Recently, women’s historians have been reevaluating home economics, coming to understand it as a field that opened up opportunities for women and emphasized the professionalization of homemaking skills. This website seeks to contribute to this trend by making available more than half a million pages of text related to the field — most published between 1850 and 1925.

These pages are drawn from the digitized texts of 1,174 books and 401 journal volumes. Topics range from “child care” and “home management” to “teaching and communications,” and include materials such as published surveys of wage-earning women, difficult-to-find journals such as the Journal of Home Economics, the American Food Journal, and the Journal of Social Hygiene. To access these materials, visitors may use the search engine, look through the Subject index, or browse alphabetically by author, title, or year of publication. Together, these materials demonstrate the major role that home economists played in the Progressive Era, the creation of the welfare state, the rise of scientific medicine, and the popularization of research on family health and economies.

Read a more in-depth review of the Home Economics Archive written by Jessamyn Neuhaus of SUNY Plattsburgh.

Or, explore other website reviews at History Matters.