FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

November 25, 2020

Contact: Athanasiou Geolas (ajg355@cornell.edu) Twitter: @athangeolas

Location: Human Ecology Building, Level T Display Cases and Virtual

Dates: December 7, 2020 – Feb. 26, 2021

Ithaca, N.Y. – A new exhibition, Standards for a New Womanhood: Gender, Race, and Expertise, will explore the rise of the professional home economist across Central and Western New York State in the opening decades of the twentieth century. The exhibition will open December 7, 2020 and is curated by Athanasiou Geolas, a Charlotte A. Jirousek Research Fellow and PhD Candidate in the History of Architecture and Urban Development at Cornell University.

The exhibition takes its name from a 1981 essay by Angela Y. Davis titled “The Legacies of Slavery: Standards for a New Womanhood.” In that essay, Davis explains that the nineteenth-century cults of “True Womanhood” and domesticity expressed an ideal of femininity that did not extend to Black women (7). Scenes of the idealized American woman’s home, like that enshrined in the frontispiece of the Beecher sister’s 1869 treatise on domestic science, displayed the ease and comfort of the middle-class white family at home. Setting aside the term “domestic science” in 1899, the newly coined discipline of “home economics” sought to apply scientific methods to a generation of women who may or may not have aspired to the Beecher’s ideal, but certainly never had time for it on a working farm. Championing the “resolute unsentimentality” of home economists, women’s studies historians and activists Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English explained that:

The architects of domestic science were repelled by the cloying nineteenth-century romanticization of home and womanhood. Lace-bordered images of sweet ‘little’ women placidly awaiting weary breadwinners filled them with revulsion. The home was not a retreat from society, not a haven for personal indulgence; it was just as important as the factory, in fact, it was a factory. […] the scientific home—swept clean of the cobwebs of sentiment, windows opened wide to the light of science—was simply a workplace like any other (For Her Own Good, 1979, 168).

What were the ideals of this new discipline and how did these exemplars fashion women’s bodies, habits, and sense of self in the early 20^th century? By bringing together historical research from the archives of Cornell’s Rare & Manuscript Collections with garments from the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, Standards for a New Womanhood revisits the pioneering efforts of early home economists to reform some, but not all of the values they inherited from the late-nineteenth century. Revealing the cultural norms that home economics received from their Victorian predecessors and snuck-under-the-rug, so to speak, exposes some of the more forthrightly racist, sexist, and classist aspects of what came to define a “professional” in the United States. However much professionals drew on scientific methods, they applied them to nineteenth-century categories imbued with all the moralizing and racializing undertones that supposedly neutral techniques claimed to have overcome. Beginning in Martha Van Rensselaer’s first office in the basement of Morrill Hall in 1900, this exhibition follows the professional home economist as they transformed the bodies of “farmers’ wives” into both an object of analysis and their primary client.

 

Geolas has constructed each exhibition case as a kind of diorama that presents historical scenes for interpretation. Extending along a path from Cornell’s campus and carried along by more than one mode of transit, the cases proceed from MVR’s office to Comstock Hall (the first home economics building) and into the early automobiles and trains that brought home economists to rural farmhouses across the State.

Home demonstrations, educational pamphlets, and university coursework offered a “scientific” approach to the fashioned body. Women came together in private homes across NYS for “home demonstrations” and “extension schools” where they to learned new sewing, fitting, and embellishment techniques. A highlight on display is a custom gummed-tape dress form that was fabricated in 2020 according to instructions found in a Cornell Extension Bulletin written by Doris Schumaker and Irene French in July 1924. The form could be used at home to make custom fit adjustments for home sewn and inherited garments, in addition to the factory-made clothing available in the newly industrialized garment industry. Guidelines for posture and the efficient use of one’s body—whether in the kitchen, chatting in the parlor, or hiring a new farm hand—are also on display. As one “farmer’s wife” confidently asserted in a letter back to Cornell: “I am glad to learn all I can to save steps. A woman’s motto ought to be: think twice and step once” (RMC #23-2-749, Box 25, Folder 10). In a discipline that often blurred the boundaries between professional and housewife, frequency of travel is one of the few distinguishing characteristics. Which women traveled, what they brought with them, and how they dressed is crucial for understanding this new profession.

By centering efforts on the hard work of domestic labor in the farm home and elevating it to the status of a profession, home economists radically revised sentimental 19^th century ideals of femininity and domesticity. Their re-fashioning of rural women’s bodies transformed “the American woman’s” home even as they built on its foundations to achieve their new social status. In other words, by professionalizing the sexual division of labor on farms, home economists produced “the scientific home” by introducing a new kind of “scientific body.”

The exhibition features facsimiles of documents and photographs from Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections (@rarecornell) alongside artifacts from the Cornell Fashion & Textile Collection (@cornellfashioncollection) and will be displayed on Level T of the Human Ecology Building, December 7, 2020 – Feb. 26, 2021. A closing reception will take place on Thursday, February 25th from 4:30 – 5:30 pm via Zoom (register Here to receive Zoom details) with remarks and a tour of the exhibition by curator, Athanasiou Geolas, at 4:45 pm.

DETAILS:

Title: Standards for a New Womanhood: Gender, Race, and Expertise

Dates: December 7, 2020 – 26, 2021

Location: Level T, College of Human Ecology Building (37 Forest Home Dr.), Cornell University central campus, Ithaca, NY 14853 and Virtual.

Access: The virtual exhibit will be available Dec. 1, 2020. Only approved current students, staff or faculty, essential vendors (such as food and delivery workers or construction and service providers), or individuals approved, in writing, by the provost or appropriate dean, vice president or their delegate, may access campus facilities. Campus visitors must abide by Cornell’s travel and visitor policy (PDF), which significantly restricts visits by individuals not part of the residential Cornell community. Campus visitors are prohibited from entering any campus facility. Only approved current students, staff or faculty, essential vendors (such as food and delivery workers or construction and service providers), or individuals approved, in writing, by the provost or appropriate dean, vice president or their delegate, may access campus facilities.

Land Acknowledgement: Cornell University is located on the traditional homelands of the Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ (the Cayuga Nation). The Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ are members of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, an alliance of six sovereign Nations with a historic and contemporary presence on this land. The Confederacy precedes the establishment of Cornell University, New York State, and the United States of America.  The Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection and the curator of this exhibition acknowledge the painful history of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ dispossession, and honor the ongoing connection of Gayogo̱hó꞉nǫ’ people, past and present, to these lands and waters. Furthermore, we acknowledge that Cornell University obtained 977,909 acres of expropriated Indigenous land through the Morrill Act of 1862. Please refer to the American Indian and Indigenous Studies Program’s Indigenous Dispossession Project Blog to learn more.

Funding: Charlotte A. Jirousek Research Fellowship, which has been supported by a generous gift from Melissa and Michael Neborak. Additional support has been provided from the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection, Department of Fiber Science and Apparel Design, and the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University.

Curator: Athanasiou Geolas (Ph.D. Candidate, History of Architecture and Urban Development, AAP, Cornell University), ajg355@cornell.edu Twitter: @athangeolas

Contributing Institutions: Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection and the Cornell Rare & Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

Social media: Instagram: @cornellfashioncollection Facebook: @cornellfashion Hashtag: #newwomanhood