Mystery Date #2 came out in 1994, only a few months after the first issue. Given that there have been a totalof six issues altogether, I am highly impressed by my productivity that year. In addition to this article, there was an annotated bibliography called "Further Readings in Home Economics," a review of books and records about Gypsy Rose Lee, and "Sex Ed on Vinyl: The Sequel." Again, all typos here are verbatim from the original.

Adventures in Home Economics
Lynn Peril © 1994

(1) "John Robert Powers Model and Career School" for those of you not in the loop. I was astounded to discover that not only did it still exist, but that there was a "campus" right here in San Francisco.

My memories of home economics class are not the fond, nostalgic kind from which Norman Rockwell found fodder for those Saturday Evening Post covers. Rather, I remember a year of seemingly unending tedium, relieved only by the tasty treats we dished up during the cooking unit. I made possibly the ugliest t-shirt ever sewn (sort of a cream color with -- please don't hold this against me -- rosebuds and olive green trim), which when completed remained at the bottom of my drawer, only to be thrown away, unworn, several years later. There was a section on babysitting and child care that I stoically faced with complete and utter boredom (although I did enjoy making a stuffed elephant out of some leftover blue floral upholstery fabric). And then there was the ultimate mortification - think of those medieval paintings of St. Sebastian shot through with arrows, only replace the figure of the saint with that of an ungainly adolescent in clogs - the unit on beauty and hygiene.

The pinnacle of this martyrdom was reached the day that a John Robert Powers(1) girl came to class to talk to us about "charm" -- an elusive quality that apparently involved posture as well as personality (more on this in an upcoming MD article on vintage health and beauty books). Anyway, there I was, faced with a perky young woman who assumed that I actually cared whether or not my non-existent boyfriend pulled out my chair for me at restaurants. In fact, she assumed that I cared so much about ladylike deportment that she chose me to help demonstrate the "How to Properly Seat Oneself" portion of the lecture. This, despite my refusal to make any eye contact with the front of the room after her call for volunteers. The nerve of her!

Then again, maybe she chose me to provide comedy relief for the rest of the class. "Go ahead," she said, "and sit down." I obliged her, seating myself at the table the teacher had helpfully provided at the front of the room. "Now," she chortled triumphantly, "if you lean forward like that, he'll see everything!"

At the time I wanted to die. In retrospect, however, I think several current obsessions can be traced to this traumatic moment in my adolescence -- for example, my love of Rusty "Bounce Your Boobies" Warren, my fascination with pinup girl June "The Bosom" Wilkinson, and my desperate need to find the perfect 50s bra that will make my tits look like the tail lights of 1960 Chrysler Le Baron. Oh, yes, and my collection of home ec textbooks.

After that hideous moment in front of the class, I put all thoughts of home economics behind me, until that day in St. Vincent de Paul on Folsom Street when I found a copy of Homemaking for Teen-Agers by Irene E. McDermott and Florence W. Nicholas. Paging through the table of contents, it all came back to me: chapters with titles like "Why Children Act Like Children," and "Organization for Manageable Living," as well as sections on sewing and food preparation and (shudder) grooming.

And that's when it started in earnest. I now have well over a dozen different home ec texts from ranging from the 1940s to the 1970s, and I love them all. [My collection has grown exponentially since this was written. - Ed.] And why shouldn't I? They're available in all the best thrift stores, they're cheap (if you pay more than a few bucks you've paid too much), they have great pictures and provide indispensable information about living in a past that never existed. And, above all, the gender role indoctrination is as humorous as it is unsettling.

Home economics books come in several formats. First there are the traditional all around home ec texts, like Homemaking for Teen-agers, that present units on cooking, sewing, child-care and social skills/hygiene. Then there are specialized books devoted to individual subjects, like Manners Made Easy, Experiences with Foods, or How You Dress and Look, or my personal favorite, Being Married (a text for those planning to be married as soon as they graduate from high school, if not sooner).

Before we look at some examples, you should understand that all home ec books seem to share a few basic elements. First, as if they realized the tenuous connection of their field with any real academic or vocational skill, the authors of most home ec texts felt compelled to bill themselves as some sort of "authority" - such as "Director of Social Conduct at South High School, Lima, Ohio" or the succinct yet magisterial "Family Life Consultant." Then, with a zeal to proselytize matched only by proponents of certain outrŽ pseudoscientific theories (imagine being trapped on public transportation with a drunken flat-earther), every home ec text contains a chapter on "Career Opportunities in Home Economics." These "careers," for the most part consist of minimum wage drudge work, although I personally have to a admire a text that stands up proudly and suggests "Baby Food Specialist" as a career option. "Tests nutritional value, taste and appearance of baby food," is the job description provided by the 1972 edition of Teen Guide to Homemaking. Call me cynical, but taste-testing at Gerber's does not seem to present a lot of opportunity for upward mobility for anybody over the age of 12 months.

Finally, most of the texts provide some sort of checklist or quiz for the student to measure his or her "progress." For example, Homemaking for Teenagers contains a fully-fledged "Personality Check List," by which one can presumably discover any personality flaws that later in life might keep one out of the local chapter of the PTA. My favorite question here is "(12) Do you resent authority and abide by customary rules?" All I can think is that the authors' subconscious desire to chuck their careers in home economics and join Marlon Brando and Lee Marvin as Hollywood biker chicks got the better of them when writing this question. I've provided the Personality Check List in its entirety [Sorry, I'm not putting it online. - Ed.] because "Life is richer and happier for all of us, when the people in it are fine, honest, dependable, generous and kind. This means that every one of us must do our part, so we must take inventory of our personal characteristics." You may choose not to fill out the check list, but remember, "It is the business of every one of us to be a fine person, and to show it to the world. Would you not like to be called 'keen, smooth, cool or neat' rather than a 'drag' or 'fink'?" The choice is yours, oh readers.

In a similar vein, the books provide "Questions for Further Study" or "Activities" at the end of each chapter, presumably to help ram home the message to recalcitrant students. Thus, after the chapter on Clothing Care in How You Look and Dress, the reader is entreated to "Discuss effective ways of removing lint or keeping it from appearing on your dark clothing." Obviously your editrix missed this chapter entirely, as she is usually sporting a stylish mixture of black clothing and cat fur, but she promises to initiate this discussion at the next cocktail party she attends.

Young Living by Nanalee Clayton is a good example of the all-around home ec textbook. It has chapters on all the necessary subjects, and was written by the "Director of Homemaking Education, Houston Independent Schools." It has a self-evaluation page entitled, "Things I Should Learn About Homemaking," which actually includes space for "What mother thinks I should learn."

But what's really interesting about Young Living is that it's subtitled "The Pre-Hi Homemaking Text." In other words, as noted in the introduction, it was meant for "pre-teeners," i.e., 11 and 12 year olds. I don't know if Nanalee Clayton was attempting to take advantage of the malleability of these youngsters, but of all my collection, Young Living is the most blatant in its "home and country" propagandizing. The text's stated intention is to help the student "develop the right attitude toward sharing the responsibilities as well as the pleasures of the home." And what is the "right attitude"? Clues can be found in the chapter entitled "What Homemaking Means to Everyone":

"Homemaking" has a lot of meanings. ... It means learning about yourself so that you can make your home more pleasant, attract more friends, add something special to your home life -- just as important as your study, in other classes, of mathematics, your native language and your beloved America and its place in the world. ... We cannot take our home life for granted. We must all learn the skills of working together to keep our way of living in America the way we want it to be.

In other words, proper homemaking is the only thing standing between Our Way of Life and Godless Communism. What if Nikita Khrushchev came to dinner and you couldn't whip up a batch of Glamour Dogs or a Baked Noodle Ring? Would you want to be responsible for our losing the Cold War?

And that's another thing about these texts. While they nominally included boys in their targeted audience -- referred to them in the text, included them in photos -- one gets the idea that this homemaking training is really for girls only. For example, the preface to the 1967 edition of Teen Guide to Homemaking noted that "since it is generally agreed that experiences in homemaking education should be made available to both boys and girls, this book was prepared for both." Yet only girls' clothing appeared in the sewing section photographs, and the diagram called "Hair Arrangements for Different Shaped Faces" presented outlines of only girls' heads and faces. Even under the guise of being coeducational, many texts presented certain topics for girls only: sewing, cooking and "good grooming" chapters often dropped the pretense, apparent in other chapters, of using masculine pronouns. Sex segregation was one of the hallmarks of home economics classes in the 50s and 60s; it wasn't until the 70s, when federal legislation outlawed sex discrimination in public education that the traditional girls-only home economics course disappeared. In fact, I was in one of the last classes of sex-segregated home ec in my junior high school. The next year both home ec and its sibling, shop, were coed.

This is not to say that classes in "Family Living" (or some other such euphemism for "middle-class morality") were not sometimes coed in the 50s and 60s. They were, as evidenced by my copy of Hazel Thompson Craig's Thresholds to Adult Living, which belonged to Dick Grimine, who wrote his name and graduation year ("64") inside the front cover. Some bored, bored, bored adolescent (certainly not Dick!) drew an executioner's hood and axe as well as a pair of sunglasses on one of the All American males on the cover, in addition to defacing a photo inside in the traditional blacked-out teeth and eyes manner. As far as I can tell, "Family Living" classes were basically home economics with stripped down or missing sections on food and clothing balanced out by expanded units on dating, marriage and family finance. Ook. I might have defaced this book, too, as Hazel Craig's world view is strictly squaresville:

The importance of being a good wife cannot be emphasized too greatly. For instance, the Air Force has found "a direct correlation between aircraft mishaps and unsettled home life .. The husbands get to thinking about rows with the little woman while they are up there and the first thing you know they press the wrong button."

In other words, just because Nikita loved the Glamour Dogs doesn't mean you can let down your guard, ladies. And, hey, guys, according to Thresholds to Adult Living, you'll be asking yourselves, "shall I volunteer right after high school or wait and be drafted," so don't think you're off the Hazel Thompson Craig gender role hook, either.

But perhaps I'm being too hard on Mrs. Craig. I think she may have been just a wee bit naive about things. In the Activities section at the end of Chapter 9 ("Marriage Miracles and Mirages") she suggests that students "Learn something about the childhood, courtship and marriage of some of the writers you are studying at present. Discuss your findings in relation to marriage predictions in this chapter. For instance, Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde had very unhappy childhoods. Were their marriages affected by these experiences?" Um, Hazel, ol' girl, I think something other than his childhood experiences had an affect on Oscar Wilde's marriage.

In the face of an ideological masterpiece like Thresholds to Adult Living, it shouldn't be overlooked that seemingly innocuous textbooks like Experiences With Foods or Mealtime could be just as dogmatic in their lesson plans. Mealtime, for example, starts out reiterating the link between home, family and country: "Family mealtime, with all its associations, is an American tradition that must not be lost." Nor does author Bess Oerke waste any valuable indoctrination time pretending that boys might be using this text. Oh, no, Mealtime is for girls only, and starts with a philosophic chapter entitled, "The Meaning of Mealtime":

This chapter is different from the usual first chapter in a foods textbook. ... It begins with personal feelings and attitudes -- so important to any homemaking success. It continues with the subject of "snacks," and their place in today's social plan.

And you thought I was being facetious about the connection between Baked Noodle Ring and Cold War politics, didn't you?

When it comes right down to it, I think what both fascinates and repels me about these books is this concern with "proper" attitudes. They describe a simplistic world where gender roles were rigid and biologically determined, and where students could assume at least a middle-class future. We laugh at these books (at least I do), but if you think for moment, it's not because they are quaint reminders of an idyllic past -- it's because they try so hard to create a world that never existed. It's the assumption that we all should be stay-at-home communist-fighting housewives and office-working daddies that sends a chill down the spine even as disparity between what the textbooks preached and real world taught makes us laugh.

But, as I mentioned earlier, in the seventh grade I wasn't laughing. However, in spite of my embarrassment that day in front of the classroom, I lived through the rest of my home ec class -- and the rest of junior high, for that matter. In fact, the last time I looked, the Cold War was allegedly over, and you know what? I still don't know how to sit like a lady.