issue of progressive legislators in the early 20th century. They were looking around and seeing that there was all this new technology in urban people's lives. People had electric lights and washers, but then rural families, they were kind of falling behind. And so people were worried that maybe they would fall irreparably behind. They would never be able to catch up. So we needed to teach people about new technologies so that they could bring it into their life. They also were kind of concerned that, as I mentioned before, there were all of these middle class families living urban lives where the women really could become full-time homemakers. But in a lot of rural families, women both had to do the inside housework but they also had to work out in the fields. The farms couldn't afford to not have their labor. So a lot of these programs were designed to figure out how to make, again, efficiency, the word of the day, so that women could spend more time inside the house and not doing all of the fieldwork as well. There was also a kind of underlying fear. This was never directly spoken, but that women, and particularly farm women, would be so busy working that they wouldn't have time to have children. There were all of these new immigrants coming into the country, and there was a very real worry that white mothers would not be producing more white children. They called it race suicide. And so they were very concerned that women be able to attend to their mothering needs. There was also a fear that rural families just didn't have the access to educational opportunities that urban families did. So in 1914, the USDA created the Agricultural and Home Economics Extension Service. Now, this program worked with agricultural schools, like the University of Wisconsin, to provide educational services to rural families. Now, it might not surprise you to learn, it certainly didn't surprise me, that Wisconsin actually already had an Extension Service before then. We had actually created our Extension Service in 1907, seven years before it was implemented on the national level. Knowing a bit about Wisconsin history, I find over and over again, I'm both surprised and not surprised, that Wisconsin was already ahead of the game on this. So the UW president created the Extension Service to provide educational opportunities to rural families. And part of that education came over the airwaves. So radios are really becoming more common and accessible, and they're very popular among farm families because they could receive vital information on what the weather was going to be like, crop prices, and by 1930, 40% of Wisconsin's rural families had radios. Now, the UW and its educational radio station, WHA, what we now know as Wisconsin Public Radio, began broadcasting regular programming in the 1920s. Up until then, WHA was mostly only on over the noon hour, and they would give weather reports and farm reports. But in the 1920s, they start having regular programs, regular hours, and women were a real natural audience for this. If you think about it, they're inside the home doing their various household tasks, and maybe they want a little entertainment so they turn on their radio. Now, women had been targeted by newspapers and magazines with home advice at least since the 19th century. There were all kinds of recipes and homemaking columns trying to appeal to them. Now, one popular column was written by this woman here. Her name is Nellie Kedzie Jones, and she grew up in Kansas and became a real pioneer in home economics. And then she and her husband moved to a farm in Marathon County where she began writing an advice column for farm women that appeared in a magazine called the Country Gentleman. It's a very popular magazine. She wrote this column from 1912 to 1918, and she wrote about all kinds of things. But one of my favorites is she had this kind of fake epistolary relationship. She was Aunt Nellie writing to her innocent young niece Janet. Now, Janet had grown up in the city, and she did not know about homemaking. So she wrote her Aunt Nellie, her beloved Aunt Nellie, for advice. And this series of letters went on back and forth for a number of years, and Aunt Nellie told her how to be efficient and spare herself in small ways because, as she wrote, "You don't want to be overworked like a piece of farm equipment."

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favorite of mine

It's good advice. So Jones eventually becomes a home economics extension leader at the UW. She stops writing her column, and she travels all over Wisconsin meeting women's groups and urging counties to hire home agents to educate farm women. She also appeared on the Homemakers Program. So, these kinds of columns, women were very used to being targeted with this kind of homemaking advice and seeking it themselves. And radio was really just a new delivery format for that information So radio program directors started filling their daytime schedules with programs that they thought would appeal to women. Things on cooking and cleaning and childcare, and they also became a major way to promote domestic technology. Now, throughout the 1920s, Home Extension agents would occasionally appear on the radio. They didn't have a dedicated program, but they would be on to talk about things like the magic of color in interior decoration, shopping for bric-a-brac, and taking the drudgery out of house cleaning. Now, Abby Marlatt, she was the one who was brought in to kind of lead this new formation of home economics, she had a very, she had an important role in shaping what home economics was to become. Remember, the initial director had this kind of social justice aimed for it. Very noble, very high. Abby Marlatt, though, just really thought we just need to help people deal with their contemporary lives. So she came up with a whole program that was placed a lot more emphasis on home and family care because she thought these were the things we're dealing with every day and we just need to figure out how to deal with them in the best possible way. And so some of these homemakers from the home economics department would appear on the radio, but finally in 1929, they got their own program, the Homemakers Program. Now, as I said, it wasn't the only homemaking program around. In 1926, the USDA had actually started its own program called Housekeeper's Chats. They featured a hostess named Aunt Sammy, Uncle Sam's wife, of course.

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favorite of mine

Now, the USDA just provided scripts to various radio stations. Each station had their own woman on staff or woman that they brought in to play the part of Aunt Sammy. And this program lasted until 1944, and people could send away for recipe booklets. It was on for about 15 minutes a day, and it mostly concerned recipes. So the Homemakers Program followed a similar format in providing recipes. In it's early years, they were just home economics students who would appear on the air and answer questions and talk about various topics, but in 1933, they decided that they needed a regular host to really guide the direction of the program, and so they hired this woman, Aline Hazard. Now, the Homemakers Program had some rules about who was allowed to be on. You had to have lived on a farm and you had to have a home economics degree. Now, Hazard had grown up on a farm in Iowa, so she hit that mark, but she did not have a home economics degree. She'd actually graduated from Grinnell College with a degree in English and one in speech. So she took this job and also enrolled as a full-time student in home economics. Now, she came at a very good time for Extension. It's the 1930s and the depression and people need a lot of help figuring out how to cook with very little. How to make low cost meals. How to make their food stretch. How to sew. And this is really what the Homemakers Program tried to tackle, and they really tried to do it all. Other programs for women had very specific themes. There's one on parenting called Parents Magazine of the Air, sewing called Let's Make a Dress, and favorite, at least based on it's name, I'm sure I'd find it offensive if I actually listened to it, but it was called the Wife Saver.

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favorite of mine

But under Hazard's direction, the Homemakers Program, like homemakers themselves, really tried to do it all. In July 1934, program topics included lace making, home canning, how to serve afternoon tea, and how to save money while buying clothes. Now, Hazard, as I said, she was working full-time as well as pursuing her degree. She did get her home economics degree in 1940. She was also doing this while raising her two children. She was a single mother. So she usually ran the Homemakers Program by inviting guest into the studio for interviews-- that's what you see here-- and there's Aline standing, and some of her guests are sitting at the table. She also had round table discussions where she would invite a number experts in and they would debate the merits of a specific topic. She also did something else that was very innovative. She called them on-the-spot broadcasts. She would take her show out on the road. And in 1935, she did her first on-the-spot. She went and visited a Madison woman in her garden, and she walked around with the woman and her microphone and basically gave her listeners a tour of the garden. Now, she became, this became kind of a regular features of the Homemakers Program. She visited women in their homes and on farms all over the state throughout her tenure. She really brought her listeners out of the studio and heard from women themselves, and that made a big difference in the popularity of the program in that she was interacting with the very people that were listening to her. Now, consumption was a big part of the Homemakers Program. Remember how I said they really wanted to bring technology into people's lives. Technology usually meant buying something. So they were always kind of experimenting and talking about new products that were on the market. They also really were changing with the times. By the '30s and then the '40s, there were more women working outside of the home, so even though they kind of celebrated the homemaker as the ideal, they still acknowledged the fact that women did have to work. So they talked a lot about kind of work and family balance and how to make housework actually work for working women. And one of the ways that they did, both talking about efficiency and new products, was through soap operas. Soap operas had become very popular on commercial radio in the 1930s, and there was a series on WHA that debuted in 1936, and it was called Air Lanes to Homemaking. And it featured the Grayson family who overcame in adversity in their life with technology. Mixers, washers, anything could be overcome with these things. Now, the series changed in 1937. They brought in a new family. They were called the Stevens, and the program became called Over at Our House. And this series ran for a number of years, and they really used it to demonstrate the science of homemaking. And in January of 1940, the new thing that they wanted to introduce their listeners to was frozen food. There was an episode called Fast Frozen Foods Are New, which starred Vic, the son, and his young bride Janet and dramatized the convenience and marvels of this food technology. Now, unfortunately, there is not a recording of this, so I will act it out for you.

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favorite of mine

Prepare yourselves. So remember, it's Vic, the son, his fiance Janet. Let's see. By the way, Jan, these butter peas are awfully good. Thank you. I'm glad you like them. They're some of those fast frozen peas. It's the first I've ever tried them. Tastes just about like fresh peas that come from the garden. Ha-ha. I only didn't have to spend hours shelling them.

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favorite of mine

The frozen ones take a little longer to cook, I suppose. No, frozen foods cook quite a bit quicker. Thank you.

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favorite of mine

The episode continues on like that. It's like 30 minutes.

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favorite of mine

And it's with the family explaining the uses and benefits of fast food because I think it's hard for us to imagine now what it was like before fast food, and to think that it might be something scary or that you might be unwilling to try it. But explaining how you cook it, why you would cook it, and what you would use it for. Now, in 1940, most rural women did not actually have freezers. So the homemakers actually suggested that they could just store their frozen food in a community communal freezer, which is not actually that convenient if you're looking at having a convenience food. Now, episodes of this program consistently emphasized why Janet needed all this help. She's, unfortunately, the dumb one in this situation. And I just realized in saying this that Aunt Nellie's niece was named Janet too. Hmm. That hadn't occurred to me right now. So before Janet got married, she'd actually worked in an office job. She was a city dweller. She didn't have these homemaking skills. And so they just keep emphasizing over and over again that she has a lot of questions and we need to help her. And in the first episode of the series, Janet is first introduced as an efficient business girl, but she knows nothing about taking care of a home. Janet has so much to learn. Now, the program wasn't just offered on the air. Listeners could also send away for free material that corresponded to the program so that they could remember the lessons that they learned and apply it to their life. By 1936, nearly 5,000 listeners were receiving these program schedules. And listeners were also urged to ask questions and suggest topics. They really wanted women to feel like the homemakers were there for them. That they were responding to them. And, of course, as you might imagine, some of the questions were a little funny. Is it safe to eat rabbits that have spotted livers? May one brush teeth with salt instead of toothpaste? I don't know why someone was even considering that, but I'm glad they asked and I hope they didn't proceed without receiving their answer. So Hazard and her staff really tried to answer every question that they received, and they used those requests to shape the content of the program. By far, most listeners wanted to know about recipes and food. So food was a big part of the homemaking program. Now, WHA also launched the Wisconsin College of the Air in 1933, and that, of course, included an on-air course about homemaking. Listeners could enroll for free, and they got course materials. They even had to take a final exam. Hazard encouraged women to form listening groups to complete the work together. Some of the programs in the College of the Air included "The Girl of Today" and " Homemaking as a Hobby." In 1934, the homemakers club also started a book club where they featured Wisconsin writers. This became one of the most popular features of the program, and it ran, basically, up until the '60s when Hazard left. Now, as I said, the Homemakers Program did change with the times. As more women were going to work during World War II, they acknowledged this reality. And she actually began using some of her remote broadcasts, her on-the-spots. She would actually leave the studio and go around Madison to factories and laundries and other work places to talk to women who had taken jobs. And she asked them about how they managed to balance their job and their home life. How they managed to do it all, basically. The same questions that women face to this day. She also visited women on farms who were growing their own food and cooking and preserving it. And she, Hazard consistently called homemakers America's number one war worker. She also offered segments on rationing and victory gardens, anything to help people get through the war. Now, homemakers programs really helped fill lonely days for women who were often separated by long distances from their neighbors. Women felt very connected to Hazard and the women who worked on the Homemakers Program. Hazard actually received more letters than any other program host on WHA. In 1962, she received more than 10,000 letters, and she responded to every single one. So she eventually left the program, as you might imagine, in 1965, and she added features over the years, but the underlying of the Homemakers

Program was much the same

to bring domestic science from the experts at the University of Wisconsin to women all over the state. It didn't matter if you went to the university or not. You had a right to learn about home economics. By the time Hazard actually did leave the program, she'd actually been on more than 10,000 broadcasts. That's pretty amazing. After she left, the program kind of changed names for a couple of years, but it still exists in a form. The Larry Meiller Show is essentially in the spot of the Homemakers Program today. And though we don't call them homemakers programs anymore, these types of shows still exist. They're not necessarily just something from the past. Homemaking programs covered many of the same topics that you'll find on HGTV, The Food Network, and many other forms of food and home media. Home economics was really founded on the notion that nothing about cooking or sewing or child rearing was intuitive. That it was really something that you had to learn. And it's interesting that this image of home economics as a kind of dead end despite our culture's voracious appetite for, apparently, television programs about homes and food and domestic products. And there are all of these things that make it so you don't even really need to cook for yourself. You certainly don't need to sew your own clothes, and yet there's a whole generation of people that are now relearning these skills. Many schools actually dropped their home economics program The founding generation of home economics with the progressive vision of what it could be, most of them retired in the '50s or '60s and weren't replaced by visionary leaders like themselves. Programs often fell by the wayside. Not that this is the end of home economics, but sometimes they were replaced by men who didn't care as much about promoting women's causes. And so the program kind of fell by the wayside and really lost some of that progressive vision that it's had. And, as I said, a lot of schools don't even have home economics anymore. I didn't go into any school that had home economics. But there's been a lot of renewed calls in recent years for home economics to be brought to schools to reteach us skills that we used to learn, we used to know. So it's kind of an interesting moment for home economics. Thank you.

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