“Hustlin’ and Homemaking”: Home Economists and Welfare Rights Activism in the Long 1970s

In 1965, Mary Dublin Keyserling, Head of the Women’s Bureau, issued a call to home economists to “help fight and win the war on poverty.” She argued that home economists’ intimate relationship with the health and welfare of the family uniquely qualified them to join the fight for welfare rights. During the late 1960s and into the 1970s, the discipline of home economics was at a crossroads. Liberal and radical feminists criticized the field for glorifying traditional gender roles and forcing young women into lifetimes of housewifery. Keyserling’s call came as a lifeline to home economists grappling with how to reorient their field amidst social changes. This paper examines how home economists built coalitions with welfare rights organizers to campaign for increased governmental support for mothers and children living in poverty from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. Home economists, through embracing their roles as experts on families and the home, advocated for welfare rights through education, family research, and legislative efforts, lending professional legitimacy to a grassroots cause. This examination of home economists’ role in this campaign adds new actors to social movements of the long 1970s, expanding the scope of feminist activism. It also shows how two seemingly opposed groups—home economists, who were primarily white, educated, professionals, and welfare rights activists, who were primarily women of color living in poverty—advocated for increased welfare rights, specifically through arguing about the value of women’s role in the home at a time that it became highly politicized.