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Catharine Beecher promoted equal access to education for women and advocated for their roles as teachers and mothers. Beecher wrote poems that were published in the Christian Spectator. Her most famous works - A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), The Duty of American Women to Their Country (1845), and The Domestic Receipt Book (1846)—demonstrated her beliefs about women’s central role as mothers and educators, and raising the next generation within the home. -
Justin Smith Morrill was a Congressman in Vermont. He sponsored the Morrill Act which allowed each state to sell up to 30,000 acres of land and use the funds to establish colleges. This act has proved to be one of the greatest pieces of legislation. Many of the country’s greatest colleges were funded through this Act.
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As an expansion to the Morrill Act, Land Grant Universities were created. Land Grant Universities were designed to bring an institution of higher education; such as science, technology, and arts to the American people.
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University of Arkansas
University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff -
Ellen majored in chemistry because it had practical applications. In 1876, she opened a women's laboratory at MIT. Ellen was passionate about the connections between science and the daily life of housewives'. In 1890, Ellen established The New England Kitchen of Boston, which offered cooking demonstrations, and nutritious meals for visitors. In 1894, her work was replicated in a demonstration kitchen at the Chicago World’s Fair, where Ellen’s research reached people from across the globe.
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The Rumford Kitchen was strictly scientifically prepared foods for the world's fair. In the Department of Hygiene and Sanitation was the exhibit known as "The Rumford Kitchen," an outgrowth of the work in the application of the principles of chemistry to the science of cooking, which has for three years been carried on as an educational agency by Ellen Richards. This was -
Attended several lake Placid conferences. Caroline and some others renamed their specialty “home economics,” seeking to create an academic discipline that could generate professional opportunities for the very women they hoped to free from household labor. She wrote a book in 1927 called "The Home-Maker and Her Job". -
In 1899, MIT chemist Ellen H. Richards instigated a series of annual “Lake Placid Conferences” (1899–1908) that became known as the foundation of the home economics movement. The Lake Placid Conferences were an important factor in determining what exactly home economics was, is and will be -
The Smith-Lever Act established a national Cooperative Extension Service that extended outreach programs through land-grant universities to educate rural Americans about advances in agricultural practices and technology. These colleges would send out agricultural and home demonstration agents to work with farmers and homemakers.American agricultural productivity has increased because of this.
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She was convinced that the greatest professional opportunity for a woman trained in chemistry lay in the application of that training to the development of the science of nutrition in a home economics department. In 1916, she became joint chairman of the newly established Department of Home Economics in the College of Letters and Science. She dedicated her career to find out and to teach the “whys” of the things that affect home and family. -
The Smith-Hughes Act recognized vocational agriculture, home economics, and the trades and industries as the fields of study that could be supported with Smith-Hughes funds.The purpose of vocational education was to prepare individuals for useful employment and allowed them to see the practical application of academic concepts.
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The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics was founded in 1917 in Cleveland, Ohio, by a group of women led by Lenna F. Cooper and the Academy's first president, Lulu G. Graves, for the purpose helping the government conserve food and improve public health during World War I. The original mission of the Academy was in part to help make maximal use of America's food resources during wartime. -
In 1926, Myra King Hammond, a Black woman, graduated after three years at Cornell from Home Economics. Cornell home economists used Black and Indigenous women both metaphorically and literally to educate all their students about the traditions, fashions, and practices of non-white “others.” -
Kittrell’s undergraduate degree was in home economics and after encouragement from her professors, Kittrell enrolled in Cornell University in New York, earning her master’s in 1930 and followed by a Ph.D. in nutrition with honors in 1938. Kittrell used her foundation to change home economics and nutrition, shaping how the fields utilized scientific research and evidence to interact within a local and global context. The American Home Economics Association created a scholarship in her honor. -
The National School Lunch Act provides low cost or free school lunch meals to qualified students through subsidies to schools. -
The vocational education act of 1963 was enacted by congress to offer new and expanded vocational education programs to bring job training into harmony with the industrial, economic, and social realities of today and the needs for tomorrow.
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The Vocational Education Amendments of 1968 extend the work of the 1963 amendments, but the emphasis has changed from occupations to people. Each state must submit a plan consisting of administrative policies and procedures and an annual and 5-year program plan. Part of the authorized funds are allocated to permanent programs in cooperative vocational as well as consumer and homemaking education.
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The purpose of the act was to: extend, improve and maintain programs; overcome sex discrimination/bias; develop new programs.
Required states receiving federal funding for vocational education to develop and carry out activities and programs to eliminate gender bias, stereotyping, and discrimination in vocational education. Also federal funds to programs for single heads of households, homemakers, part-time workers seeking full-time jobs, and those seeking jobs in areas that are nontraditional. -
The purpose of this act was to increase funding for career and technical education for secondary and post-secondary institutions to prepare students for the workforce. The Act emphasizes high-skill, high-wage, high-demand occupations to enable students to secure employment upon completion of their training.
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In 1994, the name of the course in most of the country was officially changed from Home Economics to Family and Consumer Sciences, or FCS, in an effort to dispel the impression that home ec was about teaching girls how to be housewives.