“WASTEFUL, UNPALATABLE, UNHEALTHFUL, AND MONOTONOUS COOKERY”: CULINARY EDUCATION AND ENTERPRISE IN US INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY, 1870-1909 by JAMIE S. FRICK A THESIS Presented to the Department of History and the Graduate School of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts June 2019 THESIS APPROVAL PAGE Student: Jamie S. Frick Title: “Wasteful, Unpalatable, Unhealthful, and Monotonous Cookery”: Culinary Education and Enterprise in US Industrial Society, 1870-1909 This thesis has been accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree in the Department of History by: Bob Bussel Chairperson Annelise Heinz Member Jamie Bufalino Member and Janet Woodruff-Borden Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School Original approval signatures are on file with the University of Oregon Graduate School. Degree awarded June 2019 ii © 2019 Jamie S. Frick iii THESIS ABSTRACT Jamie S. Frick Master of Arts Department of History June 2019 Title: “Wasteful, Unpalatable, Unhealthful, and Monotonous Cookery”: Culinary Education and Enterprise in US Industrial Society, 1870-1909 Culinary education was an instrument for social reform and commercial enterprise in US industrial society during the Gilded Age. This thesis traces the urban cooking school movement, beginning in the 1870s, and its relationship to the rise of the home economics movement at the turn of the century. Initially established to reform the diet of the working-class, urban cooking schools increasingly focused on providing leisurely entertainment for a growing population of middle-class women who were navigating the use of contemporary household technology, and who wanted to prepare sophisticated dishes to signify their social status. As the home economics movement grew in the 1890s, it focused on educational reform, professionalization, and scientific cooking methods, distancing itself from lessons in “feminine arts.” After the academic shift of culinary education and home economics, cooking school leaders continued to provide a distinct service to middle-class consumers into the first quarter of the twentieth century. iv CURRICULUM VITAE NAME OF AUTHOR: Jamie S. Frick GRADUATE AND UNDERGRADUATE SCHOOLS ATTENDED: University of Oregon, Eugene Oregon State University, Corvallis DEGREES AWARDED: Master of Arts, History, 2019, University of Oregon Bachelor of Arts, History, 2016, Oregon State University AREAS OF SPECIAL INTEREST: History of Technology Women’s and Gender History 19th Century American History History of US Consumerism PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE: Graduate Employee, University of Oregon, 2017-2019 International Admissions Assistant Manager, Oregon State University, 2015-2017 International Admissions Articulation Specialist, Oregon State University, 2014- 2015 International Admissions Evaluator, Oregon State University, 2011-2014 Administrative Assistant & Graphic Designer, Ambient IT, 2008-2011 GRANTS, AWARDS, AND HONORS: Graduate Student Research Grant, “‘Wasteful, Unpalatable, Unhealthful, and Monotonous Cookery’: Culinary Education and Enterprise in US Industrial Society, 1870-1909,” University of Oregon, 2018 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would never have finished this project if it hadn’t been for the support and encouragement of my family and friends. In particular, I’m grateful for Kye’s calming reassurances as I spent hours reading, writing, and studying at home. Taylor is the most supportive friend anyone could ask for, and I especially appreciate the hours that she spent with me digging through the archives at the Chicago History Museum. Connie has been a constant support, always reminding me to take care of myself. I’m indebted to my aunt Laura, my mother-in-law Nancy, and my friends Mark and Dawn for their unwavering belief in me, and to my dad for passing down his love of history. I wish to express sincere appreciation to the members of my thesis committee for their guidance and feedback. I would like to thank Bob Bussel for his assistance as I explored the history of technology. I’m grateful for the thought-provoking feedback and research advice that I received from Annelise Heinz and Jamie Bufalino. The funds that I received from the University of Oregon’s Department of History were instrumental in my research on the World’s Columbian Exposition, and I would like to thank the amazing staff at the Chicago History Museum for their help before, during, and after my trip. In my time at the University of Oregon, I’ve had the privilege of getting to know, and learning from, an amazing group of graduate student colleagues. Thanks to all of the fellow students in my 607 writing seminar for their feedback as I began work on this thesis. In particular, Nichelle Frank and Moeko Yamazaki have been immensely helpful in offering advice about my research and reading drafts of my work. Special thanks are due to Annie Reiva and Olivia Wing. I’m so grateful for their advice and friendship throughout my experience in this program and the development of this project. vi For Kye, Whose support has never wavered. And for my Grandma Bonnie, Whose encouragement always pushed me to challenge myself. vii TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter Page I. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................... 1 II. “EVILS CAUSED BY BAD COOKERY”: COOKING AS A STRATEGY FOR SOCIAL REFORM, 1870-1893 .................................................................................. 13 Household Industrialization in the Late Nineteenth Century ................................ 15 The Centennial International Exposition of 1876 .................................................. 22 The Cooking School Movement Begins ................................................................ 27 The New England Kitchen and the Science of Nutrition ....................................... 39 III. “KITCHEN PLANS FOR CHICAGO”: CULINARY EXHIBITS AT THE WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, 1893 ........................................................ 46 The Electric Kitchen as a Solution to the “Servant Problem” ............................... 51 The Illinois Corn Kitchen and Cookery as an Art ................................................. 57 The Rumford Kitchen Laboratory ......................................................................... 64 The Congress of Women and “Household Economics” ........................................ 68 III. “THE MAKING OF COOKS”: THE HOME ECONOMICS MOVEMENT AND CULINARY ENTREPRENEURS, 1893-1909 ........................................................... 76 The National Household Economic Association ................................................... 78 The Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics ............................................... 82 The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 ......................................................... 89 Cooking School Educators and Entrepreneurs ...................................................... 94 IV. CONCLUSION...................................................................................................... 106 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................ 113 viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION On October 11, 1892, six months before the opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition, a reporter for the Evening World in New York wrote: “All the ‘lady cooks’ in this part of the country are going to the World’s Fair to give lessons, superintend food exhibits, manage domestic schools or conduct kitchen bureaus, and if the wives and daughters of Chicago don’t learn a lot of new and dainty ways of serving spare-ribs, tripe and pigs’ pedals they will only have themselves to blame.” The article goes on to describe in detail the exhibits and credentials of the women who planned to present in Chicago, including Sarah Rorer of Philadelphia who planned to run a model kitchen in the Woman’s Building; Ellen Richards of Boston who was known for her scientific recipes; and Juliet Corson of New York who was planning to demonstrate a normal school of cookery.1 Collectively, all of these famous “lady cooks” and their plans to exhibit at the upcoming World’s Fair represented a rising interest in culinary education among the urban middle-class in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Based on this article it might appear that these women had the same goals for teaching culinary lessons and the same intended audience, the “wives and daughters of Chicago.” However, the World’s Columbian Exposition was a significant intersection for two separate movements in culinary education—and many more ideas about kitchen technology and household economics—all presented in the same venue in 1893. The first movement for culinary 11 Nell Nelson, “Kitchen Plans for Chicago: Famous Cooking Teachers Who are Going to the World’s Fair,” Evening World (New York, NY), October 11, 1892. 1 education began in the 1870s with the establishment of several cooking schools throughout the Northeast. The cooking school movement was established with a goal of social and dietary reform for the working poor, but the cooking schools quickly became most popular as a source of entertainment and signifier of status among women of the expanding middle class. The second movement began with experiments in scientific cookery in the 1890s and rapidly expanded into an organized national movement at the very end of the nineteenth century. Members of the home economics movement believed that educational reform and the professionalization of academic domestic science were promising avenues for progressive change. This project examines the cooking school movement and its relationship to the home economics movement that emerged three decades later. Histories of domestic work and the home economics movement usually mention the cooking schools only briefly, and as a lead up to the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics in 1899. This project investigates the different goals and audiences of these two movements, and how they advised women about the changes in home technology and managing their homes in the context of US industrial society. This story takes place during the US Gilded Age beginning in 1870, transitioning through the first decade of the Progressive Era and the establishment of the American Home Economics Association in 1909. This periodization is important to this history because of the growth of the middle-class, the increase in urbanization, and the emergence of consumer culture that took place during these years. US industrialization provided the impetus for these cultural transformations, particularly the expansion of the middle class. The employment opportunities available to middle-class men typically provided sufficient income for their wives to remain out of 2 the labor market, and it usually afforded the help of one or two domestic servants.2 This study examines cooking schools as profitable businesses that served the middle-class during this period, as US social reformers also worked to professionalize a new field of academic study in home economics, which culminated in the establishment of the American Home Economic Association in 1909. This study primarily recounts the experiences of white, middle-class women in the Northeastern United States as they lobbied for social reform, established business enterprises, and participated in the American consumer marketplace.3 The European immigrant women and African- American women that worked as domestic servants to the middle-class are also essential to the story of how these two movements developed, how kitchen technology was marketed, and how women of the middle and upper classes perceived their own household responsibilities. Chapter II traces household industrialization in the 1870s, and calls from social reformers for the development of urban cooking schools based on European models of social reform. Several cooking instructors in the Northeast during the 1870s and 1880s, including Juliet Corson, Maria Parloa, and Sarah Rorer, developed profitable cooking schools. A variety of culinary education courses at these schools were designed based on social class and were intended to improve the socioeconomic conditions of low-income families, train domestic servants, and provide entertainment and instruction for middle- class women. The growth of the middle-class during this era shifted the primary objective 2 Kristin L. Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 8. 3 In the context of this project, the use of the term “American” refers specifically to the population of the United States, and not all of North and South America. 3 of cooking schools away from social reform, and instead they were increasingly associated with profitable courses in high-class cookery. The increased focus of urban cooking schools on culinary art influenced the development of new scientific efforts for social reform based on providing nutritious meals to the urban poor in public kitchens. Chapter III focuses on the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and several model kitchens that offered visitors different interpretations of how kitchen technology could be utilized. In the Electricity Building, a model kitchen advertised the use of technology for automation and the replacement of domestic servants. The Corn Kitchen in the Woman’s Building, run by Sarah Rorer, demonstrated culinary art and the kitchen as a place to cultivate high social standards. On the southern end of the fairgrounds, Ellen Richards’ Rumford Kitchen advertised cooking as a scientific experiment, the basis for a new field of academic study. Collectively, these model kitchens, along with speeches by cooking experts and club women at the fair’s Congress of Women, reveal the significance of the kitchen and culinary education in discussions about industrial progress and the evolution of the American home at the end of the nineteenth century. They also illuminate multiple visions for the future of culinary education among cooking experts as the nation moved into the Progressive Era. Chapter IV traces the beginnings of the home economics movement, and the goals of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics. The conference’s principal focus was on the education of a new generation of American students and the larger professionalization of home economics as an academic field. Conference members also expressed frustration with the lack of interest in scientific cooking and housekeeping methods among many middle-class women. At the same time, cooking school leaders, 4 and their demonstration of high-class cookery, were made increasingly famous by their participation in expositions, their writings in newspapers, and their continued endorsement of consumer products. As a result, their culinary lessons continued to grow in popularity among the middle-class. Tracing the history of cooking schools, contemporaneous to the emergence of the academic home economics movement in 1899, reveals that the cooking school movement and its leaders continued to influence and profit from middle-class American consumers well into the twentieth century. Their accessibility and popularity among middle-class women interested in lessons in culinary art, and seeking advice from magazines like Ladies Home Journal, provided an even greater opportunity for cooking school leaders to market consumer products and to participate in new entrepreneurial endeavors. As a study of household industrialization in the late nineteenth century, this study examines trends in domestic technology and the resources that were available to middle- class women as the nature of household work changed during US industrialization. Monographs by Susan Strasser and Ruth Swartz Cowan trace the evolution of domestic work from pre-industrial America through the twentieth-century, exploring the impact of technological development on gendered housework. Never Done: A History of American Housework (1982) by Susan Strasser argues that housework was industrialized with the larger US economy; women completed less physical hand work and lost total power over daily work processes as more goods were produced outside of the home. However, unlike men, women became increasingly isolated in their domestic chores and as a result their 5 work was often rendered invisible.4 Strasser devotes a chapter to the rise of the home economics movement at the turn of the twentieth century, what she terms “The Business of Housekeeping.” She references urban cooking schools as one of three efforts to establish domestic education in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, along with domestic science training courses in both land-grant colleges and public schools. She argues that all of these efforts coalesced in the development of the home economics movement at Lake Placid in 1899.5 Never Done provides a valuable thematic account of the evolution of household labor and the development of consumer culture. This project further analyzes the urban cooking school movement and attempts to show a more complex history of the movement that continued after 1899. While many members of the two movements worked together, cooking schools continued to provide a service to middle-class female consumers that was largely outside of—and sometimes at odds with—the progressive home economics movement. Ruth Schwartz Cowan’s More Work for Mother (1983) investigates the role of technology in women’s work during the industrial revolution. Cowan argues, in opposition to Strasser, that during the course of American industrialization women’s work in the home was never fully industrialized. Cowan demonstrates how the nineteenth-century ideology of “separate spheres” influenced the development of home technology and consumer services and prevented the full industrialization of housework. According to Cowan, the uneven industrialization between the public and private spheres 4 Susan Strasser, Never Done: A History of American Housework, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 9-10. 5 Ibid, 202-206. 6 has resulted in the irony of creating “more work for mother,” rather than less, as technology has advanced since the nineteenth century.6 Cowan illustrates daily life in nineteenth-century industrial America and shows the intricate ways in which the operations of the household, and women’s work in particular, was altered by the evolution of technology. Cowan uses cookbooks and diaries to reconstruct for the reader the household technology used for preparing meals in pre-industrial society and how technological innovation changed the nuances of women’s daily work. In Cowan’s work, the industrialization of flour production and the development of the cooking stove are representational of the early stages of household industrialization in the nineteenth century, and they provide an important foundation for an examination of the market for domestic advice and the perceived need for culinary education during this era. World’s Fairs as influential cultural events are also an essential component of this study. These fairs provide a rich historical resource for examining contemporary international social and political aspirations. Many international expositions before and after the Columbian Exposition influenced the directions of these two movements, and they served as profitable venues for culinary entrepreneurs to market their skills. Historians Robert Rydell, John E. Finding, and Kimberly Pelle demonstrate the importance of political context to each fair’s meaning and significance in Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (2013).7 And in All the World’s a Fair: Visions of 6 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave (New York: Basic Books, 1983), 7. 7 Robert W. Rydell, John E. Findling, and Kimberly Pelle, Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States (Smithsonian Books, 2013). 7 Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (1984), Rydell underscores the significance of the World’s Columbian Exposition to the “imperial adventure” that followed in the first decade of the twentieth century.8 Taking an even more focused approach to the history of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Jeanne Weimann provides an extensive account of the activities of the Board of Lady Managers and their plan for the Woman’s Building in The Fair Women: The Story of the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893 (1981).9 Weimann’s work is particularly valuable for understanding the intentionality of the Board of Lady Managers and their projects and presentations within the Women’s Building. Weimann also provides an account of the interaction of the Board of Lady Managers with cooking school leaders and members of the nascent home economics movement. These histories provide an essential foundation for understanding the political inner workings and thematic messages of US expositions. This project attempts to add to the social and cultural history of these fairs by examining the culinary, educational, and entrepreneurial exhibits by women at the Philadelphia Centennial International Exposition in 1876, the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. Several historical works have recounted the history of the home economics movement and the influence of culinary experts at the turn of the century. Megan J. Elias’ Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture (2008) traces the history of the home 8 Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916, 5th printing edition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), 47-71. 9 Jeanne Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women: The Story of the Women’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893 (Chicago, Ill.: Academy Chicago, 1981). 8 economics movement from 1899 through the twentieth century. In the introduction of her work, Elias discusses cooking schools and domestic advice manuals as they became popular in the 1870s, arguing that their primary purpose was to help middle-class women manage their homes during industrialization. Her work then follows the emergence of the home economics movement as a response to the rise of scientific progressivism in the 1890s.10 Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti’s edited volume of essays, Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (1997), examines various aspects of the home economics movement, and Stage’s essay “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement” provides an important analysis of Ellen Richards’ role in the instigation of the home economics movement, and her goals for the development of home economics as an academic field.11 These two works have provided an essential history of the early years of the home economics movement. This project builds on these histories by examining the early goals of the leaders of the home economics movement, concurrent with the continued popularity and enterprise of cooking school leaders. In a 2008 study in food history, “Cooking Up Modernity: Culinary Reformers and the Making of Consumer Culture, 1876-1916,” Kiyoshi Shintani collectively examines turn-of-the-century cooking experts within the larger domestic science movement, which includes cooking school leaders as well as leaders of the early home economics movement. Shintani analyzes recipes and nutritional content to determine the impact of 10 Megan J. Elias, Stir It up: Home Economics in American Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 6-7. 11 Sarah Stage and Virginia Bramble Vincenti, Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 1-33. 9 cooking experts on the modernization of American “foodways.” Shintani emphasizes the impact of scientific culinary reformers on the dietary reform of the middle-class, the development of the consumer food market, and the modernization of larger American society at the turn of the twentieth century.12 As opposed to looking at this group of women collectively, this study attempts to examine how the affiliation of these cooking experts with these two separate movements influenced the nature of their culinary lessons. Comparing culinary exhibitions by cooking school leaders and members of the home economics movement shows that they differed in their use of ingredients, their ideological perspectives, and their intended audience. Cooking school leaders often focused on culinary art and sophisticated dishes in addition to scientific cookery because of their middle-class audience, many of whom were interested in culinary lessons as an entertainment. Conversely, leaders of the home economics movement focused on methods of regulated, scientific cookery for a primary audience of scientific professionals, students, and aspiring academic leaders—at times alienating non-academic, middle-class audiences. As Shintani’s work shows, these women were influential in the development of the consumer food industry and modernization of the American diet. This project attempts to add to this work by investigating how their relationships to these movements delineated the content of their lessons, and how they promoted specific cooking methods and household technology in addition to particular ingredients. Culinary education was an important source for social reform and for commercial 12 Kiyoshi Shintani, “Cooking up Modernity: Culinary Reformers and the Making of Consumer Culture, 1876-1916” (PhD Dissertation, UO, 2008), http://hdl.handle.net/1794/9493. 10 enterprise in the industrial society of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century. Initially established to reform the diet of the working-class, the foundation of cooking schools at the height of the market for domestic advice manuals and cookbooks in the 1870s amplified their success among middle-class women who were navigating the use of modern household technology, and who were hungry to learn the art of preparing sophisticated recipes. The World’s Columbian Exposition evidenced this success and elevated the celebrity status of cooking school leaders, while also providing an opportunity for social reformers of the early Progressive Era to organize around the scientific principles of home economics. As the home economics movement grew, it focused on educational reform, professionalization, and scientific cooking methods, distancing itself from lessons in feminine “household arts.” The success of cooking school leaders continued, and they gained additional profit from the growing attention to the home economics movement. They provided lessons to middle-class women in culinary art, while also incorporating emergent scientific principles and household technology for improved health and home efficiency. In doing so, they ran profitable business ventures, engaging in new opportunities for consumer product endorsement, and commercial enterprise. I argue that after the academic shift of culinary education and home economics in the 1890s, cooking school leaders continued to provide a distinct service to middle-class consumers into the first quarter of the twentieth century. They increasingly provided cooking demonstrations as a leisurely entertainment for middle-class women who sought to preserve the notion of women’s place in the home, and who would have felt disconnected from the professional, progressive home economics movement. The history 11 of the cooking school movement illuminates the late-nineteenth-century roots of a commercial culinary career built on the elevation of women’s place in the home that historians usually associate with the consumerist shift of home efficiency experts and academic home economists in the first decades of the twentieth century. 12 CHAPTER II “EVILS CAUSED BY BAD COOKERY”: COOKING AS A STRATEGY FOR SOCIAL REFORM, 1870-1893 In the fall of 1876, a group of women in New York City travelled to a house on St. Mark’s Place near the East Village. Once there, they removed their coats and entered a large demonstration room with a gleaming cooking range, shining copper pans, and neatly arranged dishes. The women filed into the room and found their seats, arranged facing a long wooden demonstration table, and they awaited the first instructions from Juliet Corson, founder of the New York Cooking School.13 This culinary institution was the first of several prominent cooking schools established in the Northeastern United States in the 1870s. Upon the school’s tenth anniversary a writer for the Boston Globe remarked, “It was considered one of the most curious experiments a cranky female theorist ever entered upon.”14 The Globe reporter’s remarks reveal the skepticism that accompanied the sudden appearance of cooking schools as a “curious experiment” during the Gilded Age. The remarks are also reflective of the association of cooking school instructors with the gendered stereotype of the stern, opinionated female social reformer of the late nineteenth century. As US industrialization progressed in the years after the Civil War, domestic advice manuals and land-grant schools aimed to provide practical industrial education for young women, a counterpart to the training that a new generation of men were receiving 13 F.E. Fryatt, “New York Cooking School,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 60 (1879): 22-25, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008919716. 14 “The New York Cooking School,” Boston Globe, February 27, 1886. 13 to prepare them for factory work. Cooking schools emerged as another component of this movement to provide training for women, teaching them to industrialize and manage their homes, and they were also initiated as a measure to curtail the social evils that accompanied the industrialization of US society. Stimulated in part by European models for social and educational reform, US social reformers in the 1870s insisted that instruction in cookery among the working poor and in public schools would lead to socioeconomic reform in younger generations, improving the long-term social and economic status of working-class families. Based on this goal of social reform, several cooking instructors in the Northeast during the 1870s and 1880s developed profitable cooking schools that provided socially-stratified culinary education courses designed for low-income families, domestic servants, and high-class women. However, the growth of the middle-class during this era shifted the objective of cooking schools away from social reform, and instead they became entrepreneurial endeavors providing leisurely entertainment for middle-class women, and quality control for the meals prepared by their servants. The increased focus of cooking schools on culinary art and servant training influenced the development of a separate science-based movement for social and educational reform based on providing nutritious meals to the urban poor in public kitchens. By the early 1890s, efforts to provide culinary education in the United States were increasingly divided between efforts to provide consumer services to middle-class women and endeavors to scientifically reformulate and standardize the American diet through public education. 14 Household Industrialization in the Late Nineteenth Century The impact of industrialization on US society over the course of the nineteenth century is difficult to overstate. Progressing steadily through the early decades of the century, and transforming the American marketplace, industrialization increased rapidly as the end of the century approached. As industrialization transformed the labor market, factory workers and industry leaders moved from rural dwellings to urban centers looking for new employment opportunities. In addition to native-born migrants, newly arrived immigrants (primarily from Europe) also swarmed US cities seeking industrial work. As the urban centers grew, so did a predominately white economic middle-class. Middle- class men and women developed an ideology that assigned men to the public realm of business and women to the private realm of domesticity and moral authority.15 Factory- produced goods and the rise of big business created new forms of work for male managers and day-laborers outside of the home, and developed a national “culture of consumption” focused on manufactured material goods.16 As production of consumables moved out of the home, women were charged with the purchase of these newly available household products and technologies. While much of the United States remained rural during this period, the growth of US cities during the late nineteenth century propelled the modernization of American business, the adoption of home technology, and increasing demands for social reform. Throughout the nineteenth century, Americans took steps to modernize their 15 Angel Kwolek-Folland, Incorporating Women: A History of Women and Business in the United States, Twayne’s Evolution of Modern Business Series (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998), 54. 16 Glenn Porter, “Industrialization and the Rise of Big Business,” in The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 12. 15 homes, and most emblematic of household industrialization was the cast-iron cooking stove. The cooking stove significantly altered household cooking methods as it developed throughout the 1800s. While many of the first cast-iron stoves were used for both cooking and heating, by the 1830s manufacturers had developed stoves specifically for cooking which incorporated cooking holes for pots and pans on the top surface, baking ovens in the interior, and reservoirs to supply hot water.17 By the final decades of the century, the cooking stove was an investment that most families in the United States could afford.18 As many US families embraced household industrialization, the cooking stove effectively replaced the hearth as the central feature of the kitchen. By the 1870s, wood-and-coal-burning cooking stoves could be found in many variations, manufactured by numerous companies.19 Consumers first had to determine which model of cooking stove to purchase, and then they often struggled to acclimate their taste buds to meals cooked in an oven rather than over an open hearth. Women sought out recipes and cooking accessories that might replicate the taste of the roasts they had long cooked over an open fire. The cooking stove, while more fuel-efficient and safer than cooking over an open hearth, required that home cooks relearn how to make their favorite dishes while mastering this new technology.20 As Ruth Schwartz Cowan has shown, the stove is demonstrative of the tendency for household industrialization to increase the technical complexity of tasks typically 17 Cowan, More Work for Mother, 55. 18 Strasser, Never Done, 33. 19 Ibid, 37. 20 Ibid, 36. 16 assigned to women. When cooking over an open-hearth, women had commonly cooked one-pot dishes with simple ingredients, usually grown at home or acquired through local trade. The use of a cast-iron stove allowed women to cook multi-course meals with more complex ingredients available in the new consumer marketplace. This required a cash income obtained by men outside of the home.21 In this way, household industrialization often reinforced the ideology of “separate spheres” and it transformed gendered tasks assigned to women, like cooking, into increasingly intricate and isolating work as the end of the century approached. This complexity often led the urban middle class to hire domestic servants to relieve the mistress of the house from such chores, transforming her primary role into that of household manager and consumer of household goods and technology—in some ways mirroring the middle-class male factory manager. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the stove remained the primary piece of industrial equipment used in the kitchen, and manufacturers continued to develop new models with varying accessories and fuel sources. As cooking and other household work became more elaborate with technological advancement, writers of domestic advice manuals and cookbooks found a steady market for their publications. The first American cookbook was published in New England in 1879, and their popularity grew steadily throughout the nineteenth century.22 The abundance and popularity of domestic manuals attests to women’s perceived need for instruction in the domestic complexities of the nineteenth century, with some of the earliest advice manuals appearing in the 1820s. During the second half of the nineteenth 21 Ruth Schwartz Cowan, “How We Get Our Daily Bread, or the History of Domestic Technology Revealed,” OAH Magazine of History 12, no. 2 (1998): 9–12. 22 Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium, 105. 17 century, advisors instructed their primarily middle-class audience on the economic incorporation of new technology and the application of emergent scientific knowledge to household chores.23 Manuals contended that American women should maintain the moral, Christian values of their mothers, while managing homes that looked far different technologically.24 Perhaps the most well-known manual of the mid-nineteenth-century is Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The American Woman’s Home, or, Principles of Domestic Science published in 1869.25 As an adherent of the “cult of domesticity,” which placed particular emphasis on the moral superiority of women and the domestic sphere as a safe haven from the corrupt business world, Catherine Beecher emphasized the significance of women’s work in the home and she influenced the popularity of domestic advice manuals, publishing several throughout her career beginning in 1841.26 Beecher and her contemporaries often recommended particular models of stoves, commodes, refrigerators and other nascent home technology.27 The discussion of health and biological topics in Catherine Beecher’s work reflects the work of nineteenth-century health reformers, who were linking impurities in the soil, air, and water to new theories of disease. By 1870, French chemist Louis Pasteur had asserted that 23 Sarah Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 9-20. 24 Megan J. Elias, Stir It up, 6; Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart, 24. 25 Catharine E. Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes (New York: J.B. Ford and company, 1869). 26 Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart, 15. 27 Strasser, Never Done, 36-37; Beecher and Stowe, The American Woman’s Home. Chapters are dedicated to “Stoves, Furnaces, and Chimneys” as well as a chapter to “Earth-Closets,” a form of commode. 18 organic chemical impurities were actually living organisms, and the expression “germ theory of disease” came into common use. Within the field of science, “sanitary science” or “sanitary chemistry” began to rise in popularity.28 Consistently incorporating emergent household technology and scientific principles into their works, manual writers sought to elevate women’s role as keeper of health and home. In addition, domestic advice manuals often addressed the “servant problem,” which typically involved women’s frequent dissatisfaction with the work of their domestic servants, who were often European immigrants. From 1870 to 1910, the population of women employed in domestic service grew from 960,000 to 1,830,000, a direct impact of increased immigration to the US and the expansion of the urban middle- class in the years after the Civil War.29 In rural settings it was more common for native- born white women to work in domestic service, but particularly in the Northeast the domestic service industry was composed of Irish immigrant women and African- American women who had migrated from the South.30 Some women found employment in domestic work attractive because it was associated with traditional “woman’s work,” however, many entered the field because it was the only employment option available to 28 Beecher and Stowe, The American Woman’s Home. Chapters included on “Scientific Home Ventilation” and “The Care of Health,” which includes contemporary illustrations and diagrams of muscle and “cell- life” in the human body; Nancy Tomes, “Spreading the Germ Theory: Sanitary Science and Home Economics, 1880-1930,” in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, ed. Sarah Stage and Virginia Bramble Vincenti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 37-38. 29 David M. Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 46. 30 Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 27. 19 them based on their lack of education and US societal hierarchies of race and class.31 Women who employed domestic servants usually supervised them closely and intensely scrutinized their work, constantly finding that the quality of the work did not meet their standards of cleanliness and sanitation.32 At times employers also perceived that immigrants unassimilated to American culture could physically contaminate their homes.33 As historian David Katzman has noted, the relationship between mistress and servant was highly personal. It was a sign of status that a middle-class household employed a servant, and because the servant usually lived in the household, the line between scrutiny of the work and scrutiny of the worker was often blurry or non- existent.34 Domestic advisors often discouraged the employment of domestic servants, insisting that the importance of women’s role within the home demanded her own training in the work, particularly in the context of industrial advance.35 Household technology offered an opportunity for women to employ less domestic help, according to some domestic advisors, but the economic prosperity of the growing middle-class led many women to employ them. A middle-class culture that valued white racial superiority and high social status created an inherent tension between housewives and the servants they employed, compounded by the personal nature of the work. The changes brought to domestic life by industrialization in the second half of the 31 Ibid, 3-4. 32 Ibid, 16. 33 Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart, 20. 34 Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 146-150. 35 Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart, 20; Beecher and Stowe, The American Woman’s Home, 334. 20 nineteenth century coincided with the increase in women’s college and university attendance. After the Morrill Land-Grant Act of 1862, newly established colleges in the Western United States often established courses in practical, industrial training, which included trade work for male students to prepare them for factory work, and domestic work for female students to prepare them for managing a home. The education given to these young women was designed very much as Catharine Beecher had envisioned and encouraged in her manuals. Some of the earliest programs required female students to spend an allotted amount of time working in the established kitchens or dormitories, but throughout the 1870s many of these agricultural schools developed lectures on topics that closely mirrored the chapters of domestic advice manuals. Courses included home ventilation, sewing, house furnishing, water supply, cooking, and care of the sick. As land-grant colleges continued to develop their programs in practical domestic training for women throughout the 1870s, colleges often also included courses on the scientific aspects, or “chemistry” of cooking and some colleges furnished “kitchen laboratories” for instruction.36 These early college programs in “Domestic Economy,” sought to provide both practical household industrial training and four-year degrees for generations of new homemakers.37 At the outset of the Gilded Age, industrialization had significantly transformed economic relations in the labor market and in the home. New generations of women were urged to study manuals and acquire industrial training for their domestic careers as 36 US Bureau of Education, Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education: Training Schools of Cookery 4 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1879), 285-287. 37 “Domestic Economy” was title most frequently used in the discussions of domestic training programs at land-grant colleges during this period. The term was likely modeled after England’s use of this title in their own contemporary domestic training programs. 21 housewives, mothers, and managers of household servants. Many women participated in this training because domestic work was increasingly intricate with scientific and technological advance, but also because of new cultural standards set by the writers of domestic manuals who adhered to the “cult of domesticity,” and the technical standards set by founders of programs in domestic economy. Housekeeping manuals and training programs targeted this new group of consumers and urged them to carefully balance modernization of housework and the maintenance of traditional, Victorian-era values of domesticity and frugality. As conversations around domestic industrial training for US women intensified, international expositions fostered a transnational exchange of ideas regarding education in domestic economy. The Centennial International Exposition of 1876 International expositions as a method for the exhibition of technological progress and the promotion of nationalism became popular in Europe and the United States beginning with the inaugural exposition at London’s Crystal Palace in 1851. After several more successful World’s Fairs in Europe, the United States hosted its first major exposition in Philadelphia in 1876. Historian Robert Rydell argues that in the midst of rising class tensions after the Civil War, the US fairs of the Industrial Age were an opportunity for politicians to sell their vision for the nation’s future.38 The corporate leaders of the Gilded Age planned the Centennial International Exposition held in Fairmont Park, and like the industrial expositions before it, technological innovation was 38 Rydell, Findling, and Pelle, Fair America, 8. 22 the central focus. This exposition was a celebration of the national birthday, a testament of the nation’s reconstruction after the Civil War, and a signal to the world that the United States was fit to host an international exposition.39 World’s fairs, and their profusion of exhibits, sparked inspiration among visitors and fostered an international exchange of industrial, intellectual, and cultural ideals. Surrounded by the industrial exhibits in the machinery and agricultural buildings, the work within the Woman’s Pavilion provided a collective interpretation of the “interests of women” from the perspective of the Woman’s Centennial Executive Committee.40 The Woman's Pavilion sat in the middle of the 1876 exposition, and was organized primarily by President of the Woman’s Committee, and great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin, Elizabeth Gillespe. The description of the pavilion by the women of the committee as “rigidly utilitarian” and “severely simple,” reflects the frugality encouraged by domestic advisors as well as a message that the building represented the serious contributions to technological advancement by women.41 The Woman’s Pavilion displayed an array of handicraft and inventions by women, including wood carvings, life- preserving mattresses, the Coston telegraphic night signal, and improvements made to household technologies.42 Kitchen and dining implements created by women were also 39 Ibid, 19. 40 “What the Reporter Does Not See,” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), July 15, 1876. 41 “The Exposition: The House We Live In,” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), May 13, 1876. 42 J. S. Ingram, The Centennial Exposition, America in Two Centuries, an Inventory (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 344-370. 23 on display, including a lap table, meat tenderizer, potato masher, and rolling pin.43 The exhibits in the Woman’s Pavilion, while notably sparse, placed particular emphasis on women as innovators of both household and industrial technology.44 A particularly unique feature of the Woman’s Pavilion was the steam-powered printing press, which the women of the committee used to publish weekly issues of The New Century for Woman.45 This publication, which claimed to collectively represent the interests and opinions of the Woman’s Centennial Executive Committee, focused on the contributions of women to technological progress and their pursuits in industrial employment and scientific professions. The value placed on higher education is a clear theme throughout these issues, most significantly, the importance of women pursuing education in the fields of math and science. At the same time, throughout the fair’s six- month duration, the publication also remained focused on women’s obligations in the home. The contributors kept a focus on the “woman’s sphere,” and published opinions on the standards of cleanliness and morality that they believed should remain central even as women sought to widen their influence in the public world. When it came to matters of cooking and other domestic work, the contributors to the New Century for Woman most often focused on the servant problem. An early article lamented the perceived ineptitude of domestic servants by equating domestic work with science, a field for which servants were unqualified. Food preparation was paramount to civility, child rearing, and the health of the family. The author both demeans and pities 43 “The House We Live In: Women’s Patents and Inventions,” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), July 8, 1876. 44 “The Exhibition of Women’s Work,” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), May 13, 1876. 45 “What One Woman is Doing,” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), June 3, 1876. 24 women employed as domestic servants: “Is it not strange that we should intrust this important science of cooking, on which depends life, health, and happiness, to ignorant women whose only interest in the work is that it brings them money? Not that they are to blame, poor things!” In conclusion the writer calls for the creation of cooking schools that would train both girls—and boys—in the science of housekeeping.46 This article stresses the need for specific training in scientific domestic work, arguing that women of the upper and middle classes should not leave such an important responsibility to the improperly trained immigrants that filled most domestic servant positions. The emphasis on these educational programs for both girls and boys serves to define housekeeping as an industrial profession open to lower-class workers of both genders, much like factory work. It also emphasizes the need for female employers of domestic servants to have proficient training in the work they supervised, much like factory managers. They could not expect to manage effectively or have the loyalty and respect of their workers unless they had intimate knowledge of the processes themselves. Writers of The New Century for Woman also emphasized the art involved in cooking and denounced the tendency of contemporary women to pursue jobs in factories and shops before marriage, rather than mastering artistry in the kitchen. Again, the author turned to the field of education to provide a solution, asserting that the system of education in the US “cultivated only the brain,” rather than the art and handicraft needed for proper cooking skills and the preparation of artistic dishes. The article notes that England included “domestic economy” in its national public-school code and had already established several popular cooking schools to address the inadequate domestic skills of 46 Miller, “Science in the Kitchen,” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), May 27, 1876. 25 young women. Rather than look to land-grant institutions to provide domestic training, this article suggests the establishment of three-month cooking programs expressly designed to help younger generations master artistic culinary skills, even as they pursued new scientific or technological vocational opportunities.47 This article reveals a concern that with more factory jobs opening to young women, their interest in the feminine art of cooking might fall by the wayside. The exhibits and conversations that surrounded the Woman’s Pavilion at the Centennial International Exposition in 1876 provide a glimpse of the social concerns that surrounded women’s advance into scientific and industrial professions, the status of traditional “feminine arts,” and the employment of domestic servants. Like Catherine Beecher, the contributors to The New Century for Woman emphasized and elevated women’s primary role as housewife and mother, and as more households began employing domestic servants, they wrestled with their expectations and management of household help. They expressed many of the same sentiments seen in domestic advice manuals and land-grant programs—that women needed training for their industrial careers as housekeepers or household managers. Conversely, and in the context of an exposition that celebrated the technological progress of the US, they also emphasized women’s involvement in technical and scientific efforts outside of the home. Influenced by models of education in Europe, they championed the establishment of cooking schools, which seemingly offered women a chance to pursue employment opportunities outside of the home, while also providing essential domestic skills for housewives and their servants. 47 “Cooking as an Art,” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), August 12, 1876. 26 The Cooking School Movement Begins Just a few years after the Centennial International Exposition, in 1879, the United States Bureau of Education published a circular of information regarding the status of the US education system, and one volume was dedicated to Training Schools of Cookery. In an introductory letter, the commissioner implored the Bureau to consider the implementation of cookery in the US public school curriculum to address the “domestic and social condition of our people.” The commissioner referenced increased correspondence from reformers regarding the social “evils caused by bad cookery.” The letter concludes with a quote from Professor Edward L. Youmans, founder of Popular Science Monthly: “Of the importance, the imperative necessity of this movement, there cannot be the slightest question. Our kitchens, as is perfectly notorious, are the fortified intrenchments [sic] of ignorance, prejudice, irrational habits, rule of thumb, and mental vacuity; and the consequence is that the Americans are liable to the reproach of suffering beyond any other people from wasteful, unpalatable, unhealthful, and monotonous cookery.”48 The poor social conditions and “evils” described by the commissioner and contemporary social reformers were due in large part to the economic turmoil of the mid- 1870s. An economic panic gripped the United States from 1873 to 1877, leading unemployment to rise over 16 percent. Those that retained their employment faced severe 48 US Bureau of Education, Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education, 257-260. 27 wage cuts.49 Class tensions continued to rise during this period, and the panic made the distinction between social classes even more stark. In response, social reformers wanted to establish cooking schools to educate immigrants and native-born whites in the working-class on the economical purchase of healthful and inexpensive ingredients and on cooking methods that would reduce waste, therefore improving their economic conditions. During this period, it was common in urban areas to see heaps of wasted bread and meat in the streets, usually the result of the extravagance of wealthy households.50 There was a perception that the poor purchased the most extravagant ingredients in an effort to raise their own social status. There was also an association between lower-class eating habits and intemperance, reformers believed that the working- class substituted alcohol for food.51 Youmans’ quote reflected the concerns of bureaucrats and a rising class of professionals who feared for the social image of the US as compared to other industrialized nations. Contemporary ideology held that the kitchen was the hallmark of women’s domain, central to her efforts to shield her family from corruption and degradation, but Youmans’ assertion reflects a belief among reformers that the kitchen could be the breeding ground for immorality, wastefulness, and intemperance. The writers of the circular echoed the sentiments written in The New Century for 49 Eric Arnesen, “American Workers and the Labor Movement,” in The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 56. 50 J. C. Buckmaster, Buckmaster’s Cookery: Being an Abridgment of Some of the Lectures Delivered in the Cookery School at the International Exhibition for 1873 and 1874: Together with a Collection of Approved Recipes and Menus (London: George Routeledge and Sons, 1874), 274-275, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433056925682. 51 Harvey Levenstein, “The New England Kitchen and the Origins of Modern American Eating Habits,” American Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1980): 371-374, https://doi.org/10.2307/2712458. 28 Woman three years earlier, citing schools of cookery in England as a foundation for social reform.52 The National Training School for Cookery at South Kensington was often referenced as the model upon which following schools were established. South Kensington was founded after a series of lectures given by John Charles Buckmaster at the International Exposition in London in 1873.53 Like social reformers in the US, Buckmaster believed training in cookery was lacking in English curriculum, and that young women in England needed to be convinced of the importance of training in the “chemistry and physiology of cooking.” He referred to cookery as the “art of making every scrap of food yield the greatest amount of pleasure and nourishment of which it is capable; and this, as I have so often repeated, does not depend so much on what you spend as how you cook.” He noted the tendency among women to believe that learning the art of cookery was beneath them, which his lectures at the exposition and his subsequent cookbook set out to correct.54 Buckmaster’s model kitchen and his demonstrations at the International Exposition of 1873 implored society to view cookery as both a science and art that could be utilized to reduce waste, improve the social conditions of the poor, and return to young women a sense of responsibility for household work and interest in traditional feminine arts. The building that Buckmaster used for his model kitchen at the International 52 US Bureau of Education, Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education, 258. 53 Ibid, 263. The place of International Expositions in the exchange of educational ideas is apparent throughout the report. A common topic of conversation was the exhibit of the US education system at upcoming fairs, and the final chapter of the circular details a report from a French education official that evaluated the American primary and secondary education system at the time of the Philadelphia Centennial International Exposition in 1876. 54 Buckmaster, Buckmaster’s Cookery, v-ii. 29 Exposition in London in 1873 was given to the headmistress of South Kensington for the establishment of a normal school for cookery.55 Qualified graduates from the National Training School for Cookery at South Kensington established successful cooking schools throughout England. Each school designed courses based on class: plain, middle-class, and artisan cookery. By 1879, the US circular asserted that the central goal of these English cooking schools was to teach cookery to the lower classes, particularly at very young ages. These classes taught students how to cook meals on a meager budget and were reportedly the most attended. The headmistresses of these schools firmly believed that social reform could be achieved by insisting on cookery courses for children in primary school, so that they might then carry the interest through secondary and tertiary education.56 By the late 1870s, US social reformers were confident that English schools of cookery had provided a successful model for the improvement of social conditions. The US began its own movement for social reform through culinary education when Juliet Corson established the New York Cooking School in 1876. Corson was born in Massachusetts in 1842 where her father was a successful produce wholesaler. She moved with her family to New York at a very young age and was homeschooled due to the fact that she was often sick and unable to attend public school. When Corson was sixteen her mother passed away and her father remarried, prompting her to move out of the family home. She began working in a library where she earned a meager income, which she supplemented by writing poems and creating sketches to be published in local 55 During this period the term “normal school” was used to indicate schools established for the purpose of training teachers in a given subject. 56 US Bureau of Education, Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education, 266-268. 30 newspapers. As she gained more writing experience she became the lone female staff writer for the National Quarterly Review. Corson worked for the Free Training School for Women in 1874 when her interest and experimentation in forming cooking courses for low-income women first began. Corson’s success in cooking instruction attracted the attention of her upper-class colleagues, who encouraged her to open a cooking school.57 The US Bureau of Education report credits the New York Cooking School, and Corson, with instigating the movement to refine American cooking from “wasteful and unwholesome methods to the more artistic and economical processes that distinguish the semi-scientific cookery of Europe.”58 US reformers combined notions of art, economics, and science. For them, cooking schools had the potential to benefit Americans through social refinement, economic thrift, and semi-scientific knowledge. Corson remained unmarried and dedicated much of her life to education in cookery. She established the New York Cooking School in her residence in 1876. Her primary goal was the preparation and elevation of common ingredients that would be available to the lower classes.59 Corson’s own experience as a woman living on her own with limited means likely influenced her interest in teaching women of low-income families. Corson also followed the European model of establishing stratified levels of three-month training courses based on social class. The “plain cook’s class” was focused on training women employed as domestic servants and the wives and daughters of factory 57 “Corson, Juliet,” Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project, accessed April 10, 2019, https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_corson.cfm. 58 US Bureau of Education, Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education, 269. 59 Ibid, 269-270. 31 workers. Just as the writers of The New Century for Woman had hoped, Corson intended these courses to elevate the profession of housekeeper to a skilled job, rather than simple “kitchen drudgery” so that it might entice more young women to enter employment as domestic servants rather than going into factory work.60 In addition to the class for domestic servants Corson also taught a class for the children of working men, another for “high-class cookery” where ladies could be instructed in sophisticated “artistic cookery,” and a fourth was a normal school of cookery to train women as instructors so that they could learn the skills to establish their own cooking schools.61 The influence of the New York Cooking School was also evident in the continuing development of land-grant college programs in domestic economy. Iowa State College was one of the first to establish courses in cookery, and by 1877 after their domestic economy program had been in operation for five years, they began using Corson’s Textbook for Cooking Schools.62 The New York Cooking School catered to all social classes in Gilded-Age New York, but Corson attempted to maintain her central focus on economizing ingredients and reforming the habits of the working-class. Following closely on the heels of the New York Cooking School, the Boston Cooking School was founded in 1877 by Maria Parloa. Already an experienced chef and cookbook writer, Parloa based her instruction on recipes from The Appledore Cook Book, which she had published in 1872. Parloa was born in 1843, also in Massachusetts, where 60 Ibid, 270-272. 61 Ibid, 274-275; Fryatt, “New York Cooking School,” 22-23. Amidst the labor unrest in 1877, Corson widely distributed a pamphlet entitled, “Fifteen Cent Dinners for Workingmen’s Families.” The publication was extremely popular among working-class families, and it also drew attention from politicians who attempted to keep her from circulating the materials and speaking in public in support of the working men. 62 US Bureau of Education, Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education, 287. 32 she was orphaned at a young age. As a young woman she earned a living for herself as a cook at several hotels and resorts throughout New Hampshire, including her time as a pastry chef at the Appledore House, for which she named her cookbook. In 1871 Parloa completed teacher training in Maine, and she promptly took a position as a teacher in Mandarin, Florida where she remained for five years.63 She returned to the Northeast and gave cooking lectures throughout New England in the summer of 1876, before opening the Boston Cooking School in autumn of the subsequent year.64 Like Corson, Parloa remained unmarried, dedicating her life to establishing a career in cookery.65 As opposed to the New York Cooking School’s hierarchy of courses based on social class, at its founding the Boston Cooking School primarily accommodated women interested in “high-class cookery.” The school was housed on the third floor of a large building in Boston and featured a spacious, “cheerful” room with a “dining table, large cooking stove, and a kitchen table.” A contemporary newspaper noted, “The ladies carry their accomplishments which they have acquired at Miss Parloa’s into the domestic circles which they may be called upon to grace, happy will be that man who is called upon to supply their larders.”66 Acknowledging that the ladies who attended her courses were primarily “cultivated” women of the upper and middle classes, Parloa asserted that as an individual woman running her own business she was not equipped to provide 63 “Maria Parloa,” Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project, accessed April 10, 2019, https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_parloa.cfm. 64 Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart, 46-47. 65 “Maria Parloa,” Feeding America, https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_parloa.cfm. 66 US Bureau of Education, Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education, 281. 33 additional lessons on how the “commonest” food might be elevated. She expressed her belief in the utility of cooking schools for social reform, and her hope that, “there shall be schools all over the country, in every city, town, and village, where, for a small fee, every one can go and learn to do the common, everyday [cooking] well. These schools must be taught by educated ladies, in order that this kind of work shall not fall back to the low plane from which it is now rising.”67 Based on the years she spent as a chef at New England hotels and resorts, Parloa was familiar with the preparation of elegant dishes for wealthy customers. And given the sudden popularity of cooking schools in the US and abroad, it was more profitable to provide courses as an entertainment to ladies of the growing middle-class. A third urban cooking school was opened in Philadelphia by Sarah Tyson Rorer. Born in Pennsylvania in 1849, Rorer and her family moved to Buffalo, New York a year later where her father had a prosperous business as a pharmacist. Rorer developed an interest in science and became familiar with some of the methods and equipment that her father used in his laboratory. A graduate of East Aurora Academy in New York where she studied English and classic literature, Rorer married in 1871 and returned to Pennsylvania. Her interest in science was reignited when she attended a lecture at the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia where she learned about the importance of fresh air and home ventilation, lessons which she applied at home with her two children. A middle-class woman with at least one domestic servant, Rorer didn’t seek education and employment out of the home out of necessity, but rather based on her ambition to 67 US Bureau of Education, Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education, 280-283. 34 escape the confines of her home, to supplement the income of her husband, and to follow her interest in cooking, health, and domestic science.68 She began to teach domestic science and cooking at New Century School in 1880, and she eventually founded the Philadelphia Cooking School in 1884.69 Similar to the New York Cooking School, Rorer’s school in Philadelphia taught several different courses based on social class. Many of the lectures at the Philadelphia Cooking School were taught to women of the middle-class who, like Rorer, supervised domestic servants at home. In agreement with much of the rhetoric around supervising domestic servants in the nineteenth century, Rorer asserted to her students that they needed to be adept at completing these tasks themselves if they planned to properly supervise domestic help. Many of her students came from finishing schools and had recent courses in science, which allowed Rorer to successfully demonstrate to them the chemistry involved in the cooking process. In addition, Rorer taught students from Philadelphia mission schools, where she focused on healthful and economical cooking.70 The Philadelphia Cooking School continued the trend of establishing cooking courses for wealthy women, while also reaching out to serve low-income families. Rorer’s own enthusiasm for science applied to health and diet also seems to have permeated though all of the courses she offered. Rorer’s fame increased exponentially as she began publishing cookbooks, writing 68 “Rorer, Sarah Tyson,” Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project, accessed April 10, 2019, https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_rorer.cfm. 69 Gertrude Bosler Biddle and Sarah Dickinson Lowrie, Notable Women of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 242. 70 Emma Seifrit Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer: The Nation’s Instructress in Dietetics and Cookery, Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society 119 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1977), 27-31. 35 a housekeeping advice column, and giving public cooking lectures. In 1886 while continuing to operate her cooking school, Rorer also began writing a column, “Housekeeper’s Inquiries,” for Table Talk, a monthly culinary magazine in Philadelphia. The column was very popular and provided publicity for Rorer’s school and her upcoming public lectures.71 Reporters who attended Rorer’s lectures referred to her work as an art comparing her to a skilled gymnast and an accomplished musician. Reporters marveled at the kitchen technology that she used, including a marble working surface and a glass rolling pin that could be filled with ice water to ensure the perfect temperature for rolling out a pie crust.72 As Rorer traveled throughout the US, notices about her lectures appeared in local newspapers where reviewers rhapsodized over the popularity of her cookbooks.73 By the 1890s Rorer’s name was also frequently used by manufactures in newspaper ads for new kitchen gadgets and foodstuffs from meat cutters to baking powder.74 As Rorer became a household name, newspapers were attentive to her utilization of new cooking technology and they recognized her skill and expertise in the art of cookery. Rorer often advised women in her courses and in her columns on the purchase of kitchen technology, insisting that gas stoves should be purchased when possible and advising on advances in stove technology, like the incorporation of oven 71 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 38-39. 72 “Cooking as an Art,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 22, 1881; “Culinary Art: How to Make Puff Paste and Soups a la Reine,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 15, 1880. 73 “Local Department,” Cecil Whig (Elkton, MD), October 16, 1886. 74 “Perfection Meat Cutter,” Wilkes-Barre News (Luzerne, PA), September 15, 1890; “Cleveland’s Superior Baking Powder,” Pittsburgh Dispatch, January 20, 1891. 36 thermometers.75 As her reputation as a cooking expert flourished, Rorer established a successful entrepreneurial career based on a widening class of consumers who attended her cooking school in addition to purchasing her cookbooks and the household products she endorsed. Rorer was not the only cooking expert that expanded her financial opportunities beyond the classroom. Juliet Corson published several other books in addition to her textbook for cooking schools.76 Maria Parloa stayed with the Boston Cooking School for three years and she published a textbook on housekeeping and the chemistry of cooking and digestion. After leaving the school, she traveled throughout the US and abroad giving cooking lectures and she began writing for Ladies Home Journal in 1891.77 The Boston Cooking School continued operation under principals Mary J. Lincoln, beginning in 1879, and then under Fannie Farmer, beginning in 1891, both of whom wrote exceedingly popular cookbooks during their tenures.78 Cooking school leaders also advised their middle-class audiences on the purchase and incorporation of international ingredients for the preparation of impressive and worldly dishes, commodifying ethnic cuisine and culture. Parloa incorporated included information about Russian caviar and 75 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 114. 76 “Juliet Corson,” Feeding America, https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_corson.cfm. 77 “Maria Parloa,” Feeding America, https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_parloa.cfm. 78 “Lincoln, Mary Johnson Bailey,” Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project, accessed April 12, 2019, https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_lincoln.cfm; “Farmer, Fannie Merritt.,” Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project, accessed April 12, 2019, https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_farmer.cfm. 37 French truffles in her cookbooks, and Rorer promoted the use of garlic after learning about the ingredient from one of her Italian students.79 The popularity of urban cooking schools showed no signs of slowing as the end of the century approached. The cooking school movement was an opportunity for female cooking experts to establish successful independent careers in the business world, an opportunity that only recent changes in the legal status of women at mid-century had made possible.80 The concentration of cooking schools around traditional “woman’s work” aided the transition of cooking experts into the business world, and boosted their popularity among the middle-class who predominately believed that the rightful place of American women was in the home. As men’s labor became valued economically as wage-labor during this period, the economic value of women’s work was obscured, while the moral significance of their work in the home was elevated.81 For cooking school leaders, these schools offered an opportunity to add economic value to the moral value of women’s work in the home. Founded on a model of European social reform, the original intention of the cooking school movement—at least in part—was to change the eating habits of the young, working poor in the hopes of improving their social and economic conditions and to promote feminine arts among young women. However, for the cooking schools to remain profitable they needed, and wanted, “high-class cookery” courses available to women in the middle and upper classes. Cooking schools built on the lessons of domestic 79 Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium, 108-116. 80 Kwolek-Folland, Incorporating Women, 55. 81 Ibid. 38 advice manuals, training middle-class women to efficiently incorporate and use new household cooking technologies and ingredients. As the cooking schools and the experts that ran them gained a following, their primary patrons were the highbrow women of the growing middle-class interested in learning to cook as an art and a leisurely entertainment. They also utilized the servant’s training course in an attempt to improve the quality of their domestic help, training them in the proper use of kitchen technology, and the preparation of international and American cuisine. Some social reformers believed that US cooking schools had fallen short in their goal of socioeconomic reform, spurring new efforts to refocus attention on the science of nutrition and the dietary reform of low-income families. The New England Kitchen and the Science of Nutrition In a monograph published in 1889, Ellen Richards advocated for the implementation of domestic economy courses in public schools. Like the founders of land-grant programs in domestic economy, Richards believed that the industrialization of US society necessitated industrial and scientific training to prepare the coming generation for their domestic responsibilities. She acknowledged the significance of the Northeastern cooking schools, but of them she notes, “While sympathizing heartily in the work of the cooking schools so successfully established, the writer sees the same element of danger lest they should be considered as an end instead of a means.”82 The danger was the estimation that the courses taught by cooking schools were a sufficient foundation for 82 Ellen H. Richards, Domestic Economy as a Factor in Public Education (New York: New York College for the Training of Teachers, 1889), 118, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/loc.ark:/13960/t7sn0p52w. 39 socioeconomic change. She emphasized the versatility of scientific courses in domestic economy, and their distinction from classes in art, which would be restricted to female students: “The subject chosen must be broadly educational and at the same time capable of manual demonstration… And here, as in all manual training, the science, or educational element, should be distinguished from the art.”83 Richards’ own educational background in sanitary chemistry played a significant role in her attention to the application of emergent scientific research in the home. Firmly defining domestic economy as a science, she believed the scientific study of nutrition and domestic economy was fit for both male and female students as a part of required scientific secondary school curriculum. Ellen Swallow Richards was the first female graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and she was also the institute’s first female instructor. Richards was born in Massachusetts in 1842, the daughter of two school teachers. After graduating from high school, she took care of her invalid mother for several years until she enrolled at Vassar College for Women at the age of 25. She quickly took an interest in chemistry and was particularly interested in how it could be practically applied to “everyday life.” MIT provided admission for Richards as a “special student” where she earned her B.S. in chemistry in 1873. In 1875 she married an MIT professor in mining and metallurgy, Robert Hallowell Richards, and she was enthusiastic about applying her chemistry studies to her domestic life. She balanced her domestic work with her continued teaching, eventually persuading MIT to open a women’s laboratory in 1876 where she taught chemistry. In 1883 she successfully had the women’s laboratory closed and the men’s 83 Ibid, 116-118. 40 laboratory was opened to women for co-ed courses. During these years Richards developed a life-long interest in the application of chemistry to cooking and domestic science.84 With the help of local temperance advocates, Richards established the New England Kitchen in 1890 on Pleasant Street in Boston.85 Of the New England Kitchen, Richards said it was primarily, “An experiment to determine the successful conditions of preparing, by scientific methods, from the cheaper food materials, nutritious and palatable dishes, which should find a ready demand at paying prices.”86 Along with the temperance advocates who hoped that the working poor in Boston might enter the kitchen instead of the local tavern, Mary H. Abel and Edward Atkinson aided Richards in the establishment of the New England Kitchen. Abel had long worked in public health and was interested in the promotion of sanitary and economic cooking, and Atkinson had recently invented an oven for the purpose of nutritious and healthful cooking. The Aladdin Oven was made of wood or fiberboard rather than iron, with a tin-lined interior box which was heated from underneath with a kerosene lamp. Atkinson argued that the oven would benefit the poor because it saved on fuel. However, a large complaint was the time it took to reach cooking temperature, which was typically about 5 hours.87 Abel and 84 Sarah Stage, “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement,” in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, ed. Sarah Stage and Virginia Bramble Vincenti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 19-23. 85 Stage, “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement,” 23. 86 Ellen H. Richards et al., Plain Words about Food: The Rumford Kitchen Leaflets (Boston: Home Science Publishing Company, 1899), 132, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435005037049. Emphasis is author’s own. 87 Levenstein, “The New England Kitchen and the Origins of Modern American Eating Habits,” 369–386. 41 Richards experimented with scientifically analyzed recipes, using affordable and nutritious ingredients cooked in the Aladdin Oven.88 While cooking school experts incorporated emergent scientific theories into their cookbooks, lessons, and advice columns, Richards and Abel took an even more scientific approach to the study of their recipes and the quality of their raw materials. Their goal went beyond the reduction of waste and creation of more healthful dishes, they wanted to increase the nutritional value of every meal. In mid-1890 they opened their public kitchen, and rather than operating the kitchen as a sit-down restaurant, they sold meals to working-class customers to take home and share with their families.89 The staple of their daily menu was beef broth or vegetable soup, and they occasionally also added bread rolls or corn bread.90 In the first months of their experiment, the New England Kitchen had many repeat customers which Abel asserts was the “best compliment” and a sign of their success at maintaining the standards of their dishes. Over the course of several months they also discerned a notable difference in the cleanliness of their customers and the eating utensils they brought into the kitchen. By 1892 the kitchen had also implemented cooking classes for medical students and they experimented with a school lunch program for local children, both of which they reported were successful.91 The social reform goals of the New England Kitchen were similar to those of J.C. Buckmaster and Juliet Corson at the outset of the 1870s, but rather than 88 Ibid, 375. 89 Ibid. 90 Mary Hinman Abel, “The Story of the New England Kitchen,” in Plain Words about Food: The Rumford Kitchen Leaflets, ed. Ellen H. Richards (Boston: Home Science Publishing Company, 1899), 136-140. 91 Levenstein, “The New England Kitchen and the Origins of Modern American Eating Habits,” 377. 42 bringing working-class students into the kitchen and teaching them to prepare meals, they scientifically regulated and prepared meals for customers to consume with their families in the hopes of convincing them to change their dietary habits. Efforts to establish several additional kitchens demonstrated to Abel the limits of the experiment, limits she attributed to ethnographic differences. After the success of the flagship kitchen on Pleasant Street, several other “New England Kitchens” were established in Boston, in addition to one in New York partially funded by Andrew Carnegie.92 At the newer kitchens Abel noted challenges when they attempted to alter the dietary habits of Italian and Jewish working-class immigrants, which she boiled down to their tendency to live in ethnic enclaves and their preference for their national dishes. For similar reasons, Abel cited established “negro” communities as the primary obstacle for the success of a kitchen established on Boston’s West End. In opposition to cooking schools that incorporated and advertised the use of international ingredients, Richards and Abel wanted to homogenize the diet of American immigrants and African-Americans. They attempted to make the dishes in these kitchens more “cosmopolitan” by conceding on the use of a few ingredients like pork and pepper. Abel argued, however, that ultimately the constituents of the newer kitchens lacked the intelligence to appreciate their nutritious standard of cooking, as opposed to the more “intelligent German and Irish Americans” near Pleasant Street. Abel advised that a successful public kitchen also needed to be placed a neighborhood where members of the community earned a decent wage.93 Based on Abel’s comments she believed that the working-class could be 92 Ibid. 93 Abel, “The Story of the New England Kitchen,”136-140. 43 converted to a nutritious diet, but she believed the experiment’s success was limited specifically to Anglo-Saxon immigrants and native-born white Americans who earned a moderate wage. The experiment of the New England Kitchens lasted only until 1893, but following the trend of popular cooking schools and lecture circuits this model provided a distinctive alternative approach for social and educational reform. Rather than a school, this was an experiment to see if innovative scientific methods of cooking, carefully controlled by nutritional experts, could have a visual impact on the sanitation of the surrounding urban community. Abel and Richards believed that if the working-class could be converted to their methods of cooking by means of taste, their social conditions would improve, and the money saved in food could be used for better housing and living conditions.94 They saw signs of success in the improved appearance of their repeat customers, and they determined that their most pressing challenge was the dietary assimilation of immigrants and African-Americans living in ethnic enclaves. For Richards and Abel, the result of the New England Kitchen experiment was confirmation that reform and regulation of the American diet needed to start with mandatory domestic science courses for all students in the US public school system.95 Conclusion Seeing a need to cure the social and economic “evils” of US industrial society in the late nineteenth century, reformers looked to the example of Europe and the 94 Ibid, 150. 95 Ibid, 143. 44 establishment of cooking education for working-class children in an effort to create broad social change. The cooking school movement started as an effort to create social change through scientific, healthful cooking education, particularly among the working poor and their children. It was also created out of a social fear that working women and women that employed servants were losing their sense of responsibility for learning traditional feminine arts. Helped by the popularity of the domestic advice manuals and cookbooks, the cooking school movement flourished during the Gilded Age. It owed the majority of its success to middle-class women seeking domestic advice about new technology and cooking techniques and looking to enhance the quality of their domestic help, giving cooking school founder’s novel entrepreneurial opportunities while they also elevated traditional “women’s work.” While many cooking school leaders were still concerned with scientific, healthful cooking education and social reform, their cooking schools needed to remain profitable, so their services were largely provided to women of the middle class. Still seeing a need for dietary reform in the US, new scientific efforts were begun. With the experiment of the New England Kitchens completed, Ellen Richards wanted to shift social reform efforts by refocusing on the public education system, teaching young generations of Americans about the scientific subjects of sanitation and nutrition. Increased division among social classes and widespread economic unrest in the years between 1870 and 1893 increasingly divided contemporary visions and objectives for culinary education in US society, but there was a clear consensus among these educators that the kitchen should hold cultural significance for all members of US society. As the next major international exposition in the US prepared to open in 1893, social reformers and culinary experts made plans to exhibit in Chicago. 45 CHAPTER III “KITCHEN PLANS FOR CHICAGO”: CULINARY EXHIBITS AT THE WORLD’S COLUMBIAN EXPOSITION, 1893 In May 1893, novelist Hamlin Garland arrived in Chicago just as the World’s Columbian Exposition was about to open. After experiencing the splendor of the “White City,” he wrote to his parents, “Sell the cook stove if necessary and come. You must see this fair.”96 Garland’s statement is frequently quoted in histories of the Columbian Exposition because it succinctly expresses the tremendous value that visitors placed on experiencing the fair, and the urgency of visiting this ephemeral city. In the context of the growing popularity of cooking schools at the end of the nineteenth century, and the abundance of model kitchens at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Garland’s quote is particularly pertinent. It reveals the irony of selling the household cook stove to see, among other exhibits, more cook stoves. Kitchen technology abounded at the World’s Columbian Exposition. Visitors saw the latest stoves and kitchen gadgets in the exhibits in the Manufactures Building; the aroma of bread and coffee drifted out of the enormous restaurant kitchens on the grounds; and state exhibits for model “workingmen’s homes” demonstrated economic living in simple houses, and the preparation of meals on a meager budget.97 Three particular model kitchens drew significant attention and offered visitors different interpretations of how kitchen technology could be utilized. In the Electricity Building, a model kitchen 96 Hamlin Garland, A Son of the Middle Border, (1917; Project Gutenberg, 2009), 459, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28791. Emphasis was author’s own. 97 “Wage-Earners’ Homes: Sociological Problems at the World’s Great Fair,” Boston Globe, August 27, 1893; “An Interesting Exhibit: Philadelphia Displays a Model Working-man’s Home at the World’s Fair,” Aberdeen Herald (Aberdeen, WA), May 25, 1893. 46 advertised the use of technology to automate the preparation of meals, further distancing the upper-class from their lower-class domestic servants and further removing women from their involvement in domestic work. The Corn Kitchen in the Woman’s Building demonstrated the art involved in cooking and how the kitchen could be used to elevate and maintain social status. On the southern end of the fairgrounds the Rumford Kitchen advertised cooking as a scientific experiment, the basis for a new field of academic study, using a kitchen laboratory for the nutritional preparation of meals that would nourish mind and body. Collectively, these model kitchens reveal the significance of the kitchen and culinary education in discussions about industrial progress and the evolution of the American home at the end of the nineteenth century. They also illuminate multiple visions for the future of culinary education among cooking experts as the nation moved into the Progressive Era. Chicago had been granted the honor of hosting the next major US exposition in 1890, and fair organizers immediately went to work transforming Jackson Park, eight miles south of downtown Chicago on the shore of Lake Michigan. Historian Robert Rydell asserts that for Chicago this exposition offered a chance to display its resilience after the Great Fire of 1871, which had devastated nearly a third of the city and left hundreds of thousands homeless. The fair was also an opportunity for the city to address its reputation for violent labor unrest in the wake of the Haymarket Massacre of 1886, which left several policemen dead after a bomb was thrown into a crowd.98 The history of this exposition must also be understood in the context of the US practice of racial exclusion and the ideology of scientific racism. Fair officials allowed African-Americans 98 Rydell, Findling, and Pelle, Fair America, 31-32. 47 to exhibit their work and their contributions to national progress on a single day of the fair’s six-month duration. National progress, the major theme of this exposition, was also interpreted by white Americans as a narrative of the patriarchal American civilization of racially inferior peoples, evident in the ethnographic exhibit of Native Americans and international cultures on the Midway.99 Given the cost of admission and travel to World’s Fairs, most low-income families in the US wouldn’t have been able to afford the cost of attendance. Essentially, the fair presented a chance for the city of Chicago to demonstrate its resilience and to elevate its reputation as a thriving US metropolis, and for the primarily white visitors of the middle and upper classes to observe the White City’s message of American progress, ingenuity, and power. In the context of growing American consumerism, World’s Fairs were also an opportunity for manufacturers to advertise their products to millions of visitors. Households became increasingly reliant on goods manufactured outside of the home as the end of the century neared. The exhibits crowded within monumental buildings functioned as displays of American innovation and a boundless landscape of consumption. Visitors had noted the “bazaar-like aspect” of the Centennial International Exhibition in 1876, the endless expanse of exhibits only leaving room for the “constant contemplation of shop, shop, shop.”100 An even wider array of consumer products was advertised at the World’s Columbian Exposition, particularly in the Manufactures and 99 Rydell, All the World’s a Fair, 41. 100 “The Nation’s Centennial: Last Efforts of Preparation,” New York Times, May 10, 1876. 48 Liberal Arts building, which alone occupied a space of 30.5 acres.101 There, exhibitors distributed vibrantly-colored cards advertising dozens of food products from canned beef extract to saccharine sweetener, among hundreds of other household consumables and appliances.102 As historian William Leach has shown, international expositions were part of a larger transformation of American consumer culture, or the “cult of the new,” which encouraged consumption as a means of achieving happiness.103 The exhibits at these international expositions were also the forerunners of merchandise displays at department stores, which became popular in the 1920s.104 Considering these shifts in American consumer culture at the end of the nineteenth century, the model kitchens at the Columbian Exposition and the products they used should be understood as advertisements as well as demonstrations of culinary expertise. On May 1, 1893, the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in the midst of an unusually damp spring in Chicago. Countless fairgoers in Jackson Park navigated muddy walkways between towering structures, many of which remained unfinished. “The buildings themselves are the greatest marvel,” Adelaide Evenden wrote in her diary after her first visit to the exposition on May 19. Despite its “terribly unfinished state” Evenden, a middle-class housewife and Chicago resident, asserted that the World’s Fair still 101 Rand McNally Co., Chicago and the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893 (Chicago: Midway Publishing Co., 1892), 5, Miscellaneous Official Guidebooks of the Exposition, call no. F38MZ 1893 .A1z, World’s Columbian Exposition Collection, Chicago History Museum. 102 The Cudahy Packing Co., “Rex Brand Extract of Beef,” Miscellaneous Exhibitions, call no. F38MZ 1893 .G2z, World’s Columbian Exposition Collection, Chicago History Museum. Schulze-Berge & Koechl, “Saccharine: 500 Times Sweeter Than Sugar,” Miscellaneous Exhibitions, call no. F38MZ 1893 .G2z, World’s Columbian Exposition Collection, Chicago History Museum. 103 William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture, 1st Vintage books ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 5-8. 104 Leach, Land of Desire, 318. 49 offered an abundance of curiosities. She and her husband and parents attempted to familiarize themselves with the immense grounds; they toured the vast buildings—some encompassing as many as forty acres—and stopped occasionally to glance at the overwhelming number of exhibits.105 After visiting the fair Evenden was left speechless by the abundance of displayed relics, innovations, and marvels. She needed a week for her mind to recuperate before writing about the experience in her diary.106 The daughter of middle-class English immigrants, Adelaide Evenden was born in Chicago in 1862. She remained a resident of Chicago during her years spent as a teacher, and after her marriage to William Cole, a locomotive engineer, in 1890 at the age of 28. In a diary that she kept for the first five years of her married life, Evenden describes her experience as a new wife, her daily household chores, and the social events and holidays spent with friends and family. Particularly significant was the World’s Columbian Exposition, which Evenden was fortunate enough to attend on at least ten separate occasions.107 Her diary and the exhibits that she selected to describe provide an insightful glimpse of the exposition from the perspective of an urban, middle-class, nineteenth- century housewife. After disembarking from one of the many trains running to Jackson Park, eight 105 “Weather Consolations,” The Daily Inter Ocean, May 3, 1893; Adelaide L. Evenden, diary, 21 May 1893, World's Columbian Exposition--Alpha, Evenden, Adelaide, Chicago History Museum. 106 Adelaide L. Evenden, diary, 12 June 1893, World's Columbian Exposition--Alpha, Evenden, Adelaide, Chicago History Museum. 107 “1910 U.S. Census,” Cook County, Illinois, population schedule, Chicago, p. 41 (stamped), dwelling 4301, William B. And Adelaide Cole; digital image, Ancestry.com, accessed September 15, 2018, http://ancestry.com; On wedding: Adelaide L. Evenden, diary, 17 Dec 1890, World's Columbian Exposition--Alpha, Evenden, Adelaide, Chicago History Museum. On housekeeping: Adelaide L. Evenden, diary, 5 Feb 1891, World's Columbian Exposition--Alpha, Evenden, Adelaide, Chicago History Museum. 50 miles outside of downtown Chicago, Evenden and other visitors to the World’s Fair stepped out of the railroad buildings on the southwest end of the grounds.108 They encountered a looming new city, furiously constructed on the shore of Lake Michigan over the previous three years. Covering five-hundred acres, monumental white buildings with neoclassical domes dominated the landscape, interspersed with meticulously landscaped greenery and man-made lagoons. According to the renowned head landscape architect for the fair, Frederick Law Olmsted, Jackson Park was “extremely bleak” and “forbidding” when he first encountered it in the 1870s. Olmsted had begun working on the park’s development decades before Chicago dreamed of hosting a World’s Fair, and he continued his work through the fair’s opening.109 Entering the grounds and looking eastward toward the lake, awe-inspired visitors encountered the grand Administration Building and the Court of Honor, and they blended into the immense crowd of tourists in the White City.110 The Electric Kitchen as a Solution to the “Servant Problem” Many visitors to the exposition in the summer of 1893 had never witnessed the use of electricity for illumination or for mechanical purposes. One of the five main neoclassical structures in the fair’s Court of Honor, the Electricity Building glowed with 108 A Guide to the Columbian World’s Fair, Chicago, Illinois (Chicago: Knight, Leonard & Co. Publishers, 1892), map, Miscellaneous Official Guidebooks of the Exposition, call no. F38MZ 1893 .A1z, World’s Columbian Exposition Collection, Chicago History Museum. 109 David Schuyler, “Frederick Law Olmsted and the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Journal of Planning History 15, no. 1 (2016): 5-11, https://doi.org/10.1177/1538513214553396. 110 The Columbian Exposition’s Court of Honor was a group of five neoclassical exposition buildings situated around a vast basin. 51 exhibits that showcased electric motors, telephone switchboards, and the central “Edison Light,” a towering column studded with thousands of bulbs. Adelaide Evenden found the night illumination particularly astounding: “The electric fountains played and all the buildings surrounding the plaza were illuminated. The most splendid of all was the Administration Building which glowed with thousands of lights as it rose majestic against the sky. It was visible after we were miles away from the grounds.”111 Visitors to the fair, including Adelaide Evenden, timed their visits and paced their daytime explorations so that they could find a suitable evening position from which to view the night-time luminescence. They waited in anticipation for the first bulb to illuminate, initiating the sequence of flickers and flashes that bathed the buildings, the shining lagoons, and the sea of visitors in glowing light. Accompanied by the sounds of an orchestra, the music playing in the night breeze, thousands of bulbs etched the illuminated outlines of buildings and statues on the night sky.112 The night illumination was a marvel, but visitors to the Electricity Building were also impressed with the potential to use electrical inventions at work and at home. On a trip to the fair with her mother about a month after the fair opened, Evenden visited Electricity Hall and the electric kitchen. Marveling at a roast that sat in an electric oven, which emitted no smoke or dust, she remarked, “I hope I will live to enjoy such a 111 A Guide to the Columbian World’s Fair, Chicago, Illinois (Chicago: Knight, Leonard & Co. Publishers, 1892), 23-25, Miscellaneous Official Guidebooks of the Exposition, call no. F38MZ 1893 .A1z, World’s Columbian Exposition Collection, Chicago History Museum; Adelaide L. Evenden, diary, 24 June 1893, World's Columbian Exposition--Alpha, Evenden, Adelaide, Chicago History Museum. 112 “In a Frame of Light: White City Gleams Under the Glare of Electricity,” Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1893. 52 stove.”113 Her hope reflects the fact that most Americans could not afford to have electricity in their homes until well into the twentieth century. For those that could afford an electric system in their home, the danger of fire could be enough to deter their interest. After a small fire ignited in her home, the wife of Cornelius Vanderbilt demanded that the recently installed electric system be removed.114 These reactions to household electricity reveal an irony in the availability of electricity in the late-nineteenth century. Middle- class Americans like Adelaide Evenden could not afford to install electricity, and it was likely decades before her dream of owning electric appliances became a reality, if it ever did. Upper-class citizens who could afford to have electricity in the 1890s, like Mrs. Vanderbilt, also had hired domestic servants, which trivialized the conveniences that electricity could provide, particularly if it had the potential to be dangerous. Some visitors saw the potential to use electricity as a solution to the servant problem, or a replacement for domestic help altogether. William Cameron, journalist and ex-governor of Virginia, wrote a history of the exposition published immediately after its close, providing a survey of all the fair had offered. He expressed how the model electric home at the exposition presented a way to use “Electricity as a Household Servitor”: The hostess arrives and is kept in touch with her servants by electric calls daintily fashioned. Adjournment is taken to dinner, unannoyed by smells from the kitchen, for that necessary adjunct to the home is at the top of the house and is connected with the dining-room by electric dumb-waiters. Dishes are kept hot on the table by dainty, polished electric warming furnaces connected by wires under the table. About the time dinner is over the servant gets angry at something and picks up her ‘duds’ and goes off in a huff…[The mistress] darts out into the dining room, slips the dishes into the waiter and with the touch of the button they are upstairs, where 113 Adelaide L. Evenden, diary, 8 June 1893, World's Columbian Exposition--Alpha, Evenden, Adelaide, Chicago History Museum. 114 Strasser, Never Done, 76. 53 she presently joins them. A large electric dishwasher is at hand and in five minutes the dishes are washed automatically.115 This description of the electric home and kitchen was directed at upper-class readers with an emphasis on the efficiency that the use of electricity impressed upon guests the moment their feet crossed the threshold. In the electric home the kitchen could be relegated to the top floor so that guests were not disturbed by the smells it might emit. An electric dumb-waiter (a newer version of a similar attempt more than a century earlier to diminish the need for table-side domestic help) delivered meals from the kitchen to the lower dining room, and plates were continually warmed by sophisticated electric hot plates.116 In this exhibit the annoyances of daily life and the “servant problem” could be virtually eliminated through automation. Cameron was not alone in his assertions about the uses of electricity to replace human labor in the home. Newspapers across the United States noted that this exhibit demonstrated the ways in which electricity could replace domestic servants. On the fair’s opening day, a Kentucky newspaper remarked that women would be particularly interested in the dining room presented in the Electricity Building, which could “dispense with a servant.”117 In Ohio, an article gave an account of the many uses of electricity for cooking and noted that even in its infancy electricity was already a competent domestic 115 William E. Cameron, The World’s Fair, Being a Pictorial History of the Columbian Exposition (Chicago: Chicago Publication & Lithograph Co., 1893), pg. 327; Strasser, Never Done, 76-77. Susan Strasser also discusses Cameron’s work within a larger conversation about ads that describe electricity as a servant through the early 20th century. 116 Cameron, The World’s Fair, Being a Pictorial History of the Columbian Exposition, 327. 117 “The Electricity Building: One of the Most Wonderful and Interesting Departments of the Fair,” Kentucky Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), May 1, 1893. 54 servant.118 Philadelphia went a step further and in a bold headline declared, “Lightning Our Slave,” and proceeded to note that the fair’s exhibit demonstrated that electricity could be used for cooking, ironing, and shoe-shining.119 Many marveled at the electric home exhibit and the potential automation that electricity could provide, no training necessary, and ads for electricity as a replacement for domestic servants would continue well into the early twentieth century.120 For domestic servants employed by the upper- class, electricity had the potential to ease particularly strenuous tasks in the homes they served, but it also provided employers with a new tool for the justification of high standards. The popularity of the exhibit in the contemporary media and histories of the Columbian Exposition attests to the rising level of anxiety among upper- and middle- class society about the training and loyalty of their domestic help. Chief of the Electricity Department of the fair, John P. Barrett, wrote his own account of the Electricity Building, which heralded the success of the electricity exhibits and provided technical details about electrical machinery. Barrett confidently asserted, “So complete has been the success of electricity in the domain of light and power that the people are ready to accept electric heating without question.”121 He estimated that, “mechanical and domestic arts” would be the next to adopt electric heating technology. Barrett’s work also includes an illustration of a model electric kitchen. The kitchen is 118 “Electrical Displays: Interesting Sights at the Great World’s Fair,” Akron Daily Democrat (Akron, OH), June 20, 1893. 119 “Lightning Our Slave: Varied Uses of Electricity as Exhibited at the World’s Fair,” Philadelphia Times, September 18, 1893. 120 Strasser, Never Done, 76-77. 121 J.P. Barrett, Electricity and the Columbian Exposition: Including an Account of the Exhibits (Chicago: R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., 1894), 394. 55 very modest, with all of the appliances and cabinetry tucked neatly into one corner of the room. Three small pipes emerge from the top of an electric water heater, snaking along the wall unobtrusively, until they angle down the wall and connect with a faucet just above a small sink. Next to the hot water heater sits a small electric oven with ornate glass doors. Steam rises from a hot meal cooking on an electric range. On the spacious countertop sit various small, shining electric appliances—saucepans, hot plates, and teapots—all plugged into five electric outlets, evenly spaced and situated on the backsplash between the upper and lower cabinetry.122 The image portrays a very unadorned, orderly, and efficient kitchen. There are no servants or mistresses tending to any of these appliances, the kitchen appears to be running itself, erasing the labor of working-class women and the upper-class women that supervised them. The creators of the electric kitchen advertised the use of electricity for the technological automation of chores normally done by human hands. Journalists, visitors, and contemporary historians saw the electric kitchen as an opportunity to use technology as a complete replacement for their lower-class employees—a new “slave.” This exhibit demonstrated the successful application of electricity to the home and the kitchen as a means to create further distance between the upper-class and their lower-class servants, and as an innovative solution to keep upper class women unconcerned with domestic work. While many domestic advisors and social reformers urged that women needed to be more involved in cooking, this kitchen removed women from the kitchen and feminine arts completely. It demonstrates a belief the technology can replace domestic help and serve as a stand-in for women’s traditional role as housekeeper. 122 Barrett, Electricity and the Columbian Exposition, 403. 56 The Illinois Corn Kitchen and Cookery as an Art During a solo visit to the fair Adelaide Evenden aimed to visit the Woman’s Building. Located in the northeastern corner of the grounds, directly in front of the entrance to the Midway Plaisance, the Woman's Building was designed by architect Sophia Hayden and covered almost two acres. The building contained two floors and was designed in an Italian Renaissance style.123 While there, Evenden browsed the expansive library located in the gallery on the second floor, which featured books and letters autographed by many notable American women.124 The question of whether to have a woman's building at the exposition had been fiercely debated in the years leading up to the fair. President of the Board of Lady Managers, Bertha Palmer, wrote that some women “favored a separate exhibit believing that the extent and variety of the valuable work done by women would not be appreciated or comprehended unless shown in a building separate from the work of men.” Of her opposition she noted, “The most advanced and radical thinkers felt that the exhibit should not be one of sex, but of merit, and that women had reached a point where they could afford to compete side by side with men…and that they would not value prizes given up on the sentimental basis of sex.”125 Some women believed it best to have the products of their talents classified first by their innovations and education on the same level as their male counterparts, while others thought it best to have their work classified first by 123 A Guide to the Columbian World’s Fair, Chicago, Illinois (Chicago: Knight, Leonard & Co. Publishers, 1892), 29, Miscellaneous Official Guidebooks of the Exposition, call no. F38MZ 1893 .A1z, World’s Columbian Exposition Collection, Chicago History Museum. 124 Adelaide L. Evenden, diary, 10 September 1893, World's Columbian Exposition--Alpha, Evenden, Adelaide, Chicago History Museum. 125 Weimann, The Fair Women, 51. 57 womanhood. Indeed, historian Gail Bederman asserts that by delineating female contributions to the exposition, the existence of the Woman’s Building implied to visitors that everything outside its walls represented the accomplishments of men.126 The Board of Lady Managers attempted to compromise by compiling a report on the contributions of women in the general exhibits at the fair.127 After it was finally determined to construct the Woman's Building, the frenzied work of determining and building exhibits began, one of which was a demonstration kitchen. Based partially on motivations to use the fair and the model kitchen to create a market for US corn abroad, the Corn Kitchen was a joint effort between the Board of Lady Managers and the State Committee for Illinois.128 A testament to her growing reputation as a cooking expert, Sarah Tyson Rorer of the Philadelphia Cooking School was appointed by Palmer and the Board to run the Corn Kitchen. Rorer conducted her demonstrations in a large, white-tiled kitchen on the second-floor gallery of the Woman’s Building, near the library. The kitchen featured an island table sitting on an ornate rug in the center of the demonstration area, a gas “Jewell Range” stove to one side of the room, and a Ridgeway Refrigerator on the back wall along with shelving that stored kitchen accessories and preserves. Manufacturers had fitted the kitchen with appliances that featured the latest technological improvements. The demonstration table was designed by a female inventor and included compartments for utensils. Canned preserves were 126 Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917, Women in Culture and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 34. 127 Weimann, The Fair Women, 52. 128 “To Introduce Indian Corn: Nutritive Properties of Corn to Be Demonstrated at the Fair,” Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1893. 58 available for sale, along with several domestic inventions by women including a range- and-heater, dishwasher, and an ironing table that folded into a seat.129 This room presents a stark contrast to the illustration of the electric kitchen provided by Barrett. Along with its placement in the Woman’s Building, the staging and decoration of the Corn Kitchen signified its organization and management by women. In the Corn Kitchen, Rorer gave cooking demonstrations each morning wearing a silk dress “to demonstrate that cooks need not dribble sauce all over themselves.” Always using corn as the main ingredient, Rorer presented visitors with recipes for breads, pastries, cakes, and desserts.130 A free souvenir booklet, Recipes Used in Illinois Corn Exhibit Model Kitchen, was also given out to visitors that included recipes used in the model kitchen. The small paper booklet appropriately featured a bright yellow cover and included notes on the values of “Indian” corn and recipes for hot cakes, hominy grits croquettes, strawberry float, and vanilla soufflé.131 Arguably the most popular cooking demonstration at the fair, numerous newspaper articles discussed Rorer’s extraordinary elevation of corn as a main ingredient. Headlines enthusiastically declared: “Mrs. Rorer Makes More Pudding,” and “Our Own National Flour: Mrs. Rorer will Convince You it is Made of Corn.”132 In the afternoons Rorer also taught cooking courses (not limited to 129 Biddle and Lowrie, Notable Women of Pennsylvania, 459-462. 130 Ibid, 459. 131 Sarah T. Rorer, Recipes Used in Illinois Corn Exhibit Model Kitchen (Philadelphia, PA: privately printed, 1893), Miscellaneous Exhibitions, call no. F38MZ 1893 .G2z, World’s Columbian Exposition Collection, Chicago History Museum. 132 “Mrs. Rorer Makes More Pudding,” Chicago Tribune, Mary 15, 1893; “Our Own National Flour: Mrs. Rorer will Convince You it is Made of Corn,” Salt Lake Tribune, June 4, 1893. 59 corn) in the model kitchen to young girls ages twelve to sixteen, which Rorer hoped would generate interest in her “pet project,” the introduction of cooking in public schools. Her morning lectures were so popular, she brought in a graduate of her Philadelphia Cooking School to help with the afternoon classes so that she could answer questions from the morning Corn Kitchen sessions.133 While Rorer emphasized the nutritive properties of corn to her audience, the primary goal of the Corn Kitchen was to elevate corn as an consumer product that could be used in fancy dishes, and newspapers frequently praised her success. Artistic and sophisticated cookery was also promoted by the Board of Lady Manager’s souvenir cookbook. In the months leading up to the opening of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Carrie Shuman, member of the Board of Lady Managers, led a project to compile a cookbook composed of autographed recipes contributed by other women on the board. Favorite Dishes: A Columbian Autograph Souvenir Cookery Book was published in Chicago in February 1893 and was distributed to women with limited financial means so that they might sell the book and use the commission to purchase a ticket to the fair. The book was also available to visitors of the Woman's Building, and while ostensibly a fundraising effort for women of lower socioeconomic status, the book was also an opportunity for the women of the board to advertise their standards for high- class cookery.134 The design of the book itself reflected the high-class status and preferences of its 133 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 93. 134 Weimann, The Fair Women, 469; Carrie V. Shuman et al., Favorite Dishes: A Columbian Autograph Souvenir Cookery Book (Chicago: R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., 1893). 60 authors, the pages adorned with illustrations of ladies sipping their “five o’clock tea” and section headings embellished with images of ornate silver teapots. Some contributors provided instructions for complex dishes cooked in an oven or on a stovetop range, and they insisted upon the use of specific ingredients and dinnerware. A recipe for oysters demonstrated this complexity: Blue points are the only proper oysters to serve for luncheon or dinner. They should always be served in the deep shell, and if possible upon "oyster plates," but may be neatly served upon cracked ice, covered with a small napkin, in soup plates. The condiments are salt, pepper, cayenne, Tabasco sauce, and horse radish. A quarter of lemon is also properly served with each plate, but the gourmet prefers salt, pepper, and horse radish, as the acid of lemon does violence to the delicious flavor of the freshly-opened bivalve. Clams should be served in precisely the same way.135 Other women on the board shared simple, nostalgic recipes passed down from mothers or grandmothers, often one-pot meals cooked over an open fire. The recipes within the souvenir cookbook, and their varying complexities, are a microcosmic representation of the industrialization of domestic technology over the course of the nineteenth century. As innovations in domestic technology progressed, and the urban middle class expanded, they elevated their standards for fancy dishes and dinnerware. This would have been particularly true in the households of the middle and upper classes during the Gilded Age, where refined ingredients and multi-course meals had become the social norm. Many of the women who contributed to this volume could avoid any involvement in cooking if they desired. They opted to hire domestic help for the increasingly complex cooking that high-class society preferred. This souvenir promoted by the Lady Managers was essentially a compilation of upper-and-middle-class tastes, 135 Shuman et al., Favorite Dishes, 12. 61 and the “Art of Cookery” mastered by their domestic servants. Consumption of these consumer goods and the display of these dishes was a signifier of social status. The popularity of cooking schools and culinary experts was also demonstrated in the souvenir booklets provided by food manufacturers at the exposition. A booklet, Choice Receipts by Miss Parloa was specially prepared by Walter Baker & Co, a cocoa and chocolate manufacturer in Massachusetts with their own elaborate exhibition building at the fair. The booklet advertised Maria Parloa’s newest cooking and housekeeping manuals and provided her best recipes for preparing chocolate confections.136 The makers of Cottolene, a product advertised as “the new shortening,” also distributed a pamphlet that promoted Cottolene recipes from top cooking experts, including Corson, Parloa, and Rorer, along with endorsements of the product from medical professionals.137 These exhibits, along with the Corn Kitchen and the Board of Lady Manager’s souvenir cookbook, promoted the use of new consumer products and ingredients manufactured outside of the home. Exhibitors and cooking demonstrators often emphasized the perceived nutritive properties of these new manufactures, and they elevated the preparation of such ingredients to an art. At times, cooking school leaders were also recognized for scientific contributions to the fair. When efforts to establish the model kitchen in the Woman’s Building first began in 1892, Bertha Palmer had also reached out to Juliet Corson of the New York 136 Walter Baker & Co., Choice Receipts by Miss Parloa (Dorchester, MA: privately printed, 1892), Miscellaneous Exhibitions, call no. F38MZ 1893 .G2z, World’s Columbian Exposition Collection, Chicago History Museum. 137 N. K. Fairbank & Co., Cottolene (Chicago, IL: privately printed, 1893), Miscellaneous Exhibitions, call no. F38MZ 1893 .G2z, World’s Columbian Exposition Collection, Chicago History Museum. 62 Cooking School, asking that she also establish a regular series of courses in the kitchen. After finding that Rorer had also been invited to give demonstrations, Corson quickly withdrew from the project, not wishing to “take a back seat to that redoubtable lady.”138 Despite her very poor health, Corson was still eager to establish an exhibit for the New York Cooking School on the exposition grounds, and she was successful in lobbying for her own small building on the southern end of the exposition grounds near the Anthropological Building. However, the exhibit proved less successful than Rorer’s Corn Kitchen owing principally to financial difficulties and a failure to organize and publicize planned demonstration times. Corson, whose own health was declining during the exposition, was still awarded at the fair for her contributions to “hygienic dietetics, the medical properties of foods, and the operations of chemical and economic household science.”139 However, an article in Scientific American that discussed the New York Cooking School exhibit, along with other kitchens and nutritional exhibits at the fair, invited women to use Corson’s exhibit to, “introduce novel methods of kitchen work and inventions in culinary art.”140 Corson was recognized widely by fair organizers and the press for her instigation of the movement to establish cooking schools nearly twenty years earlier, and while she herself was recognized for contributions to scientific home management, among the press and many fair visitors, cooking schools remained largely associated with culinary art over household science. 138 Weimann, The Fair Women, 459. 139 Board of General Managers, Report of the Board of General Managers of the Exhibit of the State of New York, at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Transmitted to the Legislature April 18, 1894 (Albany: James B. Lyon, State Printer, 1894), 174-175, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015070585701. 140 H.C. Hovey, “The Science of Nutrition as Exemplified at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Scientific American 69, no. 15 (1893): 231. 63 The Corn Kitchen and the Board of Lady Managers advertised to visitors the use of sophisticated recipes, the purchase of sophisticated ingredients and dinnerware, and promoted training in artistic cookery. They demonstrated the kitchen as a studio for creating culinary art, maintaining high cultural standards, and elevating feminine arts. Cooking schools, and many of their leaders, were closely associated with this message, providing a service and acting as a resource for women of the upper and middle classes. Already equipped with Rorer’s kitchen, which elevated the art of cookery, Palmer also sought to add a kitchen to the Woman’s Building to demonstrate the scientific elements of cooking. In this endeavor she was disappointed, as the leading proponent of scientific cooking, Ellen Richards, also rejected her offer to exhibit in the Woman’s Building, opting instead to partner with the Massachusetts Board of Managers and the Bureau of Sanitation and Hygiene to open a public kitchen at the fair outside of the Anthropology building.141 Richards’ Rumford Kitchen was located directly next to the New York Cooking School on the opposite side of the fairgrounds.142 The Rumford Kitchen Laboratory While the decision to exhibit outside of the Women’s Building was most likely a result of Richards’ partnership with the Bureau of Sanitation and Hygiene, which was stationed in the Anthropology Building, her choice not to demonstrate her scientific kitchen in the Woman’s Building—which would associate her kitchen with art rather than 141 Massachusetts Board of Managers, Report of the Massachusetts Board of World’s Fair Managers (Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., 1894), 41, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044015706831. 142 Weimann, The Fair Women, 462. 64 science—also reflects her earlier efforts to establish co-ed laboratories at MIT and to define domestic science as a field of study for both men and women.143 The Rumford Kitchen at the World’s Columbian Exposition was essentially a replica of the 1890 New England Kitchen in Boston, but it was also an homage to Benjamin Thompson, also known as Count Rumford. During the late-eighteenth century, Thompson had been an early advocate of applying scientific study to food, and he also developed a kitchen range.144 Constructed near the Anthropology Building, the Rumford Kitchen was a one-room structure that resembled a small farm house. Sunlight streamed through the front windows and lit the interior of the kitchen, which was set up much like a laboratory. Images of the kitchen show shelves that occupied much of the wall space and displayed orderly white dishes, cooking utensils, and scientific instruments. On the walls above the shelves signs displayed mottoes like “Preserve and treat food as you would your body, remembering that in time food will be your body” and “The seat of courage is the stomach.”145 Visitors to the kitchen spent so much time copying the mottoes as they toured the kitchen, they were later reprinted in American Kitchen Magazine.146 Larger signs with charts demonstrating the nutritional properties of food and the nutritional necessities of the human body hung between shelves and on wall dividers. Clean and sterile benches for cooking lectures stood in front of the shelves, and 143 Massachusetts Board of Managers, Report of the Massachusetts Board of World’s Fair Managers, 42. 144 H.C. Hovey, “The Science of Nutrition as Exemplified at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” Scientific American 69, no. 15 (1893): 230–31. 145 “Rumford Kitchen Mottoes,” Everyday Housekeeping IV, no. 5 (1896): 211. 146 Richards et al., Plain Words about Food: The Rumford Kitchen Leaflets, 9. 65 in the center of the room orderly tables and chairs stood awaiting guests for the cooking demonstrations.147 In a description of the Rumford Kitchen’s goals, Ellen Richards asserted that the kitchen was always first-and-foremost a scientific endeavor meant to bring attention to nutrition as a branch of sanitary science, but they also sold food to visitors in an effort to defray the cost of the exhibit. Richards very literally presented and labeled the kitchen as a laboratory. Richards, Abel, and New England Kitchen cook, Maria Daniell lectured to the kitchen’s many visitors about the nutritive properties of food and its scientific composition, and they had informational pamphlets ready to hand out.148 The food offered by the Rumford Kitchen proved very popular, and visitors waited outside to get a seat in the kitchen, which could hold only thirty people. Some guests were mystified at the scientific language ascribed to the meals. A news article noted, “A well-dressed lady remarked to the writer that it was well enough to tell people how many proteids [sic] and the like could be seen in food by the aid of microscope, but for her part she preferred not to know that they were there!”149 The food proved delicious enough to draw a crowd, but undoubtedly the scientific aspects of the kitchen were overlooked or intentionally ignored by some guests. The creators of the Rumford Kitchen impressed visitors with their meals, but they also sought to use the wide audience at the fair to bring awareness among prominent scientists and educators to their scientific endeavor. Richards and her associates 147 Massachusetts Board of Managers, Report of the Massachusetts Board of World’s Fair Managers, 41- 45. 148 Ibid, 41-45. 149 Hovey, “The Science of Nutrition as Exemplified at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” 230-231. 66 attempted to draw direct line between Thompson’s century-old efforts in the “science of nutrition,” which they claimed were “unrivaled in spite of the progress of other departments during this century,” and their contemporary goals for the study of food. The kitchen featured an Aladdin Oven as the fuel-efficient counterpart of Thompson’s earlier models, which were also on display in the kitchen. Ultimately, the Rumford Kitchen promoted the continuance of Thompson’s investigation of the nutritional aspects of foods using contemporary scientific advancements.150 The New England Kitchen had primarily focused on the consumption of food by working-class customers, but in the context of the Columbian Exposition and the narrative of American progress, the Rumford Kitchen was meant to draw the attention of scientific and academic professionals that might invest financially or intellectually to the continuation of their work. The creators of the Rumford Kitchen sought to advertise the scientific process of preparing meals, and that nutrition did not necessitate a lack of quality and flavor. Like the New England Kitchen before it, the Rumford Kitchen demonstrated the kitchen as a laboratory and a source for educational, dietary, and ultimately, social reform—efforts becoming more mainstream at the dawn of the Progressive Era. Richards followed the work of Jane Addams and donated the printed materials from the Rumford Kitchen to the Hull House upon the fair’s closing.151 The Rumford Kitchen’s cooking and scientific equipment was donated to the experimental kitchen of the women’s dormitories at the University of Chicago.152 150 Richards et al., Plain Words about Food: The Rumford Kitchen Leaflets, 12-13. 151 Massachusetts Board of Managers, Report of the Massachusetts Board of World’s Fair Managers, 43. 152 Ibid, 45. 67 The Congress of Women and “Household Economics” Addressing their peers at two separate congresses of women during the exposition, one held in the Woman’s Building and the other in the World’s Congress Auxiliary, prominent women spoke about far-ranging topics from ancient Assyrian Mythology to the nineteenth-century settlement of the Pacific Northwest. Many of the topics centered on women’s financial independence, suffrage, the ideology of true womanhood, and the evolution of the home amidst social and technological progress.153 Tending toward a conservative view that elevated women’s role in the home, cooking school leaders focused their addresses on family health, and they encouraged women to prioritize wholesome cooking based on modern techniques. Addressing the topic of home evolution directly, Juliet Corson spoke of the technological and ethnological progress of the United States, particularly in regard to cooking methods. She encouraged women to look upon the exhibits of “semi-civilized” cultures on the Midway Plaisance and the social progress demonstrated among the anthropological exhibits, and to consider their own part in the evolution of “womanly usefulness.” She asked her audience, “If our best and brightest [women] are to be devoted to competition with men in the learned professions, may we not question where the home-makers are to come from to whom we must look for the motherhood of the next generation which shall create 153 Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle et al., The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago: International Pub. Co., 1894), 17-19, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com.libproxy.uoregon.edu/tinyurl/6yh8t5. 68 our rulers?”154 In contrast to her own personal experience and career outside of the home, Corson, who herself remained unmarried, believed very much in the ideology of “true womanhood,” that US women’s role as a homemaker was more important than entering into the professional world.155 Former principal of the Boston Cooking School, Mary J. Lincoln also spoke of the need for every young woman to learn the art of cookery, and she was encouraged by the recent popularity of cooking schools and the proliferation of cooking advice in lectures, magazines, and newspapers. She urged that more work be done to promote the training of cookery in public schools, and that proper cookery be seriously taken up by housekeepers. On this point she noted, “I have for a long time felt, instead of teaching my pupils how to prepare elegant dinners of many courses, and to compete with chefs and caterers, I should spend more time in teaching them to prepare the essential dishes perfectly, and until they can do that, to give no time to elaborate menus.” Lincoln wanted women to prioritize the nutrition of their families based on proper cooking techniques over creating fancy dishes and focusing on elaborate home decor.156 However, her comments also reveal that taking her teaching back to the basics and essentials is something she had long wanted to do, but never implemented, likely because the creation of elegant dishes was in much greater demand among high-class customers. 154 Juliet Corson, “The Evolution of Home,” in The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, ed. Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (Chicago: International Pub. Co., 1894), 714-718, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com.libproxy.uoregon.edu/tinyurl/6yh8t5. 155 “Juliet Corson,” Feeding America, https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_corson.cfm. 156 Mrs. David A. Lincoln, “Cookery,” in The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, ed. Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (Chicago: International Pub. Co., 1894), 138- 142, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com.libproxy.uoregon.edu/tinyurl/6yh8t5. 69 Focusing on the health of US college students as opposed to women’s role in the home, Ellen Richards spoke about food as fuel for student’s minds and bodies. Leaning into the technological theme of the exposition, Richards speaks of human bodies as machines. She argues that if a body needs fuel for physical exertion, it needs just as much attention and fuel for mental exercise. Also using the metaphors of the US consumer marketplace, she provides an analogy, “A cow is worth to the state perhaps a hundred dollars a year, a trained mind one hundred thousand dollars a year. A nation which so carefully feeds its cattle should take care of its young men and women with promising brains.” Richards urges college faculty to study student diets in order to provide adequate nutrition for young minds.157 Rather than focusing on the home, Richards’ concern is clearly focused outward on the science of nutrition in academia. Laura Wilkinson, head of the National Columbian Household Economic Association, urged that women collectively organize around improving the home, seeking a means to provide women with competent domestic servants and to compile and evaluate copious advice on domestic science. Wilkinson presented a speech on household economics in the Woman's Building and again at the World’s Congress Auxiliary. The original Household Economics Committee was established in 1891 by the Board of Lady Managers in preparation for the congress auxiliary, and it had two primary goals. First, to improve the communication and professional relationship between mistress and domestic servant. Wilkinson’s speech discusses the lack of training schools for domestic servants, 157 Ellen H. Richards, “Food for Students,” in The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, ed. Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (Chicago: International Pub. Co., 1894), 713, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com.libproxy.uoregon.edu/tinyurl/6yh8t5. 70 and the unwillingness of servants to attend such training or lectures. The committee established a “Housekeeper’s Emergency Bureau” to supply help from domestic servants on a temporary, hourly basis as needed.158 The goal of addressing the “servant problem” received the most attention in Wilkinson’s addresses, which highlights the perceived importance of this issue among women of the middle and upper classes at the turn of the century. Her articulation of the problem denotes continuing frustration with the perceived low-quality work and lack of training among domestic servants, but it also touches upon a growing problem with the number of domestic servants available. A primary contributor to this issue was the continued growth of the middle-class throughout the second half of the nineteenth-century. As the middle class continued to expand there simply were not enough domestic servants in the industry to meet the demand.159 In addition to increased demand in domestic service positions, jobs in shops and factories also continued to provide different opportunities for working women. Given the personal constraints that accompanied live-in domestic service and the tensions that often existed between mistress and servant, women increasingly preferred to work for an hourly wage. The social stigma of being a servant also provided a large obstacle to recruitment. Servants 158 Laura Wilkinson, “The Columbian Association of Housekeepers and Bureau of Information, with Plans for the Work Outlined in the National Columbian Household Economic Association, which was Incorporated March 15, 1893,” in The World’s Congress of Representative Women; A Historical Résumé for Popular Circulation of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, Convened in Chicago on May 15, and Adjourned on May 22, 1893, under the Auspices of the Woman’s Branch of the World’s Congress Auxiliary, ed. May Wright Sewell (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894), 887-891, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951001543183x; Laura S. Wilkinson, “Household Economics,” in The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, ed. Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle (Chicago: International Pub. Co., 1894), 233-236, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com.libproxy.uoregon.edu/tinyurl/6yh8t5. 159 Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 46. 71 interviewed about their work in 1890 described a social isolation and degradation that resulted from their employment, the result being that other women or acquaintances in different occupations were hesitant to associate with domestics because of their perceived or assumed lack of intelligence.160 Domestic servants also found the uniforms demeaning and were frustrated that their employers denied them common courtesies, like addressing them by first name only and usually failing to acknowledge their presence when in the company of guests.161 With other work opportunities opening for young women, middle- class women attempted to find new strategies to reduce the stigma and tension associated with domestic work, and to reform the labor system for servants in the home. The association’s second goal was to “promote the scientific knowledge of foods and household fuels.” Wilkinson wanted the association to investigate the “utensils absolutely necessary for a well-appointed kitchen.” She noted the variation in such advice that appeared in cookbooks and sought to compile reports that would aid housekeepers in determining how to furnish their kitchens. Wilkinson and the association also endorsed Atkinson’s Aladdin Oven because of the nutritive quality of its cooking method, but cautioned that its proper use meant that it needed to “be put into the hands of an intelligent housekeeper.”162 As cooking advice, in print and in lectures, proliferated at the end of the nineteenth century, Wilkinson wanted the association to serve as a guide to the middle-class women and their housekeepers to help them navigate the economical industrialization of the household. 160 Ibid, 10. 161 Strasser, Never Done, 167-169. 162 Wilkinson, “The Columbian Association of Housekeepers,” 887-891; Wilkinson, “Household Economics,” 233-236. 72 The speeches of the Woman’s Congress are reminiscent of the writings of the Woman’s Centennial Executive Committee in 1876, and their concerns over the training of domestic servants and the elevation of feminine arts. The congress addresses at the World’s Columbian Exposition provide a window into the social and political perspectives of women concerned with cooking technology, health and nutrition, and household economics as the nineteenth century came to a close. As the US exhibited the development of industrial technology in the massive halls at the Columbian Exposition, women exhibited and spoke about the technological and scientific progress of the home. In particular, the formation of the National Columbian Household Economic Association at the exposition shows the perceived need to organize around the topic of household economics in the context of continued concerns over the availability and quality of domestic help, the continued popularity of cooking schools and cookbooks, and emerging scientific studies of nutrition and health. Conclusion Adelaide Evenden made several more trips to the exposition before the fair came to a close in the fall of 1893. Her final entry on the exposition describes another solo excursion to the fair on a drizzly October day. The cold mist chilled her but wasn’t enough to stop her exploration. Evenden aimed to see all that she could, and she returned to many of the vast buildings in the Court of Honor to hungrily explore all the exhibits she hadn’t already seen. Throughout her discussion of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Evenden’s only specific reference to kitchen technology is the electric oven. She chose instead to visit and record curiosities from the international exhibits or memorable works 73 of art. Evenden’s diary doesn’t tell us if she hired any domestic help, and it’s possible that she did, but it’s clear that she still participated in at least some of the housework. Her sparse discussion of domestic exhibits at the fair mirrors her lack of enthusiasm for the work in her own home. Intertwined with her discussion of adventures at the exposition and other social engagements, Evenden often discusses her experiences as a newlywed and her domestic chores. She complained of the drudgery of housework, her endeavors to prepare and host her first Thanksgiving dinner, and she revealed that she was sometimes self-conscious and indignant about her housekeeping abilities.163 One could hardly fault her for finding the historical relics and the exhibits by manufacturers at the fair a more interesting subject than the many displays of kitchen technology. The fact that effectively managing her home and her housekeeping still continued to appear in her writings, however, is indicative of the pressure she felt to meet the societal expectations of a middle-class housewife. The creators of these model kitchens at the World’s Columbian Exposition intended them to fit within the rhetoric of American innovation and technological progress, and together they reveal the multitude of ideas that existed about how industrial progress could be implemented in the home, and how the kitchen could be a foundation for innovation, high-culture, and scientific progress. The exhibitors negotiated for space within the White City, a stage where they could advertise their ideas to millions of visitors, and as these model kitchens show, the location of an exhibit on the grounds was an important aspect of their message. An organized movement for home economics began 163 Adelaide L. Evenden, diary, World's Columbian Exposition--Alpha, Evenden, Adelaide, Chicago History Museum. 74 in the years following the Worlds Columbian Exposition, attempting to instruct middle- class housewives like Adelaide Evenden about proper home management. Members of the movement later recognized the Columbian Exposition’s significance, particularly the Rumford Kitchen and the creation of the National Columbian Household Economic Association, in the instigation of the movement.164 However, visions for an organized movement would continue to diverge around issues of the “servant problem,” the consumer demand for courses in culinary art, and the scientific study of the home. 164 Ava Milam Clark, Adventures of a Home Economist (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1969), 25. 75 CHAPTER IV “THE MAKING OF COOKS”: THE HOME ECONOMICS MOVEMENT AND CULINARY ENTREPRENEURS, 1893-1909 In the eighth year of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics in 1906, conference member Ethel Fifield Brooks led a conference session on “Suggestions for Home and Club Study.” In the session, Brooks fulminated against contemporary Northeastern club women: “The average club woman is an intellectual infant. She does not want to be instructed; she wants to be amused. If you want to instruct her you must do it without her being conscious of your fell designs. Take a lesson from those who supply her with mental candy, and sugarcoat your pills.”165 This statement reflects the frustration that members of the academic movement for home economics felt with the middle-class audience they were attempting to reach at the turn of the century. This cynical critique of the intelligence of club women is somewhat ironic given the significance of organized club women to some of the first efforts to bring the subject of household economics to national prominence. Conversations about the importance of home economics grew exponentially as the nineteenth century came to a close, and national movements continued to expand, addressing the domestic service problem and the importance of scientific home economics in public schools. As the academic movement for home economics solidified, they focused on educating a younger generation of students, and professionalizing the field of home economics, putting efforts to educate middle-class housewives on the back 165 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference (Lake Placid, N.Y., 1906), 107, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. 76 burner. At the same time, cooking school leaders were made increasingly famous by expositions, newspapers, and cookbooks. Consequently, their culinary lessons continued to grow in popularity among the middle-class. Tracing the history of cooking schools, contemporaneous to the emergence of the academic home economics movement in 1899, reveals that the cooking school movement and its leaders continued to influence and profit from middle-class American consumers well into the twentieth century. This provided an even greater number of opportunities for cooking school leaders to market consumer products, and to participate in new entrepreneurial endeavors. During the World’s Columbian Exposition dozens of women’s organizations, including the National Columbian Household Economic Association, had set up tables in the Organizations Room of the Woman’s Building. The number of these organizations (which had merited an encyclopedia compiled after the fair) and the speeches in the Congress of women, attested to the proliferation of middle-class women’s clubs during this era.166 Throughout the Gilded Age these clubs multiplied with the increase in urbanization and efforts for progressive reform. There was a 56.4 percent increase in the urban population in 1890 and that number continued to climb at the turn of the century. By the end of the century, urban areas with a population of 10,000-25,000 had grown from 58 in 1860 to 280 in 1900, with most of the population still concentrated in the Northeast.167 Many progressive movements throughout the Gilded Age began with women’s clubs, their primarily white, middle-class members responding to the increasing 166 Weimann, The Fair Women, 520-521. 167 Robert G. Barrows, “Urbanizing America” in The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 103-104. 77 number of rural and immigrant working poor entering Northeastern cities. While the clubs had been initiated with a goal for middle-class self-improvement, their focus in the 1890s began to shift to concerns about improving the conditions of the working poor, caring for orphans, and uplifting “wayward women.” In 1890 the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) was founded as an umbrella organization, a central hub of information for the abundance of club movements and programs.168 By the turn of the century the GFWC had 150,000 members and by 1920 they had nearly a million.169 As the club movement grew in the last decade of the nineteenth century, it provided an important impetus for the beginnings of a national home economics movement and provided a potential resource for the circulation of scientific home economics principles to middle-class American housewives. The National Household Economic Association Following their inaugural meeting and speeches during the World’s Columbian Exposition, the National Household Economic Association (NHEA) continued their annual meetings where they focused primarily on solving the servant problem.170 By 1896 they had also established state branches of the organization, each working to disseminate information regarding household economics through women’s clubs. Each 168 Stacy A. Cordery, “Women in Industrializing America,” in The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, ed. Charles W. Calhoun, 2nd ed. (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 121-123. 169 Leavitt, From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart, 76. 170 National Household Economic Association, Officers and By-Laws with Suggestions for Work: And a Report of the Fifth Annual Meeting, Held at Nashville, October 27, 1897, [1897], 5, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112068324661. The Association voted to drop the word “Columbian” from their title at a meeting held in April 1894. 78 branch focused on the development of schools for potential housekeepers, and on providing advice to club members on the adoption of efficient home technology (particularly the Aladdin oven as they had endorsed as the Columbian Exposition). They also encouraged men to become members of their organization, acknowledging the contributions of Count Rumford, Professor Youmans, and Edward Atkinson to the study of scientific housekeeping.171 The inclusion of men in their organization also served to define their objectives as public housekeeping, relevant to all members of society. While their concerns centered on the home, they wanted to underscore their wider social implications. The national organization continued to meet annually, often during subsequent state and national expositions, and they held their fifth meeting in the Woman’s Building at the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition in 1897. At the annual meeting they discussed the social implications of poor housekeeping and their efforts to implement domestic science in more colleges and public schools.172 While ostensibly a continuation of earlier efforts to promote domestic economy in land-grant schools and to teach children the value of healthful cooking for social reform, the efforts by the NHEA to provide training in domestic science centered primarily on training a new generation of housekeepers to serve the middle-class. In the context of the evolving fields of germ theory and sanitary science, the proper sanitation of the home took on increased significance. The president of the NHEA identifies proper management of the home as paramount to physical and mental health: “The American people have long been accused of wastefulness, extravagance and a 171 National Household Economic Association, Officers and By-Laws with Suggestions for Work, 28-30. 172 National Household Economic Association, Officers and By-Laws with Suggestions for Work, 5-21. 79 general disregard of sanitary laws and of home hygiene. As a people we are given over to dyspepsia and nervous disorders, with the logical result of increasing vice, intemperance and insanity. Too much of this may be traced to an unstable, unscientific home life, in which the mistress is generally unfitted for her work while the maid is often both incompetent and unwilling to become otherwise.” The association urged that local granges and county fairs should hold lectures on home economics to curb health issues they perceived as stemming from mismanaged homes.173 In the 1870s Professor Youmans of Popular Science Monthly had identified the home and kitchen as a potential breeding ground for degradation and immorality, here the problem is more closely identified with physical and mental health, which also had social consequences. Once again, the home could either be a moral safeguard or the impetus for physical, mental, and moral deterioration. Housewives were responsible for acquainting themselves with the latest studies in scientific home management and making sure that their housekeepers had proper training and likely more intense supervision. The NHEA’s efforts to implement curriculum on the scientific study of household science in public schools and colleges was meant primarily to funnel young women into domestic service. They surmised that home economics curriculum “would go far toward solving the domestic service problem, besides preparing all girls for what will be the life work of the great majority of them, the making and keeping of the home.”174 The generational differences in household industrialization were cited as a primary cause for the poor domestic skills of young women. The NHEA felt that the current generation of 173 Ibid, 24-25. 174 Ibid, 26-27. 80 mothers was too incompetent and overburdened to teach household management to their own daughters. The members of this association believed that public schools could fill this gap in essential training, which would elevate the position of domestic servant to the same level as a factory or store worker, competing with those professions, and encouraging more women to enter the industry.175 In their view, the scientific study of home economics in public schools would prepare young middle-class women to be domestic managers and young women of the lower class to embrace their roles as competent housekeepers. After concluding the experiment of the New England Kitchens and the Rumford Kitchen at the Columbian Exposition, Ellen Richards also attempted to form a school of housekeeping in response to the rising concerns over hired housekeepers. Richards opened the Boston School of Housekeeping in conjunction with the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in 1897. The school, much like the ones encouraged by the National Household Economics Association, hoped to attract “a better class of immigrants” into domestic service. A leaflet for the school defined its goal as one of social progress and racial fitness, raising the standard of living “for better citizenship, for a greater country, for a nobler race.”176 The school proved unsuccessful primarily because domestic servants, already dissatisfied with this type of employment, did not want to spend eight months completing unpaid training, and their employers did not want to send 175 Ibid, 28-30. 176 Janice Williams Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003), 37. 81 away servants already under their employ.177 Servants also objected to the fact that they generally were not consulted on the curricula of these programs, and they felt they could learn better with hands-on experience.178 Given its failure as a school for domestic servants, Richards, who “had little patience with the servant problem,” decided to transform the school into an institution that provided further education for college-trained women, teaching them to apply scientific principles to the home.179 This early effort to form a national movement for training in household economics was concentrated around the issue of domestic service, a topic that would continue to permeate discussions of home economics through the early twentieth century. The women of the NHEA maintained that the ignorance of servants—and housewives— was a significant issue worthy of national concern. They urged the elevation of standards for home efficiency and the systematic education and management of domestic servants. Richards’ Boston School of Housekeeping, and its transformation into a school for college-trained women was an early indication that the movement for home economics would attempt to break away from the “servant problem.” The Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics As the “servant problem” intensified the organization of the NHEA and other club women around the topic of household economics, Richards and a small group of her close contemporaries determined that the “time [was] ripe for united action of those 177 Stage, Rethinking Home Economics, 24-25. 178 Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 38. 179 Stage, Rethinking Home Economics, 25. 82 interested in home science or household economics.” Just as she had determined to begin a science-based strategy as an alternative to cooking schools a decade earlier, Richards determined to establish a separate national movement focused primarily on the implementation of domestic science in public schools and universities, rather than on the servant problem.180 Her attempts to form a national movement were also due to the resistance of women’s colleges like Bryn Mawr, and her own alma mater of Vassar, to accept domestic science as part of the curriculum. These Eastern colleges tended to view domestic science courses as a legacy of the “cult of domesticity.” The association of domestic economy courses with practical training at agricultural land-grant colleges in the Midwest perpetuated a view of these courses as scientifically and intellectually inferior to the subjects that Eastern colleges already made available to college women.181 Richards was determined to begin new conversations about implementing household economics as a scientific subject in high schools and colleges, fitting future generations of young women and men with tools for scientifically maintaining their homes. The first Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics took place in September 1899 with Ellen Richards as Chairman, and the agenda revolved around the development of home economics as a sociological field. The first annual meeting consisted of ten members and was hosted at the Lake Placid Club by Annie and Melvil Dewey, founder of the Dewey Decimal System. The group determined that, “Home Economics” was the most suitable title to encompass their larger endeavor, and their first conference focused 180 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the First, Second, and Third Annual Conferences (Lake Placid, N.Y., 1901), 4, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. 181 Stage, Rethinking Home Economics, 25. 83 on the training of young women for “higher leadership” within the new field, and on the development of curriculum for middle schools, high schools, and colleges. From the outset the group strove to create a distinction around “home economics” as the scientific study of nutrition and home management, separate from “household arts” or handicraft, which they believed would never be accepted in the curriculum of universities outside of land-grant colleges.182 Richards articulated that a primary goal of the conference at its outset was to, “Rouse teachers and housewives to an appreciation of what the same kind of scientific intelligence might do for them that had planned railroads and machines… why may not women, forced to master the mechanical conditions of the new life which has come to us with them be given the incentives of high ideals and standards. Our living today is more a radical departure from that of our grandmothers than in any [three] centuries of earlier days.”183 In the context of rapid industrialization in the late nineteenth century, Richards envisioned this movement as the professionalization of housewives, teaching them to scientifically manage homes as a parallel to men in the industrial workforce. From the conference’s first annual meeting to its third, participation increased exponentially, and attendees articulated the necessity of teaching domestic economy to students in middle and high school. Themes concentrated around creating a new generation of healthy, economically stable American citizens. Building upon the goals of social reformers beginning in the 1870s, the conference believed that if all children were 182 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the First, Second, and Third Annual Conferences, 3-5. 183 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference (Lake Placid, N.Y., 1908), 21, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. 84 taught scientific cooking methods, proper home sanitation, and the management of a budget in secondary school then they could create economic stability for themselves, making them fit for US citizenship. Additionally, the reformers hoped to assimilate the children of the immigrant population, teaching them the preparation of nutritious dishes, similar to the fare of the New England Kitchen.184 Historian Kristin Hoganson has shown that members of the home economics movement attempted to “regulate and homogenize the American diet.”185 The articulations of home economics goals defined in terms of citizenship and racial fitness were influenced by the Eugenics movement of the early twentieth century, which aimed to improve the genetic quality of Americans to create a better race.186 Despite some inconsistency and a lamented lack of conformity in naming conventions, courses in domestic economy were implemented at an increasing number of secondary schools throughout the US in the first years of the twentieth century. By the end of the conference’s third year in 1901, seventh and eighth grade curriculum had earned support from US education officials.187 While the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics made gains in the implementation of home economics in public schools, in multiple sessions they noted the challenge of teaching scientific cooking methods to club women. In one session it was 184 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the First, Second, and Third Annual Conferences, 14-56. 185 Hoganson, Consumers’ Imperium, 122. 186 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference (Lake Placid, N.Y., 1904), 63, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. Richards was directly influenced by the leader of the Eugenics movement, Francis Galton, and she coined the term “Euthenics” in 1904 to refer to college courses in home economics as “higher education in better living.” ⁠ 187 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the First, Second, and Third Annual Conferences, 13-116. 85 noted, “The general trend of women’s clubs today seems to be toward social service, education and self-improvement, with very little interest in home economics, if one can judge from the usual absence of this topic in club notices.” The conference used data from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs to determine interest in home economics finding that 31 out of 39 states in the GFWC gave some attention to home economics, but most frequently it was a lecture on cooking. “And what does cooking or food mean to the average woman? Probably a lesson or so in cooking fancy dishes, manipulation, rather than instruction as to food values or suitability of the daily menus.” They stated that women in general were ignorant of—and cared not learn—scientific food principles. Although the conference held little hope for igniting interest in home economics among “the average woman,” they continued to develop syllabi that could be shared with women’s clubs to encourage them to pursue the scientific study of the home.188 The conference had hoped to utilize the proliferation of women’s clubs at the turn of the century to propagate the benefits of scientific housekeeping and nutritious cooking among middle-class women. However, similar to sentiments expressed by “high-class” women in the Rumford Kitchen at the World’s Columbian Exposition, they found that many women preferred not to know the scientific composition of their food. In addition, while some organizations like the NHEA insisted that women learn the scientific principles of household economics even if they employed domestic help, the employment of servants by many club women maintained their own removal from, and resistance to, daily household chores and the specifics of sanitary science. Many club women were 188 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference (Lake Placid, N.Y., 1902), 51-85, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. 86 focused on outward efforts for municipal housekeeping and were less concerned with the details of scientifically managing their own homes, opting instead for occasional lessons for cooking a “fancy” dish. Richards had instigated the conference at Lake Placid in order to move home economics toward science and steer the field away from the “servant problem,” but it continued to pervade conversations and sessions at the annual meetings. Some session leaders insisted that American families could live frugal and fulfilling lives without the help of domestic servants, and that in fact more women were happy when they didn’t employ domestic help.189 Mary Hinman Abel addressed the tension over the servant problem at the annual meeting in 1904. She noted that while some believed it was an over-emphasized issue, it was still a serious issue for many women and worthy of continued investigation.190 Mirroring the efforts of the National Household Economic Association, members of the Lake Placid Conference established boarding houses and training schools for domestic servants.191 They also had lengthy discussions about the perceived social stigma of household service, how ladies might ease some of the workload of their servants, and the cost-effectiveness of hiring help by the hour instead of having live-in help.192 Melvil Dewey also championed the use of gas and electricity to replace household help and to streamline processes in the home, reflecting earlier 189 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the First, Second, and Third Annual Conferences, 95. 190 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference, 25. 191 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference (Lake Placid, N.Y., 1903), 37, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. 192 Ibid, 29-44. 87 sentiments from the electric kitchen at the Columbian Exposition.193 While Richards wanted to move away from this issue, as did many members of the conference, it was still considered a relevant and significant problem for other members. As leader of the conference, Richards continued to participate in discussions about the issue, generally reiterating her opinion that women simply needed to participate in more of their own housework.194 It was clear to many that the industry for domestic service was in rapid decline. Rather than focus on what seemed an unresolvable issue, Richards wanted women to take responsibility for their housework and dispense with the employment of domestic servants. Given the failure of the Boston School of Housekeeping to train a “better class of immigrants,” and Richards’ belief in the principles of the Eugenics movement applied to domestic work, she and other members of the Lake Placid group likely viewed the employment of domestic servants—and their perceived unwillingness to learn proper housekeeping—as obstacles to an improved standard of living and efficiency in white, middle-class American households. In the first five years of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, attendance grew from ten members to more than seven hundred. While they made some efforts to teach their principles to middle-class housewives directly, they continued to focus primarily on the inclusion of scientific home economics courses at every level of education. With the work of Richards’ conference on household economics and their continued conversations around the servant question, the president of the National 193 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference, 155. 194 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference, 32. 88 Household Economic Association decided to dissolve the NHEA into the General Federation of Woman’s Clubs, noting that, “The Lake Placid conference was now doing much better work along the same lines.”195 Now as foremost national movement in the field of home economics, the Lake Placid group continued their efforts to affect social reform, focusing even more intently on reaching the next generation through college coursework. In addition to their annual meetings, the conference promoted their endeavors by exhibiting their work at local fairs and international expositions.196 The Louisiana Purchase Exposition of 1904 From May to December of 1904 twenty-million visitors attended the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri. It was considered “the largest and most spectacular fair the country had yet seen.” Twice as large as the World’s Columbian Exposition, the exposition was a chance for St. Louis to show the world what they had missed when they had lost to Chicago for the honor of hosting the fair in 1893. Like the Columbian Exposition, the main buildings housed technological and commercial exhibits, but given its occurrence during America’s “Imperial Age” this fair featured more anthropological exhibits than any fair that had preceded it.197 The Board of Lady Managers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition felt that by 1904 “the time [had] passed when we are to have a separate exhibit of what women can do,” therefore the exposition 195 Stage, Rethinking Home Economics, 26. 196 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference (Lake Placid, N.Y., 1907), 16, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. 197 Rydell, Findling, and Pelle, All the World’s a Fair, 52-57. 89 featured no Woman’s Building.198 Instead, the exhibits—categorized under the theme of “Man and His Works”—featured work by women and conversations about the American home, representing a significant shift toward elevating women’s accomplishments.199 In a 15-by-15 foot corner of the Education and Social Economy building, which had a central location on the grounds near the Grand Basin, stood the Mary Lowell Stone Home Economics Exhibit.200 The exhibit, named in memory of Stone, who was recognized for her contributions to the fight for woman’s suffrage, had originally been displayed at several other events beginning in 1902.201 Originally exhibited by the Boston Branch of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, it was part of a collection named “Contributions of College Women to Home Economics.” The exhibit had also been displayed at the Mechanics fair in Boston in October of 1902, where it was said to have “attracted much attention, many scientific men expressing great approval.”202 As part of the project to bring knowledge about the scientific study of home economics to the broader public, a sign of the exhibit’s success was its impression upon men with standing in the professional scientific community. Hilda Meisenbach, member of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, was in charge of the exhibit at the St. Louis fair in 1904 and reported that the exhibit held 198 Board of Lady Managers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Report to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1905), 101, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t6vx0769f. 199 Rydell, Findling, and Pelle, All the World’s a Fair, 53. 200 John Del Carson and W. J Brown, World's fair, St. Louis: Ground Plan Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, Missouri World’s Fair [S.l.: s.n., 1904], map, https://www.loc.gov/item/2007633932/. 201 “The Mary Lowell Stone Fund,” Woman’s Journal (Boston, MA), November 12, 1898. 202 “Mary Lowell Stone Home Economics Exhibit,” Woman’s Journal (Boston, MA), December 3, 1904. 90 a pleasant and prominent location. The exhibit consisted of “sensible” and comfortable furniture where guests might take a moment to rest. Fifty books chosen by the conference as standard texts for home economics were on display, as well as portable demonstration equipment for teachers of home economics. On the walls of the exhibit, photos showed visitors examples of model kitchens and charts demonstrated household budgets, nutritional information, methods of simplifying laundry, and scientific home construction.203 Meisenbach reported that visitors to the exhibit seemed interested in the nascent field of home economics and often requested copies of the various charts.204 At the St. Louis Exposition, which had far more visitors than the Mechanics Fair in Boston, the Lake Placid Conference hoped to bring more exposure to their movement among scientists and educators. As opposed to the Rumford Kitchen at the World’s Columbian Exposition, which demonstrated the benefits of nutritious cooking, this exhibit was meant to represent a new field of academic study. Visitors also took copies of a small card, which displayed the principles of home economics as defined by Ellen Richards: HOME ECONOMICS STANDS FOR: The ideal home life for day to-day unhampered by the traditions of the past. The utilization of all the resources of modern science to improve the home life. The freedom of the home from the dominance of things and their due subordination to ideals. The simplicity in material surroundings which will most free the spirit for the more important and permanent interests of the home and of society.205 This definition of the field emphasized a need to revolutionize conceptions of the 203 “Mary Lowell Stone Home Economics Exhibit,” Woman’s Journal (Boston, MA), December 3, 1904. 204 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference, 30-32. 205 Ibid, 31. 91 twentieth-century home. The Stone Exhibit, and the literature presented by the conference, urged visitors to modernize their homes (in moderation), bringing science and industrialization in, while also dispensing with the material abundance of the Gilded Age. Many members of the Lake Placid Conference promoted the training of women to utilize new technology in the home, but they felt this would be more successful among a younger generation of women with academic training that fostered the inclination to use such devices.206 Members also urged frugality and cautioned against a focus on the acquisition of household appliances, “Rather than lay stress on new appliances to do work for us, let us first see that we choose our finishing and furnishings so well that they may be easily cared for… Let us work to simplify labor rather than to multiply labor saving appliances.”207 Essentially, the use and acquisition of household technology should be undertaken as a scientific study, which required the appropriate academic training to prepare women as responsible users and consumers. The Mary Lowell Stone Home Economics Exhibit’s promotion of home economics as a scientific field, and its stated principles on frugality and sanitation in the home effectively encapsulated the primary goals of the Lake Placid Conference. As visitors entered the Eastern Pavilion, just south of the Education and Social Economy Building, they encountered a restaurant and kitchen under the management of cooking expert, Sarah Tyson Rorer.208 Once again demonstrating in a model kitchen at the 206 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference, 89. 207 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference, 105-107. 208 Carson and Brown, World's fair, St. Louis: Ground Plan Louisiana Purchase Exposition. 92 exposition, Rorer endeavored to show her audiences “how simply and easily all foods may be prepared. The object in teaching cookery is not to increase or complicate the work, not to make it ceremonial, but to point out the simple and easy way.”209 The Eastern Pavilion consisted of three floors and a basement, all of which were under Rorer’s supervision. The first and second floors housed a model restaurant, which also served upper-class guests in private dining areas on the third floor and the roof garden. The basement contained Rorer’s model kitchen and lecture hall where she gave her daily demonstrations.210 A World’s Fair Souvenir Cook Book was available to her audiences, providing instructions for a few of the most popular recipes that she prepared during her demonstrations.211 Ava Milam, future Dean of Home Economics at Oregon State University, visited the fair shortly after graduating from high school and viewed one of Rorer’s demonstrations in which she skillfully deboned a chicken in order to make a “fancy dish.” At one point in her lesson Rorer’s knife failed to hit the intended joint on the chicken and, “Without batting an eye she looked up at her audience and explained her failure: ‘Malformation of the joint!’”212 In the wake of her experience in the model Corn Kitchen at the Columbian exposition Rorer had become a celebrity at the turn of the century. Newspapers heralded her as “The Queen of Cookery.”213 Rorer was an expert at 209 Sarah Tyson Rorer, World’s Fair Souvenir Cook Book (Philadelphia: Arnold and Company, 1904), 1, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044087453247. 210 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 150. 211 Sarah Tyson Rorer, World’s Fair Souvenir Cook Book, 1. 212 Clark, Adventures of a Home Economist, 17. 213 “The Queen of Cookery,” Butte Miner (Butte, Montana), June 15, 1894. 93 self-promotion and she seems to have expertly managed the pavilion—her reputation as a cooking celebrity left audiences confident in her culinary skills. Indeed, the recipes in Rorer’s souvenir cookbook were often simple and elegant, which likely appealed to her middle-class audience at the exposition whom often had little patience with the scientific language of nutrition. Rorer still emphasized “healthful” cooking, and her dietary advice increasingly centered on health and digestibility.214 She advertised her cooking skills to the middle-class housewives and club women whom the Lake Placid Conference had found uninterested in their scientific cooking methods, and who likely wanted an opportunity to see Rorer’s lectures given her rising status as an American celebrity. While Rorer stressed health and simplicity, she also included menus in her souvenir cookbook for fancier dishes that might be used at weddings or elaborate events.215 Rorer’s appearance again at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, and her management of a multi-story pavilion devoted to the cooking, serving, and teaching of turn-of-the-century cuisine, demonstrates the continued popularity of consumer-facing cooking schools and culinary lecturers into the twentieth century. Cooking School Educators and Entrepreneurs As discussions around the science of home economics culminated in the formation of a national movement in the wake of the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, cooking schools and their instructors had also been busy widening their influence. 214 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 179. In a biography of Rorer, Emma Seifrit Weigley notes an “increasing tendency [in the twentieth century] to assign to her the distinction of being America’s first dietician.” 215 Sarah Tyson Rorer, World’s Fair Souvenir Cook Book, 171-197. 94 The two movements were by no means completely separate, and in fact the Boston Cooking School’s original founder, Maria Parloa, was in attendance at the first annual meeting of the Lake Placid conference in 1899.216 The Boston Cooking School in particular, probably due to Parloa’s influence, was closely associated to the academic, national home economics movement. In general, however, the differences in intended audience—cooking schools oriented toward middle-class housewives and consumers and the Lake Placid Conference toward the academic community—contributed to a significant difference in their visions for public cooking instruction. Ladies magazines continued to grow in popularity at the turn of the century with new attention given to the topic of home economics. Realizing this opportunity, the Boston Cooking School began its own publication in 1896. The editor of the Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics, Janet Hill, also attended the conferences at Lake Placid as the group’s membership continued to increase after 1899. Members of the Lake Placid Conference, with a primary focus on frugality and science, scoffed at the tendency of many ladies’ magazines to encourage women’s adoption of the latest styles and trends in kitchenware and home furnishings. The group chose to endorse publications like Home Science Magazine and the American Kitchen Magazine over those marketed to women of the middle and upper classes with domestic servants like Ladies Home Journal.217 Although the Boston Cooking School and its publication were rarely discussed at the Lake Placid Conferences, they included The 216 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the First, Second, and Third Annual Conferences, 9. 217 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the First, Second, and Third Annual Conferences, 95. 95 Boston Cooking School Magazine as part of their annual bibliography. As standards of cleanliness and sanitary science continued to increase, cooking schools attempted to bridge the gap between art and science. In an article describing the methods of the Boston Cooking School in the inaugural issue of the Boston Cooking School Magazine, Hill asserts, “Under the present able and progressive regime, domestic science is taught as an art.” The article discusses the importance of scientific and practical cookery, but also stresses the availability of training in culinary art and the “elaboration of the most delicate and fanciful confections known to chefs.”218 The Boston Cooking School was established by Parloa in the 1870s as an entertainment endeavor primarily for middle-class women, and as the school grew in popularity it also adopted the practical and scientific language and instruction that emerged and intensified in the late nineteenth century. Some of the school’s scientific and social reform goals aligned with Richards’ national movement for home economics in public schools, but a large part of their business still focused on providing training in culinary arts to their middle-class constituents. The Boston Cooking School was officially acquired by Simmons College in 1902 where it continued to operate primarily as a normal school for cookery, and the Boston Cooking School Magazine continued its publication. Subsequently the school’s principal, Fannie Farmer, founded an additional school, Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery.219 While still providing cooking instruction at several socioeconomic levels, the 218 Janet Hill, “The Boston Cooking School: Its Present Work and Future Aims,” Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics 1, no. 1 (1896), 2-3, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015093180209. 219 Helen Moore, “Fannie Farmer: Cookbook Innovator,” Chicago Tribune, March 29, 1979. 96 New York Cooking School attempted to provide new amenities for middle-class entertainment. Juliet Corson’s health continued to deteriorate after the Columbian Exposition, and she died in 1897. Under new management, the New York Cooking School continued operation and its popularity grew among middle-class women interested in learning culinary arts away from the peering eyes of their domestic servants. As they prepared to open for a new season of lectures in November 1897, the superintendents of the school were optimistic about their new headquarters in the charities building in downtown New York. The school still provided classes to domestic servants, members of the working class, and now also to nurses learning to cook for hospital patients. But the new quarters also provided additional conveniences for the ladies’ cooking classes, including their own private dining room and cloak rooms where they could house their gowns. After they finished their meals and dined as a group they were ready to head to the downtown matinee. One wealthy student professed: “It is fortunate for us that someone wants to help the poorer girls to make their homes happier, for, as far as I can see, we would have no such opportunity to learn but for this enterprise.” Middle-class women viewed the cooking school as a convenient entertainment, available as a result of the school’s social reform efforts and the training made available to low-income women. The specialization of cooking courses also contributed to their popularity among women who wanted classes—for themselves or their servants—that focused on cooking alone, rather than encompassing an entire syllabus for the field of household science.220 220 “New-York Cooking School: A Talk with Miss Emily Huntington, Superintendent,” New York Tribune, September 16, 1897. 97 The continued popularity of cooking schools consistently provided new opportunities for middle-class women to develop careers outside the home. It was becoming more common in the early twentieth century for women, even married women, to work outside the home in larger numbers. Often women worked outside of the home based on financial necessity, but for middle-class women there was a growing interest in choosing paid careers over solely working in their homes.221 With conversations swirling around home economics an increasing number of women had hopes of teaching at higher education institutions. Taking a more progressive stance than cooking school leaders in the Woman’s Congress at the Columbian Exposition, Janet Hill noted that women undoubtedly had claimed the home as the “woman’s true sphere of activity,” but now there was an opportunity for women to widen their “spheres of action” bringing morality to the public sphere, and themselves “equal rank with men” through higher education instruction.222 Graduates of many of the cooking schools went on to work as instructors and professors of home economics in schools and universities. Just as significant were the unique career opportunities that cooking school leaders and graduates created outside of academics. Hill also noted that, increasingly, the Boston Cooking School provided training for women that were in demand as demonstrators at women’s clubs and food exhibitions.223 World’s fairs and expositions continued to grow in popularity after the close of the World’s Columbian Exposition, and 221 Kwolek-Folland, Incorporating Women, 97. 222 Hill, “The Boston Cooking School: Its Present Work and Future Aims,” 2-4; The Editors, “The New York Cooking School,” Outlook, February 16, 1901, 420. 223 Hill, “The Boston Cooking School: Its Present Work and Future Aims,” 2-4. 98 the model kitchen became a popular exhibit at many smaller local expositions as well as larger international fairs, including the Trans-Mississippi Exposition in 1898 and at the Greater American Exposition in 1899.224 Between the major international fairs in Chicago and St. Louis, Sarah Rorer also demonstrated in the Women’s Building at the Tennessee Centennial and International Exposition in 1897, and at many food expositions throughout the Northeast.225 As the invention of household technology continued to progress and new devices were displayed at expositions, cooking schools provided experts that could demonstrate and advertise the use of new technologies for consumers. Being the leader of an established training school of cookery provided consistent avenues to earn an income in the consumer marketplace. From their founding in the 1870s, cooking school leaders published textbooks for their peer institutions, cookbooks for their customers, and they appeared in newspaper advertisements for the endorsement of consumer products. As more products were produced outside of the home, and cooking school leaders gained notoriety from their exposition lectures and cookbooks, these opportunities increased at the turn of the century. Newspaper ads for numerous household cooking and cleaning products featured the names of cooking school instructors. A single 1897 ad for Cleveland’s Baking Powder had the endorsement of seven cooking school leaders including Juliet Corson, Sarah Tyson Rorer, and Fannie Farmer, this collective endorsement was a testament to the prominence of cooking schools during this period.226 224 “News from the Field,” Everyday Housekeeping 11, no. 5 (1899), 194. 225 “About the Woman’s Building,” The Tennessean, September 20, 1897. 226 “Use Cleveland’s Baking Powder,” Indianapolis News, February 23, 1897. 99 In 1896 Farmer published what would become one of the most famous cookbooks of the twentieth century, the Boston Cooking School Cookbook. The cookbook was notable, and extremely popular, for Farmer’s introduction of standard measures into recipes, increasing favorable outcomes of recipes made at home.227 Former principal of the Boston Cooking School and lecturer in the Women’s Congress at Chicago in 1893, Mary J. Lincoln had her own line of baking powder advertised in the Boston Cooking School Magazine by 1905.228 Women at the turn of the century looked to the cooking school experts to help them navigate the emerging market for consumer goods, and cooking school leaders used their expertise and notoriety to earn money through product endorsement and the creation of their own consumer product lines. Cooking school instructors also had new opportunities to influence the adoption of technology in the home. As the founder of the Philadelphia Cooking School, a renowned demonstrator at the World’s Columbian Exposition, and a contributor to the Ladies Home Journal beginning in 1897, Sarah Rorer had thoroughly established her reputation as an expert in cooking and household advice. Her writings in the Journal throughout the first decade of the twentieth century advised efficiency in the kitchen, which included arrangement of essential kitchen appliances together to save steps, the use of a white-tiled floor, and the availability of hot and cold running water.229 In the late 227 Moore, “Fannie Farmer.” 228 “Advertisements: Mrs. Lincoln’s Baking Powder Company,” Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics 10, no. 1-4 (1905-1906), viii. 229 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 137. While Rorer doesn’t mention Frederick Taylor’s methods of “scientific management” her emphasis on efficiency in the kitchen is reflective of a larger movement for scientific home management in the first decade of the twentieth century. 100 1890s she appeared frequently in ads for refrigerators, freezers, and kitchen cabinets.230 First advertised in 1900, Rorer also had her own line of gas ranges. One advertisement addressed to middle-class husbands read: “A cross wife because you blamed her on account of the bread and pies not being baked to suit you? She can’t help it with that old stove. Buy today a Mrs. S. T. Rorer Gas Range.”231 The door of the gas stove featured Rorer’s name in the middle of a swirling ornate design along with a built-in thermometer. 232 While gas stoves had been in use for several decades, it was at this time that gas companies switched their focus from illumination to home heating, which increased the use of gas cooking stoves exponentially. It wasn’t until 1930 that gas became the most commonly used fuel for the cooking stove.233 Rorer was an early advocate of this fuel for cooking and she advised in her cookbooks and lectures that gas was the “cheapest and most easily managed of all fuels, providing care is given to its use.”234 As new household technologies emerged, Rorer demonstrated their use, sometimes in week-long department store demonstrations. In 1909 she prepared “various egg recipes in a jiffy on an electric range.”235 Rorer was able to use her expertise, particularly her notoriety as the manager of several model kitchens, to influence and encourage the purchase of new kitchen 230 “Multiple Display Advertisements,” Annals of Hygiene 12, no. 9 (1897); “Multiple Display Advertisements,” The Designer and Women’s Magazine 14, no. 3 (1901), 336; W.H. Keech Co., “Organize a McDougall Kitchen Cabinet Club,” Pittsburgh Press, May 18, 1905. 231 “A Cross Wife,” News Journal (Wilmington, DE), July 10, 1900. 232 Sarah Tyson Rorer, Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book; A Manual of Housekeeping (Philadelphia: Arnold and Company, 1902), 38. 233 Cowan, More Work for Mother, 90-91. 234 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 144. 235 Ibid, 146-149. 101 technology and to advertise her own commercial endeavors. She also advised on household management, which grew in popularity throughout the first quarter of the twentieth century. At the turn of the twentieth century cooking schools proved to be versatile in their consumer offerings, and profitable for cooking experts. As the middle-class servant problem intensified at the end of the nineteenth century, cooking schools continued to offer culinary classes for domestic servants and low-income households as they had done since the 1870s, although they faced the same difficulties as Richards’ Boston School of Housekeeping. Typically, women were uninterested in paying for a cooking course for a servant that might soon leave their employ.236 Given the propensity of the servant problem, cooking experts, similar to the members of the Lake Placid Conference, advised employers to foster the loyalty of servants by treating them with more respect.237 The proliferation of food expositions and World’s Fairs at the turn of the century also meant more lecture and demonstration opportunities, and a wider audience. Sarah Rorer had so many engagements at expositions and department store demonstrations that she closed her Philadelphia cooking school in 1903.238 For many cooking experts, cooking schools provided the impetus for an entrepreneurial career. Rorer launched several business ventures, including the opening of a restaurant in 1905 and a line of her own coffee in 1911—with mixed success.239 However, her reputation and previous 236 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 79. 237 Ibid, 133. In the Ladies Home Journal, Sarah Rorer advised employers to foster loyalty by providing servants with suitable living amenities and the respect of at least knowing their full names.⁠ 238 Ibid, 151. 239 Ibid, 157. 102 success afforded her the opportunity to take such risks. What made cooking schools particularly successful during this period was their accessibility to middle-class housewives, a demographic largely cast aside by the academic home economics movement. Where the academic movement wanted to move away from their association with “household arts” and “skills-based” lessons and toward professionalization of home economics, the cooking school leaders continued to meet the demand for fashionable lessons in culinary art.240 They offered advice to middle-class consumers about artistic and healthful dishes, household technology, home sanitation, and cooking products without insisting that women needed an academic degree to participate in the consumer marketplace. Conclusion As the first decade of the twentieth century came to a close, the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics continued to make progress on the implementation of scientific home economics programs in public schools and universities. In an opening address at the tenth annual conference in 1908, Richards noted that courses in scientific home making had been introduced in seven universities, all but three agricultural colleges, and numerous private schools. Richards again stressed the importance of this education in public schools in terms of national progress and citizenship; training in household economics was essential for the creation of ethical, moral American citizens. 240 Sarah Stage, “Introduction: What’s in a Name,” in Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, ed. Sarah Stage and Virginia Bramble Vincenti (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 5. 103 In closing she insisted that the work of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics over the past ten years had demonstrated, “The beginnings of a fundamental education along progressive lines.”241 It was determined in 1908 that a national organization should be formed, and the American Home Economics Association (AHEA) was officially established on December 31, 1908. At this time a professional journal, the Journal of Home Economics was also created.242 Many of the women involved in the Lake Placid Conferences had already found work as instructors in home economics at teaching institutes and universities, and now the doors opened wider as the professional association was formed. As the national home economics movement pushed for progressive educational reform, many middle-class housewives at the turn of the century still turned to cooking school experts for advice on consumer goods and kitchen technology. The trend in cooking school popularity was similar in many ways to the popularity of domestic advice manuals in the mid-nineteenth-century, and the prominence of figures like Catherine Beecher. Newspapers and advertisements brought these cooking school leaders into American homes and provided recognition and endorsement for the expertise of cooking school leaders. The specialization of cooking schools, the high social status of some cooking school leaders, and their provision of emergent dietary advice all contributed to their ongoing popularity. For many middle-class women that still employed domestic servants and were uninterested in earning a degree or taking a full course in home 241 Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics, Proceedings of the 10th Annual Conference, 25. 242 Keturah E. Baldwin, The AHEA Saga (Washington, D.C.: American Home Economics Association, 1949), 12-22, http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015007727657. 104 economics, cooking schools were a more attractive option than the academic home economics courses and degrees. Both cooking school leaders and the academic home economists adapted to emergent theories about scientific cooking methods and scientific home management, but the leaders of cooking schools provided advice that was more accessible, digestible, and desirable to a growing population of middle-class consumers. 105 CHAPTER V CONCLUSION Sarah Rorer was the guest of honor at the Woman’s World Fair held in Chicago, opened by First Lady, Mrs. Calvin Coolidge in 1925.243 More than 160,000 visitors attended the fair, which featured more than 280 exhibits of women’s occupations in the American Exposition Palace.244 While she was pleased to be an honored guest, and glad of the opportunities opened to women, she expressed to a reporter: “Let the women adopt any profession that may appeal to them, still the cook will never lose her prestige… I am thoroughly in sympathy with woman lawyers, physicians, artists, engineering, builders, but I am glad that these occupations have not crowded the good old fashioned feminine arts into the background.”245 Rorer had continued her cooking career well into the 1920s and she remained in contact with former students and cooking contemporaries until her death in 1937.246 Throughout her career Rorer provided cooking advice for women of many social classes, and she increasingly adapted her guidance for those middle-class women who chose to work outside the home. Yet, in 1925 she clearly saw no indication that the working middle-class woman was a threat to woman’s most significant role as a domestic culinary artist. The success of other cooking schools and culinary experts also continued well 243 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 168. 244 Maureen A. Flanagan, “Woman’s World’s Fair, 1925,” The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2005, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1374.html. 245 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 168. 246 Weigley, Sarah Tyson Rorer, 170-177. 106 into the twentieth century. Fannie Farmer continued to publish cookbooks and lecture at Miss Farmer’s School of Cookery and at medical schools until her death in 1915. Farmer’s Boston Cooking School Cook Book was the best-selling cookbook in the early twentieth century with thirteen editions published, the most recent of which was in 1990.247 The New York Cooking School continued to provide courses for housekeepers and “society women.” During the first World War high-society women taught groups of Navy men how to cook.248 The school also continued to endorse cooking products like Crisco, appearing in advertisements until it finally closed its doors in 1929.249 Ellen Richards was the first president of the American Home Economics Association in 1909. She was re-elected again in 1910 and she served as president of the association until her death in 1911.250 The AHEA continued the goals of the Lake Placid Conference, working to implement scientific home economics curriculum in public schools and universities. Throughout the early twentieth century many women began careers as instructors, professors, and deans in home economics departments teaching academic courses in subjects like food science, nutrition, and home sanitation. Megan J. Elias asserts that in the 1920s academic home economists ceded much of their domestic expertise to corporations when they began to endorse consumer products.251 By the 1930s 247 Moore, “Fannie Farmer.” 248 “Society Teaches Navy Cooks to Cook,” Morrisville Messenger, October 24, 1917. 249 Proctor-Gamble Co., “Heretofore Unknown,” News-Journal (Mansfield, OH), November 10, 1911; “Take Several Dozen Eggs,” Montgomery Advertiser, June 21, 1929. 250 Baldwin, The AHEA Saga, 21-25. 251 Elias, Stir It Up, 2. 107 it was common for women with “domestic science” training to act as “home service agents” for gas and electric companies, demonstrating how to use the new appliances.252 With the conservative shift of the Depression Era, followed by new notions of domesticity during the Cold War, home economics became even more closely associated with mass consumerism and household products over academia by the 1950s.253 Today home economics departments on college campuses have largely given way to departments of “family and consumer science” or “public health and human sciences.” As more women entered the workforce throughout the twentieth century, home economics courses became synonymous with an antiquated view of women’s role in the home. This is ironic given Richards’ initial goals for the movement based on scientific principles, removed from feminine arts. As more women began to work in factories and shops during the early twentieth century, and immigration to the US slowed during the first World War, the availability of domestic servants continued to decline. Reformers continued their efforts to convert domestic service to a day labor system, eventually succeeding in the implementation of a system that mirrored factory applications of Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” and making strides to depersonalize the mistress-servant relationship, but the social stigma of the work still proved too significant to retain a large number of women in the industry.254 By 1930 the population of women remaining in the industry was 252 Kwolek-Folland, Incorporating Women, 108. 253 Elias, Stir It Up, 2. 254 Katzman, Seven Days a Week, 41, 263. 108 predominately African-American, especially in Northern cities. Many of the women were recruited into service by employment agencies during the “Great Migration,” and because of racial prejudice domestic service jobs were often their only employment option.255 Domestic servants are an essential part of the history of culinary education during this period, and they demonstrate the limit of the educational and entrepreneurial opportunities to primarily white, middle-class women. The work of domestic servants was foundational to the success of these movements as they began. Concerns about the training of servants were central to the initiation of cooking schools in the 1870s and to the women’s club conversations that began to swirl around household economics in the 1890s. The employment of servants by the growing middle-class elevated their own social status and determined their proximity to evolving household technology and changing notions of home management. Histories that trace the development of cooking education and domestic science in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries largely write of the cooking schools as part of the lead up to the organization of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics in 1899 and the development of home economics as an academic field. Many histories have recognized individual cooking school leaders for their influence as “pioneers,” and their significance as part of the collective history of the home economics movement during this period.256 Often the term “home economist” is universally applied to all figures associated with both the cooking schools and the academic home economics movement, and certainly there was a fair amount of overlap in the expertise of these 255 Strasser, Never Done, 176. 256 Baldwin, The AHEA Saga, 3-4. 109 individuals. However, while these women all made careers that centered on domestic topics, the purpose of this project has been to examine the audiences and goals of “home economists” from 1870 to 1909 in an attempt to reveal a more complex history of the academic professionalization, entrepreneurship, and consumerism involved in culinary education. In particular, this project has traced the history of the cooking school movement as it began in the 1870s, and as schools and their leaders remained popular through the first quarter of the twentieth century, long after the first Lake Placid conference in 1899. It reveals that while some cooking school leaders and institutions, like Maria Parloa and the Boston Cooking School, were closely associated with the academic home economics movement, many cooking experts continued to run their cooking schools and build their careers largely outside of the academic movement. While the academic movement sought to teach scientific home economics to the next generation of US citizens through public schools, colleges, and universities, cooking schools continued to serve middle-class housewives—the demographic they had been most popular with from their founding, a class that continued to widen throughout the Gilded Age, and a group of consumers disconnected from the academic movement. The popularity of World’s Fairs and smaller expositions during this period helped cooking school leaders build their reputations at these events as cooking experts and domestic advisors to middle-class women. As the popularity of home economics expanded during the Progressive Era, these experts continued to demonstrate their culinary expertise, adapting their demonstrations and advice to incorporate advancing theories regarding sanitary science and efficiency. For many cooking school leaders, their success afforded them the opportunity to embark on 110 commercial, entrepreneurial ventures. The history of cooking schools, and the entrepreneurial careers of their leaders during this period, illuminates the roots of a domestic, culinary commercial world. A commercial world that in many ways anticipated the consumerist shift of the academic home economics movement in the 1920s, and a world often associated with figures like Christine Frederick. Frederick, who often drew skepticism from members of the AHEA because she didn’t hold a degree in home economics, became well-known for her work in the household efficiency movement after she began writing for Ladies Home Journal in 1912.257 Directly influenced by Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management,” Fredrick began advising middle-class women on the application of “Taylorism” to their homes and kitchens. She published The New Housekeeping: Efficiency Studies in Home Management in 1913, and in the spring of 1914 she was invited to exhibit a model kitchen at the Efficiency Exposition and Conference in New York. There she exhibited the Applecroft Kitchen, a replica of her own efficiency kitchen, the Applecroft Experiment Station.258 Frederick was perhaps best known for her third book, Selling Mrs. Consumer, where she instructed corporations and advertisers on the promotion of consumer goods to American housewives.259 An adherent of the nineteenth-century ideology of true womanhood, which emphasized women’s essential role as wife and homemaker (although she herself had a commercial career), it is easy to draw a line between Christine Frederick and Catharine 257 Elias, Stir It Up, 84. 258 Rutherford, Selling Mrs. Consumer, 60. 259 Ibid, 146. 111 Beecher. However, this history has shown that between the popularity of domestic advice manuals in the 1850s and Frederick’s rise to fame in the 1910s, cooking school leaders had already studied home efficiency, participated in the promotion of consumer goods, given domestic advice in ladies’ magazines, and exhibited model kitchens. Entrepreneurial figures like Sarah Rorer, and other cooking school leaders that elevated women’s domestic role while navigating a commercial world, were antecedents and contemporaries of Frederick as well. 112 REFERENCES CITED “1910 U.S. Census.” Cook County, Illinois. Population schedule, Chicago. Page 41 (stamped), dwelling 4301. William B. And Adelaide Cole. Digital image. Accessed September 15, 2018, http://ancestry.com “A Cross Wife.” News Journal (Wilmington, DE), July 10, 1900. A Guide to the Columbian World’s Fair, Chicago, Illinois. Chicago: Knight, Leonard & Co. Publishers, 1892. Map. Miscellaneous Official Guidebooks of the Exposition. Call no. F38MZ 1893 .A1z. World’s Columbian Exposition Collection. Chicago History Museum. “About the Woman’s Building.” The Tennessean, September 20, 1897. “Advertisements: Mrs. Lincoln’s Baking Powder Company.” Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics 10, no. 1-4 (1905-1906). “An Interesting Exhibit: Philadelphia Displays a Model Working-man’s Home at the World’s Fair.” Aberdeen Herald (Aberdeen, WA), May 25, 1893. “Cleveland’s Superior Baking Powder.” Pittsburgh Dispatch, January 20, 1891. “Cooking as an Art.” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), August 12, 1876. “Cooking as an Art.” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 22, 1881. “Culinary Art: How to Make Puff Paste and Soups a la Reine.” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 15, 1880. “Electrical Displays: Interesting Sights at the Great World’s Fair.” Akron Daily Democrat (Akron, OH), June 20, 1893. “The Electricity Building: One of the Most Wonderful and Interesting Departments of the Fair.” Kentucky Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), May 1, 1893. “The Exhibition of Women’s Work.” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), May 13, 1876. “The Exposition: The House We Live In.” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), May 13, 1876. “Farmer, Fannie Merritt.” Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project. Accessed April 12, 2019. https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_farmer.cfm. 113 “The House We Live In: Women’s Patents and Inventions.” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), July 8, 1876. “In a Frame of Light: White City Gleams Under the Glare of Electricity.” Chicago Tribune, May 9, 1893. “Juliet Corson.” Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project. Accessed April 10, 2019. https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_corson.cfm. “Lightning Our Slave: Varied Uses of Electricity as Exhibited at the World’s Fair.” Philadelphia Times, September 18, 1893. “Lincoln, Mary Johnson Bailey.” Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project. Accessed April 12, 2019. https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_lincoln.cfm. “Local Department.” Cecil Whig (Elkton, MD), October 16, 1886. “Maria Parloa.” Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project. Accessed April 10, 2019. https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_parloa.cfm. “Mary Lowell Stone Home Economics Exhibit.” Woman’s Journal (Boston, MA), December 3, 1904. “The Mary Lowell Stone Fund.” Woman’s Journal (Boston, MA), November 12, 1898. “Multiple Display Advertisements.” Annals of Hygiene 12, no. 9 (1897). “Multiple Display Advertisements.” The Designer and Women’s Magazine 14, no. 3 (1901). “Mrs. Rorer Makes More Pudding.” Chicago Tribune, Mary 15, 1893. “The Nation’s Centennial: Last Efforts of Preparation.” New York Times, May 10, 1876. “New-York Cooking School: A Talk with Miss Emily Huntington, Superintendent.” New York Tribune, September 16, 1897. “The New York Cooking School.” Boston Globe, February 27, 1886. “News from the Field.” Everyday Housekeeping 11, no. 5, 1899. “Our Own National Flour: Mrs. Rorer will Convince You it is Made of Corn.” Salt Lake Tribune, June 4, 1893. 114 “Perfection Meat Cutter.” Wilkes-Barre News (Luzerne, PA), September 15, 1890. “The Queen of Cookery.” Butte Miner (Butte, Montana), June 15, 1894. “Rorer, Sarah Tyson.” Feeding America: The Historical American Cookbook Project. Accessed April 10, 2019. https://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_rorer.cfm. "Rumford Kitchen Mottoes." Everyday Housekeeping, vol. IV, no. 5, 1896, p. 211. Nineteenth Century Collections Online, http://tinyurl.galegroup.com/tinyurl/8AJ2N9. Accessed 27 Oct. 2018. “Society Teaches Navy Cooks to Cook.” Morrisville Messenger, October 24, 1917. “Take Several Dozen Eggs.” Montgomery Advertiser, June 21, 1929. “To Introduce Indian Corn: Nutritive Properties of Corn to Be Demonstrated at the Fair.” Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1893. “Use Cleveland’s Baking Powder.” Indianapolis News, February 23, 1897. “Wage-Earners’ Homes: Sociological Problems at the World’s Great Fair.” Boston Globe, August 27, 1893. “Weather Consolations.” The Daily Inter Ocean, May 3, 1893. “What One Woman is Doing.” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), June 3, 1876. “What the Reporter Does Not See.” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), July 15, 1876. Abel, Mary Hinman. “The Story of the New England Kitchen.” In Plain Words about Food: The Rumford Kitchen Leaflets, edited by Ellen Richards, 131-154. Boston: Rockwell and Churchill Press, 1899. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435005037049. Arnesen, Eric. “American Workers and the Labor Movement in the Late Nineteenth Century.” In The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, edited by Charles W. Calhoun, 53-74. 2nd ed. Lanham. Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. Baldwin, Keturah E. The AHEA Saga. Washington, D.C.: American Home Economics Association, 1949. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015007727657. 115 Barrett, J.P. Electricity and the Columbian Exposition: Including an Account of the Exhibits. Chicago, Ill.: R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., printers, 1894. Barrows, Robert G. “Urbanizing America.” In The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, edited by Charles W. Calhoun, 101-118. 2nd ed. Lanham. Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. Bederman, Gail. Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917. Women in Culture and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Beecher, Catharine Esther, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The American Woman’s Home: Or, Principles of Domestic Science; Being a Guide to the Formation and Maintenance of Economical, Healthful, Beautiful, and Christian Homes. New York, Boston: JBFord and company; HABrown & Co, 1869. Board of General Managers. Report of the Board of General Managers of the Exhibit of the State of New York, at the World’s Columbian Exposition: Transmitted to the Legislature April 18, 1894. Albany: James B. Lyon, State Printer, 1894. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015070585701. Board of Lady Managers of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Report to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1905. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc2.ark:/13960/t6vx0769f. Bosler Biddle, Gertrude, and Sarah Lowrie. Notable Women of Pennsylvania. University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc, 2016. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv4v336k. Buckmaster, J. C. Buckmaster’s Cookery :Being an Abridgment of Some of the Lectures Delivered in the Cookery School at the International Exhibition for 1873 and 1874 : Together with a Collection of Approved Recipes and Menus. London: George Routeledge and Sons, 1874. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/nyp.33433056925682. Calhoun, Charles W., ed. The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America. 2nd ed. Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. Cameron, William E. The World’s Fair, Being a Pictorial History of the Columbian Exposition. Chicago: Chicago Publication & Lithograph Co., 1893. Carson, John Del, and W. J Brown. World's fair, St. Louis: Ground Plan Louisiana Purchase Exposition, St. Louis, Missouri World’s Fair [S.l.: s.n., 1904]. Map. https://www.loc.gov/item/2007633932/. Clark, Ava Milam. Adventures of a Home Economist. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 1969. 116 Cordery, Stacy A. “Women in Industrializing America.” In The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, edited by Charles W. Calhoun, 119-142. 2nd ed. Lanham. Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. Corson, Juliet. “The Evolution of Home.” In The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building: World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893, edited by Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle, 714-718. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1894. Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. “How We Get Our Daily Bread, or the History of Domestic Technology Revealed.” OAH Magazine of History 12, no. 2 (1998): 9–12. ———. More Work for Mother: The Ironies of Household Technology from the Open Hearth to the Microwave. New York: Basic Books, 1983. The Cudahy Packing Co. “Rex Brand Extract of Beef.” Miscellaneous Exhibitions. Call no. F38MZ 1893 .G2z. World’s Columbian Exposition Collection. Chicago History Museum. Eagle, Mary Kavanaugh Oldham, ed. The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building: World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1894. Editors, The. “The New York Cooking School.” Outlook, February 16, 1901, 420. Elias, Megan J. Stir It up: Home Economics in American Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Evenden, Adelaide L. Diary. Chicago, 1895-1890. World's Columbian Exposition-- Alpha, Evenden, Adelaide. Chicago History Museum. Flanagan, Maureen A. “Woman’s World’s Fair, 1925.” The Electronic Encyclopedia of Chicago, 2005. http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/1374.html. Fryatt, F. E. “New York Cooking School.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 60 (1879): 22-29. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/008919716. Garland, Hamlin. A Son of the Middle Border. Reprint of the 1917 edition, Project Gutenberg, 2009. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/28791. Hill, Janet. “The Boston Cooking School: Its Present Work and Future Aims.” Boston Cooking School Magazine of Culinary Science and Domestic Economics 1, no. 1 (1896). http://hdl.handle.net/2027/mdp.39015093180209. 117 Hoganson, Kristin L. Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Hovey, H.C. “The Science of Nutrition as Exemplified at the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Scientific American 69, no. 15 (October 7, 1893): 230–31. J. S. Ingram. The Centennial Exposition. America in Two Centuries, an Inventory. New York: Arno Press, 1976. Katzman, David M. Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Kwolek-Folland, Angel. Incorporating Women: A History of Women and Business in the United States. Twayne’s Evolution of Modern Business Series. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1998. Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics. Proceedings of the Eighth Annual Conference. Lake Placid, N.Y., 1906. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics. Proceedings of the Fifth Annual Conference. Lake Placid, N.Y., 1903. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics. Proceedings of the First, Second, and Third Annual Conferences. Lake Placid, N.Y., 1901. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics. Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference. Lake Placid, N.Y., 1902. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics. Proceedings of the Ninth Annual Conference. Lake Placid, N.Y., 1907. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics. Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference. Lake Placid, N.Y., 1904. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics. Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Conference. Lake Placid, N.Y., 1908. https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005973679. Leach, William. Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture. 1st Vintage books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1994. 118 Leavitt, Sarah. From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart: A Cultural History of Domestic Advice. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Levenstein, Harvey. “The New England Kitchen and the Origins of Modern American Eating Habits.” American Quarterly 32, no. 4 (1980): 369–386. https://doi.org/10.2307/2712458. Lincoln, Mrs. David A. “Cookery.” In The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building: World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893, edited by Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle, 138-142. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1894. Massachusetts Board of Managers. Report of the Massachusetts Board of World’s Fair Managers. Boston: Wright & Potter Printing Co., State Printers, 1894. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044015706831. Miller. “Science in the Kitchen.” New Century for Woman (Philadelphia, PA), May 27, 1876. Moore, Helen. “Fannie Farmer: Cookbook Innovator.” Chicago Tribune, March 29, 1979. National Household Economic Association. Officers and By-Laws with Suggestions for Work: And a Report of the Fifth Annual Meeting, Held at Nashville, October 27, 1897. [1897]. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/uiug.30112068324661. Nelson, Nell. “Kitchen Plans for Chicago: Famous Cooking Teachers Who are Going to the World’s Fair.” Evening World (New York, NY), October 11, 1892. N. K. Fairbank & Co. Cottolene. Chicago, IL: privately printed, 1893. Miscellaneous Exhibitions. Call no. F38MZ 1893 .G2z. World’s Columbian Exposition Collection. Chicago History Museum. Porter, Glenn. “Industrialization and the Rise of Big Business.” In The Gilded Age: Perspectives on the Origins of Modern America, edited by Charles W. Calhoun, 11-28. 2nd ed. Lanham. Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2007. Proctor-Gamble Co. “Heretofore Unknown.” News-Journal (Mansfield, OH), November 10, 1911. Rand McNally Co. Chicago and the World’s Columbian Exposition, 1893. Chicago: Midway Publishing Co., 1892. Miscellaneous Official Guidebooks of the Exposition. Call no. F38MZ 1893 .A1z. World’s Columbian Exposition Collection. Chicago History Museum. 119 Richards, Ellen H. Domestic Economy as a Factor in Public Education. New York: New York College for the Training of Teachers, 1889. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/loc.ark:/13960/t7sn0p52w. ———. “Food for Students.” In The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building: World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893, edited by Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle, 713. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1894. ———. Plain Words about Food: The Rumford Kitchen Leaflets. Boston: Rockwell and Churchill Press, 1899. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/osu.32435005037049. Rorer, Sarah Tyson. Mrs. Rorer’s New Cook Book; a Manual of Housekeeping. Philadelphia: Arnold and Company, 1902. ———. Recipes Used in Illinois Corn Exhibit Model Kitchen. Philadelphia, PA: privately printed, 1893. Miscellaneous Exhibitions. Call no. F38MZ 1893 .G2z. World’s Columbian Exposition Collection. Chicago History Museum. ———. World’s Fair Souvenir Cook Book. Philadelphia: Arnold and Company, 1904. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/hvd.32044087453247. Rutherford, Janice Williams. Selling Mrs. Consumer: Christine Frederick and the Rise of Household Efficiency. Athens, Ga.: University of Georgia Press, 2003. Rydell, Robert W. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916. 5th printing edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987. Rydell, Robert W., John E. Findling, and Kimberly Pelle. Fair America: World’s Fairs in the United States. Smithsonian Books, 2013. Schulze-Berge & Koechl. “Saccharine: 500 Times Sweeter Than Sugar.” Miscellaneous Exhibitions. Call no. F38MZ 1893 .G2z. World’s Columbian Exposition Collection. Chicago History Museum. Schuyler, David. “Frederick Law Olmsted and the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Journal of Planning History 15, no. 1 (2016): 3–28. https://doi.org/10.1177/1538513214553396. Sewell, May Wright, ed. The World’s Congress of Representative Women; a Historical Résumé for Popular Circulation of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, Convened in Chicago on May 15, and Adjourned on May 22, 1893, under the Auspices of the Woman’s Branch of the World’s Congress Auxiliary. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951001543183x. 120 Shintani, Kiyoshi. “Cooking up Modernity: Culinary Reformers and the Making of Consumer Culture, 1876--1916,” PhD diss., University of Oregon, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/9493. Shuman, Carrie V., May Root-Kern, Mellie Ingels Julian, Louis Braunhold, and George Wharton Edwards. Favorite Dishes: A Columbian Autograph Souvenir Cookery Book. Over Three Hundred Autograph Recipes, and Twenty-Three Portraits, Contributed by the Board of Lady Managers of the World’s Columbian Exposition. Illustrated by May Root-Kern, Mellie Ingels Julian, Louis Braunhold, George Wharton Edwards. Chicago: R.R. Donnelley & Sons Co., printers, 1893. Stage, Sarah. “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement.” In Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, edited by Sarah Stage and Virginia Bramble Vincenti, 17-33. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Sarah Stage, “Introduction: What’s in a Name.” In Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, edited by Sarah Stage and Virginia Bramble Vincenti, 1-14. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Stage, Sarah, and Virginia Bramble Vincenti. Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Strasser, Susan. Never Done: A History of American Housework. 1st ed. New York: Pantheon Books, 1982. Tomes, Nancy. “Spreading the Germ Theory: Sanitary Science and Home Economics, 1880-1930.” In Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession, edited by Sarah Stage and Virginia Bramble Vincenti, 34-54. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. United States Bureau of Education. Circulars of Information of the Bureau of Education: Training Schools of Cookery. Vol. 4. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1879. Walter Baker & Co. Choice Receipts by Miss Parloa. Dorchester, MA: privately printed, 1892. Miscellaneous Exhibitions. Call no. F38MZ 1893 .G2z. World’s Columbian Exposition Collection. Chicago History Museum. Weigley, Emma Seifrit. Sarah Tyson Rorer: The Nation’s Instructress in Dietetics and Cookery. Memoirs of the American Philosophical Society ; v. 119. Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1977. Weimann, Jeanne Madeline. The Fair Women: The Story of the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893. Chicago, Ill.: Academy Chicago, 1981. 121 W.H. Keech Co. “Organize a McDougall Kitchen Cabinet Club.” Pittsburgh Press, May 18, 1905. Wilkinson, Laura. “The Columbian Association of Housekeepers and Bureau of Information, with Plans for the Work Outlined in the National Columbian Household Economic Association, which was Incorporated March 15, 1893.” In The World’s Congress of Representative Women; a Historical Résumé for Popular Circulation of the World’s Congress of Representative Women, Convened in Chicago on May 15, and Adjourned on May 22, 1893, under the Auspices of the Woman’s Branch of the World’s Congress Auxiliary, edited by May Wright Sewell, 887-891. Chicago: Rand McNally, 1894. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/umn.31951001543183x. ———. “Household Economics.” In The Congress of Women Held in the Woman’s Building: World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, U.S.A., 1893, edited by Mary Kavanaugh Oldham Eagle, 233-236. Chicago: W.B. Conkey Company, 1894. 122