History of Modern Housekeeping Part 1 (1860-1900)

When I picked up a copy of "America's Housekeeping Book" circa 1940, I had no idea of what I was getting into.  This blog entry (maybe the next couple) follows the history of modern housekeeping from mid 19TH century to today and I found it impossible to extricate this history from the history of; US politics, our society and our educational system.  So, it's a huge topic and I hope you'll "soldier on" and read it through.  The present, Autumn 2012, is election season and this history lesson could be timely, even though this is also spider season (posthttp://mainetaine.blogspot.com/2012_01_15_archive.html), ragweed is everywhere (http://mainetaine.blogspot.com/2012_04_29_archive.html) and there is much housekeeping we could do before the harvest season turns to winter, but I'm all on fire about this history and I have to share it.  

The history of housekeeping as we know it began around the mid 19Th Century and was called Home Economics, from the ancient Greek "oikonomos" meaning "one who manages a household.  

The United States in the 1840's through 1900

Society and Educational Landscape
   There were primary schools for boys teaching religion in most towns and religious colleges were built in the major cities when the US was a British Colony.  The textbooks were brought from England, namely the "English Protestant Tutor".  As these books wore out, the printers in Boston reprinted them with some added material and called them "The New England Primer" which taught the Puritan ideal of a child's responsibility to his parents and to God.  These religious schools were not free so these were for sons of the wealthy.  Rural wealthy families had private tutors and the most wealthy sent their sons to England for higher education.  By 1800 Daniel Webster had written a truly American textbook, Webster's Speller.  It was arranged to accommodate the theory that children learned based on their age and a 5 year old was taught what was appropriate for a 5 year old and the "graduated" form of education was established, replacing the one room-one teacher-all ages model in urban settings.  The one room schoolhouse persisted for decades in rural areas.  The education of women didn't start until after the Revolution and for African Americans not until after the Civil War. Homeschooling was the only education for most people, the 1840 Census reported only 55% of children counted attended school outside the home. There were universities at that time but they generally prepared white men to be lawyers, doctors, ministers and statesmen.  
   In 1848, the Seneca Falls Convention was held to gain support for expanded education and suffrage for women but it had little impact because at the time women were still considered the property of men.  The convention did establish a foundation of support for equal education for women.  It had became clear to those in attendance that women were to have an important role in the future of nation building, an idea that suggested a thriving republic needed the influence of well educated women to be mothers and raise "republican minded" children in a properly run home. This idea became widespread in the Northeast, then spread throughout the country.  Previously male dominated studies such as mathematics and philosophy were provided for women replacing the Colonial women's education which was primarily to create "civilized" daughters who could read religious texts but could not write, making them ready for arranged marriage without a dowry.  New female academies offered a rigorous curriculum of reading, writing, philosophy, arithmetic, penmanship and French. By the end of the 1800's, women of wealthy families attending public and private girls' schools were groomed to be educators of the American moral and ethical values.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_women's_colleges_in_the_United_States
  
     The first "housekeeping" classes were taught in the agricultural and technical colleges that were built with Federal grants during the 1860's  via the Morrill Land-Grants Act.  
"This bill proposes to establish at least one college in every State upon a sure and perpetual foundation, accessible to all, but especially to the sons of toil, where all of needful science for the practical avocations of life shall be taught, where neither the higher graces of classical studies nor that military drill our country now so greatly appreciates will be entirely ignored, and where agriculture, the foundation of all present and future prosperity, may look for troops of earnest friends, studying its familiar and recondite economies, and at last elevating it to that higher level where it may fearlessly invoke comparison with the most advanced standards of the world."--1862, as quoted by William Belmont Parker, The Life and Public Services of Justin Smith Morrill (NDSU, 2005).
This act was vetoed by Democratic President James Buchanan (1857-1861). After an amendment was added to guarantee military tactics were taught along with agriculture and engineering, it was signed into law by Republican President Abraham Lincoln (1861-1865).  These colleges helped to get education into rural areas where home school was dominant. There were primary schools in most cities by this time but in states where there was law that parents must arrange for their children's education, it wasn't enforced.  The purpose of the Land-Grant Colleges was to be... 
"without excluding other scientific and classical studies and including military tactic, to teach such branches of learning as are related to agriculture and the mechanic arts, in such manner as the legislatures of the States may respectively prescribe, in order to promote the liberal and practical education of the industrial classes in the several pursuits and professions in life"
The word "pursuits" is instructive here since later the idea of education for profession overshadows the education for the purpose of personal knowledge.  Also, that the teaching is to be in a manner as the States prescribe is interesting knowing how vastly different the social makeup was from state to state.  

 Society, in this United Republic, democratic in nature, was very diverse.  The US had only been in existence for about 3 generations with the vast majority of the population having only been here a generation.  Within a span of 2 generations ( 1830 to 1900 ) over 60 million people migrated around the globe, a staggering amount, considering the vast majority were Europeans of every nationality and over half came to the United States.  Five million of these came from Europe through Great Britain, presumably to break the trip into more manageable pieces and to refortify oneself for the Atlantic crossing.  The British dominated migration network ran efficiently through trade agreements between shippers and both British and Continental railways. The death rate averaged about 1 in 7 for Atlantic crossings and the quality of travel varied greatly. The "trans migrants" as they were called, were northern Europeans for the most part, given 3rd class arrangements in the holds of the ships.  This site is a wealth of knowledge about early immigration in Colonial times. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21533369.2001.9668313

Such was the 1860's, we were 33 states and trying not to fight a civil war. http://www.civilwarhome.com/population1860.htm lists the breakdown of population as such: approx 27 million in non-slave states, 19 million free people in slave states with 8 million salves.  Slavery was abolished by the British with a few exceptions (their 'big business" at the time was East India Company obviously having sway in politics) written into the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833.  The slave/southern states were settled by British Aristocracy in the habit of taking control by force over great tracts of land granted them by "Royal Patent" which is a decree of the Monarchy of Great Britain which bestows foreign lands, titles and positions of power.  Slavery was big business from the onset. Tobacco, cotton and refined sugar were all tremendously profitable with slave labor.  Do not underestimate the deep psychological affect this societal makeup had on the population - slave and master, over a large area after effectively eliminating the original inhabitants.  The resultant egos of all parties echo still in Dixie- aristocratic superiority became courtly Southern hospitality for instance while many decedents of the enslaved are still in abject poverty. I couldn't tell you why, but it is so.  The Appalachia Mountains were settled by mostly Scots from the borderlands of England and Scotland, who had known nothing but violent, rolling warfare for 500 years (the Border Wars) and just wanted to be left alone, having a deeply rooted mistrust of any authority or intrusion, again with egos and intellect severely shaped by their culture.  
   Even though the earliest British Colonies were along our mid Atlantic shores, the character of this area was shaped by land owners who were not as dedicated to slavery as in the deep South,  but were more inclined to do business and have indentured servants, often Irish who worked off the price of their passage and became free of their indenturship and often went on to own land or into business for themselves.  The area now known as New York City was originally New Amsterdam settled by the Dutch who were big time into international trade and open to other cultures.  Some immigrant peoples, having the funds to travel at will, sought the chance to create their version of an utopian society with the social reforms not possible in their home countries, while some embraced an Anglo-Saxon Protestant identity secure in their belief of superiority over the lesser races.  Catholics from Germany and Ireland and Dutch Protestants organized and funded their own religious schools as they settled across the urban Northeast and Midwest and their influence is still there.  Big Business (as we have come to call it) in northern cities, needing cheap labor to fuel their industrial revolution, actively sought out potential laborers in their own countries by advertising the US as the land of opportunity with streets paved with gold.  The reality was quite the reverse.  Recruiting agents representing mining, steel mills and the textile industry sought out Italians, Greeks, Poles, Hungarians, Slavs, and other peoples of western Europe, many who were living much like their Dark Ages ancestors, created a desperate and willing workforce, completely out of their element and essentially enslaved them by paying just enough to survive, then collecting their wages back again as rent, food etc.  Other forces inspired immigration, this site will tell you all about it. http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/units/1999/3/99.03.01.x.html

Another wonderful reference is http://www.colinwoodard.com/americannations which offers the best explanation of who we were and are as Americans throughout our history.  If you read at all, read this book before the election is possible.  

The take away here is 
*like minded peoples arrived together in waves and they brought aspects of their culture with them.  * The very concept of govt and it's role in peoples lives, the organization of their communities, their faith and social mores and their voting patterns were wildly varied and still exist in their respective parts of the country and * big business was an employer but could not be trusted to operate humanly without being forced.  It's goal was not to employ but to profit, to the extreme of corruption and cruelty.

Back to education

   As to higher education, some of the schools created by the Morrill Land Grants Act were Cornell, Iowa State, Kansas State, Michigan State, Rutgers, Pennsylvania State, and the Universities of Vermont, Minnesota, Mississippi and Wisconsin, there were over 70 in all.  The curricula included basic farming and animal husbandry skills, basic chemistry and engineering so these new farmers could succeed, which was a radical new idea at the time.  Until then, education was the tool of the elite to further itself. The organized teaching of practical skills had begun.  Some states used the grant money to create Agriculture Colleges attached to their existing Universities.  With the establishment of the Department of Agriculture by Republican President Lincoln in 1862, the government began to educate through the use of pamphlets on food and nutrition.  http://www.nal.usda.gov/speccoll/exhibits/lincoln/pdfs/Hopkins,%20Cyril%20G.,%20Lincoln%27s%20View%20of%20Agriculture/Lincoln%27s_View_of_Agriculture_1859_6.pdf  This site is "Lincoln's View of Agriculture - 1859"  which uses direct quotes from Lincoln's speeches describing his beliefs on agriculture and education, pretty cool to read but I"ll paraphrase....  Farmers as a class are neither better or worse than other peoples but they far out number the rest of the population and with the west opening up, the farmers' interests were of greatest importance because the permanent success of American agriculture is the foundation upon which the ultimate national success does rest.  He firmly believed that family farms, not the 1860's version of agribusiness (slave owning plantation farmers) was the key to this country's success and that these new farm families needed to be educated as to the best farming and home health and safely practices.  The Homestead Act of 1862 allowed for farming families to acquire land west of the Mississippi and set up family farms. There was much opposition to the Homestead Act from Northern factory owners who feared a mass departure of their cheap labor force and Southern states worried that rapid settlement of western territories would give rise to new states populated by small farmers opposed to slavery.  With the Southern states seceding (Dec of 1860 through June of 1861) and their Congressmen vacating their posts, the Homestead Act passed.  The downside was there were inadequate controls to police this growth and many mining and timber interests acquired tracts of land far beyond the acreage allowed and they are still there over 100 years later.  Water sources were monopolized and there was no Governmental oversight.  The original inhabitants of these lands were killed off, cheated and conquered via military, Presidential and Supreme Court collusion fueled by Congress, so there was no passing on of education as to the nature of the land so the farming techniques taught were unsustainable.  The upside was the beginnings of germ theory and common households' health and safety becoming "common knowledge" instead of only for the "civilized" elite. This knowledge was the beginnings of home economics.  (hurrah) http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/homestead-act/
   
   Opening of the new western frontier and the growing inner city slums inspired the concerned educators who attended the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics in September of 1899.  This conference organized their thoughts on education and the ills of current society and defined Home Economics and all it encompassed.  This link is to Cornell University's Home Economics Archive where you can read in depth on the subject.  Awesome website!! http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/h/hearth/

    As the 19TH Century came to a close, cities and towns were building new schools and hiring new teachers properly trained.  Every community, North, South and West had public school.  Many states were enforcing the new state laws requiring children to attend school until age 12 or 14.  The idea that free public education should be offered through high school was gaining support.  Nationwide the results were impressive, in 1870 only half of children had any schooling, by 1900, 19 out of 20 children in the North and West were being educated, in the South it was 17 out of 20 white children and for Negro children it was 12 of 20.  Until this time, education was primarily for the elite of society, laborers were left uneducated to keep them laboring for the benefit of the elite.  So, to summarize the impact of education in the 1800's  

1. The nation's many small colleges helped young men make the transition from rural farms to complex urban occupations.
2. These colleges especially promoted upward mobility by preparing ministers and primary teachers, and thereby provided towns across the country with a core of community leaders and primary education.
3. The more elite colleges of the urban Northeast became increasingly exclusive and contributed relatively little to upward social mobility. By concentrating on the offspring of wealthy families, ministers and a few others, the elite Eastern colleges, especially Harvard, played an important role in the formation of a Northeastern elite with great power.
4. The growing West was being populated by pioneers with basic education and skills and college educated teachers were spreading common knowledge throughout the country.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_education_in_the_United_States

That's enough for now.  I'll be posting the rest of this history lesson as soon as I get it sorted out.