December 30, 2025 • 40 mins
Home economics seems antiquated – a class that teaches high school kids how to bake a cake and sew doesn’t sound super useful. But would you believe that everything from the obesity epidemic to student debt can be chalked up to home ec disappearing?
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's us today. We've got our aprons on,
we have our spectulism in hand. We've been spanking each
other with them, and it's time to go to class
the stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Hey, everybody, just so you know, there was construction happening
next door. So if you hear a saw or a
hammer banging, it's not me.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
No, it's not Chuck.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Sometimes you just got to live with the sounds of life.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah. I mean we recorded for a while and every
time we recorded, a fire truck would go by, like
soccer do you remember.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Yeah, Yeah, in the old Buckhead office it was I
think we were near a fire station.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, but it was like the exact same time. It
was really bizarre.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
It was the radio lab, guys pulling fire alarms all
over it. Leaf.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
So, Chuck, we're talking about homec today. Did you ever
take a home mech class?
Speaker 3 (01:03):
I sure did, buddy, how about you?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I did. I have very vague recollections of it. I
remember the room and everything, but I don't remember anything
I did. It's also possible I'm conflating it with an
episode of Saved by the Bell.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Yeah, yeah, I took it. You know, we had the
full kitchen situation in our high school back then, and
I took it because I don't know, I think I
needed an elective and you know, I knew their beekot
girls in there. And yeah, maybe I had a friend
or two that took it. Was probably my reasoning.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I could see that. I think both of us are
the types of dudes who would not have been like, OK,
I'm a boy.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, no, of course not there. And there were plenty
of dudes in the class.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah yeah, because gen X is enlightened, that's right. The
thing is, we were really in the minority, though all
the dudes in your class were in the minority. That
from what I read, that was pretty uncommon, even even
at that time. And we were among like the last
age group who could elect for homech. Yeah, pretty much
(02:05):
across the country like this was a time. This was
about the end of the time where you could find
a home MECH classroom and most high schools are middle schools.
But that is not the case anymore. Although it's still around,
it's just not everywhere like it used to be.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yeah, and in fact, I can confirm when I went
back to my high school a couple of years ago,
when they had me back to talk to students as
a you know, interesting professional, I remember that. Yeah, it
was fun. I took a walk around and I even
remember going by where the homech room was and it
was definitely not the kitchen anymore.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
No, I remember you told me they filled in all
the sinks with cement.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Yeah, it's called the cement class.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So classic get really boring, really fast.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Yeah, we should probably say homechis stands for home economics,
and just in case that's foreign to your tongue.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
True, true, I understand that it's called homechir home economics
in Australia, and I think maybe Canada and in the
UK they call it food sciences. I think, yeah, it's
all the same thing. And essentially what it is for
those of you who don't know, it was a class
in high school where you would learn basic life skills
that had a lot to do with being at home.
(03:15):
You would learn sewing, you would learn to bake a cake.
As time wore on, you would learn to take care
of a child, maybe learned to balance a checkbook, just
basic life skills as a class in high school or
middle school. And that is it turns out I didn't
quite realize the extent of home ec one little slice
(03:37):
of the whole home ec pie, which is delicious because
it was made by home economists and there's a whole
history to it and it's actually pretty feminists in nature too.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Yeah, you know, as we'll see, there was a bit
of a push pull at a certain time and which
way both feminism would that have.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Been the dose?
Speaker 3 (03:58):
The dose? Yeah, where you know, there were certain people
saying like, no, this is you know, you shouldn't be
teaching women to stay at home and stay in the kitchen,
and other people were like, we're not teaching them, saying
you have to do that, but we're saying, you know,
there are viable careers that you can gain in you know,
industrial engineering and statistics. And as we'll see, you know,
(04:21):
plenty of science careers came out of home economics and
food science because it is a science.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Right, and that was actually one of the initial points
of it. But if you were a homech proponent and
you were arguing with a feminist, you might start by saying,
let me give you a little picture of what life
used to be like for the average woman in the
United States before we came along, and you would start
in about the nineteenth century, they run the turn of it,
(04:48):
so they're still wearing tri cornered hats, but they were
looking forward to trains. And if you were a farm
woman at this time, you worked yourself to the bone.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah. I mean what we know as homeck was not
early homech because early homech was like you might have
seven or eight kids that all worked on the farm,
and you might have farm hands that you also have
to kind of care for and feed. So you're feeding
these huge families from stuff that you're growing probably on
your land and processing and canning and churning butter, and
(05:24):
you're handmaking clothes and doing laundry by hand, and it's
a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Yeah, And like you would say, that's not even home economics,
that's just home terribleness, right.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
When home economics came along, it was based on this
idea that, Okay, all of these people are working really hard.
There has to be ways to improve this to make
it more efficient.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
I suspect it. I'm pretty sure we talked about it
that this all grew out of tailorism, that obsession with
getting things as efficient as possible. And I think that
that kind of grew out of that same vein. And
there were actually a few things that and it came
together to make the fertile soil that home grew from.
One of them, the big one was literacy started to
(06:08):
spread in the mid nineteenth century. And so when literacy spreads,
you got more books and home like domestic tips and
householding was a whole genre of books, so were cookbooks.
And then part and parcel of that was this kind
of the very beginnings of this idea that maybe women
can be educated too, but just in women.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Stuff, Yeah, for sure. And you know, the books were
important because previous to that, it was everything was sort
of handed down from you know, parent to child as
far as any kind of wisdom goes about how to
do anything right. So if you had books and you
had classes, you didn't depend on like your grandmother necessarily
(06:49):
being good at, you know, baking a cake or something
like that.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Like but if your grandmother was a dipstick, right, yeah, exactly,
So cooking schools also emerged, and this was important because
your grandmother might also in addition to being a dipstick
might not have been that great of a cook. Now
there's a place you can go to learn to cook
well and nutritiously. That was a big one too. And
then also this was a new career path that a
(07:15):
woman could take to become a cook and like say,
a wealthy household, so they were training now people to
work outside of the house doing domestic.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Stuff, yeah, for sure. And then one of the biggest
ones was the Morile Act of eighteen sixty two, and
that's when land grant colleges were established, and all of
a sudden there were schools that said, hey, maybe we
should offer you know, it was kind of the beginnings
of trade schools, like, you know, teach people how to
work in agriculture and industry and things like that and
(07:45):
not necessarily just sit around with your nose in the
air of reading the classics exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
And women were open or these colleges were open to
women as well too. So these three things come together.
And one of the other reasons that really made homemech
kind of come to life start sprouting from that fertile
soil was the transition that America was going through with industrialization.
All of a sudden, you weren't on the farm with
(08:13):
your mother and grandmother who were telling you how to
do things, like you were in the city now surrounded
by people you've not really ever met before, with a
husband who now works in the factory rather than a farm,
and you're like, I have no idea what I'm doing.
And so Homech kind of came in to fill that
break that had happened, that intergenerational passage of knowledge from
(08:34):
mother to daughter. Homech said, Hey, forget mothers. We're going
to tell you how to do this, and we're going
to tell you how to do it better. They didn't
really say forget mothers. That wasn't the sentiment. That was
me being a smart alec.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, and you know, initially it was not in high school.
It was a college level thing. And there's a PhD
named Nancy Darling who kind of backs up this idea
that it was a feminist movement to begin with with
this quote she said, it developed that is from something radical,
the idea that the traditional work of women is important, meaningful,
and here's the key for me, economically significant. And it
(09:10):
was economics. They didn't just call it that to make
it seem fancy. The running of a household is big
time economics, and if you're not good at that, as
we'll see with younger generations, it can spell trouble for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yeah yeah, yeah, there's a whole wash out that's happened
that will cover for sure. But one of the people
that you have to tip your top hat to is
Ellen Swallow Richards, who's probably the most important person in
the history or the early history at least of home economics.
Now let's just say it, the entire history of home economics.
She was a pretty impressive sort. She studied chemistry. She
(09:49):
got a bachelor's and a master's from Vassar and then
became the first woman to get a degree from MIT,
and then became the first woman instructor at MIT and
set up a sanitary chemistry lab that was for women only.
And this was not really domestic work. It was figuring
out water quality and air quality tests like essentially the
(10:11):
foundations of environmental protection and consumer protection too. That's what
this lab was doing. And the reason why you associated
with homec is because one of the reasons homech existed. Also,
you said that it started at the college level was
as a way for women, almost a back door a
workaround a loophole for women to become scientists. It was
(10:33):
okay as long as there was enough of a whiff
of women's work like clean water, that's woman's work that
academia could put up with it. That was one of
the big ways homech started funneling women into education and
into the sciences.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Yeah. I mean she was trying to improve the United States,
and she thought, and she was right on the money.
She was like, if I'm going to try to improve
you know, the United States and civilization, then I have
to start at what she considered. And you know, I
think most people agree is the basic unit, which is
a family, the family unit. And if I can each
(11:12):
if I can get each household one at a time
to practice you know, more efficient practices, more sanitary practices,
safer practices, you know where you're not, you know, burning
kitchens down and things like that, then it'll you know,
all boats will rise. And it started to become a movement.
And you know, this is like the late eighteen hundreds,
early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, and remember also there was a big emphasis on
this work is important, Like this is unpaid labor, but
it produces a lot of dividends. For any family, and
hence building upward for civilization, for a nation, civilization all that. So,
like you said, this is starting to become a movement.
And they had a series of conferences called the Lake
Plastid Conferences starting right at the turn of the century,
(11:55):
and at one of these meetings they chose the term
home economics, like you said, to basically point out not
to kind of latch their field on economics, to point
out that domestic work was a huge part of economics,
and up to this point economists had basically just been
looking at production, they weren't looking at the demand side.
(12:17):
And one of the things HOMECH introduced was the idea
of consumer sciences, like studying consumption as well as part
of the larger economy, which is you can't do economics
without that now, but that's what one of the things
HOMECH introduced.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Yeah, and they came up with the name homek at
one of those conferences after debating domestic science and they said,
now that that doesn't sound like it's studying consumerism. That's
a big part of this. I think household arts was
put forward and they said, no, that sounds too artsy,
fartsy and not academic. Enough, so they landed on home
(12:53):
economics and an ironic twist that kind of takes it
back home because the words or economics comes from I
love this word oiknoymia oikonomia. I inserted an extra either,
which is ancient Greek for household management. So there you
have it.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah, they dropped the old timing mike at this point.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Yeah, for sure. And then in nineteen oh eight, at
that same conference, the Lake Placid Conference, they founded the
American Home Economics Association. Really got the ball rolling, and
then shortly after, in nineteen seventeen, the Hughes Act started
funding vocational education like shop class and homech and it
was off to the races.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yep. So you want to take a break and come
back and talk about how, like you said, home X
starts to take off.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Want to learn about a terrors sort and college arridactyl,
how to take a perfect is gone?
Speaker 3 (14:01):
That's a little hunt the Lizzie Borderer.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Word up, Jerry. Okay. So when we left off, homech
was starting to take off, and by the nineteen twenties,
the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, had created the Bureau
of Home economics, and when you create a bureau dedicated
to a new field, that's that's when the field has arrived.
If you're a band and weird Al has done a
(14:32):
cover of your song, that's how you know you've arrived.
If you're a field of study and someone opens a
bureau dedicated to it, that's how you know your field arrived.
But it became the country's biggest employer of women's scientists,
which is pretty significant at the time.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
That's right. Their mission, of course, was education, and it
wasn't just you know, how to cook obviously, it was
meal planning, it was budgeting. There was a lot of
science behind it because they got into you know, nutritional
values like in any you know, nutritional tag that you read,
and in fact, any like clothing tag that you read.
(15:10):
I'll go ahead and get ahead of that one. That
all was born out of the science of this new
bureau that was founded. They were testing mildew proofing for fabrics.
They were servicing military service members, like you know, trying
to come up with better things for the US military
to eat, and of course school lunch programs all over
the country were dependent on the science.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, this is where the square pizza was invented.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
I suspect they should have a monument to that.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Well, one of the I agree one of the other
things about that though, in addition to the square pizza,
the square pizza is actually an excellent example of this pizza.
It comes from Italy, and if you've ever seen an
actual like Neapolitan pizza, it does not resemble the square pizza.
The square pizza at lunch is the Midwestern americanized, much
blander version of it, although I agree with you it's
(15:59):
quite good. And this is where American food as we
think of it today was founded. All the ethnic food
got pushed out as the immigrants were kind of brought
into the home ech world, and that bland Midwestern American
food took over. That's where that came from.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
And this also coincided with the birth of radio that
we seems like we've talked a lot about that lately.
But because of that, of course you're going to have
shows on the radio about this kind of thing. The
Bureau of Home Economics in the twenties had a show
called Housekeeper's Chat that ran for a couple of decades.
Started in nineteen twenty six. Not Uncle Sam, but Aunt
Sammy was the host of that one, or I guess
(16:37):
not the host, but it featured her and she would
have like household tips and recipes and stuff like that.
A lot of the brands got in the game, General
Mills and Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air. You know,
it's another radio show sponsored by General Mills. And again
the Bureau was like helping to get all of these
(16:57):
things launched on the airwaves.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
One of the other examples of what the Bureau of
Home Economics was doing that had a huge sweeping impact
in addition to founding like the mass produced food movement,
was they came up with the poverty line. In fact,
Molly or Shansky did. She was a statistician who studied
how much a house spent to come up with a
(17:21):
basic nutritious diet that could keep you alive. They multiplied
that by three and they came up with the federal
poverty line that's still in use today.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, and if you've ever seen, you know, astronauts eating
lasagna out of a what looks like a toothpaste tube
or something like that, you can thank Home Economics and
Science for that. Because a woman named Bee Finkelstein, great name,
she was getting food together for the very first astronauts
in the Mercury Project, which is pretty great, that's right.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
And then one of the other things that struck me
too that I didn't realize was that a lot of
those recipes that you find on like a food label.
One of the most famous ones is Campbell's Cream and
Mushroom soup labels have a cream bean casserole recipe, and
that was created by a home economist who worked for Campbell's,
Dorcas Riley, And she's a good example of what was
(18:16):
happening at this time. Starting in the twenties thirty four
and continuing on, these companies like General Mills and Campbell's
were setting up home economics departments, and one of the
things that these home economists were being paid to do
was to figure out new uses for the products made
by the companies they worked for so that people would
buy more of that stuff. And then they put those
(18:38):
recipes on the label.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Yeah. I mean, if you love rice Krispy Treats, you
can thank the home economics program and Matilligens and Mildred
Day at Kellogg's there for that and Chex Mix. This
wasn't a sort of an internal team. But chex Mix
was actually a contest and it was in I believe
the nineteen fifty when they just had a contest like
(19:02):
what can you do with check Cereal? And someone submitted
chex Mix, and like it's the same recipe basically that
everyone enjoys today, Like all of these.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Are did your family make chex mix around the holidays?
Speaker 3 (19:16):
But not a time that Emily's family really did though,
so she still makes you know, that same recipe, that
chex mix recipe.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
It must be so high. Oh then because my family
did as well. Yeah, but that's a good example of
how like these companies farmed out the task of coming
up with stuff because homech had become so widespread, the
average homemaker out there could do the same thing in
a lot of ways that some of the homech workers
working for the company could do too. I think that's
(19:43):
pretty neat.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Talk about efficiencies, like if you're baking a cake from scratch,
or making pancakes or something like that, or a gravy
from scratch. There were women in homech's homeck departments at
companies saying like, hey, we can make this. You know,
there's a lot to do, so what if it if
this stuff was all kind of pre mixed in a
box and you could sell them like well, I was
(20:05):
about to say, like hotcakes, and they did. And you
know that these were things that were real time savers
in the kitchen.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
For sure, And that was the point remember of homech
is saving time, being more efficient. And then as food
companies were concerned making tons of money off of this
stuff too, So that's kind of going on in the
corporate world the government world. Simultaneously, there's that whole thread
of homech being taught in high school in middle school,
(20:33):
and there was a time in the twentieth century up
into the eighties and nineties, and I'm sure beyond again.
These these classes are still out there, but nothing like
they used to be, where you could go into a
high school or middle school and there was a simulated
kitchen in one of the rooms with a bunch of
different stoves and ovens and refrigerators, and people would be
(20:53):
in there cooking and learning to sew, and maybe taking
care of a fake baby and in some cases taking
care of a real baby too, because this stuff got
intense sometimes.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Yeah, the baby thing. I don't remember our high school
class ever, delving into that. I do remember the egg babies,
like where you would I never had to take part,
but I saw other kids in school carrying around the
egg and yeah, sort of in the seventies and eighties,
they would give you a raw egg, you know, in
(21:26):
the shell, and because some people will be like what
the heck is he even talking about, they would give
you an egg. And the whole idea was you have
to care for that egg without breaking it for a
couple of weeks. You got to carry this thing around.
It sounds easy just to not get that egg broken,
but it's really not. You know, you have to really
think ahead about everything. And that's the whole idea, is
(21:46):
that when you have a baby, you can't just make
decisions on the spur of the moment. You have to
kind of pre plan everything. And the egg came along
after they'd used real babies from orphanages.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, apparently it's some of the colleges that were teaching
home they would borrow babies from orphanages for the students
to just basically practice on. And apparently there's a writer,
a historian named Danielle Drellinger who wrote a book The
Secret History of Home economics, And she said that for
adoptive parents who would go to a foster home, they'd
(22:17):
show up and be like, you got any one of
them babies that's been in the home economic classic? Yeah, man,
because the reasoning is, these babies spent some of their
earliest days being cared for just with complete attention and
care by women who were working in like the cutting
edge of child rearing, so they were much more desirable
(22:37):
than the non homech babies.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
It turns out, yeah, for sure. I mean before I
even read that part of this, I was thinking in
my head, like, oh man, you want that baby for sure?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
For sure. Apparently those eggs would get on custodian's nerves
enough that they switched to flour or sugar, which also
had the added benefit of heft. And I saw in
a like some educational magazine I can't remember, but they
would put pantyhose of different colors to simulate multicultural skin
(23:08):
tones over the flower sugar, and that sometimes if you forgot,
like your kid, whether it was an egg or a
sack of flower or something in your locker, you might
be forced to like write a paper on child abuse
or something like that. So the whole point was to
just teach high school kids you don't want to have
a baby at this period in your life. Maybe ever,
(23:29):
like if the class was hard enough, maybe they're like,
I'm never having a kid, but certainly not through my
teen years. That was the point.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah, it's kind of funny. I think they kind of
sold it to you as like, here, it'll teach you
like how to kind of care for a baby and
how much goes into that. But what they were really
saying is police don't have sex kind of kind well,
I mean one of them in the nineties they came
along with a more of a like a baby simulator.
It was called Baby Think it Over. I mean they've
(23:59):
flat out seted it that point. Yeah, Like I think
we all know what think it over means.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Sure, And I don't know if it worked or not,
but it was a great attempt at the very least
for sure. So by the middle of the twentieth century,
I think nineteen fifty nine, half of all American girls,
half of all the girls in America were taking home
mech courses in school. And then just suddenly it just
dried up. It wasn't like a faucet got turned off
(24:25):
or a light switch was turned. But it started to
go downhill pretty fast in about the early sixties. And
let's take a break and we'll come back and talk
about where Homech went after.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Well, the break, I want to learn about a terrors
ort in college, horedactyl, how to take a bird, a
rectal gink is gone, that's a little.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Hunt, the Lizzie everything, joh.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
S word up, Jerry.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
All right, So Homeck is on the decline. And there's
a bunch of reasons for this that kind of all
kind of steamrolled together at a certain point. But one
of the biggest ones was when the United States really
got into standardized testing, which came along mostly with the
No Child Left Behind Act, Because all of a sudden,
a school's funding was tied to test scores. And if
(25:28):
there aren't any Homech questions on these tests and the
testing is tied to funding, then what's the point of
even teaching that stuff. I don't agree with that, obviously,
but that was sort of the thought, and so a
lot of those classes started to just slowly go away.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Yeah, and there was an article on father Lee written
by a guy named Cameron LeBlanc, and he traced it
back even Further, he traced the origin of where the
emphasis on STEM came from the eighties and the Vocational
and Technical Education Act that Ronald Reagan signed, where it said,
cater's colleges, you're no longer responsible for figuring out what
(26:04):
we want to teach our kids. We're going to hand
this over to business and industry so they can tell
us what they want us to teach, so that we
can basically train workers. That was the point from that
point on for school, train workers as much as you can.
And then eventually universities got in on the act and
they're like, let's also make these like pipelines to colleges,
so like that's the point of high school is to
(26:24):
get into college, and we're going to charge them out
the yin yang. So standardization of testing was a huge
part of it, but that was not the only part.
Like you kind of touched on earlier, Betty Fridan's feminist mystique,
which kicked off the second wave of feminism, as very
often cited as a huge chilling effect or having a
(26:44):
huge chilling effect on home mech classes being taught in
high school.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Yeah, for sure, a lot of people started dropping those classes,
saying it was, you know, sort of symbolic of a
woman's confinement to the home in the kitchen. The Vocational
Education Act of nineteen sixty three all of a sudden
gutted or at least reduced funding that that Smith's Hughes
Act had brought about. So it was, you know, shop
(27:09):
class suffered kind of the same fate around the same
time for the same reasons. We didn't have shop at
my school. We had Industrial Arts, which I took, and
I bet you anything, those have kind of lessened over
the years as well. Now that I think about.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
It, is an industrial arts the same thing as shop.
Is it different?
Speaker 3 (27:26):
No, shop is like like autoshop class.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Oh no, I think that's different. I think shop is
like drill presses and lathes and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Well, it depends on your school. A lot of schools
had autoshop class, yeah, like where they taught you had
to change oil and work on your carburetor.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
For sure. My high school had that. My middle school
had shop class in home.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Mac what they call the autoshop class.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
I don't remember. I don't remember, but I saw it
written somewhere as like automotive arts or something like that. Really, yeah,
somebody said it so I get to repeat.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
It the art of changing oil exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
But now I knew a couple of kids who were like,
I'm going to be a mechanic, That's what i want
to do after school. I'm not going to go to college,
so it's great, I'm getting this education starting now in
high school, Like it would give them a huge leg
up to either becoming apprentices or going and taking like
classes at a technical trade school. Right that went away,
(28:31):
vocational education just really took a huge hit, and again
high school became a pipeline for college. Homech still kind
of stayed around. It saw the writing on the wall,
but it rebranded itself as Family and Consumer Sciences, I
think because homeck just had such a folksy, old timey
name that seemed to reinforce gendered stereotypes. Family and Consumer
(28:54):
Sciences is new, it's fresh, it's nineties, right, And they
had a bigger emphasis on careers, helping people start careers
outside the home, like interior design, nutrition, elder care, culinary arts,
like you could become a chef, get a huge leg
up taking high school classes. About that. So that's still
around today. But one of the biggest problems that Family
(29:17):
and consumer science classes still have that started around this time.
Is finding qualified teachers to actually teach the family and
consumer science classes that are still around in the US.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Yeah, for sure. I mean if you didn't have, you know,
if these classes started to go away, then kids aren't
going to be interested in that. They're not going to
you know, develop those skills and take those classes in college.
And so without universities training these teachers, you're just going
to have a shortage of professionals teaching it at the
high school level. And that you know, that's still going on.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, and apparently the enrollment rates are very difficult to find.
Olivia helped us with this, and she dug up a
twenty thirteen report that said about three and a half
million high school kids took family and consumer science classes
classes in the twenty eleven a twenty twelve school year.
(30:11):
And that still sounds kind of impressive to me. That
was a forty percent drop from just the decade earlier,
the aughts, the two thousands, and that they were still
pretty much divided among gender lines sixty five percent girls
and thirty five percent boys. So they're still out there,
they're still around. They'd just taken such a massive hit,
(30:31):
and yet there's a lot of people who are like, Okay,
I get why HOMEAK, you know, took a massive hit.
It needed to regroup. It's regrouped now. And we're also
seeing the fallout from what happens when you don't teach
middle and high school kids basic life skills. They grow
up to be adults who don't know how to do
(30:52):
basic life skills. And that seems to be happening before
our very eyes.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, especially you know when it comes to any kind
of like home finance, like passing basic sort of home
financial literacy or even financial literacy, it's really declining. I
think there was a study from the World Economic Forum
in twenty twenty four that found that the majority of
Americans can't pass a test of financial literacy. So if
(31:20):
you ask your average you know, recent high school graduate
and even college graduate sometimes like, you know, tell me
about interest rates, what do you know about inflation or
investing or compound interest or home loans? You might get
that gen z stare back in your face, and you know,
this is the stuff that homek was teaching. You know,
(31:42):
I don't remember so much learning sort of the nitty
gritty of that stuff. But I certainly learned about, you know,
banks and how to get a bank loan, and how
to balance your checkbook and how to kind of keep
up with personal finances.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Exactly, or maybe even do learn how to do basic taxes,
like a simple ten forty form. Again, life stuff. And
in addition to finance stuff, they would learn things like,
you know, how to tell if a chicken breast was underdone,
or maybe a few recipes to cook. And if you
don't teach people even basic stuff like how to cook,
(32:14):
you can't really blame them for eating takeout constantly or
eating nothing but prepackaged foods. Right, So some people say
that this has led to the obesity epidemic that the
United States is facing, at least in part. It's probably
a little full blown to say, yep, that's what happened.
We did away with homech and now that's the problem.
The biggest problem is that's the food that's out there.
(32:36):
But some people are saying, like, we're not. These people
don't have any idea how to cook at all. The
parents didn't take up the slack when the home mech
classes went away, and so that's part of the problem
that came from doing away with home mech.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Yeah for sure. And there are people saying that we
now have generations coming up that don't know how to
adult properly, just sort of basic chores and you know,
ironing and doing laundry and just sort of the things
that you need to do to survive on your own.
They found that younger generations just you know, they weren't
(33:09):
taught that stuff as much, partially from home ech, partially
because they weren't made to do chores like we were.
There was a study from twenty fourteen from Braun Research
that said eighty two percent of parents did chores as children,
but only twenty eight percent have their children doing chores.
And I think a lot of that is just I
(33:30):
don't know, we had to do a lot of chores,
and I think, like, I don't make Ruby do as
many chores as I should, just because I remember what
a drag chores were. Okay, But I'm also trying to
think ahead of like, no, I need to teach her
these life skills as well, So maybe try and mix
some more of that stuff in would be a good idea.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I was wondering where that what the cause was of
that disconnect. Yeah, so is that as simple is that
you just don't want to make your kid unhappy.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
I mean not that we're perfect fine with unhappiness. So yeah,
it's definitely not bad.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
But that's what I'm saying, Like, and I'm not asking
you to just speak for yourself but speak for parents today.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
I'm speaking for myself. No, it's very important that kids
experience all the full range of emotions. So that's that's
definitely not it. It's just I don't know. For me.
I think it's just like chores are such a drag,
and you know, and she's like, you know, nine and
now ten years old, so I think chores will get
a little more ramped up here in the tween and
(34:30):
teen years.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
You should buy her a straw hat and some overalls
for Christmas and be like, this is the year you
get started. So one of the other things you might
be saying is like there's an app for everything, Like
like if you can't cook, it doesn't matter, get door
dash or somebody's going to make food for you and
we'll bring it to you just have to give them money.
(34:53):
And it's that you just have to give them money thing.
That's kind of a problem right now because wages haven't
kept up, and debt has just continued to increase. In
the second quarter of twenty twenty five, America had one
point two to one trillion dollars of credit card debt.
The average American had almost sixty five hundred dollars of
credit card debt on their card at the time. So
(35:17):
it's not like there's just some some easy solution, Like
maybe there will be is stuff like that becomes cheaper,
But right now there's just a whole grab bag of
problems that you can trace back to if not coming
from homeck, not being taught homech being taught could have
solved them or could solve or prevent them in the future.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
Yeah, I mean, I guess a good thing about these
days is you know, there's a YouTube tutorial. There's a
thousand of them for every single task you could ever
want to accomplish in life. Yep. So in that case,
it's good to have an app for that, because I
don't think necessarily younger generations are like, I don't know
how to plug in an iron, So you know, I
think they'll they'd look that stuff up on YouTube and
(35:59):
teach themselves. But you know, it's also good to learn
that in the classroom setting.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
You know, yeah, I'm really glad you said that, because
this could so easily slide into well, when we were
in school, we learned all this stuff and look at
how great we turned out. It could just be people
who are proponents of HOMECH not understanding where the country
is going, where the culture is going, and it's going
away from HOMECH in a different direction that will take
(36:23):
care of itself. It's not like homech is the solution
to every problem. So that's a really good argument against it.
There's others too, like do we if we bring back
like vocational education, does the US need jobs like that?
And you can make an argument against that argument and
(36:44):
that yeah, we do, especially hands on jobs like trade
skills like plumbing and electricians. Jensen Wang, the CEO of Nvidia,
said the next generation of millionaires are going to be
plumbers and electricians because it's so hard to replace that
with AI. So there's like argument one way or another,
but it's you just have to be really careful not
to slip into the back of my day things were
(37:06):
better kind of mentality.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
Oh yeah, I mean, because that will and rightfully get
smack backed in your face if you're like, well, how'd
you learn to steam a shirt? You didn't take homech
and this like TikTok bruh, like get out of my face. Yeah,
we do things differently now and we don't have to
do it the way you did it.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
That's right. Like I can't set a table properly in
like the exact way it's supposed to be, but our parents'
generation probably learned how to do that. It doesn't matter
because the culture evolved in a way that didn't need
that anymore.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Yeah, just put the soup bowl down, cup your hands
and go to town.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
There you go. Yeah, I don't think we can do
any better than ending on that, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Who thank you.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
So if you want to learn more about homech go
find a homech class and take it and then let
us know what you think about it. If you take
home mech, Now get in touch and tell us what's
going on there, because we want to hear if you
got your finger on the pulse of homec And since
I mentioned pulse, that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
Yeah, we're like, what are you using for babies these days?
And they're like, we're just using the babies that we've
had bring them into school.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
They didn't get to us in time.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
This is a Roquettes thing. I think we ran our
Rockettes episode as a select recently because tis the season,
and we heard from Santa Claus. You, guys, hey just
wanted I didn't know Santa was a listener, but it
turns out he is just listened to the selects on
the Rockettes. You did a wonderful job, or heard you
say you hope a Roquette writes in which, by the way,
(38:39):
did happen back then when we first released it. I
may not be a Roquette, but I'm lucky enough to
work very closely with these ladies six days a week.
I've been Santa Claus in the Christmas Spectacular for the
past four years. To say these women are the greatest
stage athletes would be an understatement. Not only are they
the best in their field, but even off stage, they
are gracious, intelligent individuals, and many have other unique passions
(39:03):
outside of dance. This year is quite special as it
marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Roquets, not the
Christmas Spectacular that'll be in twenty thirty three, but if
you guys want to come see a show, let me know.
I'll give you my Santa schedule and get you some tickets.
My wife and I missus Claus a door Stuff you
Should Know and we're at your last New York City
Live show. Thanks for everything, and that is from Santa
(39:25):
Claus Adam.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
That's sweet. Thank you, Santa Adam. That was a really
great one. And thanks for the offer too. We're gonna
have to take them up on it, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
I've always wanted to see that show, so maybe maybe
we'll do that one day.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
That's pretty great. Thanks again, Sanna. And before we sign off, Chuck,
this episode comes out on UM's birthday, so I want
to say happy birthday you MEI. What's your birthday the thirtieth?
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Oh? I thought it was the thirty first. No, I wonder.
I'm always a daylight, but you're not a dollar short, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
You always come.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
Through, all right. Well, have your birthday, Yumi.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Thanks and if you want to get in touch with us,
like Santa did, you can send us an email too
at stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple
Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's
Chuck and it's us today. We've got our aprons on,
we have our spectulism in hand. We've been spanking each
other with them, and it's time to go to class
the stuff you should know.
Speaker 3 (00:24):
Hey, everybody, just so you know, there was construction happening
next door. So if you hear a saw or a
hammer banging, it's not me.
Speaker 2 (00:32):
No, it's not Chuck.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
Sometimes you just got to live with the sounds of life.
Speaker 2 (00:37):
Yeah. I mean we recorded for a while and every
time we recorded, a fire truck would go by, like
soccer do you remember.
Speaker 3 (00:45):
Yeah, Yeah, in the old Buckhead office it was I
think we were near a fire station.
Speaker 2 (00:49):
Yeah, but it was like the exact same time. It
was really bizarre.
Speaker 3 (00:54):
It was the radio lab, guys pulling fire alarms all
over it. Leaf.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
So, Chuck, we're talking about homec today. Did you ever
take a home mech class?
Speaker 3 (01:03):
I sure did, buddy, how about you?
Speaker 2 (01:05):
I did. I have very vague recollections of it. I
remember the room and everything, but I don't remember anything
I did. It's also possible I'm conflating it with an
episode of Saved by the Bell.
Speaker 3 (01:16):
Yeah, yeah, I took it. You know, we had the
full kitchen situation in our high school back then, and
I took it because I don't know, I think I
needed an elective and you know, I knew their beekot
girls in there. And yeah, maybe I had a friend
or two that took it. Was probably my reasoning.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
I could see that. I think both of us are
the types of dudes who would not have been like, OK,
I'm a boy.
Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, no, of course not there. And there were plenty
of dudes in the class.
Speaker 2 (01:45):
Yeah yeah, because gen X is enlightened, that's right. The
thing is, we were really in the minority, though all
the dudes in your class were in the minority. That
from what I read, that was pretty uncommon, even even
at that time. And we were among like the last
age group who could elect for homech. Yeah, pretty much
(02:05):
across the country like this was a time. This was
about the end of the time where you could find
a home MECH classroom and most high schools are middle schools.
But that is not the case anymore. Although it's still around,
it's just not everywhere like it used to be.
Speaker 3 (02:20):
Yeah, and in fact, I can confirm when I went
back to my high school a couple of years ago,
when they had me back to talk to students as
a you know, interesting professional, I remember that. Yeah, it
was fun. I took a walk around and I even
remember going by where the homech room was and it
was definitely not the kitchen anymore.
Speaker 2 (02:38):
No, I remember you told me they filled in all
the sinks with cement.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
Yeah, it's called the cement class.
Speaker 2 (02:45):
So classic get really boring, really fast.
Speaker 3 (02:49):
Yeah, we should probably say homechis stands for home economics,
and just in case that's foreign to your tongue.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
True, true, I understand that it's called homechir home economics
in Australia, and I think maybe Canada and in the
UK they call it food sciences. I think, yeah, it's
all the same thing. And essentially what it is for
those of you who don't know, it was a class
in high school where you would learn basic life skills
that had a lot to do with being at home.
(03:15):
You would learn sewing, you would learn to bake a cake.
As time wore on, you would learn to take care
of a child, maybe learned to balance a checkbook, just
basic life skills as a class in high school or
middle school. And that is it turns out I didn't
quite realize the extent of home ec one little slice
(03:37):
of the whole home ec pie, which is delicious because
it was made by home economists and there's a whole
history to it and it's actually pretty feminists in nature too.
Speaker 3 (03:49):
Yeah, you know, as we'll see, there was a bit
of a push pull at a certain time and which
way both feminism would that have.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
Been the dose?
Speaker 3 (03:58):
The dose? Yeah, where you know, there were certain people
saying like, no, this is you know, you shouldn't be
teaching women to stay at home and stay in the kitchen,
and other people were like, we're not teaching them, saying
you have to do that, but we're saying, you know,
there are viable careers that you can gain in you know,
industrial engineering and statistics. And as we'll see, you know,
(04:21):
plenty of science careers came out of home economics and
food science because it is a science.
Speaker 2 (04:27):
Right, and that was actually one of the initial points
of it. But if you were a homech proponent and
you were arguing with a feminist, you might start by saying,
let me give you a little picture of what life
used to be like for the average woman in the
United States before we came along, and you would start
in about the nineteenth century, they run the turn of it,
(04:48):
so they're still wearing tri cornered hats, but they were
looking forward to trains. And if you were a farm
woman at this time, you worked yourself to the bone.
Speaker 3 (05:00):
Yeah. I mean what we know as homeck was not
early homech because early homech was like you might have
seven or eight kids that all worked on the farm,
and you might have farm hands that you also have
to kind of care for and feed. So you're feeding
these huge families from stuff that you're growing probably on
your land and processing and canning and churning butter, and
(05:24):
you're handmaking clothes and doing laundry by hand, and it's
a lot.
Speaker 2 (05:29):
Yeah, And like you would say, that's not even home economics,
that's just home terribleness, right.
Speaker 3 (05:34):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:34):
When home economics came along, it was based on this
idea that, Okay, all of these people are working really hard.
There has to be ways to improve this to make
it more efficient.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (05:45):
I suspect it. I'm pretty sure we talked about it
that this all grew out of tailorism, that obsession with
getting things as efficient as possible. And I think that
that kind of grew out of that same vein. And
there were actually a few things that and it came
together to make the fertile soil that home grew from.
One of them, the big one was literacy started to
(06:08):
spread in the mid nineteenth century. And so when literacy spreads,
you got more books and home like domestic tips and
householding was a whole genre of books, so were cookbooks.
And then part and parcel of that was this kind
of the very beginnings of this idea that maybe women
can be educated too, but just in women.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
Stuff, Yeah, for sure. And you know, the books were
important because previous to that, it was everything was sort
of handed down from you know, parent to child as
far as any kind of wisdom goes about how to
do anything right. So if you had books and you
had classes, you didn't depend on like your grandmother necessarily
(06:49):
being good at, you know, baking a cake or something
like that.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
Like but if your grandmother was a dipstick, right, yeah, exactly,
So cooking schools also emerged, and this was important because
your grandmother might also in addition to being a dipstick
might not have been that great of a cook. Now
there's a place you can go to learn to cook
well and nutritiously. That was a big one too. And
then also this was a new career path that a
(07:15):
woman could take to become a cook and like say,
a wealthy household, so they were training now people to
work outside of the house doing domestic.
Speaker 3 (07:22):
Stuff, yeah, for sure. And then one of the biggest
ones was the Morile Act of eighteen sixty two, and
that's when land grant colleges were established, and all of
a sudden there were schools that said, hey, maybe we
should offer you know, it was kind of the beginnings
of trade schools, like, you know, teach people how to
work in agriculture and industry and things like that and
(07:45):
not necessarily just sit around with your nose in the
air of reading the classics exactly.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
And women were open or these colleges were open to
women as well too. So these three things come together.
And one of the other reasons that really made homemech
kind of come to life start sprouting from that fertile
soil was the transition that America was going through with industrialization.
All of a sudden, you weren't on the farm with
(08:13):
your mother and grandmother who were telling you how to
do things, like you were in the city now surrounded
by people you've not really ever met before, with a
husband who now works in the factory rather than a farm,
and you're like, I have no idea what I'm doing.
And so Homech kind of came in to fill that
break that had happened, that intergenerational passage of knowledge from
(08:34):
mother to daughter. Homech said, Hey, forget mothers. We're going
to tell you how to do this, and we're going
to tell you how to do it better. They didn't
really say forget mothers. That wasn't the sentiment. That was
me being a smart alec.
Speaker 3 (08:46):
Yeah, and you know, initially it was not in high school.
It was a college level thing. And there's a PhD
named Nancy Darling who kind of backs up this idea
that it was a feminist movement to begin with with
this quote she said, it developed that is from something radical,
the idea that the traditional work of women is important, meaningful,
and here's the key for me, economically significant. And it
(09:10):
was economics. They didn't just call it that to make
it seem fancy. The running of a household is big
time economics, and if you're not good at that, as
we'll see with younger generations, it can spell trouble for sure.
Speaker 2 (09:26):
Yeah yeah, yeah, there's a whole wash out that's happened
that will cover for sure. But one of the people
that you have to tip your top hat to is
Ellen Swallow Richards, who's probably the most important person in
the history or the early history at least of home economics.
Now let's just say it, the entire history of home economics.
She was a pretty impressive sort. She studied chemistry. She
(09:49):
got a bachelor's and a master's from Vassar and then
became the first woman to get a degree from MIT,
and then became the first woman instructor at MIT and
set up a sanitary chemistry lab that was for women only.
And this was not really domestic work. It was figuring
out water quality and air quality tests like essentially the
(10:11):
foundations of environmental protection and consumer protection too. That's what
this lab was doing. And the reason why you associated
with homec is because one of the reasons homech existed. Also,
you said that it started at the college level was
as a way for women, almost a back door a
workaround a loophole for women to become scientists. It was
(10:33):
okay as long as there was enough of a whiff
of women's work like clean water, that's woman's work that
academia could put up with it. That was one of
the big ways homech started funneling women into education and
into the sciences.
Speaker 3 (10:49):
Yeah. I mean she was trying to improve the United States,
and she thought, and she was right on the money.
She was like, if I'm going to try to improve
you know, the United States and civilization, then I have
to start at what she considered. And you know, I
think most people agree is the basic unit, which is
a family, the family unit. And if I can each
(11:12):
if I can get each household one at a time
to practice you know, more efficient practices, more sanitary practices,
safer practices, you know where you're not, you know, burning
kitchens down and things like that, then it'll you know,
all boats will rise. And it started to become a movement.
And you know, this is like the late eighteen hundreds,
early nineteen hundreds.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
Yeah, and remember also there was a big emphasis on
this work is important, Like this is unpaid labor, but
it produces a lot of dividends. For any family, and
hence building upward for civilization, for a nation, civilization all that. So,
like you said, this is starting to become a movement.
And they had a series of conferences called the Lake
Plastid Conferences starting right at the turn of the century,
(11:55):
and at one of these meetings they chose the term
home economics, like you said, to basically point out not
to kind of latch their field on economics, to point
out that domestic work was a huge part of economics,
and up to this point economists had basically just been
looking at production, they weren't looking at the demand side.
(12:17):
And one of the things HOMECH introduced was the idea
of consumer sciences, like studying consumption as well as part
of the larger economy, which is you can't do economics
without that now, but that's what one of the things
HOMECH introduced.
Speaker 3 (12:32):
Yeah, and they came up with the name homek at
one of those conferences after debating domestic science and they said,
now that that doesn't sound like it's studying consumerism. That's
a big part of this. I think household arts was
put forward and they said, no, that sounds too artsy,
fartsy and not academic. Enough, so they landed on home
(12:53):
economics and an ironic twist that kind of takes it
back home because the words or economics comes from I
love this word oiknoymia oikonomia. I inserted an extra either,
which is ancient Greek for household management. So there you
have it.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
Yeah, they dropped the old timing mike at this point.
Speaker 3 (13:16):
Yeah, for sure. And then in nineteen oh eight, at
that same conference, the Lake Placid Conference, they founded the
American Home Economics Association. Really got the ball rolling, and
then shortly after, in nineteen seventeen, the Hughes Act started
funding vocational education like shop class and homech and it
was off to the races.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Yep. So you want to take a break and come
back and talk about how, like you said, home X
starts to take off.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Want to learn about a terrors sort and college arridactyl,
how to take a perfect is gone?
Speaker 3 (14:01):
That's a little hunt the Lizzie Borderer.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Word up, Jerry. Okay. So when we left off, homech
was starting to take off, and by the nineteen twenties,
the USDA, the Department of Agriculture, had created the Bureau
of Home economics, and when you create a bureau dedicated
to a new field, that's that's when the field has arrived.
If you're a band and weird Al has done a
(14:32):
cover of your song, that's how you know you've arrived.
If you're a field of study and someone opens a
bureau dedicated to it, that's how you know your field arrived.
But it became the country's biggest employer of women's scientists,
which is pretty significant at the time.
Speaker 3 (14:48):
That's right. Their mission, of course, was education, and it
wasn't just you know, how to cook obviously, it was
meal planning, it was budgeting. There was a lot of
science behind it because they got into you know, nutritional
values like in any you know, nutritional tag that you read,
and in fact, any like clothing tag that you read.
(15:10):
I'll go ahead and get ahead of that one. That
all was born out of the science of this new
bureau that was founded. They were testing mildew proofing for fabrics.
They were servicing military service members, like you know, trying
to come up with better things for the US military
to eat, and of course school lunch programs all over
the country were dependent on the science.
Speaker 2 (15:31):
Yeah, this is where the square pizza was invented.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
I suspect they should have a monument to that.
Speaker 2 (15:37):
Well, one of the I agree one of the other
things about that though, in addition to the square pizza,
the square pizza is actually an excellent example of this pizza.
It comes from Italy, and if you've ever seen an
actual like Neapolitan pizza, it does not resemble the square pizza.
The square pizza at lunch is the Midwestern americanized, much
blander version of it, although I agree with you it's
(15:59):
quite good. And this is where American food as we
think of it today was founded. All the ethnic food
got pushed out as the immigrants were kind of brought
into the home ech world, and that bland Midwestern American
food took over. That's where that came from.
Speaker 3 (16:15):
And this also coincided with the birth of radio that
we seems like we've talked a lot about that lately.
But because of that, of course you're going to have
shows on the radio about this kind of thing. The
Bureau of Home Economics in the twenties had a show
called Housekeeper's Chat that ran for a couple of decades.
Started in nineteen twenty six. Not Uncle Sam, but Aunt
Sammy was the host of that one, or I guess
(16:37):
not the host, but it featured her and she would
have like household tips and recipes and stuff like that.
A lot of the brands got in the game, General
Mills and Betty Crocker Cooking School of the Air. You know,
it's another radio show sponsored by General Mills. And again
the Bureau was like helping to get all of these
(16:57):
things launched on the airwaves.
Speaker 2 (17:00):
One of the other examples of what the Bureau of
Home Economics was doing that had a huge sweeping impact
in addition to founding like the mass produced food movement,
was they came up with the poverty line. In fact,
Molly or Shansky did. She was a statistician who studied
how much a house spent to come up with a
(17:21):
basic nutritious diet that could keep you alive. They multiplied
that by three and they came up with the federal
poverty line that's still in use today.
Speaker 3 (17:30):
Yeah, and if you've ever seen, you know, astronauts eating
lasagna out of a what looks like a toothpaste tube
or something like that, you can thank Home Economics and
Science for that. Because a woman named Bee Finkelstein, great name,
she was getting food together for the very first astronauts
in the Mercury Project, which is pretty great, that's right.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
And then one of the other things that struck me
too that I didn't realize was that a lot of
those recipes that you find on like a food label.
One of the most famous ones is Campbell's Cream and
Mushroom soup labels have a cream bean casserole recipe, and
that was created by a home economist who worked for Campbell's,
Dorcas Riley, And she's a good example of what was
(18:16):
happening at this time. Starting in the twenties thirty four
and continuing on, these companies like General Mills and Campbell's
were setting up home economics departments, and one of the
things that these home economists were being paid to do
was to figure out new uses for the products made
by the companies they worked for so that people would
buy more of that stuff. And then they put those
(18:38):
recipes on the label.
Speaker 3 (18:40):
Yeah. I mean, if you love rice Krispy Treats, you
can thank the home economics program and Matilligens and Mildred
Day at Kellogg's there for that and Chex Mix. This
wasn't a sort of an internal team. But chex Mix
was actually a contest and it was in I believe
the nineteen fifty when they just had a contest like
(19:02):
what can you do with check Cereal? And someone submitted
chex Mix, and like it's the same recipe basically that
everyone enjoys today, Like all of these.
Speaker 2 (19:12):
Are did your family make chex mix around the holidays?
Speaker 3 (19:16):
But not a time that Emily's family really did though,
so she still makes you know, that same recipe, that
chex mix recipe.
Speaker 2 (19:22):
It must be so high. Oh then because my family
did as well. Yeah, but that's a good example of
how like these companies farmed out the task of coming
up with stuff because homech had become so widespread, the
average homemaker out there could do the same thing in
a lot of ways that some of the homech workers
working for the company could do too. I think that's
(19:43):
pretty neat.
Speaker 3 (19:44):
Talk about efficiencies, like if you're baking a cake from scratch,
or making pancakes or something like that, or a gravy
from scratch. There were women in homech's homeck departments at
companies saying like, hey, we can make this. You know,
there's a lot to do, so what if it if
this stuff was all kind of pre mixed in a
box and you could sell them like well, I was
(20:05):
about to say, like hotcakes, and they did. And you
know that these were things that were real time savers
in the kitchen.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
For sure, And that was the point remember of homech
is saving time, being more efficient. And then as food
companies were concerned making tons of money off of this
stuff too, So that's kind of going on in the
corporate world the government world. Simultaneously, there's that whole thread
of homech being taught in high school in middle school,
(20:33):
and there was a time in the twentieth century up
into the eighties and nineties, and I'm sure beyond again.
These these classes are still out there, but nothing like
they used to be, where you could go into a
high school or middle school and there was a simulated
kitchen in one of the rooms with a bunch of
different stoves and ovens and refrigerators, and people would be
(20:53):
in there cooking and learning to sew, and maybe taking
care of a fake baby and in some cases taking
care of a real baby too, because this stuff got
intense sometimes.
Speaker 3 (21:05):
Yeah, the baby thing. I don't remember our high school
class ever, delving into that. I do remember the egg babies,
like where you would I never had to take part,
but I saw other kids in school carrying around the
egg and yeah, sort of in the seventies and eighties,
they would give you a raw egg, you know, in
(21:26):
the shell, and because some people will be like what
the heck is he even talking about, they would give
you an egg. And the whole idea was you have
to care for that egg without breaking it for a
couple of weeks. You got to carry this thing around.
It sounds easy just to not get that egg broken,
but it's really not. You know, you have to really
think ahead about everything. And that's the whole idea, is
(21:46):
that when you have a baby, you can't just make
decisions on the spur of the moment. You have to
kind of pre plan everything. And the egg came along
after they'd used real babies from orphanages.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
Yeah, apparently it's some of the colleges that were teaching
home they would borrow babies from orphanages for the students
to just basically practice on. And apparently there's a writer,
a historian named Danielle Drellinger who wrote a book The
Secret History of Home economics, And she said that for
adoptive parents who would go to a foster home, they'd
(22:17):
show up and be like, you got any one of
them babies that's been in the home economic classic? Yeah, man,
because the reasoning is, these babies spent some of their
earliest days being cared for just with complete attention and
care by women who were working in like the cutting
edge of child rearing, so they were much more desirable
(22:37):
than the non homech babies.
Speaker 3 (22:39):
It turns out, yeah, for sure. I mean before I
even read that part of this, I was thinking in
my head, like, oh man, you want that baby for sure?
Speaker 2 (22:47):
For sure. Apparently those eggs would get on custodian's nerves
enough that they switched to flour or sugar, which also
had the added benefit of heft. And I saw in
a like some educational magazine I can't remember, but they
would put pantyhose of different colors to simulate multicultural skin
(23:08):
tones over the flower sugar, and that sometimes if you forgot,
like your kid, whether it was an egg or a
sack of flower or something in your locker, you might
be forced to like write a paper on child abuse
or something like that. So the whole point was to
just teach high school kids you don't want to have
a baby at this period in your life. Maybe ever,
(23:29):
like if the class was hard enough, maybe they're like,
I'm never having a kid, but certainly not through my
teen years. That was the point.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
Yeah, it's kind of funny. I think they kind of
sold it to you as like, here, it'll teach you
like how to kind of care for a baby and
how much goes into that. But what they were really
saying is police don't have sex kind of kind well,
I mean one of them in the nineties they came
along with a more of a like a baby simulator.
It was called Baby Think it Over. I mean they've
(23:59):
flat out seted it that point. Yeah, Like I think
we all know what think it over means.
Speaker 2 (24:04):
Sure, And I don't know if it worked or not,
but it was a great attempt at the very least
for sure. So by the middle of the twentieth century,
I think nineteen fifty nine, half of all American girls,
half of all the girls in America were taking home
mech courses in school. And then just suddenly it just
dried up. It wasn't like a faucet got turned off
(24:25):
or a light switch was turned. But it started to
go downhill pretty fast in about the early sixties. And
let's take a break and we'll come back and talk
about where Homech went after.
Speaker 1 (24:37):
Well, the break, I want to learn about a terrors
ort in college, horedactyl, how to take a bird, a
rectal gink is gone, that's a little.
Speaker 3 (24:55):
Hunt, the Lizzie everything, joh.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
S word up, Jerry.
Speaker 3 (25:05):
All right, So Homeck is on the decline. And there's
a bunch of reasons for this that kind of all
kind of steamrolled together at a certain point. But one
of the biggest ones was when the United States really
got into standardized testing, which came along mostly with the
No Child Left Behind Act, Because all of a sudden,
a school's funding was tied to test scores. And if
(25:28):
there aren't any Homech questions on these tests and the
testing is tied to funding, then what's the point of
even teaching that stuff. I don't agree with that, obviously,
but that was sort of the thought, and so a
lot of those classes started to just slowly go away.
Speaker 2 (25:43):
Yeah, and there was an article on father Lee written
by a guy named Cameron LeBlanc, and he traced it
back even Further, he traced the origin of where the
emphasis on STEM came from the eighties and the Vocational
and Technical Education Act that Ronald Reagan signed, where it said,
cater's colleges, you're no longer responsible for figuring out what
(26:04):
we want to teach our kids. We're going to hand
this over to business and industry so they can tell
us what they want us to teach, so that we
can basically train workers. That was the point from that
point on for school, train workers as much as you can.
And then eventually universities got in on the act and
they're like, let's also make these like pipelines to colleges,
so like that's the point of high school is to
(26:24):
get into college, and we're going to charge them out
the yin yang. So standardization of testing was a huge
part of it, but that was not the only part.
Like you kind of touched on earlier, Betty Fridan's feminist mystique,
which kicked off the second wave of feminism, as very
often cited as a huge chilling effect or having a
(26:44):
huge chilling effect on home mech classes being taught in
high school.
Speaker 3 (26:48):
Yeah, for sure, a lot of people started dropping those classes,
saying it was, you know, sort of symbolic of a
woman's confinement to the home in the kitchen. The Vocational
Education Act of nineteen sixty three all of a sudden
gutted or at least reduced funding that that Smith's Hughes
Act had brought about. So it was, you know, shop
(27:09):
class suffered kind of the same fate around the same
time for the same reasons. We didn't have shop at
my school. We had Industrial Arts, which I took, and
I bet you anything, those have kind of lessened over
the years as well. Now that I think about.
Speaker 2 (27:22):
It, is an industrial arts the same thing as shop.
Is it different?
Speaker 3 (27:26):
No, shop is like like autoshop class.
Speaker 2 (27:30):
Oh no, I think that's different. I think shop is
like drill presses and lathes and stuff like that.
Speaker 3 (27:35):
Well, it depends on your school. A lot of schools
had autoshop class, yeah, like where they taught you had
to change oil and work on your carburetor.
Speaker 2 (27:43):
For sure. My high school had that. My middle school
had shop class in home.
Speaker 3 (27:47):
Mac what they call the autoshop class.
Speaker 2 (27:50):
I don't remember. I don't remember, but I saw it
written somewhere as like automotive arts or something like that. Really, yeah,
somebody said it so I get to repeat.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
It the art of changing oil exactly.
Speaker 2 (28:07):
But now I knew a couple of kids who were like,
I'm going to be a mechanic, That's what i want
to do after school. I'm not going to go to college,
so it's great, I'm getting this education starting now in
high school, Like it would give them a huge leg
up to either becoming apprentices or going and taking like
classes at a technical trade school. Right that went away,
(28:31):
vocational education just really took a huge hit, and again
high school became a pipeline for college. Homech still kind
of stayed around. It saw the writing on the wall,
but it rebranded itself as Family and Consumer Sciences, I
think because homeck just had such a folksy, old timey
name that seemed to reinforce gendered stereotypes. Family and Consumer
(28:54):
Sciences is new, it's fresh, it's nineties, right, And they
had a bigger emphasis on careers, helping people start careers
outside the home, like interior design, nutrition, elder care, culinary arts,
like you could become a chef, get a huge leg
up taking high school classes. About that. So that's still
around today. But one of the biggest problems that Family
(29:17):
and consumer science classes still have that started around this time.
Is finding qualified teachers to actually teach the family and
consumer science classes that are still around in the US.
Speaker 3 (29:30):
Yeah, for sure. I mean if you didn't have, you know,
if these classes started to go away, then kids aren't
going to be interested in that. They're not going to
you know, develop those skills and take those classes in college.
And so without universities training these teachers, you're just going
to have a shortage of professionals teaching it at the
high school level. And that you know, that's still going on.
Speaker 2 (29:51):
Yeah, and apparently the enrollment rates are very difficult to find.
Olivia helped us with this, and she dug up a
twenty thirteen report that said about three and a half
million high school kids took family and consumer science classes
classes in the twenty eleven a twenty twelve school year.
(30:11):
And that still sounds kind of impressive to me. That
was a forty percent drop from just the decade earlier,
the aughts, the two thousands, and that they were still
pretty much divided among gender lines sixty five percent girls
and thirty five percent boys. So they're still out there,
they're still around. They'd just taken such a massive hit,
(30:31):
and yet there's a lot of people who are like, Okay,
I get why HOMEAK, you know, took a massive hit.
It needed to regroup. It's regrouped now. And we're also
seeing the fallout from what happens when you don't teach
middle and high school kids basic life skills. They grow
up to be adults who don't know how to do
(30:52):
basic life skills. And that seems to be happening before
our very eyes.
Speaker 3 (30:57):
Yeah, especially you know when it comes to any kind
of like home finance, like passing basic sort of home
financial literacy or even financial literacy, it's really declining. I
think there was a study from the World Economic Forum
in twenty twenty four that found that the majority of
Americans can't pass a test of financial literacy. So if
(31:20):
you ask your average you know, recent high school graduate
and even college graduate sometimes like, you know, tell me
about interest rates, what do you know about inflation or
investing or compound interest or home loans? You might get
that gen z stare back in your face, and you know,
this is the stuff that homek was teaching. You know,
(31:42):
I don't remember so much learning sort of the nitty
gritty of that stuff. But I certainly learned about, you know,
banks and how to get a bank loan, and how
to balance your checkbook and how to kind of keep
up with personal finances.
Speaker 2 (31:53):
Exactly, or maybe even do learn how to do basic taxes,
like a simple ten forty form. Again, life stuff. And
in addition to finance stuff, they would learn things like,
you know, how to tell if a chicken breast was underdone,
or maybe a few recipes to cook. And if you
don't teach people even basic stuff like how to cook,
(32:14):
you can't really blame them for eating takeout constantly or
eating nothing but prepackaged foods. Right, So some people say
that this has led to the obesity epidemic that the
United States is facing, at least in part. It's probably
a little full blown to say, yep, that's what happened.
We did away with homech and now that's the problem.
The biggest problem is that's the food that's out there.
(32:36):
But some people are saying, like, we're not. These people
don't have any idea how to cook at all. The
parents didn't take up the slack when the home mech
classes went away, and so that's part of the problem
that came from doing away with home mech.
Speaker 3 (32:49):
Yeah for sure. And there are people saying that we
now have generations coming up that don't know how to
adult properly, just sort of basic chores and you know,
ironing and doing laundry and just sort of the things
that you need to do to survive on your own.
They found that younger generations just you know, they weren't
(33:09):
taught that stuff as much, partially from home ech, partially
because they weren't made to do chores like we were.
There was a study from twenty fourteen from Braun Research
that said eighty two percent of parents did chores as children,
but only twenty eight percent have their children doing chores.
And I think a lot of that is just I
(33:30):
don't know, we had to do a lot of chores,
and I think, like, I don't make Ruby do as
many chores as I should, just because I remember what
a drag chores were. Okay, But I'm also trying to
think ahead of like, no, I need to teach her
these life skills as well, So maybe try and mix
some more of that stuff in would be a good idea.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
I was wondering where that what the cause was of
that disconnect. Yeah, so is that as simple is that
you just don't want to make your kid unhappy.
Speaker 3 (33:58):
I mean not that we're perfect fine with unhappiness. So yeah,
it's definitely not bad.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
But that's what I'm saying, Like, and I'm not asking
you to just speak for yourself but speak for parents today.
Speaker 3 (34:09):
I'm speaking for myself. No, it's very important that kids
experience all the full range of emotions. So that's that's
definitely not it. It's just I don't know. For me.
I think it's just like chores are such a drag,
and you know, and she's like, you know, nine and
now ten years old, so I think chores will get
a little more ramped up here in the tween and
(34:30):
teen years.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
You should buy her a straw hat and some overalls
for Christmas and be like, this is the year you
get started. So one of the other things you might
be saying is like there's an app for everything, Like
like if you can't cook, it doesn't matter, get door
dash or somebody's going to make food for you and
we'll bring it to you just have to give them money.
(34:53):
And it's that you just have to give them money thing.
That's kind of a problem right now because wages haven't
kept up, and debt has just continued to increase. In
the second quarter of twenty twenty five, America had one
point two to one trillion dollars of credit card debt.
The average American had almost sixty five hundred dollars of
credit card debt on their card at the time. So
(35:17):
it's not like there's just some some easy solution, Like
maybe there will be is stuff like that becomes cheaper,
But right now there's just a whole grab bag of
problems that you can trace back to if not coming
from homeck, not being taught homech being taught could have
solved them or could solve or prevent them in the future.
Speaker 3 (35:38):
Yeah, I mean, I guess a good thing about these
days is you know, there's a YouTube tutorial. There's a
thousand of them for every single task you could ever
want to accomplish in life. Yep. So in that case,
it's good to have an app for that, because I
don't think necessarily younger generations are like, I don't know
how to plug in an iron, So you know, I
think they'll they'd look that stuff up on YouTube and
(35:59):
teach themselves. But you know, it's also good to learn
that in the classroom setting.
Speaker 2 (36:03):
You know, yeah, I'm really glad you said that, because
this could so easily slide into well, when we were
in school, we learned all this stuff and look at
how great we turned out. It could just be people
who are proponents of HOMECH not understanding where the country
is going, where the culture is going, and it's going
away from HOMECH in a different direction that will take
(36:23):
care of itself. It's not like homech is the solution
to every problem. So that's a really good argument against it.
There's others too, like do we if we bring back
like vocational education, does the US need jobs like that?
And you can make an argument against that argument and
(36:44):
that yeah, we do, especially hands on jobs like trade
skills like plumbing and electricians. Jensen Wang, the CEO of Nvidia,
said the next generation of millionaires are going to be
plumbers and electricians because it's so hard to replace that
with AI. So there's like argument one way or another,
but it's you just have to be really careful not
to slip into the back of my day things were
(37:06):
better kind of mentality.
Speaker 3 (37:08):
Oh yeah, I mean, because that will and rightfully get
smack backed in your face if you're like, well, how'd
you learn to steam a shirt? You didn't take homech
and this like TikTok bruh, like get out of my face. Yeah,
we do things differently now and we don't have to
do it the way you did it.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
That's right. Like I can't set a table properly in
like the exact way it's supposed to be, but our parents'
generation probably learned how to do that. It doesn't matter
because the culture evolved in a way that didn't need
that anymore.
Speaker 3 (37:38):
Yeah, just put the soup bowl down, cup your hands
and go to town.
Speaker 2 (37:42):
There you go. Yeah, I don't think we can do
any better than ending on that, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (37:48):
Who thank you.
Speaker 2 (37:50):
So if you want to learn more about homech go
find a homech class and take it and then let
us know what you think about it. If you take
home mech, Now get in touch and tell us what's
going on there, because we want to hear if you
got your finger on the pulse of homec And since
I mentioned pulse, that means it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 3 (38:08):
Yeah, we're like, what are you using for babies these days?
And they're like, we're just using the babies that we've
had bring them into school.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
They didn't get to us in time.
Speaker 3 (38:19):
This is a Roquettes thing. I think we ran our
Rockettes episode as a select recently because tis the season,
and we heard from Santa Claus. You, guys, hey just
wanted I didn't know Santa was a listener, but it
turns out he is just listened to the selects on
the Rockettes. You did a wonderful job, or heard you
say you hope a Roquette writes in which, by the way,
(38:39):
did happen back then when we first released it. I
may not be a Roquette, but I'm lucky enough to
work very closely with these ladies six days a week.
I've been Santa Claus in the Christmas Spectacular for the
past four years. To say these women are the greatest
stage athletes would be an understatement. Not only are they
the best in their field, but even off stage, they
are gracious, intelligent individuals, and many have other unique passions
(39:03):
outside of dance. This year is quite special as it
marks the one hundredth anniversary of the Roquets, not the
Christmas Spectacular that'll be in twenty thirty three, but if
you guys want to come see a show, let me know.
I'll give you my Santa schedule and get you some tickets.
My wife and I missus Claus a door Stuff you
Should Know and we're at your last New York City
Live show. Thanks for everything, and that is from Santa
(39:25):
Claus Adam.
Speaker 2 (39:28):
That's sweet. Thank you, Santa Adam. That was a really
great one. And thanks for the offer too. We're gonna
have to take them up on it, Chuck.
Speaker 3 (39:35):
I've always wanted to see that show, so maybe maybe
we'll do that one day.
Speaker 2 (39:38):
That's pretty great. Thanks again, Sanna. And before we sign off, Chuck,
this episode comes out on UM's birthday, so I want
to say happy birthday you MEI. What's your birthday the thirtieth?
Speaker 3 (39:50):
Oh? I thought it was the thirty first. No, I wonder.
I'm always a daylight, but you're not a dollar short, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (39:56):
You always come.
Speaker 3 (39:57):
Through, all right. Well, have your birthday, Yumi.
Speaker 2 (39:59):
Thanks and if you want to get in touch with us,
like Santa did, you can send us an email too
at stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 3 (40:10):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
For more podcasts myheart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple
Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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My Favorite Murder with Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark
My Favorite Murder is a true crime comedy podcast hosted by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark. Each week, Karen and Georgia share compelling true crimes and hometown stories from friends and listeners. Since MFM launched in January of 2016, Karen and Georgia have shared their lifelong interest in true crime and have covered stories of infamous serial killers like the Night Stalker, mysterious cold cases, captivating cults, incredible survivor stories and important events from history like the Tulsa race massacre of 1921. My Favorite Murder is part of the Exactly Right podcast network that provides a platform for bold, creative voices to bring to life provocative, entertaining and relatable stories for audiences everywhere. The Exactly Right roster of podcasts covers a variety of topics including historic true crime, comedic interviews and news, science, pop culture and more. Podcasts on the network include Buried Bones with Kate Winkler Dawson and Paul Holes, That's Messed Up: An SVU Podcast, This Podcast Will Kill You, Bananas and more.