Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,778

This is the grave of Mabel Hyde Kittredge.

Born in 1867 in Boston, Kittredge grew up wealthy. Her father was the Presbyterian leader A.E. Kittredge. He sent his daughter to all the fancy schools, including Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, which still exists today. She graduated and had the problem of a lot of wealthy, smart women in the late 19th century. She wanted to solve social problems, but the professions were closed to her. She had a great education for the time but that often meant that even wealthy men didn’t want to marry someone like that.

So Kittredge ended up following the path of people such as Jane Addams and Florence Kelley and Alice Hamilton. She found her way to social work and the settlement house movement. She was at the very least close friends with Lillian Wald, who ran the Henry Street Settlement in New York and while she never worked in the houses directly for very long, she did live and work at Henry Street for a bit in the early 1900s. There is some belief that Kittredge and Wald had a romantic relationship as well, though with rich Progressive women, these relationships were often more homosocial than sexual. It’s hard to know, though have described Kittredge as “in love” with Wald and they had a standing date once a week. Kittredge was known to resent Wald’s attention to the poor and the belief among many Henry Street residents that she was just another of Wald’s crushes. Kittredge herself absolutely struggled with ethnic stereotypes and Wald often got after her about her biases; this much we know about their relationship through their writings. Whatever went on between them, it seemed to have ended in 1906.

Meanwhile, Kittredge found her niche to make social change as well–school lunches and then home economics more broadly. Advocating for school lunches makes so much sense, then and now. In 1908, she and others served soup to students on Thanksgiving at an elementary school in Hell’s Kitchen. A lot showed up. So many kids weren’t getting an education at all and so many of those who were at least showing up to school sometimes were doing so hungry enough that they couldn’t really learn. She founded the School Lunch Committee, bringing together women like herself, philanthropists, and doctors to work for lunches for kids. In Italian schools, they got the schools to hire an Italian chef so that the kids would want to eat. It spread through the city. So that was Kittredge’s first big victory and she stayed with it into the 1920s which was good because the New York budget was so heavily controlled by often corrupt borough presidents that it was a constant fight to win the yearly funding.

Kittredge moved into broader home economics issues. Now this is where Progressive women get hard to teach in a sympathetic way, though they get far more problematic than she. The issue is that these women wanted to go into the homes of women who had immigrated to the United States and tell them what to do. That could be about sexuality, it could be about parenting, it could be about cleanliness, it could be about food. The Progressive mindset was very much that we know better than you and we are going to use the power of the state to enforce our beliefs.

So Kittredge set herself out there to teach all these weird Italian and Jewish and Polish women how to keep a house like a good middle-class American would. And don’t fool yourself, Kittredge was a full-on Gospel of Efficiency Progressive as much as Theodore Roosevelt or Gifford Pinchot could ever dream of being. She wrote  “If household administration is to take its place in the front rank with the other professions of the day, educators as well as women must wake up and realize that the whole housekeeping question is dependent upon scientific management, efficiency, skilled labor, and effective tools.”

That was in relation to Kittredge’s project called the Association of Practical Housekeeping Centers, which set up model tenement apartments in New York to teach immigrants the Right Way to Do Things, without asking them of course. This was about food and it was about cleanliness too. But it was also about decorating your house with proper taste that would make Mabel Hyde Kittredge feel good about coming into your home. No Catholic saint paintings on those walls! Plus, Kittredge personally hated carpet or rugs and so she pushed the benefits of bare floors on immigrants. Yes, I prefer a bare floor too and carpets get really gross. but this is an aesthetic preference and that’s all it is. Kittredge was running against the fashions of the day in her anti-carpet mania and took some heat from women for it.

These centers became Kittredge’s life project. In 1911, she published  Housekeeping Notes: How to Furnish and Keep House in a Tenement Flat and in 1918, The Home and Its Management. These were some of the foundational books of modern home economics, based on how to provide clean food and efficient housekeeping on a budget. In theory, there’s nothing wrong with this, but like a lot of modern fields, the origins really are WASPs telling those weird immigrants what to do with their lives, such as to strip all the carpets from their floors. She tried to claim that housekeeping could be the most interesting job in the world if just women would take it seriously and see it as a science. Yeah, not so sure about that claim.

Kittredge was also involved in international women’s issues. She headed to Europe during World War I, working for Herbert Hoover’s attempts to feed western Europe during the war. She of course was primarily involved in the women and children’s side of this, fitting her status as a Progressive woman. She headed the child feeding program in France and Belgium. She attended the International Women’s Congress for Peace and Freedom in 1915 at The Hague as well. When The Home and Its Management was published, the publisher played up Kittredge’s role in feeding Europe as a reason for Americans to buy the book, framing her as the ultimate female patriot. The publicity material read, “President Wilson has called upon every woman to practice strict economy and thus put herself in the ranks of those who served their country” and held Kittredge and her own strict economy advice as the model for doing so.

After the war, Kittredge continued with her housekeeping centers. In 1935, Columbia University awarded her a medal for this work. She also continued working with Hoover in his food aid programs in the late 1910s and early 1920s, raising funds to keep feeding Europe as it attempted to get back on its feet.

Kittredge died in 1955. She was 87 years old.

Mabel Hyde Kittredge is buried in Quaker Meeting House Cemetery, South Yarmouth, Massachusetts. I gather that she became a Quaker later in life, but I don’t really know the details.

If you would like this series to visit other Progressive Era women, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Jane Addams is in Cedarville, Illinois and Helen Arthur is in Queens, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.