The Secret History of Home Economics by Danielle Dreilinger

Author:Danielle Dreilinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2021-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

Another business sector continued to promote home economists as well: media. Aunt Sammy had hung up her apron, but homemaking radio soldiered on, and it finally included Black women. In the 1940s, some African American colleges, including Fisk, Howard, and Atlanta, obtained radio licenses and started homemaker and home economics programs. WBIG-Greensboro and Flemmie Kittrell’s former department at Bennett College in North Carolina created Gwen’s Folks, beamed to Black and white schools alike. In each installment, Gwen’s family despaired over a household problem—say, “Bringing Up Junior,” “Investing Money,” or “Making Low-Income Diets”—only to be rescued by their daughter’s Bennett home-ec education. Broadcasters soon recognized that the many Black women who cared for others’ homes as well as their own could spend even more time listening to the radio than the full-time white housewife. Memphis’s Willa Monroe became the biggest star in this community in 1949 when she started Tan Town Homemaker’s Show, sharing recipes and society news backed by soothing music and interspersed with national ads. (The station already aired a show called Tan Town Jamboree.) On any given weekday morning, 40 percent of Memphis listeners, of all races, tuned in to Monroe.11 Following in her footsteps were Alice Wyre in Atlanta; Louise Fletcher in Nashville; Carolyn Shaw in Jackson; Leola Dyson in Norfolk; R. J. Pope in Birmingham; and Delores Estelle, Sister Bessie Griffith, and Laura Lane in New Orleans. Yes, their material focused on the home. But their portrayal of Black women as knowledgeable, dignified, modern wives and mothers caring for their own families was a huge upgrade from white radio’s stereotypes. (Plus Monroe told listeners about her work with the NAACP.) They also provided a meaningful professional foothold. Martha Jean “The Queen” Steinberg, Monroe’s successor as Tan Town host, became a legendary Detroit broadcaster. The college shows in particular offered Black women a rare opportunity to work as producers and directors as well as hosts.

The white-hosted radio homemaking programs flourished as well. Though centered in the Midwest and explicitly rural, the programs broadcast all over the country. At one point in the 1940s, fourteen radio homemakers broadcast live daily from Shenandoah, Iowa, alone, competing at the station over who got the most mail. Usually the winner was Kitchen-Klatter, which might receive more than 1,500 letters responding to a single broadcast. Despite losing her ability to walk due to complications from a 1930 car crash, Leanna Driftmier had spun K-K into a multigeneration, multiplatform empire with her siblings and children. The Driftmiers produced a monthly magazine, cookbooks, sewing guides, seed packets, and a line of flavoring extracts and cleaning products whose bottles featured the matriarch’s face. The magazine included letters from the expanding Driftmier clan, who often appeared on the radio program, with updates on road trips, gardens, babies, and what vegetables they had canned; craft projects; light verse; letters from readers about their hobbies; advertisements for kitchen gadgets, dolls, and K-K products; classified ads (many featuring work-from-home opportunities such as GOOD MONEY IN WEAVING); and of course recipes “Tested in the Kitchen-Klatter Kitchen.

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