While I have been at Cornell for almost three years now, and Flora Rose House for two years, this week’s Rose café made me realize how little I actually know about Cornell history and the legacy of Flora Rose in particular. Eileen Keating from the Cornell archives gave a very interesting summary of the development of the College of Human Ecology which started back in the early 1900s as a department of home economics overseen by Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose, who were Cornell’s first female faculty. I especially liked how Ms. Keating tied this Cornell history into a broader national context by discussing, for instance, how the women’s friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt was instrumental in their obtaining of funds and recognition for the school.

For me the most interesting aspect of the talk was the collection of artifacts and documents that Ms. Keating had brought with her to display, from photos of the early faculty to an actual desk commissioned by Eleanor Roosevelt for Martha Van Rensselaer. She also passed around a reproduction of a pamphlet published in 1901 by Van Rensselaer giving home economics tips for farmers’ wives. These tips ranged from replacing cakes and pies in the family diet with fruit, to how to construct an efficient icebox, to taking time at the end of the day to watch the sunset. These artifacts really added to my understanding of the talk and made me want to go over to the archives soon to see what other interesting pieces of history they have.