A fresh contribution to women’s history and a resurrection of contributions too often overlooked.
A study about how home economics has reflected changing attitudes about women’s lives in the past 150 years.
Education journalist Dreilinger makes a spirited book debut with a well-researched history of home economics, founded in the late 19th century by women who believed that improving the home through science would improve society. Through the years, the field, branding itself as domestic science, enlarged its scope. Home economists, writes the author, “originated the food groups, the federal poverty level, the consumer protection movement, clothing care labels, school lunch, the discipline of women’s studies, and the Rice Krispies Treat.” The author offers adroit portraits of women who shaped the field. These include Ellen Swallow Richards, for example, a chemist who became MIT’s first female instructor and wrote books about adulterated food and the chemistry involved in housework; and her contemporary Margaret Murray Washington (wife of Booker T.), who wrote Work for the Colored Women of the South, a household manual for impoverished Black rural women, hoping that improving the home would hasten racial equality. For much of its history, the field was blighted by racism and xenophobia. Still, home economists found opportunities in business, laboratories, and academia that might otherwise have been closed to them. In 1923, the field gained status when President Warren Harding created the Bureau of Home Economics, whose purpose was to research “the scientific basis for the mechanics of living.” World War II saw a surge of respect for Bureau scientists, who “figured out how to sterilize wool, treat cotton against mildew, and improve the flavor and nutrient retention of dehydrated food.” After the war, though, when women were enjoined to leave jobs and stay home, the field, Dreilinger writes ruefully, became “repressive, boring,” and trivialized. The Bureau ended in the early 1960s, and home economics turned from its scientific roots to emphasize the delights of homemaking and women’s responsibilities to nurture strong, happy families.
A fresh contribution to women’s history and a resurrection of contributions too often overlooked.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-324-00449-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.
A popular novelist turns his hand to historical writing, focusing on what shipwrecks can tell us.
There’s something inherently romantic about shipwrecks: the mystery, the drama of disaster, the prospect of lost treasure. Gibbins, who’s found acclaim as an author of historical fiction, has long been fascinated with them, and his expertise in both archaeology and diving provides a tone of solid authority to his latest book. The author has personally dived on more than half the wrecks discussed in the book; for the other cases, he draws on historical records and accounts. “Wrecks offer special access to history at all…levels,” he writes. “Unlike many archaeological sites, a wreck represents a single event in which most of the objects were in use at that time and can often be closely dated. What might seem hazy in other evidence can be sharply defined, pointing the way to fresh insights.” Gibbins covers a wide variety of cases, including wrecks dating from classical times; a ship torpedoed during World War II; a Viking longship; a ship of Arab origin that foundered in Indonesian waters in the ninth century; the Mary Rose, the flagship of the navy of Henry VIII; and an Arctic exploring vessel, the Terror (for more on that ship, read Paul Watson’s Ice Ghost). Underwater excavation often produces valuable artifacts, but Gibbins is equally interested in the material that reveals the society of the time. He does an excellent job of placing each wreck within a broader context, as well as examining the human elements of the story. The result is a book that will appeal to readers with an interest in maritime history and who would enjoy a different, and enlightening, perspective.
Gibbins combines historical knowledge with a sense of adventure, making this book a highly enjoyable package.Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781250325372
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 28, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2024
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