‘Are you ready for the fresh alpine air to welcome you as you travel up the scenic mountain roads and into the quaint villages of the Adirondacks?’ enquires the tourist website in 2017. ‘Are you ready to settle into your home away from home … to experience all that Lake Placid and the High Peaks Region has to offer?’ Lake Placid, a village in the Adirondack mountains region of New York State, has offered many recreations in its time, including a modestly successful film of that name starring a giant, man-eating crocodile, the 1932 Winter Olympics and a series of conferences held between 1899 and 1910 featuring the enormously important and equally undervalued subject of domestic economy or household science. These conferences laid the foundations of home economics as an educational science and produced both the American Home Economics Association and The Journal of Home Economics; the movement also took root in other countries, providing yet another, mostly female, international network for the exchange of ideas, work and friendship. This terrain of work had various names, and the topic of its naming occupied much intellectual energy among its proponents. What’s in a name? A great deal, when what is at issue is the whole domain of work in and for the home, itself a topic that can never be discussed without tramping the treacherous landscape of women’s identity, what they do and what they ought to do, and how all of this is tied into structures of production and reproduction in modern industrial societies. Household science isn’t the same thing as housework, although, according to the trailblazers who feature in this chapter, it ought to be. The chapter complements the previous one in its focus on how women reformers extended the science of health and hygiene into the most intimate recesses of the home.

Telling women how to do housework has a long and sometimes not very salubrious history. Henrietta Barnett, co-founder of Toynbee Hall, wrote her own little treatise for elementary school children in 1885; she conceived of moral education in unselfishness as sitting quite happily side by side with a lesson on drains – although she did avoid ‘speaking of the water-closet’, fearing it might put her audience off. No such timidity affected other women sanitary advisers.