The ideology of the Happy Family, 1915-48 -- Gendered responsibilities : debates over femail education in the Republican Period -- Domestic discipline : the development of home economics curricula -- A discipline of their own : home economists in institutions of higher learning -- Experimenting with the family : family education experimental zones in the 1940s -- Cleaning house : the last decade of a gendered discipline -- The post-1949 politics of home economics : stories of professional evolution -- Conclusion
Summary
The term home economics often conjures images of girls learning to cook dinner and swaddle dolls in sterile classrooms far removed from the seats of power. Helen Schneider unsettles this assumption by revealing how Chinese women helped to build a nation one family at a time. From the 1920s to the early 1950s, home economists transformed the most fundamental of political spaces - the home - by teaching women to nurture ideal families and manage projects of social reform. Although their discipline came undone after 1949, its legacies of gendered professions and leaders' attempts to shape the domestic rituals of the people lived on. </body> </html>
Notes
"Published with the assistance of the Virginia Tech Department of History"--Title page verso
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 283-307) and index
