UNTOUCHED BY HUMAN HANDS - White Bread: A Social History of the Store Bought Loaf - page 10

and tradition. Training in fields ranging from medicine to teaching was standardized and professional-
ized, and new disciplines—sanitation, hygienics, and public health—were created to extend scientific
rationality into new realms. 19
By the 1900s, a whole class of professional experts, armed with official certificates, fancy titles, and
evangelical fervor, had secured a place for itself in the country's rigid social hierarchies. Emboldened
by success and unwavering in its confident belief in the superiority of scientific expertise, this class set
its sights on the country's hearth. In the eyes of nearly every branch of this new army of professional
experts, mothers stood on the frontlines of the battle for national hygiene and efficiency. They conduc-
ted the care, feeding, and education of the population, and they governed the most intimate spaces of
everyday life. Organized under the banner of “home economics,” experts in household management and
scientific motherhood believed that most of the nation's problems could be cured with careful attention
to the workings of family life. “When the principles of hygiene are fully understood by women,” Emma
Sickels proclaimed to a large audience at Chicago's Art Institute in 1891, “there will be comparatively
little disease.” 20
Scientific housekeeping, domestic hygiene, research-based meal planning, and efficient child rearing
were supposed to liberate women from drudgery, but home economics aspired to even greater goals: by
eliminating contagion, moral weakness, and inefficient energy use that sapped the stamina of the popu-
lation, scientific household management would improve the very fabric of society from the hearth up.
For the mostly middle-class women who pioneered the field of home economics, the professionaliz-
ation of domestic labor meant liberation and recognition. According to one of the movement's founders,
Ellen Richards, women's work should properly be conceived as a professional occupation no different
from doctor or engineer. 21 This professionalization of housework was, in theory, a way to place all wo-
men's work on par with that of men. In practice, however, it was primarily a way for women social
reformers to gain respect for their work. If household management was a science, every housewife was
a scientist of sorts, but home economists were the real experts.
Home economists' authority required the existence of a population deemed in need of education and
reformation. Luckily, thanks to tremendous influxes of “unclean” southern and eastern European immig-
rants as well as the growing visibility of other minority groups, the nation appeared replete with mothers
mired in tradition and ignorance. Thus, for the bulk of the nation's mothers, the ascendance of home
economics meant less that their work would receive recognition as a vital contribution to the nation and
more that their perceived backwardness and resistance to expert advice would be seen as threats to the
nation.
The new disciplines of domestic expertise buttressed their authority by propagating an emergency
mentality—painting vivid pictures of looming dangers and imminent disasters that would befall the na-
tion if their advice weren't heeded. Household cleanliness, or rather the lack thereof, topped social re-
formers' lists of impending threats. By the turn of the twentieth century, the hypothesis that invisible mi-
croscopic organisms caused many illnesses had gained widespread scientific acceptance and was, thanks
to the efforts of Progressive reformers, beginning to take hold in popular culture. In the 1900s, diverse
groups, ranging from the Boy Scouts to the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, worked to
preach this “gospel of germs” to the masses. 22 School curricula impressed the “laws of scientific hy-
giene” on young minds, and public signage warned of the dangers of kissing and spitting. Public health
had been entirely reconceived. It was no longer the solitary concern of government officials, but rather
the duty of all. In this era obsessed with the dangers of contagion, “the slightest deviation from perfect
cleanliness was a cause for social anxiety since the invisible passage of germs could put the health of
the family, companions, and even the entire nation at risk.” 23