Historical Portraits of Women Home Scientists: The University Of ...

of Home Science at the University of Otago,¹³ this book illuminates how women sought to carve out scholarly careers and professionalize their field of expertise through their teaching, research, consultancy work, and interactions with colleagues across national and international boundaries.

Our core intention is to focus on the patterns and networks in the professional lives of early women home scientists. Until recently, the majority of histories of higher education in New Zealand have been preoccupied with the foundation and administration of the university¹⁴ and the history of individual colleges.¹⁵ Histories of women’s involvement in higher education in New Zealand and elsewhere have notably highlighted the uneven history of the inclusion of academic women,¹⁶ portrayed individual lives,¹⁷ documented particular groups of women on individual campuses,¹⁸ and examined the career paths of women graduates.¹⁹ These histories have offered a glimpse into the everyday lives of academic women and their struggles to claim a presence in a male enclave.

The work of women scientists has been ably explored by Margaret Rossiter and Ruth Watts,²⁰ and the development of home science has been documented by Maresi Nerad, Sarah Stage, Virginia Vincenti, Ellen Fitzpatrick, and others.²¹ However, gaps remain. For example, scant attention has been paid to the expansion of household science and the opportunities the field provided for academic, scientific, and professional careers for university-educated women.²² The underpinning assumption has been that household science produced glorified housekeepers.²³ What has not been fully considered, therefore, is how home science offered a range of professional possibilities for educated women and how women exercised their scholarly agency to ensure that the field offered both scientific and academic careers for women graduates.

This book aims to address this gap in the field of knowledge. It will present a series of individual portraits of women home scientists at the University of New Zealand in the early to mid-twentieth century, show how these women established an academic and scientific department in a new university, and demonstrate the extent to which they actively used their networks and organizations to build coalitions and secure