In the summer of 1956, the University of Connecticut's School of Home Economics began planning a new instructional film to showcase its recent work. An early script opened with a scene of a woman bathing her baby, which the male narrator described as “one of the happiest experiences of the young mother.” Another scene showed the same woman cheerfully peeling potatoes, before panning to her husband enjoying them mashed and covered with brown gravy.Footnote 1 Although 1950s home economics materials routinely featured such topics as cooking and childcare, UConn's approach was far less conventional than initially portrayed. In a series of dramatic twists, the narrator implored the audience to “consider the woman whose husband just loves mashed potatoes and gravy. And she has lost the use of one hand.” Or “suppose you are a mother who has only one hand with which to bathe her child.”Footnote 2 As viewers pondered these scenarios, the shot transitioned to a montage of other “seemingly impossible jobs” for women with physical disabilities. Turning to the home economics program at UConn, the script introduced Neva Waggoner, a wife and mother who had lost the use of her left arm when she contracted polio at age three. Seamlessly and without any apparent difficulty, Waggoner was then shown carrying out an array of homemaking tasks before explaining, in the final scene, how life can be as full and rewarding for individuals with disabilities as for “normal people.”Footnote 3
The film project was designed to publicize UConn's recent workshop, The Team Approach to the Rehabilitation of the Handicapped Homemaker, which Waggoner had helped to coordinate through the School of Home Economics the previous year.Footnote 4 Bringing together a wide range of professionals working in vocational rehabilitation—a field focused on assisting disabled people enter or resume employment—the workshop reflected a growing interest among home economists in the subject of physical disability. Although some teachers at deaf and blind schools had provided homemaking instruction to their students beginning in the nineteenth century, their efforts had been scattered and largely restricted to special institutions.Footnote 5 It was not until after World War II that home economics students and faculty studied the role of physical disability in homemaking and family life in any systematic way.
In the two decades after the war's end, a network of home economists emerged that sought to help homemakers with physical disabilities perform their work. At colleges and universities across the country, and often in consultation with physically disabled homemakers, these home economists researched and designed assistive devices, adaptive equipment, and work simplification techniques that could be used to “rehabilitate” this population of ten million.Footnote 6 They publicized their findings through home economics courses in the subject, graduate theses and academic publications, instructional films and printed materials, workshops for “rehabilitation” professionals, cooperative projects with government agencies and community groups, fellowship programs, and professional conferences.
Home economists’ new attention to disability was informed by a number of factors, such as the growth of the vocational rehabilitation system in the 1940s and beyond. As disabled soldiers and defense workers returned from the frontlines and factories, government funding for vocational rehabilitation research and training programs swelled for veterans and civilians alike. Amidst the postwar baby boom and heightened emphasis on domesticity, home economists sought to increase the participation of homemakers in this system. In doing so, they helped to expand vocational rehabilitation beyond its historic focus on male wage earners while also enlarging the parameters of their own field by addressing disability in meaningful ways.Footnote 7
Using a wide range of archival sources from colleges and universities across the country, this article uncovers a little-known chapter in the history of home economics: the development of “homemaker rehabilitation” as a field of study. In doing so, it responds to calls by Richard J. Altenbaugh, Kate Rousmaniere, and others to analyze the history of education through the lens of disability.Footnote 8 Although historians of education have aptly documented how gender, race, and class shaped the development of home economics, few have examined the role of disability in the same way. Consequently, we know little about how ability and disability informed the experiences of home economics students, faculty, or the field itself.Footnote 9 At the same time, scholars who have studied the development of the vocational rehabilitation system and its educational programs have devoted little attention to gender.Footnote 10 The history of homemaker rehabilitation, then, provides a new way to understand the intersections of gender, disability, and education.
In exploring how home economists understood and engaged with disability, this article calls attention to the contradictions embodied in their efforts to “rehabilitate” physically disabled homemakers. Home economists’ work with physically disabled homemakers simultaneously upheld and challenged white, middle-class, able-bodied gender roles. In the two decades following World War II, home economists—like many of their contemporaries—viewed homemaking as primarily women's work. While discussions of vocational rehabilitation for men (and some wage-earning women) focused on preparing them to resume paid employment, the subject of homemaking centered almost entirely on women. Although it was not uncommon for physically disabled men to learn to prepare food with one hand or sweep while using crutches as part of their overall rehabilitation process, their work was usually framed as “daily living” and hardly ever as homemaking. Men's work inside of the home was not only divorced from any vocational importance but also described as an aberration from gender norms. The 1957 Handbook for One-Handers, which provided guidance on carrying out everyday tasks, prefaced its section on sewing with the statement, “While this is a problem in which women or girls are most interested, there are also emergency situations when the male might find the following information valuable,” thereby reinforcing the unusualness of having men conduct such work.Footnote 11 Eventually, by the late 1950s and early 1960s, some home economists acknowledged the need to prepare disabled men for homemaking roles so that their nondisabled wives could work outside of the home. But they were also cautious in this approach, warning that these men would likely “need psychiatric aid in order to make this traumatic shift from ‘men's work’ to ‘women's work.’”Footnote 12
Homemaker rehabilitation was geared not only toward female homemakers but also families with male breadwinners. While many white men struggled to earn a “family wage” that supported full-time homemaking, attaining this level of income was even more difficult for African Americans due to persistent racism and discrimination. Because many black families relied on the income of mothers and wives, African American women were less likely to be full-time homemakers when compared to white women, even though they remained responsible for much of the work inside of their homes.Footnote 13 In 1960, as Stephanie Coontz has shown, 64 percent of black upper-middle-class mothers worked outside of the home. By contrast, only 35 percent of white lower middle-class mothers and 27 percent of white upper-middle-class mothers held outside jobs that year.Footnote 14 Consequently, the women who comprised the focus of most homemaker rehabilitation studies were overwhelmingly white and lower to middle class, a trend that reflected the demographics of American homemakers. Although African American women were included in homemaker rehabilitation initiatives, as evidenced by occasional examples and photographs, they appeared infrequently. Moreover, few programs broke down participation rates by race or analyzed the role of race in the rehabilitation process.Footnote 15
At the same time that home economists reinforced gender, class, and race-based biases in their approach to homemaking, they also helped to expand opportunities for disabled women, who had long been discouraged or prevented from pursuing this vocation. Homemaker rehabilitation provided an avenue to disabled women for participating in postwar domesticity—and reaping its cultural rewards—in ways similar to their nondisabled counterparts. Working with disabled homemakers, home economists forged a broader definition of homemaking and brought new attention to the experiences of disabled women. Although many home economists saw disability as a problem to be solved, they stressed the importance of adapting work to individuals, as later disability rights activists would do. At the same time, home economists created professional networks, extended the boundaries of their discipline, and carved out new spaces for themselves in the burgeoning rehabilitation system.
Historical Context
Home economists’ work with physically disabled homemakers in the post-World War II period built on two longer developments: the emergence of home economics as a subject of study in the nineteenth century and the creation of the vocational rehabilitation system in the early twentieth century. Despite their different trajectories and goals, both home economics and vocational rehabilitation hinged on gendered assumptions about the home, work, and family life that prized white, middle-class, male-breadwinning models. Although these formulations hardly fit with the lives and experiences of many Americans, they nevertheless occupied a central place in the educational experiences of home economists and vocational rehabilitation participants. Gender expectations were shaped not only by race and class, however, but also by ability. For much of their early histories, home economics and vocational rehabilitation promoted a model of family life as one where members—whether explicitly stated or simply deduced—were decidedly not disabled, or had managed ways to compensate for or hide their disability.
While these constructions of gender and family life informed both fields, they manifested themselves in different ways. From its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century, home economics drew inspiration and justification from emerging white, middle-class gender roles and the doctrine of “separate spheres,” which dictated that women concern themselves with the “private sphere” of the home, while men focus on the “public sphere” of politics, government, and paid employment. Although this distinction between public and private was artificial, permeable, and race- and class-specific, it nevertheless exerted a powerful influence on the work of home economics advocates, such as famed nineteenth-century education reformer Catharine Beecher.Footnote 16 Beecher believed not only that schooling for women should be as purposeful and rigorous as men's, but also that women's responsibilities centered primarily on domestic life. Consequently, she championed home economics—or what she initially called “domestic economy” and later “domestic science”—as a field of study that belonged in every school for women.Footnote 17
In addition to working with educational associations and individual schools, Beecher sought to elevate and professionalize homemaking through her writings, which treated the subject as a science and served as some of the first texts in the field.Footnote 18 Although these publications were adopted widely by schools and homemakers alike, they were narrow in scope, speaking primarily to the experiences of white, middle-class, able-bodied women. Beecher's advice on managing servants, for example, mainly concerned women with the means to employ a labor force in their home. Her sketches of home interiors also contained architectural features such as twisting staircases and wardrobes that required overhead lifting that would have been inaccessible to many physically disabled women. Although some of these designs aimed to reduce the required amount of time and labor in much the same way that later home economists sought to streamline work processes (both in general and in an effort to assist disabled homemakers), it is evident that disability did not factor into Beecher's designs.Footnote 19
As domestic science instruction expanded throughout the late nineteenth century, so did the parameters of the field. Civil War-era legislation such as the Morrill Land-Grant College Act of 1862 both enlarged existing institutions of higher education and led to the creation of new ones, where coeducation soon became commonplace.Footnote 20 The resulting growth in female enrollments was accompanied by the expansion of domestic science instruction, which many educators viewed as bolstering their land-grant missions.Footnote 21 While most land-grant schools primarily benefited white students, some—such as the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia—exclusively served students of color.Footnote 22 Although domestic science instruction at both kinds of institutions shared the continued presumption of able-bodiedness, curricula and expectations for female students varied widely based on race, class, and ethnicity, as Elisa Miller demonstrates. In the first decades of the Hampton Institute, where white administrators viewed domestic science as a tool for stabilizing southern race relations and assimilating Native Americans, courses stressed the need for African American and Native American women to unlearn old habits from their communities and to replace them with the ideals of white, middle-class domesticity.Footnote 23 Domestic science instruction for rural white women and white, middle-class women, by contrast, more readily stressed modernization and the application of scientific principles to everyday life. At Iowa State, beginning in 1871, students not only attended lectures on housekeeping but also enrolled in Chemistry as Applied to Domestic Economy, while from the mid-1870s, Kansas State students supplemented their hands-on instruction in sewing with a course in household chemistry.Footnote 24
Over the next several decades, scientific training became a common part of domestic science instruction more broadly, with important implications for the developing field. As new disciplines such as bacteriology, hygiene, and sanitary science grew in this period, so did their place in domestic science curricula at white land-grant institutions and beyond.Footnote 25 The heightened emphasis on these topics reflected not only the older belief espoused by Beecher and others that scientific approaches improved homemaking, but also the emerging Progressive Era view that scientific knowledge could help ameliorate the excesses of late nineteenth-century industrial capitalism.Footnote 26 Training in domestic science likewise bolstered women's claims to “municipal housekeeping,” which extended the boundaries of the home to society at large. Imbued with scientific authority, domestic scientists found themselves equipped to speak on a wide range of social and political problems. Their education provided an academic outlet for women interested in science, an avenue to Progressive Era reform, and a path to professional careers ranging from teaching to public health.Footnote 27 These themes figured prominently in the series of ten “Lake Placid” conferences that were held annually beginning in 1899, where domestic scientists sought to systematically define, professionalize, and publicize the field. Their efforts included adopting the term “home economics” to better represent their work and later, in 1909, creating the American Home Economics Association (AHEA), which became the principal professional organization in the field.Footnote 28
In many ways, the teaching and practice of home economics in the early twentieth century looked considerably different from the version Beecher first advanced. Preparation for careers outside of the home had assumed a prominent place in home economics curricula and graduates could be found not only in their own homes but also government agencies, public school classrooms, university laboratories, hospitals, and private industry.Footnote 29 The demographics of home economics students, teachers, practitioners, and subjects of study had also expanded significantly beyond white, middle-class housewives. Yet the experiences of this racial and socioeconomic group continued to be privileged by many in the field. As Joan Jacobs Brumberg and others have shown, the idealized homemaker, as presented in home economics materials well into the twentieth century, was a woman who was white and middle class.Footnote 30 According to Penny A. Ralston, black women home economists regularly found themselves marginalized and their experiences discounted by white colleagues. Despite their numerous professional contributions, black home economists were not involved with the Lake Placid Conferences, and until the Civil Rights Act of 1964 many in the South could only participate in the AHEA through segregated state associations.Footnote 31
The AHEA, and the field of home economics more broadly, also continued to venerate the experiences of able-bodied women. With the important exception of schools for deaf and blind students, where education for girls often included some preparation in home economics, practitioners seem to have largely ignored the subject of disability.Footnote 32 Home economists’ general lack of attention to the subject can also be viewed in the activities and publications of the AHEA. It was not until 1931, more than two decades after the association's founding, that the AHEA's Journal of Home Economics covered disability in an extended way. That August, the AHEA published a special volume devoted to “Home Economics for the Handicapped,” which examined in a series of five articles how home economics could be used to improve the lives of people with physical and intellectual disabilities. Most of the articles focused largely on how (presumably nondisabled) teachers could use home economics principles to enhance student instruction. While it was acknowledged that these lessons would prepare students for their adult lives, only cursory attention was given to the subject of homemaking or its social role.Footnote 33
The failure of most home economists to consider the lives and experiences of physically disabled women must be examined in the context of how many Americans understood disability in this period. Until the late nineteenth century, as K. Walter Hickel indicates, “Disability and its economic effects of unemployment, poverty, and dependence were often regarded as a preordained fate, a divine stigma incurred at birth, or a result of individual moral flaws and self-destructive habits such as criminality, alcoholism, and sexual promiscuity.” Beginning in the 1890s, this “moral understanding of disability” was increasingly abandoned as a growing number of Americans “began to locate its causes not just in the trauma of warfare but in the effects of infectious disease . . . and the health risks of factory production.”Footnote 34 In both formulations, however, disabled women were largely presumed to be unfit mothers and wives. Even blind women, who were more likely to receive home economics instruction than other physically disabled women, were not necessarily expected to marry and have children. As Catherine J. Kudlick points out in her study of representations of blind women at the turn of the twentieth century, “Since few believed blind women could run a household and provide a home environment for a husband and children, they were deemed unmarriageable, cutting them off from a major avenue of social participation.”Footnote 35
The right of disabled people to marry and procreate was challenged in other ways as well, such as through the eugenics movement that gained influence in the early twentieth century and which justified the involuntary sterilization of disabled people by claiming they would pass down “undesirable” traits.”Footnote 36 Characterizations of physically disabled women as “unfit” for marriage and motherhood were also circulated through psychological studies conducted in the 1930s and 1940s that described them as lacking sexual desire.Footnote 37 Many of these beliefs persisted into the post-World War II era, when many Americans continued to view “disabled citizens’ capacity to serve as wives and mothers . . . with skepticism,” as Audra Jennings writes.Footnote 38
Home economists’ attention to physically disabled homemakers in this period helped challenge such views. Amidst rising marriage rates among young couples, the accompanying baby boom, and a renewed focus on domesticity, home economists increasingly sought to assist women with physical disabilities to fulfill the same gender expectations as their nondisabled counterparts. While their emphasis on conforming to white, middle-class family life can certainly be viewed as conservative, it represented a radical departure for those women who had long been discouraged from pursuing such options because of their disability. Home economists’ focus on homemakers with physical disabilities, a population defined as women with cardiovascular disease, hemiplegia, arthritis, tuberculosis, and other orthopedic conditions, also helped to expand the reach of home economics beyond blind and deaf students.Footnote 39
These changes were informed by a number of factors, including the diagnosis and incidence of certain “disabling” diseases. Polio epidemics in the early twentieth century left a significant number of marriageable-age women with restricted mobility. Fear of the disease, which peaked in 1952, preoccupied countless Americans, as did efforts to develop a vaccine over the course of the decade.Footnote 40 The longitudinal Framingham Heart Study launched in 1948 also brought new attention to cardiovascular disease. Women constituted more than half of the participants in the landmark study, which was the first major investigation on the topic to include female subjects.Footnote 41
Alongside these developments was a heightened awareness of disability in general, as disabled veterans and defense workers sought to resume their former lives—and jobs. Integrating them into the workforce was at the heart of vocational rehabilitation, a system that dated back to World War I. During these early years, the federal government adopted a number of measures to assist people with disabilities enter or resume employment. In 1917, amendments to the War Risk Insurance Act of 1914 included vocational rehabilitation in its provisions for disabled veterans.Footnote 42 The following year, the Smith-Sears Veterans Rehabilitation Act of 1918, established and subsidized state-level vocational rehabilitation programs and entrusted their oversight to a federal board. In 1920, Congress extended vocational rehabilitation to disabled civilians through the Smith-Fess Act, which authorized vocational training, job placement, and counseling for “persons disabled in industry or otherwise.”Footnote 43 Another major change occurred in 1943 when Congress passed two pieces of wartime legislation, Public Law 16 and the Barden-LaFollette Act, which substantially expanded the size and scope of vocational rehabilitation services for disabled veterans and civilians alike.Footnote 44
For much of its early history, vocational rehabilitation primarily benefited male veterans and wage earners by restoring their bread-winning potential.Footnote 45 Following World War I, as Beth Linker describes, rehabilitation helped to restablish social order “by (re)making men into producers of capital. Since wage earning often defined manhood, rehabilitation was, in essence, a process of making a man manly.”Footnote 46 The historic connection between rehabilitation and masculinity was further reflected in the demographics of vocational rehabilitation participants. According to Ruth O'Brien, “In the 1920s and 1930s, the average rehabilitated person was white, male, and thirty-one years old.”Footnote 47 Over the course of these two decades, women were included only gradually and peripherally.
In the post-World War II period, however, home economists increasingly asserted the importance of homemaking to the vocational rehabilitation system. At colleges and universities across the country, home economics students and faculty began investigating ways to assist disabled homemakers with their work. Their efforts were bolstered by new legislation, such as the Vocational Rehabilitation Act Amendments of 1954, which made available funding for research projects in the field.Footnote 48 Most of these initiatives reflected the demographics of American homemakers, who were largely white and middle class, and often privileged their experiences in ways that earlier home economists had done. Yet they also helped to broaden understandings of disabled women's choices and lives in ways that were quite radical. At the same time that home economists expanded the parameters of vocational rehabilitation, they enlarged the purview of their own discipline, where “homemaker rehabilitation” emerged as a subject of study. This new focus can be seen in the explosion of homemaker rehabilitation projects, conferences, and publications that came out of home economics departments and schools in the postwar era as well as increased attention from the AHEA.
“Discovering” Disability
Home economists’ interest in homemaker rehabilitation is most widely credited to the famed industrial engineer, psychologist, and efficiency expert Lillian Moller Gilbreth, who made some of the first forays into the subject during World War II. Although Gilbreth was not formally trained in home economics, she had an immeasurable impact on the field that spanned decades. Her contributions to home economics drew largely on the principles of motion study that she and her husband, Frank Bunker Gilbreth, had pioneered years earlier. Following their 1904 marriage, the Gilbreths became increasingly involved in the scientific management movement that sought to increase worker productivity and economic efficiency through the analysis of workflows. They recorded, charted, and studied work processes in order to eliminate unnecessary movements that caused physical and psychological fatigue. The Gilbreths applied these principles to bricklaying, factory work, surgical procedures, vocational rehabilitation for disabled World War I veterans, and even rearing their eleven living children, as featured in the blockbuster book and movie Cheaper by the Dozen. Footnote 49
Home economists’ embrace of scientific management as promoted by the Gilbreths and others can be seen as an extension of their Progressive Era faith in science as a cure-all for social ills. Although most early scientific management studies focused on industrial settings, home economists gradually applied their findings to reduce the drudgery of the housewife. In 1910, for example, the AHEA's Journal of Home Economics recommended that homemakers calculate their hours in the same way as factory and commercial laundry managers. Efficiency experts who focused on the home, such as Christine Frederick, helped to further popularize these methods in the 1910s.Footnote 50 The Gilbreths conducted their first studies of homemaking during this period as well and, as early as 1912, Frank shared their research at an AHEA meeting. At this time, however, the Gilbreths viewed their work in home efficiency as secondary to their more lucrative consulting work in industry and the service sector. This situation changed drastically in 1924 when Frank died of a heart attack and Lillian found that three of their biggest clients now refused to work with her. Struggling to make ends meet, Lillian increasingly embraced home management, reinvented herself as a domestic consultant, and marketed her expertise in home efficiency.Footnote 51
Gilbreth's professional work in engineering and psychology (in which she held a PhD), along with her personal experiences raising a large family, made her attractive to broad audiences and she quickly became a sought-out speaker and columnist. In 1926, Gilbreth began serving as a consultant to university home economics departments that were developing home management courses. In 1927, Gilbreth brought together more than two hundred home economics students and homemakers as part of a conference on scientific management in the home that she organized at Columbia University's Teachers College.Footnote 52 That same year saw the publication of Gilbreth's The Home-Maker and Her Job, which was hailed in the Journal of Home Economics as “a decided contribution to the field of home economics literature.”Footnote 53 Utility companies and the New York Herald Tribune Institute (a homemaking research branch of the newspaper) took notice of Gilbreth as well, hiring her to design efficiency kitchens in the late 1920s and 1930s. Her designs further elevated her reputation among home economists. At Purdue University, where she was named professor of management in 1935, Gilbreth spent six years establishing work simplification as a new subfield of the university's home economics department.Footnote 54 Yet while she made notable contributions to home economics and home management, and while she had conducted studies on disabled workers earlier in her career, she seems to have conceived of these subjects as separate and unrelated until the 1940s.
World War II marked a pivotal moment both in Gilbreth's career and the history of homemaker rehabilitation. During the war, Gilbreth served on the New York Heart Association's Committee on Cardiovascular Disease in Industry, which was charged with studying the utilization of workers with heart problems. Over time, the committee expanded its focus beyond industrial workers and created a subcommittee devoted to conditions faced by “cardiac homemakers.” Chaired by Gilbreth, the subgroup brought together experts in a variety of fields, such as engineering, home economics, physical therapy, rehabilitation, and architecture. Their crowning achievement was the design of a “Heart Kitchen” for homemakers with cardiovascular disease that aimed to help disabled homemakers perform their work with a minimum of steps and fatigue.Footnote 55
The Heart Kitchen was later constructed by the New York Heart Association and put on display at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, where it debuted in October 1948 as part of National Employ the Handicapped Week.Footnote 56 Later that year, it was relocated to the newly established Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at New York University (NYU), where it became the centerpiece of the fledgling homemaker rehabilitation program there. According to Howard A. Rusk—the institute's director, the “father of rehabilitation medicine,” and a New York Times medical columnist—the homemaker program was inspired by Lillian Gilbreth herself. While Rusk was still planning the institute, which opened in March 1948, Gilbreth reportedly inquired whether any attention would be paid to the subject of disabled homemakers. Although she was initially informed that there would just be a “research corner,” Rusk later brought in a range of professionals, including physical therapist and home economist Julia Judson, to create a more expansive program.Footnote 57
Judson, who Rusk named the coordinator of NYU's homemaker program, had recently earned her master's degree in home economics in 1949 from The Ohio State University. There, she completed a groundbreaking thesis on “Home Management Aids for Women with Physical Difficulties,” one of the earliest investigations of the subject, next to Gilbreth's work. Recognizing the lack of available vocational rehabilitation programs for homemakers, her thesis sought to identify management techniques, equipment, devices, and adaptations already in use by a wide variety of physically disabled women. After surveying and interviewing physically disabled homemakers in Ohio, she analyzed and compiled their suggestions in order to assist other disabled homemakers and rehabilitation professionals, including home economists.Footnote 58
Home Economists Take Up Homemaker Rehabilitation
Under Judson's direction, and with Gilbreth as a consultant, the homemaker rehabilitation program at NYU gradually expanded beyond cardiac homemakers to include women with a broad range of physical disabilities.Footnote 59 The Heart Kitchen, however, remained central to the NYU program and inspired similar homemaker rehabilitation programs across the United States. The American Heart Association, for example, widely promoted it through a film strip and accompanying pamphlet, both titled “Heart of the Home,” as well as through its local heart associations which subsequently adopted some version.Footnote 60 Not long after the kitchen's installation at NYU, the Michigan Heart Association's executive director of occupational cardiology, John G. Bielawski, paid a visit to Rusk's institute and became intrigued by the possibilities of work simplification for women with cardiac disease. Upon returning to Michigan, he helped establish a similar program at Wayne University (renamed Wayne State University in 1956) in Detroit, in conjunction with its director of home economics, Frances G. Sanderson.Footnote 61
Beginning in 1950, with grants from the Michigan Heart Association and under Sanderson's direction, Wayne University's home economics department offered a free work simplification course for cardiac homemakers. Held at Wayne University's home economics laboratory and financed by the Michigan Heart Association, the set of two, three-hour classes were free to the women attending. After getting acquainted, participants enjoyed slides and instructional films, demonstrations of streamlined housework techniques by Wayne University staff, and the opportunity to share their own experiences. The homemakers also took a tour of three kitchens in the laboratory. Although they varied in price and shape, all three drew inspiration from the Heart Kitchen.Footnote 62 Additionally, the course covered meal preparation, bed making, cleaning, dusting, and other household tasks, such as laundry, which many class members reported as their most tiring activity. At the end of the session, many participants requested an additional refresher course, which the Wayne University staff arranged.Footnote 63
Throughout the early 1950s, interest in rehabilitating cardiac homemakers grew quickly. The Michigan Heart Association not only funded additional homemaking projects at Michigan State University (then Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science), but similar programs sprouted up in such far-flung places as Chicago, Los Angeles, Baltimore, Buffalo, Milwaukee, and Washington State. Occasionally, local heart associations worked in conjunction with utility companies and popular publications, such Woman's Home Companion, to design and promote heart programs and kitchens.Footnote 64 At the same time as interest in cardiac homemakers spread, Wayne University's department of home economics began to address the experiences of other physically disabled homemakers, as NYU had already done. Sanderson became aware of this need after the county orthopedic consultant inquired if one of her patients—a pregnant mother of twins who was recovering from polio—could attend the cardiac homemaker classes, to which Sanderson agreed. Later, with Sanderson's assistance, the consultant organized a class for other homemakers with limited mobility. But because it was still patterned on the needs of women with cardiac disease, the class was inadequate in terms of meeting attendees’ needs. Requests soon flooded in for a more comprehensive program, and a committee of representatives from twenty-three agencies began planning workshops for homemakers with a broader range of physical disabilities.Footnote 65
Three disabled homemakers—including the mother with twins--played a critical role in planning and running the Wayne University workshops. One of the women, a doctor's wife who had used a wheelchair in her homemaking for more than a decade, compiled suggestions to share with other physically disabled homemakers. Additionally, she developed a planning questionnaire for all prospective participants. All three homemakers also allowed photographs of their own homes, which had been recently redesigned to be more accessible, to be turned into color slides to share with others.Footnote 66
Their efforts resulted in a series of three workshops, beginning in August 1953. Approximately seventy participants attended the first workshop, which included a mixture of home economists, rehabilitation professionals, and physically disabled homemakers. The three disabled homemakers who had helped organize the gathering each led a discussion group and demonstrated devices and methods for simplifying housework. These demonstrations were particularly popular with the other disabled homemakers in attendance who requested to see even more homemaking devices and equipment for wheelchair users, as well as additional movies, slides, and images.Footnote 67 The second workshop, held four months later, sought to build and improve on the first both in terms of content and accessibility. Additional colleges and departments participated this time, and the daily schedule was shortened by extending the overall program to four days. To minimize the amount of travel required to get to and from campus, the university arranged for lodging in the student center and food services prepared a variety of meals. The building and grounds department also built ramps to facilitate entering buildings and navigating curbs. Additionally, the university provided cots in the home economics department to allow participants to relax and shift their body positions during breaks. Disabled homemakers were also delighted with a fashion show that featured “attractive and functional garments chosen particularly for the woman on crutches or in a wheelchair.” These included skirts, blouses, sweaters, dresses, short coats, capes, and a stole that were not only washable, durable, lightweight, and wrinkle-resistant but most importantly, “comfortable to put on and to wear.”Footnote 68 The third workshop combined the most successful elements of the first two and, according to Sanderson, “was very well received.”Footnote 69
Similar themes can be found in the homemaker rehabilitation projects that the University of Connecticut's School of Home Economics carried out in the 1950s, with funding from the United States Office of Vocational Rehabilitation (OVR). One of UConn's earliest undertakings was the seven-day Handicapped Homemakers conference that the university held in June 1953. Under the guidance of the school's dean, Elizabeth Eckhardt May, the event (formally called the Leader's Workshop on Principles of Work Simplification Applied to Problems of Physically Handicapped Homemakers) brought together home economists, physical therapists, public health officials, medical experts, and local residents in a variety of fields to explore problems that homemakers with physical disabilities faced. Participants perused exhibits featuring assistive devices developed at the Institute of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation at NYU, Braille labels and recipes cards for visually impaired cooks, and the Connecticut Heart Association's adaptation of the Heart Kitchen. They also viewed films instructing them on the use of motion study principles in home management and enjoyed an address by Gilbreth, who was honored for her work in the field with a special reception.Footnote 70
Neva Waggoner, who had spent the 1952–1953 academic year teaching a Marriage and Family Living course for UConn's School of Home Economics, was one of the people in attendance. As a physically disabled homemaker, she was particularly interested in the efforts of Gilbreth and others to find new ways to perform homemaking tasks. Yet the idea of “let[ting] your head save your heels” was not entirely new to her nor was the idea of testing out different work methods.Footnote 71 Rather, she had long used these approaches. As a child responsible for household chores, Waggoner often tended to the laundry, washing and hanging clothes. As Waggoner later explained:
Since [hanging clothes] was normally a two handed task I had to experiment until I found a way to do it with one hand. I found I had to use all five fingers on one hand to manage; two for positioning the fabric on the line and two to push the clothespin into place.Footnote 72
Later on, when she was a college student pondering her future as a mother and wife, she spent the summer babysitting for a friend to see if she could carry out childcare tasks on her own. She recalled:
This was a great opportunity for me to experiment and practice with safe ways of lifting and carrying a baby; preparing formula and capping bottles; but most of all diapering securely and safely. No ‘Pampers’ in those days! This required considerable dexterity of all fingers to gather the two ends of the diaper and join them securely to the shirt without sticking the child. I practiced until it became routine.Footnote 73
Over the next several years, Waggoner became increasingly involved with UConn's homemaker rehabilitation efforts. Waggoner served as assistant coordinator for the 1955 workshop on The Team Approach to the Rehabilitation of the Handicapped Homemaker that the OVR also sponsored. In this capacity, she worked closely with Gilbreth, Judson, and May, the lead organizer. May described the initiative as “a pioneer project—a workshop where representatives of nine professional fields came together for three days to consider possibilities and problems in the ‘team approach’ to the rehabilitation of the handicapped homemaker.”Footnote 74 The event drew together a wide range of rehabilitation professionals, such as physicians, social workers, physical therapists, and home economists, as well as disabled homemakers, who participated in every session.Footnote 75 On the program, Waggoner spoke on the need for rehabilitation “experts” to see disabled homemakers as agents in their own rehabilitation and to take their experiences seriously. She urged the audience to recognize how disabled women have “all the basic needs of other women, the need for love and affection, the need to be important to some one or some thing, and the need for new and challenging experiences.” She closed her remarks by calling attention to the importance of individualizing rehabilitative approaches to better meet homemakers’ needs.Footnote 76
The importance of tailoring home management techniques to individual disabled homemakers was also addressed by Judson, who spoke about her work at NYU. In addition to outlining specific work strategies for disabled homemakers, such as sliding filled pots from the sink to the range when possible, or positioning appliance controls in places that wheelchair users could reach, Judson spoke about the general importance of homemaking training to rehabilitation.Footnote 77 In doing so, she bolstered the workshop's underlying goal: to legitimize and expand the work of home economists in the growing vocational rehabilitation system. Although doctors, physical therapists, and social workers were already seen as integral members of any “rehabilitation team” or group of people who worked to assist in the rehabilitation of disabled people, the role of home economists was still relatively new. This concern was echoed by a home economics working group chaired by Hannah Pretzer, a home economics instructor at Wayne University. The group argued that other rehabilitation professionals should recognize “that home economics specialists . . . have definite contributions to make to the rehabilitation of the handicapped homemaker” and that “home economists should be recruited and trained to take their position on the rehabilitation team.”Footnote 78
Expanding the Role of Home Economics
The efforts of UConn's School of Home Economics to carve out a role for home economists in vocational rehabilitation shaped the direction of the AHEA itself. Particularly influential in this shift was A. June Bricker, who became the executive director of the AHEA in 1960. Earlier, as the head of the Field and Community Health Bureau of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company in New York City, she represented the AHEA at UConn's 1955 Team Approach workshop.Footnote 79 Reporting on this workshop in an article published in the AHEA's Journal of Home Economics, Bricker wrote that the program “did more than make available many facts concerning rehabilitation of the handicapped homemaker [or] focus attention on the need for more research in many areas. . . . It stimulated thinking on the potentials of our own profession and its relation to the whole large area of rehabilitation.” “In reflecting over this three-day workshop and what it meant to me,” Bricker continued, “I think of how much the home economist can do in this field. This is a new horizon for service—a new challenge in our recruitment program. Are enough of us aware of the tremendous scope of rehabilitation?”Footnote 80
The role of home economists in rehabilitation was also discussed at the AHEA's preconvention Workshop on Job Evaluation, held in conjunction with the association's 1955 annual meeting in Minneapolis. After hearing from AHEA members who, like Bricker, had attended the UConn Team Approach workshop just weeks earlier, participants discussed how they could contribute to the field. They expressed such a desire to learn more that some members approached the AHEA board in early 1956. Later that year, the AHEA's social welfare and public health section formed a rehabilitation committee which, by June of 1957, became a joint committee of the AHEA and American Dietetic Association (ADA). The committee sought to stimulate members’ interest in rehabilitation work, highlight the contributions of home economists and allied professionals to rehabilitation teams, publicize services for disabled people, and enhance the training of home economists, nutritionists, and dieticians by assisting with course content. Bricker, who headed up the group's publicity efforts, and Judson, who served as co-chair on behalf of the AHEA, were instrumental in this initiative.Footnote 81
Over the next decade, attention to homemaker rehabilitation increased exponentially, as evidenced by the growing number of journal articles, conferences, graduate theses, courses, and research studies on the subject. In June 1960, the joint AHEA-ADA committee collaborated with Colorado State University's College of Home Economics and the Denver Regional Office of Vocational Rehabilitation to host a homemaker rehabilitation workshop. The program, held in connection with the annual meeting of the AHEA, included formal remarks from Judson, Bricker, Waggoner, Sanderson, May, and others.Footnote 82 Two and half years later, in January 1963, the AHEA held one of its largest rehabilitation workshops to date in Highland Park, Illinois. According to the AHEA's executive director Bricker, much of the planning had been done by Neva Waggoner, who was credited as assistant director of the workshop. While the workshop addressed many of the same themes and included many of the same participants as earlier meetings, what was distinctly new was the announcement of the inaugural AHEA fellowships in rehabilitation. Supported by the newly reconstituted Vocational Rehabilitation Administration (previously OVR), these fellowships funded forty-one home economics master's and doctoral students in the program's first five years.Footnote 83
The AHEA's rehabilitation fellowship programs highlight the expanding interests of the association, the increased involvement of home economists in rehabilitation, and new directions for home economics itself. Home economists’ increased attention to disability in the post-World War II period reflected a significant change in how educators, students, and practitioners in the field conceived of women's homemaking roles. Although popular representations of homemaking continued to focus on white, middle-class, able-bodied models, home economists took a more expansive view, as seen in their work and studies. By recognizing the experiences of disabled women and by drawing on disabled homemakers’ own expertise, home economists forged connections to the later independent-living movement. May, for example, even spoke on behalf of an “Independent Living Bill” proposed in Congress in 1959.Footnote 84
The work of home economists after World War II also expanded the boundaries of their discipline and their roles in society. These efforts were carried out largely through the creation of loose networks that allowed them to share their interests, publicize their work, and expand their influence. By situating their work within the broader rehabilitation system, home economists at colleges and universities across the country promoted the usefulness and relevance of their own training, while at the same time complicating postwar domesticity and able-bodied normalcy.
