Home economics history is filled with contradictions and ambiguities. It was first introduced in the late nineteenth century as scientific housekeeping. The first mission statement for home economics was developed from the fourth annual Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics and included the following:

Home economics in its most comprehensive sense is the study of laws, conditions, principles and ideals which are concerned on the one hand with man's immediate physical environment and on the other hand with his nature as a social being, and is the study specifically of the relation between those two factors.  In a narrow sense the term is given to the study of the empirical sciences with special reference to the practical problems of housework, cooking, etc.  (Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference, 1902, pp. 70-71).

Ellen Richards and Adelaide Hoodless
In 1900 an interesting dialogue took place between Ellen Richards, the undisputed founder of home economics in the United States and Adelaide Hoodless, who claimed the same position in Canada.  The occasion was the twenty-second annual meeting of the Ontario Agricultural and Experimental Union at Guelph, Ontario, the first year that home economics had been included as a discussion group.  Ellen Richards first spoke on her views of scientific housekeeping: 

The greatest need in the education of the 20th Century housekeeper is in values - whether of textiles, of woods, of food.  No one will study these, however, until the place of the home in the social life is re-settled, until the new product of the home is seen in the men and women developed in them, in the character and ability which is for the world's service of greater value than can be obtained in any other way.... To have the new ideal house and home, we must have the real new woman with scientific knowledge and training in the use of power.... Scientific housekeeping is what is good for us; a systematic division of the income between the different departments of expenditure; a careful balancing of the claims of each side of our nature. It is only possible in perfection in the house which the new architect shall build for us (Richards, 1900, p.61).

A discussion followed in which Hoodless asked Richards how scientific housekeeping could be instituted:

Mrs. Hoodless: [O]ur first movement was in the direction of instituting Cooking Schools, and we found that those who came were the good housekeepers and those who really required such teaching would not come within a mile of it.  We found the women themselves were the greatest obstructionists.  This worried us for some time, and we finally decided that the only way by which a new state of things could be brought about, was to begin in the public schools and teach the children these first principles.  And I would like to ask Mrs. Richards if she does not think this is the only way we can overcome the old habits

Mrs. Richards:  A professor of psychology said the other day at the closing of my college that we would never get any light on it until we made it part of the pupils' religion; that in many of these things we had been apt to consider them of not much importance. I agree with you.  I don't know of any place to begin except in the Public Schools; not to put it in as an extra thing, but as part of the Natural Science education, just as much as anything else educational.... I think we may have to possibly consider a little modification at first.  I do not believe that is possible to put fully equipped kitchens in all your schools in Canada. The people we want to influence are the ignorant ones.  Here you are more fortunate than we are in some of our foreign population.  The thing to do is to give the children in school the general principles, and then have them practise at home.  With us many times they could not have a place to practise, but my observation as I have been through Canada is that in a great many places you could introduce the thing (p. 62).

Mrs. Hoodless:  That thought of Mrs. Richards' this afternoon is, I think the keynote of the whole work - creative interest.  When it is taught that our body is composed of certain elements, and that the food must go to keep that body in repair, and that when they go to prepare food they must consider the essential qualities of that meal, there is an intelligent interest in it which is otherwise impossible.  It is just that haphazard way of doing work that is driving our intelligent girls out of the kitchen.  Let me give an instance of one experiment tried in Glasgow. In the mill district there were, perhaps three generations, and all sorts of vice prevailed in that district.  A lady, who was interested in Domestic Science, thought she would like to have it introduced into the school there, and out of 600 children who went through her hands she reported 350, who instead of going to the mill to work, had gone out to domestic service.  That she gave as the effect of scientific teaching.  What is the use, as Herbert Spencer says, of being able to quote Dante in the original when standing by the death bed of a sick child if you cannot make a proper poultice.  We find that our university girls are not the more practical and many of them say that if they had their lives to live over they would take it differently, as their education has not brought to them their highest good (p. 62-63). 

The rationale for early home economics education thus became entwined with influencing the ignorant and providing domestic servants. Home economics pioneers such as Ellen Richards and Adelaide Hoodless believed that home economics education would cure all of society's ills.  While home economics has not remained static over the past one hundred years, the current mission statement of the Canadian Home Economics Association retains overtones of societal betterment:
Home economics is concerned with all aspects of daily living including human relationships and development, resource management, consumerism, foods and nutrition, clothing and textiles, housing, and aesthetics.  Home Economics brings together knowledge from its own research, the sciences and the arts and uses this knowledge to assist people in enhancing their daily lives (Canadian Home Economics Association, 2000, p. 151).

Teaching White Culture
In addition to enhancing daily lives, home economics has had a seldom-mentioned aim of teaching white culture.  This became obvious to me in the summer of 2000, which I spent teaching the equivalent of Home Economics 12 to adults in the small African country of Malawi.  They were teachers who wanted to pass their state certificate examinations in home economics by studying a curriculum that was almost entirely British.  My Malawian co-tutor asked me to teach flour mixtures, despite the cost of flour being the equivalent of one week's wages and nsima or corn flour pudding the staple food.  I could have taught nutrition - the mortality rate for children under five years of age is 256/1000 and it is most frequent after age two, when the child is weaned to nutrient-deficient nsima.  But flour mixtures would help the students pass the examination, and that is what counted.  Other African students have told me about learning the parts of the vacuum cleaner for the sake of the examination even though hard-packed dirt floors are much more practical and vacuum cleaners unheard of. 

In fairness, many home economists around the world are working to reconceptualize home economics, for example, Dr. Lila Engberg, who has devoted a great part of her life to making home economics in Africa relevant to the daily lives of Africans. See IDRC link.


Absent Centre of White Culture

Pajaczowska and Young call the failure to make white culture explicit the "absent centre of White ethnicity". The identity of white culture is absent in a political and subjective sense: 

Within European history descriptions of whiteness are absent due to denial of imperialism, and this leaves a blank in the place of knowledge of the destructive effects of wielding power. An identity based on power never has to develop a sense of itself as responsible, it has no sense of its limits except as those are perceived in opposition to others.  The blankness of the identity of empire covers an ambivalence which is often unconscious, and which, consequently, can most readily be perceived in the representations it creates of the colonial "other" (Pajaczowska & Young, 1992, p. 202).

When other cultures are included, Pajaczowska and Young claim that this is done so in a "continuing mythology of white constructed multi-culturalism which serves to appropriate and co-opt cultures into a controlling framework".  I would argue that home economics is and has always been a white identity with the power to define the boundaries of others but not of itself.  A discussion of multiculturalism is beyond the present scope of this paper, although the ways in which "foreign foods" are incorporated into the current secondary school seem to resonate with appropriation and co-opting of cultures at a superficial level.

References:

Canadian Home Economics Association.  (2000).  Canadian Home Economics Journal. 50 (3). p. 151.

Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics: Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Conference, 1902, pp. 70-71.

Pajaczowska, Claire & Young, Lola. Racism, representation, psychoanalysis.  In James Donald  & Ali Rattansi (Eds.) ( 1992).  "Race", culture and difference.