By Kimberly Voss, PhD
Professor, University of Central Florida
Home economics often gets a bad rap – reduced to descriptions of boring stories about sewing aprons or cooking dishes with too many raisins. Yet, this field offered many opportunities and adventures for women in the 1930s through the 1970s. These graduates had impressive careers in the test kitchens of food companies, magazine or newspaper journalists and university professors. One of the most prominent home economics graduates from Iowa State University was Ruth Ellen Church – the longtime food editor, cookbook author and pioneering wine editor at the Chicago Tribune. She set the standard for quality newspaper food journalism at an important time in food history – earning the University’s Schwartz Award in 1984.
Journalism – often combined with home economics – long provided paid employment for American women, especially for material that was aimed at female readership. For example, at newspapers, women journalists worked in the women’s pages from the 1880s through the end of the sections in the 1970s. These sections have been described as housing the four F’s: family, fashion, food, and furnishings. While some journalists derisively dismissed these as “fluff,” these are topics that impact daily life and meant a great deal to readers.
The ISU Special Collections and University Archives offer a wealth of material about Church and home economics journalism, which helps us understand a history that is too often overlooked. The annual course catalogs provide proof of the rigor of the home economics’ curriculum. The students also showed they were good researchers and reporters who produced significant materials student publications and yearbooks. They also had a lot of fun. After all, they had been taught about entertaining. Church showed off those skills at many parties on her Wisconsin farm – with lots of good food.[1]
Home Economics Background
While too often mocked for reinforcing tradition, home economics was a significant major for college women. The students majoring in and later working in the home economics field in the 1950s and 1960s were well aware of the issues that would become part of the mission of the Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s. In truth, they were much closer to their activist sisters as acquaintances than enemies. A common textbook, Introduction to Home Economics, began with quotes from the report The American Women that documented women’s employment difficulties faced by many women in 1965.[2] It was based on a 1962 report from the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which predicted a new role for women in society. The textbook addressed the numerous jobs that the home economists field offered.[3] The author cited an article in Cosmopolitan magazine that described home economists as “Today’s Glamour Girls.”[4]
Home economics journalism, a common major at several land-grant colleges, has a long history at Iowa State University. According to a history of ISU, home economics journalism was a significant major – especially from 1927 to 1952. A school history noted, “Manufacturers of food products and household equipment discovered that home economics-trained women could write reports and directions.”[5]
These ISU home economics students were taught by impressive professors. Pioneer Katherine Goeppinger was a home economics journalism professor from 1936 until 1950. (She is honored in the ISU Plaza of Heroines.) She wrote the foreword and a chapter in the classic home economics textbook, “How to Write for Homemakers.” During her career, she addressed changes in the department from the depression days through the war years and consumer years. Through it all, she taught about home economics skills and journalism ethics, as well as the significance of food and fashion. Goeppinger graduated from Iowa State College in 1924. Before returning to the school as a professor, she served as director of home economics for various utilities, as well as an editor at Curtis Publishing in Philadelphia.
ISU Alum Ruth Ellen Church
Church was born Ruth Ellen Lovrien in Humboldt, Iowa, in 1909 and graduated from Iowa State University in 1933. She was a staff writer for the school’s yearbook, editor for the student magazine Iowa Homemaker and an editor of the student publication Green Gander. She made the most of her home economics journalism degree – a popular variation of home economics at the time. Catalogs found in Special Collections and University Archives show the classes taken, yearbooks verify activities and student publications feature the work student produced. In Church’s case, there were examples of her writing about cosmetics with the great title of “From Cleopatra to Betty Co-ed” and an article about an Iowa State television show “Homemakers’ Half Hour.”
She briefly held the position of society editor at a small Iowa daily but left because she refused to get involved in advertising – a violation of her journalism background.[6] By 1936, she began her nearly 40-year run as food editor at the ChicagoTribune. (She became Ruth Ellen Church when she married advertising executive Freeman Church later that same year.)
Initially, Church used the pen name “Mary Meade” as her byline. It was a common for newspaper food writers was to use pen names, often at the request of management because they wanted to preserve the continuity of the columnist, as it was expected the female reporter would leave employment once married. Church – despite marrying and having two children – never left her job.
At the Tribune, Church oversaw numerous projects including a weekly recipe contest. The winner earned a $5 prize and her recipe was published. Readers were advised to test the recipes and be specific with the measurements and directions.[7] During her career, she wrote a daily food column plus a weekly special section and oversaw a test kitchen. She also directed all of the food photography that ran in her section.[8]
Church also traveled internationally and shared her adventures with her Chicago readers – including stories of wine. For example, she spent three months abroad in 1967 for her “What’s Cooking in Europe” feature series, which ran for 56 days in the Tribune. She visited a dozen countries and sent back stories from restaurants and home cooks.[9] This was a time when few newspapers wrote about wines. It was more of a cocktail era.[10]
Her wine writing style was described as “conversational, disarmingly breezy and unabashedly enthusiastic. When something particularly pleased Ms. Church, she often noted it with an exclamation mark!”[11] Some specific headlines from 1962 included “Wines Can Be Divided into Five Classes,” “Today’s Lesson is on Sauternes,” and “Our Wine Columnist Visits Home of Famed Sherry.”[12]
It was a time that the foundation of wine journalism was being developed. As current wine journalist Lettie Teague wrote: “Church made it clear that she was learning right along with her readers. She approached wine as accessible, and that fact alone is worth an exclamation point!”[13] Thankfully, ISU Special Collections and University Archives has information that provides for a better understanding of home economics journalism!
Kimberly Wilmot Voss, PhD, is a University of Central Florida full professor of journalism and author of the books The Food Section: Newspaper Women and the Culinary Community; Politicking Politely: Well-Behaved Women Making a Difference in the 1960s and 1970s; Re-Evaluating Women’s Page Journalism in the Post-World War II Era: Celebrating Soft News and a co-author of Mad Men & Working Women: Feminist Perspectives on Historical Power, Resistance and Otherness. She has also published more than 25 journal articles about women and journalism history.
[1] Jodi Wilgoren and Carol Haddix, “Ruth Ellen Church, Ex-Tribune Editor,” Chicago Tribune, August 22, 1991.
[2] Ruth Hoeflin, Introduction to Home Economics (Manhattan, Kansas: Kansas State University, 1965), 1.
[3] Hoeflin, 183.
[4] Joan Younger, “Home Economists – Today’s Glamour Girls,” Cosmopolitan, April 1965, 12.
[5] Ercel Sherman Eppright and Elizabeth Storm Ferguson, A Century of Home Economics at Iowa State University (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University, 1971), 202.
[6] “Ruth Ellen Church, Food Editor, Retires,” Chicago Tribune, December 2, 1974.
[7] Mary Meade, “Follow Rules When Entering Recipe Contest,” Chicago Tribune, March 21, 1942.
[8] Susan Adams, “Personality of the Month,” 1962. Ruth Ellen Church file, Cecily Brownstone papers, Fales Library, New York University.
[9] Ruth Ellen Church, “What’s Cooking in Europe,” (British food), Chicago Tribune, April 30, 1967. Ruth Ellen Church, “What’s Cooking in Europe,” (Swedish food), Chicago Tribune, May 5, 1967.
[10] Lettie Teague, “The Wine Writer Who Taught Us How to Say ‘Rosé’” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2020.
[11] Lettie Teague, “The Wine Writer Who Taught Us How to say Rose,” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2020.
[12] Tom Acitelli, American Wine: A Coming-of-Age Story (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015), 9.
[13] Lettie Teague, “The Wine Writer Who Taught Us How to say Rose,” Wall Street Journal, March 13, 2020.
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