King's College of Household and Social Science (KCHSS) in London, England, offered university degrees in household and social science for over 30 years, beginning in 1920. The King's College initiative is unique in the history of housework, not because it was the only institution to provide domestic science degrees – by 1920 there were many places doing that – but because of its independence as an institution from other university connections, its longevity, the sustained academic and political struggle that gave rise to it, the outstandingly comprehensive curriculum of research, teaching and policy work that went on there, and its legacy today in programmes of food and nutrition science that are known and respected around the globe. KCHSS has received little attention from historians of housework. This is a pity, as tracing its rise, development and influence has much to tell us about the domestic science movement, and about its tight interconnections with the movement for women's higher education. The scientisation of housework and the education of women are like conjoined twins: recognising, and at the same time disputing, the closeness of their relationship. By following the development of household science at KCHSS we can see how the argument for scientific education in housework meshed with, and at times contradicted, the drive to get women accepted as equal citizens in the professional academic world.

This chapter and the next are based on many weeks spent in the marvellous archives of KCHSS which are now held in the library of King's College, London. Carefully preserved by assiduous (and very helpful) archivists, some of these records throw up clouds of dust that would horrify the protagonists of the domestic science movement. Thus these two chapters are different in tone and purpose from the others in The Science of Housework because their concern is with the meticulous details of ideas and arrangements, negotiations and social networks that gave rise in one particular place to a university degree in household science. Our journey through this story will cause us to re- encounter many names we have already met in previous chapters: the resourceful British sanitary scientist, Alice Ravenhill, for example; domestic science lecturer Margaret McKillop and her co- author, economist Mabel Atkinson; Arthur Smithells, professor of chemistry and supporter of a thoroughly scientific education for women; Clementina Black, who railed against the domestic idiocies of much home design and had her own brilliant remedial ideas.

The passion for injecting science into housework which gripped Europe, America and many other countries in the period between 1880 and 1940 didn't confine itself to recipes for cabbage soup, the persecution of dust and other microbial enemies of human health, and how to cook cheaply for the poor. Housework happens in people's homes and these – the way they’re designed, manufactured and furnished – shape the extent to which housework can be converted into a scientific discipline. Thus, the making of homes needs to be as much a subject of discussion as the doing of housework.

The American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman published a book called The Man- made World in 1911. Gilman is most famous for her terrifying fable, ‘The yellow wallpaper’, which is about the creation and treatment of depression in women. She is less well- known for what she was, the leading feminist intellectual of her day, and a prominent social theorist in the emerging discipline of sociology. In her autobiography Gilman described herself as ‘a philosophic steam- engine’, and she certainly propelled herself with enormous zest through most of the debates that raged in her lifetime about women, households, gender and social policy. She was the greatniece of Catharine Beecher whose 1841 text on domestic economy took the first sustained scientific interest in housework. Although this may have helped to fuel Gilman's own interest in the home as a place of labour for women, she didn't see the relationship between women and housework in at all the same way as her great- aunt. Indeed, Gilman devoted much energy to undoing Catharine Beecher's ideology of the home as women's natural domain. Between 1898 and 1911 she wrote books about the home, women and economics, human work, children, and The Man- made World, whose subject is the effect on human life of ‘the unbridled dominance of one sex’. In this ‘androcentric’ culture, as she termed it, men have made homes essentially places for women and children, but without considering their needs.

This chapter ties together various themes about house design, efficiency and economics in a story about how the domestic science movement developed in the period from around 1910 to the 1930s.

In the early 1900s a social investigator and welfare worker called Cecile Matheson undertook to explore for the British Board of Education how some European countries set about the business of training girls for the performance of home duties. She personally went to look at many different kinds of schools in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. In one she visited, in Cassel (now Kassel), Germany, domestic hygiene was taught in a ground- floor kitchen with a tiled floor, a light green dado and cream- coloured walls, around the top of which were painted a series of mottoes: ‘The little kitchen builds the big house’, ‘Your home is your kingdom – stay there’. The 25 children who attended the class Matheson witnessed were ‘bright and tidy’, although some wore the patched clothes that told of poverty.

The lessons Matheson attended mostly took the form of question and answer. The children were asked such questions as: ‘What are the constituents of the body and why do we need food?’ ‘What are the chief kinds of food and why are they mixed?’ In the lesson she witnessed they were taught how to make a milk soup. Glasses of sour milk, strainers and plates were fetched from the attached larder and store room, and the class considered what milk is made of and what it can be made into. The children were already, noted Matheson, ‘acquainted with the action of bacteria, the value of ice, boiling, covering, and, above all, of cleanliness in the preservation of milk’. ‘Homely illustrations’ were used to demonstrate the unappetising details of how milk is digested and acted on by the gastric juices. Once the soup was made, the class was shown the best way to extend hospitality, with a clean tablecloth and a vase of flowers. The meal that followed provided an ‘opportunity for the practice of the politeness and good manners which are too often obscured in home when the pressure of poverty is great’. Science and good manners went hand in hand as markers of future womanhood.

My mother, born in 1903, possessed one cookery book, a weighty brown, gilt- engraved volume first published in 1927 to promote a new design of gas stove called ‘New World’. This stove was the first to possess a thermostat, enabling the temperature of the oven to be controlled; the Radiation group of companies, which produced the cookery book, created a new term in naming it a ‘regulo’. The photograph inside my mother's copy of the Radiation Cookery Book is an exact replica of the oven that stood in my childhood home, on which the flames would frequently and terrifyingly ‘light back’ in the draught from the open kitchen door: the new world of gas cooking clearly had some way to go.

This chapter looks at two of the most fundamental of all modern housework technologies: gas and electricity. Along with running water and sewerage, they form the ‘technological infrastructure’ of housework. The story of their evolution interweaves several themes that are central to the household science movement. One is the impact of scientific-technological developments. How core is technology to the doing of scientific housework? Has technology really reduced household labour? A second theme is how such developments have helped to shape women's position as workers both inside and outside homes. Third, there is the fascinating question of the relationship between scientific understandings of housework and the modern culture of mass consumption. In the period covered by this book, but particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, household work became decisively a matter of consumption. Homes obtained and thus ‘consumed’ externally produced supplies and services rather than generating their own. They became essential players in a vast market of mass- produced and mass- distributed products designed to be bought and constantly replaced, and that therefore required an equally vast empire of seductive promotional advertising.

In the conversion of ‘Mrs Housewife’ into ‘Mrs Consumer’, the struggle to be clean and healthy couldn't possibly be won without buying. And to buy into a state of proper modernity, to be regarded by oneself and others as thoroughly modern, it became necessary to live in a state of highly technologised domesticity. In order to achieve its aims, the industries that sold household technology used two rhetorical devices.

Abbott, Edith (1876–1957) US

Abel, Mary Hinman (1850–1938) US

Addams, Jane (1860–1935) US

Atkins, John (1875–1963) UK

Atkinson, Mabel (married name Palmer) (1876–1958) UK

Atwater, Wilbur Owen (1844–1907) US

Baddeley, Florence (1858–1923) UK

Barnett, Henrietta (1851–1936) UK

Barry, Alfred (1826–1910) UK

Beecher, Catharine (1800–1878) US

Beeton, Isabella (1836–1865) UK

Bell, Vanessa (1879–1961) UK

Benson, Clara (1875–1964) Canada

Bernege, Paulette (1896–1973) France

Bevier, Isabel (1860–1942) US

Black, Clementina (1853–1922) UK

Booth, Hubert Cecil (1871–1955) UK

Bondfield, Margaret (1873–1953) UK

Boys- Smith, Winifred (1865–1939) UK and New Zealand

Breckinridge, Sophonisba (1866–1948) US

Brereton, Maud Cloudesley (1872–1946) UK

Buckmaster, John Charles (1820–1908) UK

Buckton, Catherine (1826–1904) UK

Burstall, Sara (1859–1939) UK

Calder, Fanny (1838–1923) UK

Calloway, Doris (1923–2001) US

Campbell, Helen Stuart (1839–1918) US

Creighton, Louise (1850–1936) UK

Dendy, Arthur (1865–1925) UK

Dewey, Annie Godfrey (1850–1922) US

Elliott, S. Maria (1854–1942) US

Esdaile, Philippa (1888–1989) UK

Eyles, Leonora (1889–1960) UK

Faithfull, Lilian (1865–1952) UK

Finkelstein, Beatrice, US

Frederick, Christine (1883–1970) US

Freund, Ida (1863–1914) Austria and UK

Gabe, Frances (1915–2016) US

Gaekwad, Maharaja of (Sayajirao Gaekwad III) (1863–1939) India

Gilbreth, Frank (1868–1924) US

Gilbreth, Lillian (1878–1972) US

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins (1860–1935) US

Gordon, Alice (1854–1929) UK

Gradwell, Cecil (1855–1942) UK

Greville, Daisy, Countess of Warwick (1861–1938) UK

Grey, Maria (1816–1906) UK

Hall, Radclyffe (1880–1943) UK

Haslett, Caroline (1895–1957) UK

Helgesen, Helga (1863–1935) Norway

Hewins, William (1865–1931) UK

Hoodless, Adelaide (1857–1910) Canada

Howes, Ethel Puffer (1872–1950) US

Hutchins, Bessie (E.L. Hutchins) (1858–1935) UK

Inoue, Hideko (1875–1963) Japan

Kedzie, Nellie (1858–1956) US

Kyrk, Hazel (1886–1967) US

Laird, Annie (1871–1939) US and New Zealand

Lancaster, Maud, UK (1870–1950)

Lane- Claypon, Janet (1877–1967)

Lathrop, Julia (1858–1932) US

Lawrence, Maude (1864–1933) UK

Lihotsky, Grete (Margarete Schutte- Lihotsky) (1897–2000) Austria

Macarthur, Mary (1880–1921) UK

MacDonald, Ishbel (1903–82) UK

Matheson, Cecile (1874–1950) UK

Matheson, Helen (1876–1936) UK

Matthews, Mabel (1879–1970) UK

A book called Women, Plumbers, and Doctors attracts our attention with its mysterious title, signifying something of interest in the association between three normally unconnected occupations. And indeed, Mrs Harriette M. Plunkett, who published the book in 1885, saw a very intimate connection between women, whom she declared should make plumbing their business, and preventive health, which she saw as curtailing the demand for doctors: a wise sanitary woman would keep the doctors away. The book's subtitle, Household Sanitation, stated its allegiance to the emerging movement for domestic science. It wasn't a proper movement yet, but there were signs all over the place: there were the cooking schools and the cooking classes; the tide of enthusiasm for girls’ domestic education; the first textbooks were emerging; and European and North American reformers were busy meeting to exchange ideas.

This chapter engages with several important preludes to the academic household science movement. The emergence of germ theory, which happened just as Harriette Plunkett was preparing her text, revolutionised the scientific underpinnings of housework. As germs appeared on the landscape of conversations about housework, servants increasingly, but coincidentally, disappeared. The conjunction of these two historical moments created a stage on which women reformers’ espousal of sanitary reform could more easily penetrate the private world of the home. At the close of the 19th century, this strengthened scientific rationale for housework formed the basis of a ground- breaking meeting of household science reformers at Lake Placid in the United States. The Lake Placid convention was a launch moment for all kinds of energetic currents and ideas that helped to propel household science into the world of higher education. Most importantly, the subject acquired an evidence- based theoretical approach which was a great aid to countering the dismissive derisions of those critics who saw housework as merely women's work and not worthy of any serious academic attention at all.

The trouble with drains

Harriette Plunkett was a woman with ideas. A respected New England matron, she wrote her book in the middle of a typhoid epidemic, and in it she grappled with that iconoclastic historic moment when the old miasma theory of disease was giving way to the new knowledge about germs.

Geraldine and Bernard le Fecht, a French couple who took part in a research study of how men and women arbitrate the doing of domestic laundry, are firmly committed to the idea that everything in the home must be shared equally. They’re so convinced of this that they decide to do their laundry separately. The problem for Geraldine and Bernard is that they don't each generate enough dirty clothes to fill the machine, so they reluctantly agree that they will have to fill it together. They continue to store their dirty laundry separately, though, and they arrange to meet in front of the machine to put it in, and again to take it out and bear it off to be dried. Naturally, the ironing is also done separately which means that none of the shared household linen ever gets ironed. Whether it was the pain caused by negotiating these delicate arrangements or some other incompatibility, by the second interview in the study Geraldine and Bernard had agreed to live apart.

Reading this account, and the others in Jean- Claude Kaufmann's Dirty Linen: Couples as Seen Through Their Laundry, delivers a strong sense of just how heartfelt and time- consuming these conversations about housework can be. This chapter considers some of the modern evidence relating to the theme of gender that is so firmly embedded in the history of housework. It introduces us to a second theme that is equally firmly embedded and much discussed in later chapters of this book but much less evident today: germs. A collision of these two themes occurred in the COVID-19 pandemic that began in China in December 2019. Early signs in the first British lockdown suggested that this virus might actually be accomplishing what numerous campaigns had failed to, namely reducing women's share of housework: ‘An unexpected upside to lockdown’, The Guardian newspaper called it: ‘experts suggest that this could lead to a lasting change in gender norms’. Both The Guardian and the experts were wrong: it didn’t, and six months later the newspaper had to admit that the novelty of doing more housework had already waned for men.

By the end of the 19th century housework was advancing into the universities of various continents in various ways. The King's College initiative in London described in the last two chapters was a bold effort to reimagine households as scientific enterprises. How the academisation of housework happened depended on place and culture. But, most of all, it depended on the spirit and energy of the people, mostly women, who pushed it forward. At King's College, Hilda Oakeley, a transatlantic traveller like many of the women encountered in this book, identified the University of Chicago as coming closest in spirit and method to their own experiments in Kensington. On one of her US trips Oakeley had stayed with Alice Freeman Palmer, a history professor who was key to establishing household science at Chicago. Oakeley had also encountered Marion Talbot, the intellectual driving force behind its life as a separate department. I would love to have overheard the conversations of these women. They would have enriched the story at the centre of this chapter of how the University of Chicago also hosted, for a few, somewhat tumultuous, decades, its own experiment in treating household science as deserving of a university home.

Tales of two cities and a few other places

In the original proposal for The Science of Housework I gave it the subtitle, ‘a tale of two cities’. I’d been struck in my preliminary reading by the parallels between the fate of academic household science at King's College in London, and its career around the same time in Chicago. Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities had always been one of my favourite books, especially when I learnt about the true history of Madame Defarge and the other tricoteuses, the women who sat and knitted red liberty bonnets while the heads of aristocrats rolled to the ground in the Place de la Revolution. The science of knitting has provided wonderful cover for all kinds of female espionage, for who would suspect an innocent knitter of anything evil? In the Second World War women in the Resistance embedded codes in their knitting with dropped stitches and misplaced purling. One of Winston Churchill's Special Operations Executives was even parachuted into France with her communication code encrypted in a woven silk hair ribbon. Domestic work, intelligently done, can be a form of sabotage.

The King's College for Women (KCW) magazine, King's Minstrel, drew parallels with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland when in March 1929 it celebrated the college's formal transformation into King's College of Household and Social Science. The London University Senate had resolved that the Household and Social Science Department of KCW should now be recognised as a wholly independent school of the university. Thereafter it would conduct its own business, and all links with King's College in the Strand were severed. But had the Senate been in its right mind when it took this decision, asked the magazine's editorial? The question was followed with a short piece called ‘Alice through the cooking class’: ‘For some minutes, Alice stood without speaking, looking in all directions over the kitchen – and a most curious kitchen it was.’ Alice stands in this curious kitchen looking at a ‘luxurious parsley tree’ through one window and a kitchen garden with rows of shining pans and gooseberry bushes hung with sieves, strainers, whisks and spoons through another. White Pawns and Knights leap over tables laden with food, while the White Queen issues cooking instructions. She addresses the White Pawns, all lined up in front of her, each with a slate and a piece of chalk (just like the KCW housework students themselves): ‘ “The time has come”, the White Queen said,/ “To talk of many things;/ Of stews – and chips – and cooking caps - / Of cabbages – and King's - / And why the fat is boiling hot - / And whether pigs have wings”.’

Lectures for Ladies had come a long way from its tentative, chaperoned beginnings in Kensington's Vestry Hall. There were three constants, however. First, it was still an institution located in West London, some distance from the other University of London colleges. This geographical separation helped to foster a distinct curricular identity. Second, the commitment of its staff, supporters and students to creating a university education that met women's needs had in no way faded: on the contrary, the years since the first household science course had appeared in the prospectus had been full of hard- won achievements, intellectual innovations and imaginative expansion, all amidst unpredicted but consequential academic manoeuvrings which we will hear about in this chapter.

Classism is the most obvious ‘ism’ to plague the domestic science story. The domestic science movement was undeniably, to some extent and in certain quarters, about putting working- class women in their place. Imposing middle- class values on ‘an unruly, unkempt and ultimately unfit working class’ was a poorly thought out route to solving many problems of industrialisation and urbanisation: crime, drinking, poor nutrition, high infant mortality. But classism and sexism are linked to other ‘isms’. This chapter focuses on racism, imperialism and colonialism as creeds that have done their part in afflicting the domestic science movement. The chapter is also about the wide reach of the Euro- American ideology and practice of home science: how it was exported to other places, including Japan, Canada, New Zealand and other territories of what used to be the British Empire. The story in this chapter features a multi- faceted cast of characters: two Japanese women advocates of household science, Sumi Miyakawa and Hideko Inoue; the British household scientist Alice Ravenhill (again); a wealthy Canadian called Lillian Massey Treble; two clever Canadian food chemists, Annie Laird and Clara Benson; three British women who developed household science in New Zealand, Winifred Boys- Smith, Helen Rawson and Margaret Dyer; and two very different male characters, John Studholme, a philanthropic landowner, who thought women needed to be educated for their work at home; and an enthusiastically reformist Indian royal, the Maharaja of Gaekwad, who wanted a scientific woman to modernise his palaces. Household science was nothing if not versatile in adjusting to different cultural contexts. However what was versatile could also be inflexible. The same Euro- American- derived values and practices didn't necessary agree with the habits of the cultures into which attempts were made to insert them.

Why whiteness?

In 2001 a Canadian home economics teacher, Mary Leah de Zwart, was asked a testing question by one of her students: ‘White flour, white sugar, white sauce, white table manners, why is it that everything we do is white?’ The student might have added to her (it was almost certainly a her) list of white subjects the overwhelming emphasis on whiteness and how to achieve it that has habitually haunted the laundry sections of domestic science manuals and classes, and that more than linger in our consumer industry today. Why should everything be white? What's wrong with off- white, grey, brown or even black?

This book is about housework as science: bacteria, germs, dirt, tools, machines, water, coal, gas, electricity and architecture are among its main characters. So are the people, mostly women, who had the vision needed to understand the importance of household science in making the world a healthier place. To this end, they engaged in huge amounts of scientific and educational work, much of which has been eclipsed from our cultural memory, and some of which appears in the following chapters of this book. But housework is a matter of personal experience as well as of scientific analysis and public policy. The observations that follow originally formed an Appendix to The Science of Housework, but I came to see that they were misplaced, that I had succumbed to the academic convention which hides from view the origins of our intellectual engagement with the world.

I began this morning by watching a YouTube video about how to mend a dishwasher. One of the machine's little red lights was flashing. I had no idea why: the light said the machine needed more salt to be added, but I’d done that, and still the light blinked fiercely at me. This whole episode is a huge inconvenience to me, a pensioner (which is not how I think of myself) living on her own with no one else to blame, most of the time, for the burnt porridge saucepans and the congealed remains of odd delicious meals.

I’ve never liked washing up. I do it so badly that my family refuse to let me do it in their houses. Often I don't put my glasses on, so much of the detritus just has a swim and is still there afterwards. I read somewhere the useful piece of advice that housework is easier if you can't see the dust and the bits of rubbish which this book is so excruciatingly about; thus, leave your glasses off when you do it. None of those wise matrons whose sensible scientific tracts feature in this book would have approved of me. This morning I have to take all the dirty dishes out of the dishwasher and subject them to my version of hand- cleaning. The water is barely hot, and I am cross.

Patent number 4,428,085 was lodged with the US Patent Office by an artist and inventor called Frances Grace Arnholz Bateson in 1980 and finally registered in January 1984. The patent was for an enterprise called ‘Self-Cleaning Building Construction’, and it consisted of 68 separate designs that together would enable houses and their contents to be cleaned automatically. Although this radical plan came many years after the zenith of the household science movement, it was inspired by the same principles: that cleanliness is essential, but it should be achieved as efficiently as possible. All the incumbent of the self- cleaning house had to do was press a button, wear waterproof clothes and hold an umbrella. In every room sprinklers housed in the ceiling and at the junction of wall and floor sprayed a mist of soap and water followed by drafts of warm air: the water could contain, as appropriate, germicides to counter communicable diseases, and bug repellents to deal with infestations of termites, carpenter ants, bedbugs, cockroaches, fleas and suchlike. The floors were coated in waterproof resin and were slanted so that gutters at the edges drained the water directly outdoors to the doghouse, giving the dog a good wash as well. Waterproof fabrics protected furniture, pictures and books. The whole process took under an hour. Particularly inventive was the method for laundering clothes. These were washed, dried and stored while hanging in a closet that was also a washing machine; they emerged from the wash on their hangers ready for wearing. The entire design was really quite like today's automatic car wash.

Frances Bateson, known as Frances Gabe, who created this marvel, was the daughter of an architect and the wife of an electrical engineer. She was born in 1915, found school very boring, and spent 27 years inventing her self- cleaning house. Her eureka moment came when she confronted globules of fig jam her two young children had thrown at the wall. Gabe took the garden hose to the fig jam and the idea for her mechanised house was born. She converted her own house, which was up a dirt track in rural Oregon, and charged people to come and look at the results.

Most of the world's labour isn't manufacturing articles in factories, farming the land or the sea for food, providing financial, social or health care services, engaging in technological flights of fantasy, or thinking and analysing all of this. Most of human labour is housework. How do we define housework? Most obviously, housework is concerned with the care of people's bodies and the material environments in which they live. Feeding, washing, cleaning are its core. But then, as societies become more complex, other items get attached to the core: housework struggles under the weight of an assigned additional responsibility for moral values, social relationships and psychological health.

In her historical study of housework in Ireland, Joanna Bourke raises the complication that:

For the purposes of her book, Bourke decides to define housework as ‘those uses of household time, outside the arrangements of paid markets, which are aimed at the production of goods and services that might be replaced by market goods and services’. This line, that housework is a form of unwaged labour providing services that otherwise could be paid for, has been adopted by those few economists who have taken housework seriously. The same case was central to the wages for housework movement which emerged in tandem with the women's movement in Europe and North America in the late 1960s. These two movements, for paid housework and women's liberation, were associated because one can never get very far discussing housework (in this case, two paragraphs) without landing on what ought to be an earth- shattering statistical fact, that more than three-quarters of the world's unpaid domestic work is done by women.