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Hunt, Caroline (1865-1927)
Appointed as the first professor of home economics at the University of Wisconsin in 1903, Caroline Hunt was forced to resign only five years later. Her life and her short tenure at UW indicate some of the tensions and debates that surrounded the establishment of home economics programs within colleges. Her attempts to create a home economics program may not have met with approval from university officials in her own time, but with the benefit of hindsight her vision for the field appears worthy of much admiration. Hunt believed that home economics ought to provide a general and interdisciplinary education. Her own broad interests can be seen in her educational background. For her undergraduate degree, completed in 1888 at Northwestern University, she majored in Latin and enrolled in a variety of science and language courses. After graduation, she taught chemistry and physics at two high schools. Between 1893 and 1896, she carried out graduate work in chemistry and German at Northwestern University. For two of these years, she lived part-time at Hull House, where she collected data for two studies: The Italians in Chicago: A Social and Economic Study (1897), which was published by the US Department of Labor, and Dietary Studies in Chicago (1898), which was published by the US Department of Agriculture, and for which she collaborated with Jane Addams. From 1896 until 1902, Hunt was an instructor in domestic economy at the Lewis Institute in Chicago. Her interest in the newly developing discipline of home economics is evident in her participation in several of the Lake Placid Conferences, a set of conferences led by Ellen Richards between 1899 and 1908. During these conferences Hunt argued that a training in home economics ought to liberate women from the hardships of housework, teach women to guard their health and safety and that of their families, and simplify their lives. She spoke often of the power of home economics to liberate women from drudgery, such as when she argued that, "The final test of the teaching of home economics is freedom. If we have unnecessarily complicated a single life by perpetuating useless conventions or by carrying the values of one age over into the next, just so far have we failed. If we have simplified one life and released in it energy for its own expression, just so far have we succeeded." Another aspect of Hunt's view of home economics was her advocacy of its role in bringing about social justice. She repeated numerous times her view that home economics ought to teach students how to consume ethically. By avoiding products produced under poor labor conditions, they could help improve social conditions for those without power. In 1903, Charles Van Hise, president of the University of Wisconsin, selected Hunt to head the newly established home economics department. During her years as professor--she was never given the title director--Hunt was the only full-time female professor, and the lowest-paid professor at the university. For three and a half years she attempted to create an intellectually rigorous program that would carry out her ambitious social vision for home economics, despite pressure to emphasize manual skills. She was deeply disappointed by Van Hise's decision in the spring of 1908 to transfer the program to the College of Agriculture, a decision that was predicated upon her resignation. She wrote, "I think there is a place for Home Economics in colleges--and that the purpose of this work should be to teach women the social significance of the control which they have over wealth, of the fact that they can determine to a large extent what shall be made and under what conditions it shall be made. I see no place for cooking and sewing in such courses except as they give an understanding of materials and processes." Although Hunt pursued many other activities after her departure from the university, she lost the important role she had once played in the discipline, as influence shifted towards those who wanted to emphasize homemaking and teacher preparation over a broad liberal arts and sciences foundation. In the early 1910s, she became co-editor with her friend Belle LaFollette of the women's page of LaFollette's Weekly, she authored numerous pamphlets for the US Department of Agriculture, she contributed to the suffrage movement, and in 1912 she published the work for which she is best known, The Life of Ellen H. Richards. But she soon gave up her public life. It was Hunt's misfortune to hold a vision of home economics that few in her time shared. |
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