*kicks door open*

Hey guys I'm back with more tea on the Van Rensselaers

Today I found out a main founder of the home ec movement

which was, lbr, kind of a eugenics project to keep the US well-stocked with hearty white babies

was one of 'em

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Van_Rensselaer

This family (the Van Rensselaers) kept feudalism legal in NY til 1845 so they could stay rich.

They had tenants making oaths of fealty until a peasant uprising made them stop *in 1845.*

But they were so used to telling peasants what to do I guess they had to go found Home Ec

white feminism: a history

The home ec movement, for all the nostalgia we hold it in now, was about pulling white women out of economic roles basically so we could focus on breeding. For colonial & eugenic reasons.

Before that farm women had a lot more outward-facing roles.

Immigration panics meant the US made a formal project of getting poor rural white women to raise more kids. Officials knew damn well most would never be able to stay on the farm. So they'd flood into the cities & keep them white!

so basically farming children for export lmao

There was also a lot of rich white anxiety about how poor white farmers were way too gay, mobile, & prone to making families with Indigenous & Black folks for their liking

just another reason they had to teach the masses about good clean settled Christian living

Traditionally a lot of the sales/distribution in ag tended to be women's work.

Making butter & cheese, butchering & smoking meat, pickling vegetables, etc.

In traditional agrarian economies women spend shitloads of time on this bc, like, that's where the money is.

Honestly the best concise explanation of this I've ever seen is from Tywo (sp?), a leader in Makoko which is often described as "the world's largest floating slum" but is really just a fishing village that got eaten by Lagos.

listen to Tywo y'all

So that's how traditional economies work. Women spend LOTS of time on goods for trade.

American-style "traditional" living where women do 100% child-rearing & household management is new, bizarre, & had to be inflicted onto poor & middling farms by the wealthy starting ~1900.

In this view, women spending too much time making & marketing goods was a PROBLEM.

They weren't spending enough time on reproductive labor & that called for state intervention.

Enter the home ec movement.

This "problem" was especially acute when it came to poor white farmers (which probably meant a tenant farms tbh).

Rich farmers' wives were already spending most of their time administering their estates, I MEAN homemaking.

But poor white farm women just, like, worked too much?

This is a HUGE, undersold part of the story of "agribusiness takeover."

By this time the beef industry had already consolidated into the Chicago packing yards mostly thanks to railroad arbitrage.

Folks just assume that other ag industries consolidated the same way.

NOPE.

Farm goods that weren't beef or grain- dairy, eggs, meat poultry, & growing/selling fruit & veggies- were still largely women's work around the turn of the century.

And thus, somewhat underfunded & underdeveloped businesses on most farms. Bc sexism did already exist.

The home ec movement encouraged white farm women to stop trying to develop their businesses & abandon economic roles entirely.

But! People still wanted to buy dairy, eggs, chicken, & fruits & veggies!

What now?

This was around when companies started popping up to ... basically help men who didn't know much about their wives' businesses take them over.

This is how poultry went from "every farm has a yard flock of chickens" to a concentrated industry with stacks of cages.

It bears mentioning that a lot of rural men, rich middling & poor, were enthusiastic about this change

it gave them much, MUCH more leverage to dictate the terms of daily living their own households.

So that's just a little slice of the real story about why at is the way it is today.

It's so not a straightforward tale of "capitalist takeover."

It was a colonial eugenics project, first & foremost.

Agribusiness was just the aftermath.

I hear folks say "why don't we teach home ec anymore?" out of this idea that it was abolished to make people more dependent on premade clothes & food

ngl this is probably true

HOWEVER, home ec itself was also a big crock of fuckery and we should say it.

Teaching all the kids how to cook their own food & darn their own clothes: good!

but not what the home ec movement was really about.

It was about teaching rigid race & gender roles that impoverished rural communities, for the benefit of white supremacy.

Home ec was an internal colonization project.

if there weren't already enough layers to this, Martha Van Rensselaer was gay & low-key hailed as an early feminist

white queers & feminists, let this be a lesson about how colonialism is always waiting & ready to make fools out of us all

And if you're a food or ag writer whose go-to explanation for agbiz is "Women stopped cooking," know you're just repeating a talking point rich folks made to cover their guilt.

If that's the level of critique you're bringing to the game … go home.

this thread brought to you by a book I shall not name, but it's a glowing "history of farmers banding together!" that doesn't doesn't mention Black co-ops or rez farms even existed so I was moved to correct the record

But if you love tea about how "traditional" gender roles had to be invented & forced on people in the early 1900s to their own detriment, @gnrosenberg is the agricultural historian for you and his website has links to some non-paywalled articles on the matter : )