Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Early Adventures of a Home Economist: Ava B. Milam’s Integration of Science and Home Economics at Oregon Agricultural College, 1911-1921

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/d791sq008

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  • Across from the Memorial Union on Oregon State University’s campus sits Milam Hall, the former site of the Department of Home Economics. The building is named for Ava Milam Clark, the dean of home economics for thirty-three years, from 1917 to 1950. I aim to understand Ava Milam’s early career through a lens examining how she integrated science into her curriculum, helping develop home economics into a serious scientific field for women. In this thesis, I explore three cases in which Milam implemented scientific curriculum through home economics. Through these cases I argue that Milam created a sphere that allowed female students to practice science in a capacity that aligned with current gender roles, emphasizing women’s domestic duties as women, wives, and mothers. The gendered spaces that Milam created to allow women to practice science contributed to new forms of womanhood, predicated on scientific management, domesticity, and Progressive Era ideals. The first chapter explores her home economics extension work, looking at how she communicated scientific ideas about the home to rural white women lacking a formal education. I use Milam’s bulletins published by the Oregon Agricultural College Extension Service to show how she tailored home economics ideas to fit the needs of rural women. Through this I also define rural white womanhood in Oregon and how providing home economics education and scientific ideas changed this form of womanhood. The second chapter focuses on the Oregon Agricultural College’s tearoom at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco, where students served meals to the Oregon Commission and to members of the public using methods of scientific cookery, quantity cookery, and sanitation. It chronicles Milam’s attempts to present the tearoom as a professionalized field for women to a national audience. The third chapter examines Milam’s implementation of household training through the Withycombe House, a practice house in which students applied the knowledge they gained in classes in a real-life lab. This chapter analyzes the scientific reasoning for “practice babies” in this house and how Milam implemented concepts of scientific motherhood and contextualizes it within Progressive Era movements regarding science and child rearing.
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  • Pending Publication
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  • 2022-03-18 to 2024-04-18

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