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

recognition from their peers and further their own professional interests. For these early women academics, access to the academy and academic qualifications were central to the professionalization of the field and their expertise.

In this book, we go beyond the arguments that home science, as a subject and a field of study, hindered women, to ask instead how and why it developed as it did. Furthermore, our interest is in examining the lives and careers of early home scientists as a way of understanding women’s historical agency. Our analysis accentuates the extent to which home science provided women with an entry wedge to the academy, generated new fields of scholarly research, and created cross-national networks that advocated for women’s participation in professional life and higher education.

We trace the experiences of professional scholars and contest the view that home science was little more than ‘glorified housekeeping’.²⁴ We offer a narrative of the remarkable tenacity and resilience of university-educated women in the early to mid-twentieth century and their struggles to establish this new and emerging field of study in a relatively new institution at the geographic periphery of the British Empire and the intellectual periphery of the academy.²⁵

In chapter 1, we examine the notions of portraits and portraiture and introduce the key individuals whose portraits provide a framework for this book. In chapter 2, biographical portraits of the first four women professors illuminate the central role these women played in the development of home science as a legitimate scholarly arena for women. Tracing the contours of these women’s lives, this chapter shows the interconnection between these prominent women and the challenges they faced as relative outsiders in the patriarchal enclave of the University of New Zealand. In chapter 3, an examination of the professional lives and careers of two women home scientists highlights the interplay between gender and professional work. Chapter 4 considers how tensions between public perceptions of home science as glorified housekeeping and the pursuit of scholarly and professional careers by academic women were ameliorated by the strategies that were adopted by a generation of academic women. The extent to which it was possible