Historical portraits of women home scientists

"This book offers an historical portrait of the first generations of women home scientists at the University of New Zealand in the early decades of the twentieth century. It adopts the tools of biographical research to interrogate their professional lives in a new colonial university. With a specific focus on Home Science, this book contests contemporary views that a university education would produce glorified housekeepers. Previous scholarship has not fully considered how Home Science expanded the range of professional, academic and career options for educated women. Drawing extensively on archival material from New Zealand, the United States, and England, this book examines how women worked with, around, and against gender stereotypes to establish themselves as professional scholars in the field of Home Science. This book is a rich micro-history of gender identities and roles. It demonstrates how Home Science, intended by male academic administrators to confine women to their "proper" domestic sphere, was used by home scientists to create new professional opportunities for women, both in the academy and in the scientific community at large. These determined and talented women were not victims of patriarchy but creative agents of change and promise. As activist women before them, they worked with, around, and against gender stereotypes to expand the area of "women's sphere." The portraits sketched in this book illuminate the extent to which New Zealand home scientists established connections with women in the US and England and their contribution to this transnational community of scholars..." --Publisher description.