What Happened to Home Economics?

In 1959, almost half of girls in US secondary schools were taking home economics, according to federal reports. The subject had been built to bring science to cooking, cleaning and the family budget.

Today the subject is called family and consumer sciences. The last national survey found it shrinking. US enrolment fell 38% between 2002–03 and 2010–12, and the number of teachers fell 26%.

This is how the subject rose and fell in the US and Canada, what has filled the gap, and what the evidence says about teaching its core skills in school.

It began as applied science

US public schools taught a subject called domestic economy as early as the mid-1800s. The modern field, and its new name, were shaped by a chemist.

Ellen Swallow Richards (1842–1911) became the first woman to graduate from MIT, in 1873. She studied sanitation and the chemistry of food, and wanted that science used in ordinary homes.

In September 1899, she met 10 other people at the Lake Placid Club in upstate New York. The hosts were Melvil Dewey, creator of the Dewey Decimal System, and his wife, Annie, who had founded the club together. The group agreed on a name for the new field: home economics.

The Lake Placid conferences met every year until 1908. Attendance peaked that year at 74. Over the years they drew people from other states and from Toronto and other parts of Ontario.

The tenth and last conference, in 1908, gave way to a national body: the American Home Economics Association, with Richards as its first president. The association itself gives 1909 as its founding year, the year its journal began.

Richards saw why the subject mattered. Factories and shops now made much of what homes once made, such as soap, food and clothes. Families had to learn to choose, spend and stay healthy in a new kind of economy.

The home has ceased to be the glowing centre of production … and has become but a pool toward which products made in other places flow—a place of consumption, not of production.

Federal money made it a school subject

The Smith-Hughes Act, approved on February 23, 1917, gave states federal money for vocational education. It helped pay teachers of agriculture, trades, industry and home economics, and paid to train new teachers in those subjects.

The law also set a limit. No more than 20% of its money for the salaries of trade, home economics and industrial teachers could go to home economics teachers.

Even so, the subject spread. Federal reports show the share of girls in US secondary schools taking home economics rose from 17% in 1915 to almost 50% by 1959.

The 1959 report was the last federally supported count of the subject's programs. Later national figures come from federal transcript studies and from surveys of state officials.

The push to core academics

In April 1983, a federal commission published A Nation at Risk. It warned that US high schools offered a “cafeteria-style curriculum in which the appetizers and desserts can easily be mistaken for the main courses.”

The report named “personal service and development courses, such as training for adulthood and marriage” as part of the problem. It found that 25% of the credits earned by general-track students were in courses like these, along with physical and health education, work experience and remedial English and math.

Its answer was the “Five New Basics”: four years of English, three of math, three of science, three of social studies and half a year of computer science. It also said high schools should offer demanding courses in the arts and vocational education to complement the basics.

School transcripts show what happened next.

Graduates in 2009 earned 5.6 more credits than graduates in 1982. Of those extra credits, 5.2 went to these five academic subjects.

Family and consumer sciences went the other way. The average graduate earned 0.49 credits in it in 1990 and 0.34 in 2009.

A new name, fewer students, fewer teachers

In 1994, the American Home Economics Association renamed itself the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences. Family and consumer sciences became the profession's name, in schools as well. Some universities had moved earlier: Cornell's College of Home Economics became the College of Human Ecology in 1969.

Those figures come from a national survey of state officials led by Carol Werhan of Pittsburg State University. Many states could only estimate, and a few sent no data. Werhan says the totals are probably slightly low.

The subject has not disappeared. The same survey found family and consumer sciences offered in all 50 states.

The report pointed to several pressures. Schools were judged and funded on “core” academics and test results. Some states said a shift to career pathways left the subject struggling to find its place.

And teacher training programs had closed or shrunk. Some districts had to close a program or hire teachers not fully prepared to teach it.

Shop class went the same way. Industrial arts made up 0.56% of the credits graduates earned in 1990 and 0.16% in 2009. The share of graduates who earned any manufacturing credit fell from 22% to 13% over the same years.

Canada's parallel story

Canada had its own pioneer. In August 1889, Adelaide Hoodless of Hamilton, Ontario, lost her 14-month-old son, Jack, to an illness caused by contaminated milk. She blamed herself and set out to teach other women about hygiene and safe food.

She helped found the first Women's Institute, at Stoney Creek, Ontario, in 1897. She wrote the textbook Public School Domestic Science in 1898. In 1900, she founded Canada's first school for training domestic science teachers, in Hamilton.

The Macdonald Institute opened at Guelph in 1903. Canadians also shaped the field's ideas. Alice Chown of Kingston, Ontario, sat on the committee at the 1902 Lake Placid conference that drafted the field's often-quoted definition.

Canadian universities and schools later renamed and reorganised the field. Guelph dissolved the Macdonald Institute in 1969 and created a College of Family and Consumer Studies. The University of Toronto replaced its Faculty of Household Science with a nutrition department. In some provinces, the school subject became “family studies.”

Canada's 10 provinces and 3 territories each run their own schools, with “significant differences in curriculum.” We could not find a national count of home economics students to compare with the US survey.

Ontario has started to move the other way. Students who started Grade 9 in 2024 or later must earn a technological education credit in Grade 9 or 10. From 2026–27, students who started Grade 9 in 2025–26 or later must also meet a financial literacy requirement in Grade 10 Career Studies.

Neither is a home economics course. But both put practical skills on the required list.

What filled the gap

Many people now learn practical skills online. In a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, 51% of US YouTube users said the site was very important for learning to do things they had never done before. That is 35% of all US adults. These answers are self-reported.

But a video has no teacher checking the work. In the same survey, 64% of users said they at least sometimes saw videos that seemed obviously false or untrue.

Public libraries stepped in too. In 2017, North Bend Public Library in Oregon started “Adulting 101,” a monthly series. It opened with a cooking session and planned sessions on money, finding a job, finding a place to live and telling fact from fiction online.

A dozen people came to the first session. The cooking supplies cost $4.

Programs like these are useful. But they reach the people who choose to come. A required course reaches every student in it.

Why these skills still need a home in school

Home cooking has changed. US time-use studies of adults aged 19 to 60 show the share of women who cooked on a given day fell from 92% in 1965–66 to 68% in 2007–08. Men rose from 29% to 42%. Women who cooked spent 66 minutes a day on it, down from 113.

Most of that drop came before 1992, earlier than the steepest fall in home economics classes. So fewer classes cannot explain all of it.

When people learn matters. In a survey of 1,049 adults aged 20 to 60 on the island of Ireland, those who learned to cook as children or teens reported more cooking skills, more confidence and, on most measures, better diet quality than those who learned as adults.

The survey was cross-sectional and self-reported, so it shows a link, not proof of cause.

Food safety is not a small matter. The CDC estimates that each year about 48 million people in the US get sick from foodborne illness, 128,000 are hospitalized and 3,000 die. The Public Health Agency of Canada estimates about 4 million people in Canada (1 in 8) get sick each year, 11,600 are hospitalized and 238 die.

School teaching can change behaviour when the content is right. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York used credit reports to study young people in states that changed graduation rules in financial literacy, math or economics.

Young adults exposed to financial literacy and math rules had modestly fewer late payments and debts sent to collections, though the effects faded with age. Economics requirements were linked to more debt problems, not fewer. What a course teaches matters.

The lesson from more than a century of home economics is not to bring back a 1950s class for girls. It is to teach every student a short list of practical, testable skills, built on the founders' idea of science applied to daily life.