November 3, 2010 • 29 mins
In this episode, Molly and Cristen explore the surprisingly feminist origins and history of Home Economics, an academic discipline that's often referred to as Family and Consumer Sciences today.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to step mom never told you?
From house stup works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. Is Smiley and I'm Kristen. Kristen. Let's go
(00:21):
back to my high school days, right for some memories.
And I think I might have mentioned this on other podcasts.
I'm not sure, probably because it was kind of a
big part of my high school career. Was my membership
in the Future Homemakers of America. Yes, and I remember,
you know, back then, I didn't. It wasn't hip to
you know, feminist writings and uh and the like. It
(00:43):
was not. It was not the stuff mom, I who
told you host you see before you today? But even then,
like the name rubbed me the wrong way, the homemaker part,
the homemaker part. I loved the organization. I did so
many cool projects with them. I went to national conventions
and I was on national committees and um, you know one.
It was really a big part of my high school experience.
I'm really glad I did it. So what kind of
(01:04):
projects did you do? Though? I'm just curious? You just
make do you so? Things? But I did UM competitive events,
of which there were a wide or way to choose from.
You could do UM a baking project, you do a
fashion project. I was dick community service projects. UM taught
some little kids to read, helped them improve their scores
that year. I'm very proud to report UM. But I
(01:26):
was really relieved when they changed the name right before
my senior year of high school from Future Homemakers America
to Family Career Community Leaders of America. That does sound
in a lot more legit, because I thought that looked
better on college resumes UM. And also I remember, you know,
to be a member of a h A you had
to take the Family and Consumer Science classes UM formerly
(01:48):
known as HOMEMECK. And even when I was telling my friends,
you know, next period, I've got Foods and Nutrition, or
next period I've got my sewing class, or next period
I've got UM Parenting and child about admit, it always
felt weird to say that, because you know, you just
you had this thing that you really you shouldn't be
learning this. You should be worried about your career and
(02:09):
not staying at home. You know, even then, I kind
of knew that there was something is stigmatized about um
these skills, even though I would get in parenting and
child development, You'd learned all these cool things about child
psychology and biology of how a baby developed in the womb.
And it was a really cool class. But I remember
being really embarrassed I was taking it, and Uh, I
wanted to kind of dive into why HOMEMEC has this
(02:30):
stigma around it, because for for being such a cool
organization and being some of the best classes I took
in high school, I was really kind of embarrassed to
be a future Home Make of America and be taking
home mac sure because from my perspective, obviously we know
that I was homeschooled ha ha um, but I actually
did go to high school high school in a building
outside of my home um your garage jokes, um, and
(02:56):
we did not have any sort of homec um curriculum.
And so from my perspective, home Max seemed like, yeah,
classes you go to to become June Cleaver. Yeah, you know,
you learn how to sew up an apron so you
can put it on and make your man some meat loaf,
which I mean, you know I like meat loaf. Uh,
(03:17):
But you're right, I think there is a major stigma
about home mech and the whole idea of the Becky Homecky's.
And then when you get to college, it's the same
group of women who we refer to as the other
They're just going to get their mrs. Degree. But I
think it's unfortunate because when we go back and we
look at the history of homemec and family and consumer sciences,
(03:38):
the women who pioneered home economics, Uh, pretty awesome. They
are so amazing. I want to go back to high
school and just tell all the kids in those classes
to worship at their altar because it's such a cool
discipline when you look at it from a historical perspective,
and um, now I'm really proud of my participation in it. Yeah,
it's it's an interesting discipline to go back and study.
(04:00):
Also from our perspective because we talk a lot about feminism,
and this is one example when second wave feminism might
not have really been helping out the women too much.
I'm gonna go as far as say they got it wrong.
I think, yeah, homeck feminists, you got it wrong. So
let's let's go back to to the early days. You
gotta remember that kitchens were not always a given. You
(04:23):
got to remember that, like having a sewing machine was
a luxury. Grocery stores didn't exist, and so I think that,
you know, you've got to remember that that is the
environment in which the discipline of home economics sprung up.
It was really teaching women how to do things when
they had no tools to do them. So in eighteen
forty one we have a landmark book written by Catherine Beecher,
(04:47):
who was, fun fact, the half sister of Harry Beecher Stowe.
She wrote the Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use
of Young Ladies at Home, and it was all about
the importance of keeping a healthy, clean home and applying
scientific principles to child rearing, cooking, and housekeeping. And at
(05:08):
the same time she's also advocating for the education of
young women because at first we might think, who beat
your young ladies at home? How about young ladies out
of the home? Okay, but that's the kind of knee
your exseminis reaction that kind of gave home Mech's bad
rep Yeah. I mean, at some point everyone has to
go home. Yeah, even if you're a high powert executive.
Breaking the glass ceiling in a fortune five hunder company.
(05:30):
At some point you have to have a home. And
I love this idea of science behind uh domestic arts.
I guess is um. You know, this book is sort
of the first publication of many that would follow that
are like, you know, at some point, someone's gotta clean
this house, someone's got to get a meal on the table,
someone's going to have to clothe everybody. What are the
(05:52):
most efficient economic, um things to do it? And why
do we do it? You know, why do we need
to clean up the place where we cook our food?
Had like germ theory and bacteriology in it. It was
all about the most scientific ways to do things. And
then in eighteen sixty two we have the passage of
the Moral Act, which established land grant colleges in each date.
(06:15):
And this was really important because this also supplied federal
funding at these colleges for quote unquote mechanic arts. Because
prior to that time, going to college meant you were
going to go to learn the classics and you're going
to become a minister or a doctor or a lawyer,
more of a liberal arts, the bookish kind of education.
But this really recognized the fact that you had all
(06:37):
of this all of these people out in um more
agricultural lands that needed more practical skills. And as part
of that, they extended funding for women who are allowed
to go to these land grant colleges. That was another
great thing about these schools was that they actually admitted women.
And so this these mechanic arts were extended to household
(07:00):
management skills for farmers wives because while the farmers were
out in the fields, the wives had a lot to
do to not only take care of the house, but
also I mean, the household chores were pretty intensive at
that point. And remember this is you know, we're just
starting now to get kitchens and kitchen apparatus, is I guess.
And so you know, there are cooking schools. Even in
(07:21):
the urban locations like Boston, there are these cooking schools
that are so in demand so people can learn, you know,
how to feed their family helpfully. Right, because we don't
have refrigerators at this point. This was one thing I
didn't think about until I was reading this. You know,
it's nice to be able to just throw through your
groceries in the fridge and called the day they didn't
have those kind of things, so you have, you know,
(07:42):
back issues with bacteria. Um sickness is really prevalent at
this point. It's very easily spread throughout households because sanitation.
We really have not gotten the hang of it yet.
And then in eighteen we have the first Lake Placid
confer which is led by this really amazing woman name
(08:04):
Ellen Richards, who was a graduate of Vassar, and she
kind of weaseled her way into M I T. I
didn't want to admit her because she was a woman. Yeah,
but she was like, I'll go anyway, and uh and
by the way, I'll earned a degree in chemistry in chemistry,
and so she organizes the Lake Placid Conference, which coins
the term home economics, and Richards really gets involved in
(08:26):
this movement, as do many of these early pioneers, because
they do have these backgrounds in science. You know, she
has a chemistry degree and she can't get a job
because it was already a struggle enough to get the
chemistry degree. Surely no university's going to hire a woman's scientist.
But she kind of again weasels her way into M
I T and says, well, don't you just give me
a lab just for women and I'll teach them. I'll
(08:46):
teach them some things, and so they really see it
as this this way to get women into education and
then into higher education and then into the workforce. And
so out of these Lake Placid conferences comes sort of
what this what this field of home economics is going
to cover. It's going to cover everything from UM, industrial design,
(09:07):
applied arts, UH, food and nutrition, child rearing, child rearing UM.
Basically everything that's gonna surround you in your home. You're
going to have mastery over if your chair, if the
weaving on it breaks, you're gonna be able to fix it.
And it even applies to things outside of the home,
such as industrial management that gives us school lunch programs
(09:31):
and UH ergonomics, you know from the types of chairs
that we sit in today kind of going you know
down the road. UH home economists are to think for
our comfy chairs that we sit in at our comfy cubicles.
Oh I wish. But then going back to like Placid,
it also forms the Umbrella organization ninet know eight, the
(09:54):
American Home Economics Association, and so they're really starting to
organize and get home mech into the leading colleges and
universities at the time. And yes, they were, Uh, these
ideas were mainly being developed to give to the women.
I think that's when we come down the road that's
(10:14):
going to be the problem that feminists have with this
with this field is that it's women teaching other women
how to be homemakers. But it's before the homemaker takes
on this stigma of a woman who's been kept down
by a man and can't leave the house. I mean
that was just her roll back then. And it was like,
if you are going to have to make a cake
and keep your family from getting sick and make socks
(10:37):
for everyone, what are the most you know, efficient ways
to do it? And it was it was so that
you would see it as an art. You would be like, oh,
today I'm going to, you know, make my art of
baking a cake. It was taking this pride in a
job well done, and it was teaching how to do
the best job you can do. Now, how did that
translate to a class? You know, all these first classes
(10:58):
are in um colleges, and Cornell had one of the
first programs and one of the most famous programs. And
I think my favorite thing I learned about Kristen were
the practice apartments. Oh yeah, so to give these home
x students a chance to put what they learned in
the classroom into practice. Beginning in the early nineteen hundreds,
(11:19):
a lot of collegiate programs started up practice apartments and
practice homes to learn the quote mother craft which they
referred to, which they used to describe the scientific art
of child rearing. Okay, And in nineteen nineteen, they start
bringing in practice babies to these practice apartments so that
(11:43):
the women can really observe the science of child rearing. Hew,
please say practice babies. You might think of, you know,
those fake babies that you get in high school and
you gotta take it home for a week and uh
pretend that it's real and stuff. No, no, no, these
are real babies. Okay. They went to area orphanages and
child welfare associations, picked up some babies, brought them back
(12:08):
to the practice apartments. First practice baby was named Dickie
Domicon for Domestic Economy, and Dickie Domicon was raised for
the first year of his life at Cornell. And the
best part about this, uh these practice babies or that
they were actually highly coveted people who were looking to
(12:30):
adopt because they were raised in this highly scientific and
sanitary environment. They had the best first year of life possible. Yeah,
I mean imagine getting to learn, you know, seeing how
every study that you're learning about in class affects a
real child. Now, let's not get into the potential ethical
issues around borrowing babies. You know, no one it was
(12:52):
unclaimed at the moment, but that's I think it's a
great example though, of just how serious these HOMEMEG programs were.
And as one essay I read put it, you know,
it's it's showing women that you go to school and
you take care of a child. It's not saying you're
taking care of a child seven this is your life.
It's more like, Okay, I've got to do all this
and the I'm gonna come home to my practice home
and I'm gonna use these newest, new fangled theories on
(13:15):
this child. It was. I think it's one of the
first examples of balancing, of teaching a woman to balance
work and family and also when it comes to say,
examining how to manage your home better. Uh, we might
think that that's something that's going to keep women back.
Why do we need to teach them how to become
(13:35):
better domestic workers? But at the same time, I think
it was pretty valuable back then because they didn't have
all of the modern luxuries that we have today, and
so it actually did take just as much time, if
not more as a guy going off to work for
the day for a woman to take care of her home.
So in these whole management courses, students would actually study
(13:57):
take time and motion studies that were developed in industrial
settings and apply them two household tasks such as food prep, dishwashing,
and laundry to figure out how to do it in
far more efficient ways, with the goal of freeing up
women's time to get them out of the house. Now,
Betty for Dan would come back and say, no, you're
(14:17):
just building up the feminine mystique and keeping women in
the home. But at the same time, I think that
I think that those messages might have gotten misinterpreted it
along the way by second wave feminists. Well, and let's
where are the men in all this. The fact of
the matter is is that at Cornell there was something
called the marriage course that was one of the most
popular courses between among men and women. And uh it was,
(14:40):
of course, as it says on marriage. But let me
read you the description from the course catalog Kristen, because
parts of it I did not think sounded that undifferent
from sminty. All right, here we go a course dealing
with the social and economic changes which today are influencing
the relations of men and women before and after marriage.
Scientific information which has promoted the study of mate choice
(15:02):
and marital adjustment, the development of affection in the individual
and the achievement of heterosexuality, substitutes for mate love and
the adjustment of the single person, the choice of a mate,
courtship and engagement, the nature of the marriage relationship, and
factors which influence adjustment to this relationship, adjustments to parenthood.
It taught people how to have a family life, and
(15:24):
these are the issues were still grappling with today, right
and not surprisingly at the time, this course was highly
controversial on campus, but the students loved it, it seems
because someone talked honestly to them. The professor who taught it,
uh Lemo Rockwood. She got in trouble with the school
because she was basically saying, the girl's dorms don't have enough,
you know, privacy for cording to go on a courting
(15:47):
meaning sex. She was fairly she was aware that this
was something that was going on that people wanted to
do before they made this choice. And if they're gonna
do it, she was going to teach them how to
use that information to find the best mate possible. And
you know, that's what we're still struggling to do, is
to teach kids how to do that. And here's someone
who in the early nineteen hundreds is like, here's all
(16:07):
this complicated information about men and women, here's the science
behind it. I like to think maybe she was a
little forerunner of all Smith team. Well. Aside from the
child rearing and mating and food preparation and cleaning your home,
there are certain aspects two of these early homemech courses
of of study that we might not really think about.
(16:31):
For instance, back in the day when all this was
going on, there were major public health issues such as tuberculosis, influenza, typhoid, pneumonia,
and diphtheria, and a lot of this was being spread
and perpetuated because of unsanitary conditions at home. So one
healthy byproduct of home mech was actually looking into hygiene
(16:55):
and sanitation and getting uh, you know, antibiotics developed and
more sanitary practices for food preparation, and all those kind
of things that led to healthier communities. And the home
economics program really kind of saved our butt in the
wars because people didn't know how to deal with these
food shortages. And in World War One, home economists joined
(17:16):
the war effort to educate people about nutritional substitutes for
ration foods. They come back again during the Great Depression
and teach people about canning and about victory gardens and
about how to you know, sustain your family when things
are bad. But while all of this is happening, this
rise of home mack, we have the passage of the
(17:38):
Smith Hughes Act in nineteen seventeen. And on the one hand,
it was a good good move for homech because they
started getting a lot more federal funding. But as part
of the Smith Hughes Act, they had to link home
mach closer to vocational training. Was basically an earmark in
order to get these federal funds. But that also meant
(17:59):
that instead of really being able to focus all of
the attention um in these collegiate programs and you know,
to apply things out to industry and really make it
a respected science, it became more linked to vocational training
and training for high school, so you have more women
who are taking these courses just so that they can
teach girls in high school how to sew and cook
(18:22):
and clean. And I think that that's something that disturbs
some people in the field to the day, is that,
you know, Ellen Richards envisioned every woman who studied at
home economics to be a scientist, not necessarily a teacher
of this type of science. And so some people think
that it really got watered down when it it would
take when it took that move to the high school.
And in combination with that, you've got after the Wars,
(18:45):
the consumer craze where you can get mass produced goods
for the first time, and a lot of women who
had been sort of the movers and shakers in that
field move into that field and work for corporations thinking
that they can really, you know, help design products and
the composition of products, even the packaging in ways that
are going to be the most effective, most efficient for women.
Sometimes they get stuck in the consumer relations role so
(19:08):
that you know, if a housewife calls up, they just
put her on the phone with another woman to to
calmer down. There are some women who made, you know,
really cool UM advances as their roles. Like they talk
about Lucy Mappi, who ran the test kitchen at Corning
Glass and she helped prevent pyrates based on feedback. UM.
There's another woman named Mary Ingle Pennington who promoted the
New Household Refrigeration Bureau so that she could, you know,
(19:30):
you could call up and say which refrigerators gonna work
best for my family. So it's it's kind of around
the nineteen fifties, it's kind of splintering a little bit
from this pure program of study to applications in the field.
That kind of water it down, which I think makes
it the perfect target for the feminist movement, right. And
I think we also have to note too that with
(19:52):
this army of brilliant home economist doing all this work
in the background, just kind of like it still is today,
they were not being paid nearly as much as the
men and similar levels and companies as they were at
the time, and we're highly unrecognized. We still have UM
the you know, the men who were receiving a lot
of the recognition for those kinds of advances because they
(20:14):
were the ones at the top of the companies at
the time, and with the rise of second wave feminism.
We have a major backlash against homec But what I
found most interesting was that the Home Economic Association invited
prominent feminists like Bettyford Dan and Robin Morgan to speak
at their conventions because they considered themselves feminists. They saw
(20:37):
that they were empowering women to do their job the
best that they could do. And you know, someone like
Robin Morton comes into the nineteen SEVENTIWO convention and says, well,
I'm a feminist here addressing the enemy, and uh, you know,
it was very shocking to them, and you know, they
took it seriously. The president that time, Marjorie East, responded,
if home Economics does indeed perpetuate this traditional meant to
(21:00):
concept of women, we may have some rethinking to do.
It's not like these women were fighting to keep them
in the kitchen. They thought that they were, and I
think they were, like I said, empowering women to do
the best that they could do with the tools they
had right and saving time. I think when you look
back to at the story of of Betty Crocker, for instance,
you have her whole persona because back in the day, uh,
(21:24):
people thought that Betty Crocker was an actual person lo
and behold, it's just a brand as we know now,
But it was all these home economists who were developing
all these recipes and all of these mixes for different
things that they thought were would be great because it
would save women time and get them out of the kitchen.
And by the time we get to second wave feminism,
(21:44):
you know, obviously the revolution hasn't happened. A lot of
women are still stuck in the kitchen or stuck at home.
You've got the Betty Drapers, you know, and then there
are also a men who want to be there, right
And I think that you know, that's the whole topic
for another podcast, is how we view women who stay
at home. But I just think that whether you're staying
at home full time or whether you're working and working
(22:07):
full time, at the end of the day, everyone has
to have a home and everyone's gonna have a kitchen,
whether you're a man or a woman. And I think
that that's where, um, the attacks by the feminists on
this department are kind of dangerous because as a result,
kids don't want to take those classes. Even I felt
embarrassment about taking them, because you do think though this
is just wife one oh one, right, and we aren't
(22:29):
recognizing the valuable contributions of these women who not only
were the first woman going out and getting college degrees
and diving into the very male dominated sciences, you know,
but the women who were giving us advances in public
health and sanitation and food preparation. Now granted the you know,
(22:50):
the whole you know, you could argue that the whole
food prep issue has now back slid into fast food
and unhealthy processed foods that are making obese. But that's
the point Jennifer Grosshom makes in an editorial New York Times,
is that we do live in a culture of obesi. Now,
what do we need more than ever but the science
behind food so that you know, a kid can grow
(23:12):
up and learn. Okay, I've got the choice between a
big mac and something else. Here's why I know about
the big mac. And here's what I know about, you know,
a salad and understanding how to prepare that sad, how
to prepare and if you are going to eat a hamburger,
learning about the most you know healthy, learning about the healthiest,
most economical way to make a hamburger. These are not
(23:32):
skills that are bad and of themselves, which I think
was sort of the attack made by feminist is that
if we never teach girls how to sew, they can't
stay home and sew. But everyone's gonna get a hole
in their sock. I think that feminists may have misinterpreted
the spirit behind the original homec you know Ellen Richards,
(23:53):
who graduated from Vasser and weaseled her way into m
I t I don't. I don't know how feminists say
that she was not, you know, standing up for the cause.
I know, and so I think, But I think it's interesting.
You know, when we were researching this podcast, we obviously
spend a lot of time on the historical stuff which
was made possible, I should note by a book that
was written called stir Up that was covered pretty extensively
(24:16):
by Bus and some other articles, and that's what we're
using for our historical source material. But if you look
at articles about home economics or as it's called now,
family and consumer sciences and this idea of homemaking today,
you can tell that the field is still really shaken
up by these attacks they sustained by the feminist Because
even in trend pieces about you know, how crafting its back,
(24:37):
or how canning is back, and all these people want
to learn about these traditional arts. You know, the writers
of these pieces take great pains to separate it from
this traditional idea of homemaking. It's got to beat retro
or ironic or hipster. It's not a recognition that there
is science behind what we do in our homes, Whereas
an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education points out
(25:00):
that Family and Consumer Sciences is responsible for doing things
like designing the comfortable desk chairs and safer fabrics for firefighters,
looking at connections between cancer and foods, biodegradable fibers, social
welfare programs, all of these things which we might not
link it to home mac because it's now called family
(25:21):
and Consumer sciences. But we have homemech too, really thank
for it. So I do think that it's it's kind
of um sad that I was so embarrassed about it
and that the numbers dropped. You know, a lot of
the stories from the past few years also make this
big point to say, well, boys take our classes too,
as if you know, getting boys in the class, we'll
(25:41):
just make it somehow gender neutral and and all right,
which is good because everyone needs these skills, but still
this um idea that homemaking us somehow bad, or that
returning to this idea of you know, making your own
clothes or or making yourself a good meal is somehow
you know, hipster and ironic and if you were an
apron while you do it, it's it's damaging to the
(26:02):
entire female population. Is something that it's one legacy of
feminism that is slightly uncomfortable. So let's hear from you. Guys.
Did you take Homemeck? Do you what do you think
about Homemeck? Let us know your thoughts on it or
are you in family and consumer sciences today, let's hear
from you. It's mom stuff at how stuff works dot com.
(26:25):
And in the meantime, we got a couple of emails
here Molly. Before we get into listener mail, I want
to let everyone know that how stuff Works dot Com
has a brand new app available for the iPhone for
everyone on the go. It's just it's an easy way
(26:45):
to get everything while you're traveling. You can get how
stuff works dot Com articles, videos, and of course podcasts.
There might be some pictures of us, perhaps some photos,
hopefully flattering photos. I don't know, so for all those
people like to push phones while they're you know, waiting
in line on buses, not while you're driving. That's unsafe. Don't, yeah, don't,
(27:08):
don't app while you drive. But for everyone else, we've
got a great app. Check it out, and now let's
get back to listen. Email. So, I've got an email
here from Paul, and it's about the Doll podcast. He writes,
I'm a boy and I play with dolls as a
small kid. The only difference is that instead of being
cabbage patched, they were g I jokes. I put guns
in their hands, bought them cars to drive around in,
(27:29):
while I begged my cars for begged. My parents were
cars anyway, and told all kinds of wonderful imaginary stores
with my dolls. I insisted, and still do publicly, that
these were not dolls but action figures instead. Deep down
I know the truth though. Action figures are nothing more
than dolls that boys play with. Well, I've got an
email here from Mary and it is in response to
a podcast we did a while ago on polycystic ovary syndrome.
(27:51):
The acronym which is p C O S, which Molly
referred to throughout the podcast as pea coasts, and Mary
was very upset us. Apparently we are the only people
in the known world pronouncing it as pecos, and we
certainly do not want to misrepresent polycystic over syndrome. It's
something that is highly underreported when it comes to women's health,
(28:15):
yet is affecting a lot of women, and it's very
difficult sometimes to get an accurate diagnosis. So these symptoms,
you know, are often rage on for women because they
can't find proper treatment. So the last thing we want
to do is call it by the wrong thing. So
Mary says, it really hurts my feelings when you mispronounce
pc O s as. I feel like the way you
(28:36):
pronounced it is making fun of me and my peers.
I know it's not your intention, but please try to
be a little more sensitive instead of the blanket, I
think you should be able to call it whatever you want.
Let's leave it at that, And so we certainly don't
want to leave it at that. So from here on out,
picos will now be pc O s Somalia's to join
(28:58):
the rest of the medical world and all it buy
its acronym. I would like to point out that the
New York Times so that it was pronounced pekos. Alright,
so Mary, you did ask for our source, and there
it is, Molly says New York Times. Alright, So if
you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to
send us an email Mom stuff at how stuff works
dot com or throw it up on our Facebook wall,
(29:20):
or you can give us a shout out on Twitter.
And then, finally, you want to read what Molly and
I are writing about during the week, head over to
our blog It's stuff I've Never told you, and it's
at how stuff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works
dot Com. Want more how stuff works? Check out our
(29:42):
blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page.
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to step mom never told you?
From house stup works dot com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. Is Smiley and I'm Kristen. Kristen. Let's go
(00:21):
back to my high school days, right for some memories.
And I think I might have mentioned this on other podcasts.
I'm not sure, probably because it was kind of a
big part of my high school career. Was my membership
in the Future Homemakers of America. Yes, and I remember,
you know, back then, I didn't. It wasn't hip to
you know, feminist writings and uh and the like. It
(00:43):
was not. It was not the stuff mom, I who
told you host you see before you today? But even then,
like the name rubbed me the wrong way, the homemaker part,
the homemaker part. I loved the organization. I did so
many cool projects with them. I went to national conventions
and I was on national committees and um, you know one.
It was really a big part of my high school experience.
I'm really glad I did it. So what kind of
(01:04):
projects did you do? Though? I'm just curious? You just
make do you so? Things? But I did UM competitive events,
of which there were a wide or way to choose from.
You could do UM a baking project, you do a
fashion project. I was dick community service projects. UM taught
some little kids to read, helped them improve their scores
that year. I'm very proud to report UM. But I
(01:26):
was really relieved when they changed the name right before
my senior year of high school from Future Homemakers America
to Family Career Community Leaders of America. That does sound
in a lot more legit, because I thought that looked
better on college resumes UM. And also I remember, you know,
to be a member of a h A you had
to take the Family and Consumer Science classes UM formerly
(01:48):
known as HOMEMECK. And even when I was telling my friends,
you know, next period, I've got Foods and Nutrition, or
next period I've got my sewing class, or next period
I've got UM Parenting and child about admit, it always
felt weird to say that, because you know, you just
you had this thing that you really you shouldn't be
learning this. You should be worried about your career and
(02:09):
not staying at home. You know, even then, I kind
of knew that there was something is stigmatized about um
these skills, even though I would get in parenting and
child development, You'd learned all these cool things about child
psychology and biology of how a baby developed in the womb.
And it was a really cool class. But I remember
being really embarrassed I was taking it, and Uh, I
wanted to kind of dive into why HOMEMEC has this
(02:30):
stigma around it, because for for being such a cool
organization and being some of the best classes I took
in high school, I was really kind of embarrassed to
be a future Home Make of America and be taking
home mac sure because from my perspective, obviously we know
that I was homeschooled ha ha um, but I actually
did go to high school high school in a building
outside of my home um your garage jokes, um, and
(02:56):
we did not have any sort of homec um curriculum.
And so from my perspective, home Max seemed like, yeah,
classes you go to to become June Cleaver. Yeah, you know,
you learn how to sew up an apron so you
can put it on and make your man some meat loaf,
which I mean, you know I like meat loaf. Uh,
(03:17):
But you're right, I think there is a major stigma
about home mech and the whole idea of the Becky Homecky's.
And then when you get to college, it's the same
group of women who we refer to as the other
They're just going to get their mrs. Degree. But I
think it's unfortunate because when we go back and we
look at the history of homemec and family and consumer sciences,
(03:38):
the women who pioneered home economics, Uh, pretty awesome. They
are so amazing. I want to go back to high
school and just tell all the kids in those classes
to worship at their altar because it's such a cool
discipline when you look at it from a historical perspective,
and um, now I'm really proud of my participation in it. Yeah,
it's it's an interesting discipline to go back and study.
(04:00):
Also from our perspective because we talk a lot about feminism,
and this is one example when second wave feminism might
not have really been helping out the women too much.
I'm gonna go as far as say they got it wrong.
I think, yeah, homeck feminists, you got it wrong. So
let's let's go back to to the early days. You
gotta remember that kitchens were not always a given. You
(04:23):
got to remember that, like having a sewing machine was
a luxury. Grocery stores didn't exist, and so I think that,
you know, you've got to remember that that is the
environment in which the discipline of home economics sprung up.
It was really teaching women how to do things when
they had no tools to do them. So in eighteen
forty one we have a landmark book written by Catherine Beecher,
(04:47):
who was, fun fact, the half sister of Harry Beecher Stowe.
She wrote the Treatise on Domestic Economy for the Use
of Young Ladies at Home, and it was all about
the importance of keeping a healthy, clean home and applying
scientific principles to child rearing, cooking, and housekeeping. And at
(05:08):
the same time she's also advocating for the education of
young women because at first we might think, who beat
your young ladies at home? How about young ladies out
of the home? Okay, but that's the kind of knee
your exseminis reaction that kind of gave home Mech's bad
rep Yeah. I mean, at some point everyone has to
go home. Yeah, even if you're a high powert executive.
Breaking the glass ceiling in a fortune five hunder company.
(05:30):
At some point you have to have a home. And
I love this idea of science behind uh domestic arts.
I guess is um. You know, this book is sort
of the first publication of many that would follow that
are like, you know, at some point, someone's gotta clean
this house, someone's got to get a meal on the table,
someone's going to have to clothe everybody. What are the
(05:52):
most efficient economic, um things to do it? And why
do we do it? You know, why do we need
to clean up the place where we cook our food?
Had like germ theory and bacteriology in it. It was
all about the most scientific ways to do things. And
then in eighteen sixty two we have the passage of
the Moral Act, which established land grant colleges in each date.
(06:15):
And this was really important because this also supplied federal
funding at these colleges for quote unquote mechanic arts. Because
prior to that time, going to college meant you were
going to go to learn the classics and you're going
to become a minister or a doctor or a lawyer,
more of a liberal arts, the bookish kind of education.
But this really recognized the fact that you had all
(06:37):
of this all of these people out in um more
agricultural lands that needed more practical skills. And as part
of that, they extended funding for women who are allowed
to go to these land grant colleges. That was another
great thing about these schools was that they actually admitted women.
And so this these mechanic arts were extended to household
(07:00):
management skills for farmers wives because while the farmers were
out in the fields, the wives had a lot to
do to not only take care of the house, but
also I mean, the household chores were pretty intensive at
that point. And remember this is you know, we're just
starting now to get kitchens and kitchen apparatus, is I guess.
And so you know, there are cooking schools. Even in
(07:21):
the urban locations like Boston, there are these cooking schools
that are so in demand so people can learn, you know,
how to feed their family helpfully. Right, because we don't
have refrigerators at this point. This was one thing I
didn't think about until I was reading this. You know,
it's nice to be able to just throw through your
groceries in the fridge and called the day they didn't
have those kind of things, so you have, you know,
(07:42):
back issues with bacteria. Um sickness is really prevalent at
this point. It's very easily spread throughout households because sanitation.
We really have not gotten the hang of it yet.
And then in eighteen we have the first Lake Placid
confer which is led by this really amazing woman name
(08:04):
Ellen Richards, who was a graduate of Vassar, and she
kind of weaseled her way into M I T. I
didn't want to admit her because she was a woman. Yeah,
but she was like, I'll go anyway, and uh and
by the way, I'll earned a degree in chemistry in chemistry,
and so she organizes the Lake Placid Conference, which coins
the term home economics, and Richards really gets involved in
(08:26):
this movement, as do many of these early pioneers, because
they do have these backgrounds in science. You know, she
has a chemistry degree and she can't get a job
because it was already a struggle enough to get the
chemistry degree. Surely no university's going to hire a woman's scientist.
But she kind of again weasels her way into M
I T and says, well, don't you just give me
a lab just for women and I'll teach them. I'll
(08:46):
teach them some things, and so they really see it
as this this way to get women into education and
then into higher education and then into the workforce. And
so out of these Lake Placid conferences comes sort of
what this what this field of home economics is going
to cover. It's going to cover everything from UM, industrial design,
(09:07):
applied arts, UH, food and nutrition, child rearing, child rearing UM.
Basically everything that's gonna surround you in your home. You're
going to have mastery over if your chair, if the
weaving on it breaks, you're gonna be able to fix it.
And it even applies to things outside of the home,
such as industrial management that gives us school lunch programs
(09:31):
and UH ergonomics, you know from the types of chairs
that we sit in today kind of going you know
down the road. UH home economists are to think for
our comfy chairs that we sit in at our comfy cubicles.
Oh I wish. But then going back to like Placid,
it also forms the Umbrella organization ninet know eight, the
(09:54):
American Home Economics Association, and so they're really starting to
organize and get home mech into the leading colleges and
universities at the time. And yes, they were, Uh, these
ideas were mainly being developed to give to the women.
I think that's when we come down the road that's
(10:14):
going to be the problem that feminists have with this
with this field is that it's women teaching other women
how to be homemakers. But it's before the homemaker takes
on this stigma of a woman who's been kept down
by a man and can't leave the house. I mean
that was just her roll back then. And it was like,
if you are going to have to make a cake
and keep your family from getting sick and make socks
(10:37):
for everyone, what are the most you know, efficient ways
to do it? And it was it was so that
you would see it as an art. You would be like, oh,
today I'm going to, you know, make my art of
baking a cake. It was taking this pride in a
job well done, and it was teaching how to do
the best job you can do. Now, how did that
translate to a class? You know, all these first classes
(10:58):
are in um colleges, and Cornell had one of the
first programs and one of the most famous programs. And
I think my favorite thing I learned about Kristen were
the practice apartments. Oh yeah, so to give these home
x students a chance to put what they learned in
the classroom into practice. Beginning in the early nineteen hundreds,
(11:19):
a lot of collegiate programs started up practice apartments and
practice homes to learn the quote mother craft which they
referred to, which they used to describe the scientific art
of child rearing. Okay, And in nineteen nineteen, they start
bringing in practice babies to these practice apartments so that
(11:43):
the women can really observe the science of child rearing. Hew,
please say practice babies. You might think of, you know,
those fake babies that you get in high school and
you gotta take it home for a week and uh
pretend that it's real and stuff. No, no, no, these
are real babies. Okay. They went to area orphanages and
child welfare associations, picked up some babies, brought them back
(12:08):
to the practice apartments. First practice baby was named Dickie
Domicon for Domestic Economy, and Dickie Domicon was raised for
the first year of his life at Cornell. And the
best part about this, uh these practice babies or that
they were actually highly coveted people who were looking to
(12:30):
adopt because they were raised in this highly scientific and
sanitary environment. They had the best first year of life possible. Yeah,
I mean imagine getting to learn, you know, seeing how
every study that you're learning about in class affects a
real child. Now, let's not get into the potential ethical
issues around borrowing babies. You know, no one it was
(12:52):
unclaimed at the moment, but that's I think it's a
great example though, of just how serious these HOMEMEG programs were.
And as one essay I read put it, you know,
it's it's showing women that you go to school and
you take care of a child. It's not saying you're
taking care of a child seven this is your life.
It's more like, Okay, I've got to do all this
and the I'm gonna come home to my practice home
and I'm gonna use these newest, new fangled theories on
(13:15):
this child. It was. I think it's one of the
first examples of balancing, of teaching a woman to balance
work and family and also when it comes to say,
examining how to manage your home better. Uh, we might
think that that's something that's going to keep women back.
Why do we need to teach them how to become
(13:35):
better domestic workers? But at the same time, I think
it was pretty valuable back then because they didn't have
all of the modern luxuries that we have today, and
so it actually did take just as much time, if
not more as a guy going off to work for
the day for a woman to take care of her home.
So in these whole management courses, students would actually study
(13:57):
take time and motion studies that were developed in industrial
settings and apply them two household tasks such as food prep, dishwashing,
and laundry to figure out how to do it in
far more efficient ways, with the goal of freeing up
women's time to get them out of the house. Now,
Betty for Dan would come back and say, no, you're
(14:17):
just building up the feminine mystique and keeping women in
the home. But at the same time, I think that
I think that those messages might have gotten misinterpreted it
along the way by second wave feminists. Well, and let's
where are the men in all this. The fact of
the matter is is that at Cornell there was something
called the marriage course that was one of the most
popular courses between among men and women. And uh it was,
(14:40):
of course, as it says on marriage. But let me
read you the description from the course catalog Kristen, because
parts of it I did not think sounded that undifferent
from sminty. All right, here we go a course dealing
with the social and economic changes which today are influencing
the relations of men and women before and after marriage.
Scientific information which has promoted the study of mate choice
(15:02):
and marital adjustment, the development of affection in the individual
and the achievement of heterosexuality, substitutes for mate love and
the adjustment of the single person, the choice of a mate,
courtship and engagement, the nature of the marriage relationship, and
factors which influence adjustment to this relationship, adjustments to parenthood.
It taught people how to have a family life, and
(15:24):
these are the issues were still grappling with today, right
and not surprisingly at the time, this course was highly
controversial on campus, but the students loved it, it seems
because someone talked honestly to them. The professor who taught it,
uh Lemo Rockwood. She got in trouble with the school
because she was basically saying, the girl's dorms don't have enough,
you know, privacy for cording to go on a courting
(15:47):
meaning sex. She was fairly she was aware that this
was something that was going on that people wanted to
do before they made this choice. And if they're gonna
do it, she was going to teach them how to
use that information to find the best mate possible. And
you know, that's what we're still struggling to do, is
to teach kids how to do that. And here's someone
who in the early nineteen hundreds is like, here's all
(16:07):
this complicated information about men and women, here's the science
behind it. I like to think maybe she was a
little forerunner of all Smith team. Well. Aside from the
child rearing and mating and food preparation and cleaning your home,
there are certain aspects two of these early homemech courses
of of study that we might not really think about.
(16:31):
For instance, back in the day when all this was
going on, there were major public health issues such as tuberculosis, influenza, typhoid, pneumonia,
and diphtheria, and a lot of this was being spread
and perpetuated because of unsanitary conditions at home. So one
healthy byproduct of home mech was actually looking into hygiene
(16:55):
and sanitation and getting uh, you know, antibiotics developed and
more sanitary practices for food preparation, and all those kind
of things that led to healthier communities. And the home
economics program really kind of saved our butt in the
wars because people didn't know how to deal with these
food shortages. And in World War One, home economists joined
(17:16):
the war effort to educate people about nutritional substitutes for
ration foods. They come back again during the Great Depression
and teach people about canning and about victory gardens and
about how to you know, sustain your family when things
are bad. But while all of this is happening, this
rise of home mack, we have the passage of the
(17:38):
Smith Hughes Act in nineteen seventeen. And on the one hand,
it was a good good move for homech because they
started getting a lot more federal funding. But as part
of the Smith Hughes Act, they had to link home
mach closer to vocational training. Was basically an earmark in
order to get these federal funds. But that also meant
(17:59):
that instead of really being able to focus all of
the attention um in these collegiate programs and you know,
to apply things out to industry and really make it
a respected science, it became more linked to vocational training
and training for high school, so you have more women
who are taking these courses just so that they can
teach girls in high school how to sew and cook
(18:22):
and clean. And I think that that's something that disturbs
some people in the field to the day, is that,
you know, Ellen Richards envisioned every woman who studied at
home economics to be a scientist, not necessarily a teacher
of this type of science. And so some people think
that it really got watered down when it it would
take when it took that move to the high school.
And in combination with that, you've got after the Wars,
(18:45):
the consumer craze where you can get mass produced goods
for the first time, and a lot of women who
had been sort of the movers and shakers in that
field move into that field and work for corporations thinking
that they can really, you know, help design products and
the composition of products, even the packaging in ways that
are going to be the most effective, most efficient for women.
Sometimes they get stuck in the consumer relations role so
(19:08):
that you know, if a housewife calls up, they just
put her on the phone with another woman to to
calmer down. There are some women who made, you know,
really cool UM advances as their roles. Like they talk
about Lucy Mappi, who ran the test kitchen at Corning
Glass and she helped prevent pyrates based on feedback. UM.
There's another woman named Mary Ingle Pennington who promoted the
New Household Refrigeration Bureau so that she could, you know,
(19:30):
you could call up and say which refrigerators gonna work
best for my family. So it's it's kind of around
the nineteen fifties, it's kind of splintering a little bit
from this pure program of study to applications in the field.
That kind of water it down, which I think makes
it the perfect target for the feminist movement, right. And
I think we also have to note too that with
(19:52):
this army of brilliant home economist doing all this work
in the background, just kind of like it still is today,
they were not being paid nearly as much as the
men and similar levels and companies as they were at
the time, and we're highly unrecognized. We still have UM
the you know, the men who were receiving a lot
of the recognition for those kinds of advances because they
(20:14):
were the ones at the top of the companies at
the time, and with the rise of second wave feminism.
We have a major backlash against homec But what I
found most interesting was that the Home Economic Association invited
prominent feminists like Bettyford Dan and Robin Morgan to speak
at their conventions because they considered themselves feminists. They saw
(20:37):
that they were empowering women to do their job the
best that they could do. And you know, someone like
Robin Morton comes into the nineteen SEVENTIWO convention and says, well,
I'm a feminist here addressing the enemy, and uh, you know,
it was very shocking to them, and you know, they
took it seriously. The president that time, Marjorie East, responded,
if home Economics does indeed perpetuate this traditional meant to
(21:00):
concept of women, we may have some rethinking to do.
It's not like these women were fighting to keep them
in the kitchen. They thought that they were, and I
think they were, like I said, empowering women to do
the best that they could do with the tools they
had right and saving time. I think when you look
back to at the story of of Betty Crocker, for instance,
you have her whole persona because back in the day, uh,
(21:24):
people thought that Betty Crocker was an actual person lo
and behold, it's just a brand as we know now,
But it was all these home economists who were developing
all these recipes and all of these mixes for different
things that they thought were would be great because it
would save women time and get them out of the kitchen.
And by the time we get to second wave feminism,
(21:44):
you know, obviously the revolution hasn't happened. A lot of
women are still stuck in the kitchen or stuck at home.
You've got the Betty Drapers, you know, and then there
are also a men who want to be there, right
And I think that you know, that's the whole topic
for another podcast, is how we view women who stay
at home. But I just think that whether you're staying
at home full time or whether you're working and working
(22:07):
full time, at the end of the day, everyone has
to have a home and everyone's gonna have a kitchen,
whether you're a man or a woman. And I think
that that's where, um, the attacks by the feminists on
this department are kind of dangerous because as a result,
kids don't want to take those classes. Even I felt
embarrassment about taking them, because you do think though this
is just wife one oh one, right, and we aren't
(22:29):
recognizing the valuable contributions of these women who not only
were the first woman going out and getting college degrees
and diving into the very male dominated sciences, you know,
but the women who were giving us advances in public
health and sanitation and food preparation. Now granted the you know,
(22:50):
the whole you know, you could argue that the whole
food prep issue has now back slid into fast food
and unhealthy processed foods that are making obese. But that's
the point Jennifer Grosshom makes in an editorial New York Times,
is that we do live in a culture of obesi. Now,
what do we need more than ever but the science
behind food so that you know, a kid can grow
(23:12):
up and learn. Okay, I've got the choice between a
big mac and something else. Here's why I know about
the big mac. And here's what I know about, you know,
a salad and understanding how to prepare that sad, how
to prepare and if you are going to eat a hamburger,
learning about the most you know healthy, learning about the healthiest,
most economical way to make a hamburger. These are not
(23:32):
skills that are bad and of themselves, which I think
was sort of the attack made by feminist is that
if we never teach girls how to sew, they can't
stay home and sew. But everyone's gonna get a hole
in their sock. I think that feminists may have misinterpreted
the spirit behind the original homec you know Ellen Richards,
(23:53):
who graduated from Vasser and weaseled her way into m
I t I don't. I don't know how feminists say
that she was not, you know, standing up for the cause.
I know, and so I think, But I think it's interesting.
You know, when we were researching this podcast, we obviously
spend a lot of time on the historical stuff which
was made possible, I should note by a book that
was written called stir Up that was covered pretty extensively
(24:16):
by Bus and some other articles, and that's what we're
using for our historical source material. But if you look
at articles about home economics or as it's called now,
family and consumer sciences and this idea of homemaking today,
you can tell that the field is still really shaken
up by these attacks they sustained by the feminist Because
even in trend pieces about you know, how crafting its back,
(24:37):
or how canning is back, and all these people want
to learn about these traditional arts. You know, the writers
of these pieces take great pains to separate it from
this traditional idea of homemaking. It's got to beat retro
or ironic or hipster. It's not a recognition that there
is science behind what we do in our homes, Whereas
an article from the Chronicle of Higher Education points out
(25:00):
that Family and Consumer Sciences is responsible for doing things
like designing the comfortable desk chairs and safer fabrics for firefighters,
looking at connections between cancer and foods, biodegradable fibers, social
welfare programs, all of these things which we might not
link it to home mac because it's now called family
(25:21):
and Consumer sciences. But we have homemech too, really thank
for it. So I do think that it's it's kind
of um sad that I was so embarrassed about it
and that the numbers dropped. You know, a lot of
the stories from the past few years also make this
big point to say, well, boys take our classes too,
as if you know, getting boys in the class, we'll
(25:41):
just make it somehow gender neutral and and all right,
which is good because everyone needs these skills, but still
this um idea that homemaking us somehow bad, or that
returning to this idea of you know, making your own
clothes or or making yourself a good meal is somehow
you know, hipster and ironic and if you were an
apron while you do it, it's it's damaging to the
(26:02):
entire female population. Is something that it's one legacy of
feminism that is slightly uncomfortable. So let's hear from you. Guys.
Did you take Homemeck? Do you what do you think
about Homemeck? Let us know your thoughts on it or
are you in family and consumer sciences today, let's hear
from you. It's mom stuff at how stuff works dot com.
(26:25):
And in the meantime, we got a couple of emails
here Molly. Before we get into listener mail, I want
to let everyone know that how stuff Works dot Com
has a brand new app available for the iPhone for
everyone on the go. It's just it's an easy way
(26:45):
to get everything while you're traveling. You can get how
stuff works dot Com articles, videos, and of course podcasts.
There might be some pictures of us, perhaps some photos,
hopefully flattering photos. I don't know, so for all those
people like to push phones while they're you know, waiting
in line on buses, not while you're driving. That's unsafe. Don't, yeah, don't,
(27:08):
don't app while you drive. But for everyone else, we've
got a great app. Check it out, and now let's
get back to listen. Email. So, I've got an email
here from Paul, and it's about the Doll podcast. He writes,
I'm a boy and I play with dolls as a
small kid. The only difference is that instead of being
cabbage patched, they were g I jokes. I put guns
in their hands, bought them cars to drive around in,
(27:29):
while I begged my cars for begged. My parents were
cars anyway, and told all kinds of wonderful imaginary stores
with my dolls. I insisted, and still do publicly, that
these were not dolls but action figures instead. Deep down
I know the truth though. Action figures are nothing more
than dolls that boys play with. Well, I've got an
email here from Mary and it is in response to
a podcast we did a while ago on polycystic ovary syndrome.
(27:51):
The acronym which is p C O S, which Molly
referred to throughout the podcast as pea coasts, and Mary
was very upset us. Apparently we are the only people
in the known world pronouncing it as pecos, and we
certainly do not want to misrepresent polycystic over syndrome. It's
something that is highly underreported when it comes to women's health,
(28:15):
yet is affecting a lot of women, and it's very
difficult sometimes to get an accurate diagnosis. So these symptoms,
you know, are often rage on for women because they
can't find proper treatment. So the last thing we want
to do is call it by the wrong thing. So
Mary says, it really hurts my feelings when you mispronounce
pc O s as. I feel like the way you
(28:36):
pronounced it is making fun of me and my peers.
I know it's not your intention, but please try to
be a little more sensitive instead of the blanket, I
think you should be able to call it whatever you want.
Let's leave it at that, And so we certainly don't
want to leave it at that. So from here on out,
picos will now be pc O s Somalia's to join
(28:58):
the rest of the medical world and all it buy
its acronym. I would like to point out that the
New York Times so that it was pronounced pekos. Alright,
so Mary, you did ask for our source, and there
it is, Molly says New York Times. Alright, So if
you have any questions, comments, or concerns, feel free to
send us an email Mom stuff at how stuff works
dot com or throw it up on our Facebook wall,
(29:20):
or you can give us a shout out on Twitter.
And then, finally, you want to read what Molly and
I are writing about during the week, head over to
our blog It's stuff I've Never told you, and it's
at how stuff works dot com. For more on this
and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff works
dot Com. Want more how stuff works? Check out our
(29:42):
blogs on the house stuff works dot com home page.
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready, are you
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
Hosts And Creators
Anney Reese
Samantha McVey
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.