SISTERS DOING IT FOR THEMSELVES

furniture with an Allen wrench a man’s job and sewing a shirt woman’s work. Far more than does the task of connecting pieces with nuts, bolts, and screws, sewing entails knowledge of materials, mathematics, and engineering. Nonetheless, the home economics movement’s founders she chronicles the movement as one of women initially fighting toward equality by seeking recognition of their work in the home. Educated White upper-class women and educated Black women conceived separate but overlapping visions of toil on behalf of hearth and household. These visions, Dreilinger writes, reflected the universe that constitutes home economics, foreshadowing many aspects of today’s social justice agenda.