The Homemaker and the Home Economist: Definitions and Identities in the Second Half of the 20th Century

Abstract

Anna Flaming describes how home economists proposed a positive and diverse definition of the American homemaker. Through secondary and collegiate education and organized outreach to homemakers, home economists became important arbiters of American understandings of housewifery. Simultaneously, many home economists worked to defy stereotypes that equated home economics with housewifery and attempted to update the image of the discipline by eliminating its association with such domestic tasks as "cooking and sewing."