I found Eileen Keating’s lecture on the history of Cornell’s College of Human Ecology to be extremely informative, mostly because I had known next to nothing about the college coming into the Rose Cafe. I certainly had not expected the story of the college to be so closely tied to women’s rights and women’s work.

Originally the Department of Home Economics, the College of Human Ecology was created through the collaboration of two women, Martha van Rensselaer and Flora Rose, and was expressly developed to fill a need for farmer’s wives. It maintained an entirely female student population and an all-female faculty. Men were only allowed into the Department of Human Ecology when the School of Hotel Administration was introduced into the department.

The day before the Rose Cafe, in my engineering probability and statistics class, the professor compared the average salaries of graduates of Cornell’s colleges. The College of Human Ecology had the lowest salary by a significant margin, $6000/yr lower than the next lowest, that of the College of Architecture. This is quite surprising for a college that houses a common Pre-Law major, Policy and Management, as well as the common Pre-Med majors Human Development, Global Public Health Sciences, and Human Biology, Health, & Society. I would expect a college housing majors related to the potentially high-paying fields of medicine and law to produce graduates with high salaries.

I suspect that the college’s relationship to gender could be a contributor to the low numbers. Women’s work and women’s fields have historically been looked down upon and undervalued, and this could have had a lasting effect on the salaries in the fields that the college focuses on. This could also have affected the College of Human Ecology itself, resulting in it receiving less respect and funding than it deserves. Even now, the student population of the college remains mostly female, so the lower salaries could also be a result of the gender pay disparity that still exists today. Interestingly enough, the School of Hotel Administration, the only aspect of the college that was never all-female, has a starting salary more than $9000/yr higher than that of Human Ecology.