Danielle Dreilinger’s “The Secret History of Home Economics: How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live” is a fascinating history of the field and the contributions of some very determined women.

By the later years of the 19th century, as American society became preoccupied with science and systemization, the home presented itself as requiring a scientific approach. Science would bring dignity and respect to women’s work and highlight its fundamental importance to a healthy, prosperous nation. The field was promoted by a number of forceful women, including Margaret Murray Washington, who ran a college program in versions of the discipline.

The American Home Economics Association (AHEA) — which settled on the name “home economics” — was formed by a group of 10 white people in 1899. The organization was not fully integrated, nationally and regionally, until 1960. Indeed, Washington — who is African American — continued to call the field “domestic science” for another 10 years. While the AHEA had encouraged teaching home economics to nonwhite people, it saw its purpose as training Blacks to be servants, teaching Native Americans to live like whites, and weaning immigrants and Hispanics from their un-american diets.

For both whites and Blacks, home economics became an academic discipline and a field in which women could work outside the home, not only as teachers, but in developing textiles, domestic products, nutritional guidelines and as business and marketing professionals. Dreilinger shows how home economists, as experts in nutrition and domestic frugality, played crucial roles in both World Wars and the Depression.

The rot set in as the 1950s brought an emphasis on consumerism, especially in the home, and home economics increasingly concerned itself with fashion, beauty and “likability,” the goal being to shape the ideal wife who drudged with a smile amid modern appliances.