Home Economics and Household Production
As women in the U.S. gained greater access to higher education, they also began to seek employment as teachers. Few were able to penetrate the sanctum of political economy, but they flocked in increasing numbers to the new discipline of home economics that elevated ideals of domesticity through application of the scientific method.
Long emphasized in women's colleges, home economics promised both practical gains and respectable segregation from men. By the 1920s, more women held academic positions in this discipline in the United States than in any other of the social sciences.30The divide between home economics and economics reflected the legacy of separate spheres. Even within the masculine discipline, Alfred Marshall's notion that women could best make their contribution by studying other women was apparently widely shared. Between 1886 and 1924, women represented less than 10 percent of all those indexed as authors of articles appearing in economic journals, but 63 percent of all those who published on the topic of‘‘women and children.''31
This niche strategy reinforced sex segregation, but enabled a few talented and hard-working individuals to gain professional cachet. Most successful scholars avoided the issue of women's non-market work to focus on their contributions to family income through informal market work—their contributions to family farms and businesses. The argument that women ‘‘had always worked'' (for pay) lent support to the argument that they should now be allowed to seek wage employment. The first Englishwoman to publish in the eminent Economic Journal emphasized this point, explicitly chiding men for their fear that married women with independent access to income would abandon their families (which she
termed ‘‘the veriest scooped-out, sheet-draped turnip that ever made a village dolt take to his heels and run”).32 The English economist Clara Collett pursued similar themes, as did historians Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck.33
In the U.S.
Edith Abbott, who completed a Ph.D. in economics at the University of Chicago in 1905, published seven articles in the Journal of Political Economy (two of them coauthored with Sophonisba Breckinridge), and wrote a classic history entitled Women in Industry.34 Neither Abbott nor Breckinridge were offered jobs in economics, but they created a beachhead in the new School of Social Work at the University of Chicago. They threw their institutional weight behind a demand for a joint appointment for Hazel Kyrk in the departments of Home Economics and Economics35
in 1929.
Kyrk had just completed a book entitled Economic Problems of the Family that directly addressed the issue of non-market work.36 She estimated the number of women engaged in full-time homemaking between 1890 and 1920 and cited early time use studies administered by home economists to illustrate the extent and variety of homemakers’ productive contributions. ‘‘Care of members of the family’’ was included along with meal preparation, laundering, and other more tangible activities. Kyrk used the data to measure the impact of additional children on the total amount of time that Oregon farm homemakers spent in homemaking.37 She pointed out that women working in the home had every interest in performing their work efficiently. Posing the question ‘‘Is home-keeping a full-time job?’’ she sidestepped polemical debate to observe dispassionately that men and women could choose to share household responsibilities.38
Kyrk’s student Margaret Reid developed a more systematic theoretical perspective, couched more explicitly in the terminology of the discipline. Her Economics of Household Production argued that both non-market and market work were governed by the principle of seeking maximum returns at minimum costs.39 Like Gilman, Reid observed that the increasing costs of raising children were prompting many women to plan and reduce births, and predicted that women’s participation in wage employment would increase.40 In response to criticisms that the home was a site of consumption, rather than production, she patiently explained that no one person could consume on behalf of another and that many homemakers engaged in activities that directly benefited their husbands and their children.41
Like Kyrk, Reid focused primarily on full-time homemakers, but her definition of work as something that could, in principle, be performed by someone else (the ‘‘third party” criterion) provided a basis for classification and measurement of household members' activities that is widely utilized today.42 Her book elicited negative reviews from two other women economists, both rather hostile to emphasis on home production, but it helped win her a position in the University of Chicago economics department.43 She was personally appreciated there, and Milton Friedman gratefully acknowledged her contributions to his theory of consumption.44 Widespread appreciation of Reid's Economics of Household Production, however, would not be expressed for more than fifty years.