Bless Her Heart

And so where did the study of home economics take place?

Who first recognized the need to teach these basic “life skills” to college women, and the few college men that signed up for these classes, in the late 1800s?

Perhaps the mother of mothers…the one person responsible for first teaching women how to be homemakers and mothers was Mary  Beaumont Welch.

Welch was a professor at Iowa State Agricultural College, the school that would eventually become known as Iowa State..

Welch taught classes in botany, chemistry, geology, physics and physiology at the Iowa Agricultural College.

She was married to Adonijah Welch, a U.S. senator from Florida and later the first president of Iowa State Agricultural College from 1869 until 1883.

As a young woman, Welch had trained in “domestic skills” in both New York and London. This training helped Welch realize that Americans did not understand or appreciate the importance of home economics.

As the wife of the college president, Welch had a unique opportunity to teach the importance of domestic skills.

She began teaching the very first college-level “home economics” classes.

She began in 1872 by teaching classes on cooking in her home.

Within three years, she had established a Department of Domestic Economy, complete with its own fully-equipped kitchen…the first such facility at any American college. She served as head of this department from 1875 to 1883. 

Lectures given by Welch included lectures on home furnishing and arrangement, water supply and drainage, labor management, health care and nursing, accounting, hospitality, etiquette and entertaining.

Welch also realized that there were no textbooks or even reference materials designed for teaching home economics.

So she began writing a book that would share the information that she had been teaching in her classes.

Her goal was to show that household management was “a practical endeavor and of great importance to the social welfare of the community and nation.”  She wanted to improve dietary standards and living conditions in Iowa by training college women as “proper homemakers.”

The book was published in 1884 and simply called “Mrs. Welch’s Cookbook.”

Even though these days, none of us could actually attend her lectures, her cookbook is still available to those interested in the beginning days of home economics.

Honestly, I haven’t read this book yet. I just ordered it from Amazon.

But this is the one non-fiction book that I will be reading this month. Should be interesting. Come read it with me so that we can share what we learn.