White Bread by Aaron Bobrow-Strain Page A

change, and this would make possible—even imperative—the shift from homemade to store-bought bread. Industrial bakers like the Wards had mastered baking technology and designed its cutthroat business model, but the ultimate source of their product’s success lay in a new way of seeing the home.
    In the last decades of the nineteenth century a “culture of professionalism” had begun to grip the country’s emerging middle classes. Powerful visions of expertise and efficiency were colonizing every corner of daily life, from how babies were born (with doctors, not midwives, in attendance) to fashion (hemlines raised for sanitary reasons) and interior design (smooth, easily cleanable surfaces, not Victorian fringe and ruffle). This fervent new belief in science, social engineering, and industrial efficiency aimed to sweep away old forms of knowledge and authority perceived as grounded in craft, intuition, and tradition. Training in fields ranging from medicine to teaching was standardized and professionalized, and new disciplines—sanitation, hygienics, and public health—were created to extend scientific rationality into new realms. 19
    By the 1900s, a whole class of professional experts, armed with official certificates, fancy titles, and evangelical fervor, had secured a place for itself in the country’s rigid social hierarchies. Emboldened by success and unwavering in its confident belief in the superiority of scientific expertise, this class set its sights on the country’s hearth. In the eyes of nearly every branch of this new army of professional experts, mothers stood on the frontlines of the battle for national hygiene and efficiency. They conducted the care, feeding, and education of the population, and they governed the most intimate spaces of everyday life. Organized under the banner of “home economics,” experts in household management and scientific motherhood believed that most of the nation’s problems could be cured with careful attention to the workings of family life. “When the principles of hygiene are fully understood by women,” Emma Sickels proclaimed to a large audience at Chicago’s Art Institute in 1891, “there will be comparatively little disease.” 20
    Scientific housekeeping, domestic hygiene, research-based meal planning, and efficient child rearing were supposed to liberate women from drudgery, but home economics aspired to even greater goals: by eliminating contagion, moral weakness, and inefficient energy use that sapped the stamina of the population, scientific household management would improve the very fabric of society from the hearth up.
    For the mostly middle-class women who pioneered the field of home economics, the professionalization of domestic labor meant liberation and recognition. According to one of the movement’s founders, Ellen Richards, women’s work should properly be conceived as a professional occupation no different from doctor or engineer. 21 This professionalization of housework was, in theory, a way to place
all
women’s work on par with that of men. In practice, however, it was primarily a way for women social reformers to gain respect for
their
work. If household management was a science, every housewife was a scientist of sorts, but home economists were the real experts.
    Home economists’ authority required the existence of a population deemed in need of education and reformation. Luckily, thanks to tremendous influxes of “unclean” southern and eastern European immigrants as well as the growing visibility of other minority groups, the nation appeared replete with mothers mired in tradition and ignorance. Thus, for the bulk of the nation’s mothers, the ascendance of home economics meant less that their work would receive recognition as a vital contribution to the nation and more that their perceived backwardness and resistance to expert advice would be seen as