Women's Work and Women's Education

The most common explanation of educational change hinges on a "technical-function" theory. Technical-functionalists explain educational expansion primarily in terms of preparation for jobs newly created by technological innovation and economic transformations. This case study raises questions about that simple and direct interpretation of the relationship between educational and occupational change. The shifting occupational patterns of women, changing immigration patterns, and increasing emigration from farms to cities affected the midwest, northeast, south, and west differently. Although women's education, which was synonymous with home economics education, arose at different times and took different forms in each of these regions, in all of them it was a formula to preserve a passing order and control change. Home economics education was to divert women from employment outside the home by upgrading the status of housework, thus, placing the home at a competitive advantage with the alternative employment opening to women in the 1870-1920 period.