The year the household took its word back

Lake Placid, September 1899

In September 1899 a small group met at a club in Lake Placid, New York, to found a subject. The organizer was Ellen Swallow Richards, a chemist, the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in 1870.¹ With her were the librarian Melvil Dewey and his wife Annie.

They needed a name. Richards had earlier proposed "oekology", from the same Greek root as "ecology", a word she had helped bring into English around 1892. She would later propose "euthenics". Both lost.² The name chosen was "home economics", and the minutes record how the founders understood it. The name was agreed "as the title preferable for the whole general subject", and the group "determined to consider it a distinct section of the general subject of economics".³

That sentence is the point of this chapter. The founders of home economics did not think they were founding a course in cookery and sewing. They thought they were reclaiming a branch of economics for the household, and they said so in writing.

Ten conferences and a journal

The Lake Placid meetings ran every year from 1899 to 1908, ten in all.⁴ In 1908 the participants founded the American Home Economics Association, with Richards as its first president, and in 1909 its journal began.⁵ The narrowing came later, as the subject was taught in schools and became associated with the domestic arts. In 1994 the association renamed itself for family and consumer sciences.⁵

The economists in home economics

Between the wars the subject produced real economists. Hazel Kyrk published A Theory of Consumption in 1923 and from 1925 held a joint appointment at the University of Chicago in home economics and in economics. In 1945 and 1946 she chaired the government committee that built the first "standard family budget".⁶ Margaret Reid published Economics of Household Production in 1934, became a professor at Chicago in 1948, and was made a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association in 1980.⁷

Reid's influence went further than her titles. Her distinction between a household's "permanent" and "transitory" income was taken up directly by Milton Friedman and Franco Modigliani in the theories of consumption that won them Nobel prizes.⁸ The household economists were not forgotten pioneers. The men who built on their work acknowledged it.

Beecher's three heads, a generation earlier

The habit these economists studied had been taught for decades. Catharine Beecher's household manual of 1841 told every woman to keep an account of a year's spending under three heads, and described a boarding-house keeper who did her books for fifteen minutes each evening.⁹ Home economics gave that habit a department.

1904: a journalist gives Japan an account book

The same year the Lake Placid conferences were halfway through, a Japanese journalist did something more practical. Hani Motoko, the first woman to work as a newspaper reporter in Japan, published a household account book, the kakeibo, at the end of 1904 for use in 1905. It works by setting a budget for each category for the year and subtracting each entry as it is made. It has been published every year since, except for four wartime years when paper was rationed.¹⁰ It is the longest-used household account book in Japan, and it was designed by a woman who wrote for a living.

1965 and 2006: two more reaches

The household came back into economic theory in 1965, when Gary Becker treated it as a small firm that produces what it consumes from bought goods and its members' time.¹¹ Becker acknowledged Reid and Kyrk.⁸ It came back into finance in 2006, when John Campbell used his presidential address to the American Finance Association to name "household finance" as a field. The field, he said, "still lacks definition and status within our profession".¹²

What the reclaiming got, and what it missed

Each time the household reached for its word it got something real. A school subject. A theory of time. A branch of finance with its own classification code. What none of them produced was an economics that an ordinary household could use for itself: a set of accounts, a way of measuring what it gives to the businesses it deals with, and a name for the whole. The founders of 1899 were right about the word. The rest of the work was left undone.