School Lunch Politics (39 page)

21. See Susan Levine,
Degrees of Equality: The American Association of University Women and the Challenge of Twentieth Century Feminism
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995). On home economics as a women's profession, also see Shapiro,
Perfection Salad,
and Sarah Stage and Virginia B. Vincenti, eds.,
Rethinking Home Economics: Women and the History of a Profession
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), esp. Rima Apple's, “Science Gendered.”

22. Historians have labeled this generation “maternalists” because, while affirming equality for women they also emphasized traditionally female roles in children's welfare and social policy. See Mink,
Wages of Motherhood;
Ladd-Taylor,
Mother-Work;
Muncy,
Creating a Female Dominion;
and Koven and Michel,
Mothers ofa New World.

23. Caroline L. Hunt,
The Life of Ellen H. Richards, 1842–1911
(1912; 8th printing, Washington, D.C.: American Home Economics Association, 1980), 37. Hunt suggests that MIT agreed to the “special” status so they could continue to say that they did not admit women students.

24. See Hunt,
Ellen Richards.
On Richards, also see Shapiro,
Perfection Salad;
Sara Stage, “Ellen Richards and the Social Significance of the Home Economics Movement,” in Stage and Vincenti, eds.,
Rethinking Home Economics;
Rima Apple, in her essay, “Science Gendered,” says that nutrition science “enhanced women's position in the domestic sphere and gave women an arena in which to practice science” (p. 129).

25. Nancy K. Berlage, “The Establishment of an Applied Social Science: Home Economists, Science, and Reform at Cornell University, 1870–1930,” in Helene Silverberg, ed.,
Gender and American Social Science, the Formative Years
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). She argues that historians have put too much emphasis on the dichotomy between “technocratic” (or male) versus advocacy (or female) interests and credits home economists with both a reform tradition and a commitment to objectivity and science (184–87, 198).

26. Ellen H. Richards,
The Cost of Food: A Study in Dietaries
(New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1917), 7.

27. See Shapiro,
Perfection Salad,
127–31.

28.
Journal ofHome Economics
(hereafter JHE), April 1932, editorial.

29. Quoted in Shapiro,
Perfection Salad,
129. Also see Levenstein,
Revolution at the Table.

30. Hunt,
Ellen Richards,
103. Abel won the first prize ever offered in Home Economics for her essay. The prize money was donated by Henry Lomb, founder of the Bausch and Lomb Company.

31. Shapiro,
Perfection Salad,
144–45. For a brief biography of Mary Hinman Abel, see her entry in
Feeding America: The Historic American Cookbook Project,
MSU Libraries,
http://digital.lib.msu.edu/projects/cookbooks/html/authors/author_abel.html
.

32. Hunt,
Ellen Richards,
105–6. Also see Shapiro,
Perfection Salad,
and Apple, “Science Gendered.” On the standardization of recipes, see Anne Mendelson,
Stand Facing the Stove: The Story of the Women Who Gave Us the Joy of Cooking
(New York: Henry Holt, 1996).

33. Hunt,
Ellen Richards,
105; and Richards,
The Cost ofFood.

34. Hunt,
Ellen Richards,
107–8. The model kitchen was named after Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford of Bavaria, who was reputed to have coined the term “nutrition science.” He pioneered in institutional feeding of the poor and was also credited with introducing the potato to the poverty diet in Europe. See C. M. McCay, “Four Pioneers in the Science of Nutrition—Lind, Rumford, Chadwick, and Graham,” in Adelia M. Beeuwkes, E. Neige Todhunter, and Emma Seifrit Weigley, eds.,
Essays on History of Nutrition and Dietetics
(Chicago: American Dietetics Association, 1967), 263–68.

35. Also see Hayden,
The Grand Domestic Revolution.

36. Levinstein,
Revolution at the Table,
discusses this transition.

37. Richards,
The Cost ofFood,
2–3.

38. Hunt,
Ellen Richards,
109.

39. Margaret Rossiter,
Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 66. A similar dynamic operated in England as reformers attempted to teach working-class housewives scientific nutrition. See, e.g., Ross,
Love and Toil.
She observes that reformers believed they could rescue children from their “slum tastes,” 36; and see Walton,
Fish and Chips.

40. Lucy H. Gillett, “How Can Our Work in Foods Be Made More Vital to the Health of the Child?” JHE, September 1920, p. 391. On religious teaching and food, also see John Burnett, “The Rise and Decline of School Meals in Britain,” in John Burnett and Derek J. Oddy, eds.,
The Origins and Development of Food Policy in Europe
(London: Leicester University Press, 1994). Little information is available on Lucy Gillett. She was probably a student of Mary Swartz Rose at Columbia.

41. Richards,
The Cost ofFood,
27; and Hunt,
Ellen Richards.
She calls Richards a “missionary of science” (103).

42. Hunt,
Ellen Richards,
112.

43. Tomes,
The Gospel of Germs,
has a good discussion of the missionary zeal with which scientists and reformers (not to mention entrepreneurs) promoted theories of germs and disease. The nutrition advocates exhibited a similar zeal in their efforts to convince Americans to alter their eating habits.

44. The figure of 29% appears in many sources. See Bernadette M. Marriott and Judith Grumstrup-Scott, eds.,
Body Composition and Physical Performance: Applications for the Military Service
(Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1992), 39. Also, Howard Markel and Janet Golden, “Successes and Missed Opportunities in Protecting Our Children's Health: Critical Junctures in the History of Children's Health Policy in the United States,”
Pediatrics
115, no. 4 (April 2005); 1129–33. By most estimates, in addition, about one-quarter of all draftees were illiterate.

45. E. V. McCollum and Nina Simmonds,
Food, Nutrition, and Health
(Baltimore: the Authors, 1925), 30.

46. Gillett, “How Can Our Work in Foods Be Made More Vital?” 386.

47. For a discussion of modernization and attitudes toward health, see Lynne Curry, “Modernizing the Rural Mother: Gender, Class, and Health Reform in Illinois, 1910–1930,” in Apple and Golden, eds.,
Mothers and Motherhood.

48. On food as a cultural, social, and psychological structure, see Maurice Aymard, “Toward the History of Nutrition: Some Methodological Remarks,” Roland Barthes, “Toward a Psychosociology of Contemporary Food Consumption,” and Jean Soler, “The Semiotics of Food in the Bible,” all in Forster and Ranum, eds.,
Food and Drink in History.
Also, Mary Douglas, “Deciphering a Meal,” in Counihan and Van Esterik,
Food and Culture;
and Sidney Mintz,
Tasting Food, Tasting Freedom: Excursions into Eating, Culture, and the Past
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1996).

49. Mink,
Wages of Motherhood,
89. The achievements and limits of maternalism are discussed in a number of works. See, e.g., Muncy,
Creating a Female Dominion;
Michel, “The Limits of Maternalism”; Gordon, ed.,
Women the State, and Welfare;
Fitzpatrick,
Endless Crusade;
Ladd-Taylor,
Mother-Work;
and Kathryn Kish Sklar,
Florence Kelley and the Nation's Work
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995).

50. George Sanchez, “Go after the Women: Americanization and the Mexican Immigrant Woman, 1915–1929,” Working Paper Series No. 6, June 1984, Stanford Center for Chicano Research, 17 and 1. Sanchez argues that, initially, Americanization represented social settlement and social gospel traditions, “These individuals felt that society had an obligation to assimilate the Mexican immigrant and hoped to improve societal treatment of immigrants in general.” But with World War I, nativism took over and business took an interest in the Americanization movement as a method of combating radicalism among foreigners (p. 9). Settlement workers valued immigrant “gifts” to American culture while Americanizers did not. These efforts were also common in Europe. See Ross,
Love and Toil;
and Walton,
Fish and Chips.

51. Levenstein,
Revolution at the Table,
104.

52. Michael M. Davis, Jr.,
Immigrant Health and the Community
(Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1971), 71. Burnett, “The Rise and Decline of School Meals,” discusses food imperialism in the Socialist Labor party.

53. Dorothy Dickins, “Negro Food Habits in the Yazoo Mississippi Delta,” JHE, September 1926, p. 524.

54. Mary Swartz Rose and Gertrude Gates Mudge, “A Nutrition Class,” JHE, February 1920, p. 49. During the first three decades of the twentieth century, social investigators undertook scores of surveys of immigrant and workingclass households. These studies were often used to judge how close various groups came to achieving an “American standard of living.” Trade unions used household budget studies to argue for a “living wage,” while employers used similar studies to argue that workers' living standards were adequate and that they should learn to spend their money more wisely. See Susan Levine, “A Bit of Mellifluous Phraseology: The 1922 Railroad Shopcraft Strike and the Living Wage,” in John Belchem and Neville Kirk, eds.,
Languages of Labour
(Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 1997).

55. See Rossiter,
Women Scientists,
66; and Shapiro,
Perfection Salad.
Rossiter suggests that they sought to “train, “Americanize,” and generally “homogenize and upgrade these unwashed hordes into respectable middle-class citizens” (66).

56. Velma Phillips and Laura Howell, “Racial and Other Differences in Dietary Customs,” JHE, September 1920, p. 396.

57. Grace A. Farrell, “Homemaking with the “Other Half” along Our International Border,” JHE, June 1929, p. 413.

58. Sophonisba Breckinridge,
New Homes for Old
(1921; rpt., Montclair, N.J.: Patterson Smith, 1971).

59. Ibid., 132.

60. “Notes from the Field,” JHE, October 1921, p. 527.

61. Gillett, “Factors Influencing Nutrition Work, among Italians,” JHE, January 1922, p. 19. Also see Davis,
Immigrant Health,
247. He says, “There is much that we may learn from these people ifwestudy their ways and customs and acquaint ourselves with their foods we shall be able to help them to adjust.” He claimed that during the 1918 flu epidemic, “gallons of American soups and broths were served to these people only to be thrown out untouched.” He concluded that “our milk soups are nutritious but so are theirs” (248).

62. Lucy H. Gillett, “Factors Influencing Nutrition Work,” p. 14. Emphasis in the original. Also see Gillett, “How Can Our Work in Foods Be Made More Vital?,” 389, and her essay, “The Great Need for Information on Racial Dietary Customs,” JHE, June 1922. Michael M. Davis, in
Immigrant Health and the Community,
states, “Knowledge of the foods of the foreign born and of their native dietaries is the foundation of all success in this endeavor” (275).

63. See discussion of Atwater's theory in
chapter 1
.

64. Gillett, “How Can Our Work in Foods Be Made More Vital?,” 389.

65. Gillett, “Factors Influencing Nutrition Work,” 19.

66. Gillett, “The Great Need for Information on Racial Dietary Customs,” p. 258.

67. Breckinridge,
New Homes,
132. The story was reproduced in William M. Liserson,
Adjusting Immigrant and Industry
(New York: Harper and Brothers 1924), 69. He said the social worker discovered “that dampness in Polish houses and the tendency of paper to come off the walls were due to the continual flow of steam from the kitchen stove. The Poles boiled their food and boiled it for hours. The use of the oven was scarcely known. Cabbage soup, boiled meat, and pastry bought at the store were about all the food items they knew.”

68. Breckinridge,
New Homes,
122, 59. See also Michael M. Davis, Jr., and Bertha M. Wood, “The Food of the Immigrant in Relation to Health,” JHE, January 1921, pp. 19–20.

69. Cummings,
The American and His Food,
198.

70. Breckinridge,
New Homes,
127–28. (For this reason, Breckinridge favored more standardized grocery stores.) On the other hand, she found that the Italian groceries regularly stocked an impressive array of greens.

71. See Donna R. Gabaccia,
We Are What We Eat: Ethnic Food and the Making of Americans
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998; and Lizabeth Cohen,
Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

72. Gillett, “Factors Influencing Nutrition Work,” 16.

73. Breckinridge,
New Homes,
124.

74. See Irving Bernstein,
Lean Years: A History of the American Worker, 19201933
(Baltimore: Penguin Press, 1966).

75. Breckinridge,
New Homes,
129. Also see Phillips and Howell, “Racial and Other Differences in Dietary Customs,” p. 399; Lucy Gillett, “A Minimum Food Allowance and a Basic Food Order,” JHE, July 1920, p. 324; and Salome S. C. Bernstein, “Home Economics in a Family Case Agency,” JHE, February 1926 p. 95.

76. Karen Graves,
Girls' Schooling during the Progressive Era: From Female Scholar to Domesticated Citizen
(New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), finds that African American girls were more likely than white girls to be targets of home economics classes in 1920s St. Louis.

77. See Cohen,
Making a New Deal.

78. Paul E. Mertz,
The New Deal and Southern Poverty
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 12. Just because families lived on the land did not mean they had nutritious food to eat. Mertz points out that tenant farmers' diets often lacked fresh vegetables because they used every acre of land for the cash crop of cotton. Also see Phillips and Howell, “Racial and Other Differences in Dietary Customs,” p. 396; and Davis,
Immigrant Health,
246.