For this year’s Women’s History Month, I wanted to explore Business Opportunities for the Home Economist. This book was published in 1938 and looked at home economics skills that could be useful in the business environment. It was a Works Progress Administration project, written by Mrs. Chase Going Woodhouse.
Woodhouse was a suffragist and educator, who would serve as the Secretary of the State of Connecticut and a member of Congress representing Connecticut. She was working for the Institute of Women’s Professional Relations when the book was published.
The Institute spent three years studying a variety of occupations, getting input from over 600 educators and businesswomen. The Institute’s researchers looked at specific jobs and provided information on the activities involved in those jobs, as well as the personal qualifications, training, and education a woman would need to perform the roles. It feels a bit like an edition of the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook. Business Opportunities for the Home Economist includes the basics like getting a job and working in business as well as a nice list of useful periodicals, but most of the book is organized into chapters that discuss specific fields or sectors:
- Chapter 3 – Food manufacture/distribution (dairy councils, institutional food services, tea rooms, cafeterias, restaurants, and hotels)
- Chapter 4 – Household equipment, public utilities (electricity, gas, ice), appliance manufacturing the equipment
- Chapter 5 – Textiles (clothes and household fabrics and their care)
- Chapter 6 – Encouraging consumers (advertising, photography, writing for radio)
- Chapter 7 – Journalism (newspapers, magazines)
- Chapter 8 – Consultants
- Chapter 9 – Financial sector (banks, insurance companies, department stores, social welfare agencies)
- Chapter 10 – Housing (including decoration and hotels)
The book opens with the following two paragraphs:
“The manufacture and distribution of food, clothing and housing as carried on today on a gigantic scale is really nothing more than super-housekeeping. Our primitive grandmothers went out after the hunters, dragged in the kill, cut up and prepared the meat; they cultivated the grain and ground it into meal; they made clothes from skins or bark and learned to spin and weave; they saw to the primitive dwelling. They were very close to the ultimate consumer – their immediate families.
Today a large part of this activity is carried on by great corporations removed by many miles and by many steps in the distribution process from their consumers. While the system provides us with quantities of goods of a variety undreamed of when women were working each for her own small group, the gap between maker and user has been a growing source of many economic problems. Today business is recognizing that it must be bridged and is asking how this can be done.” (p. 1)
Each of the chapters includes anecdotes from women about specific tasks, providing small windows into the work lives of women. It includes some universal personal qualifications, but it also includes additional qualities for consulting like starting with a good idea they could sell, persistence, determination, self-confidence, a good personality, and a well-established reputation. The opening sentences in the chapter on consulting has a pretty concise description:
“Only after long experience as a successful teacher, extension worker, dietitian, tearoom or restaurant manager, lecturer, director of the home-service department of a public utility or manufacturing firm, or editor having contacts with many agencies and individuals does the home economist become a consultant.
The consultant gives expert advice to commercial organizations which manufacture, sell at retail, or advertise foods, textiles, cleaning agents, household equipment or appliances. Consultants have had business experience from the beginning jobs up, so that they know business practices, the problems of big companies in purchasing, improving, distributing, and promoting their products on a national scale.” (p. 192)
According to the chapter, the institute’s study indicated earnings for consultants varied from $400 to $20,000 a year. One woman reported $650 a month, while another charged $35 a day plus expenses, and another reported revenue of $10,000 with expenses of $3,000.
If you are interested in women’s business history beyond what the Institute gathered, Business staff have created the Women in Business and the Workforce guide, which lists a variety of resources. There are also other works by Woodhouse or published by the Institute of Women’s Professional Relations, including:
Occupations for College Women (Woodhouse, 1929)
Special Librarianship as a Career (1933)
Dentistry, its Professional Opportunities; with Chapters on the Dental Hygienist, Dental Assistant and Dental Mechanic (Woodhouse, 1934)
War Demands for Trained Personnel; Proceedings of the Conference held at the Mayflower Hotel, Washington, D.C., March 20 and 21, 1942
Big Store; Opportunities in Department Store Work, (Woodhouse, 1943)
Designing Dress Accessories as an Occupation (1936)
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