8 - Transatlantic experiments

Summary

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.