Women's Suffrage
Over the years home economics has received a reputation as confining women to the home, while the movement for women's suffrage has been viewed as liberating women from the home. However, the Progressive Era movements for home economics and women's suffrage both had shared a common mission: to improve the condition of women in American society. Consequently, during the first quarter of the 20th century, leaders of the home economics and suffrage movements corresponded: sharing tactics and ideas, as well as publicly promoting each other's causes.
Susan B. Anthony Letter
In this 1905 letter, Susan B. Anthony wrote to Martha Van Rensselaer, who initiated and ran Cornell's extension program to New York state's farm wives, inquiring about the strategies used "in getting farmers' wives to talk."
Civic Duties of Women
At Cornell the home economics department taught innovative classes on women's role in society during the 1910s on topics such as the "history of housekeeping" and the "history of women's organizations." In 1914, Martha Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose hired Radcliffe-educated Blanche Hazard as an assistant professor to develop a series of courses on the history of women and women's work. After women won the right to vote in New York State in 1918, Blanche Hazard wrote an essay entitled Civic Duties of Women. In this article, she instructed women about the electoral process, the different levels and functions of government, and the importance of their political participation.
Blanche Hazard Letter
In a September 12, 1919 letter to Van Rensselaer, Hazard explained her reasons for writing the Civic Duties: "Our department did pioneering emergency work through its staff and the extension agents when the right to vote was first suddenly put into the lives of N. Y. State women, knowing as we did, that the average farm woman had not the access to many suffragists or political speeches or books and would want to be and need to be an intelligent voter and worker in public life."
NAWSA Recognition
Suffrage leaders recognized Cornell home economists contributions to the movement. In 1920, the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) placed Martha Van Rensselaer on the organization's honor roll for her aid.
League of Women Voters
Following the nation's ratification of the vote for women, suffragists too shifted their energy to educate women in their new responsibility as voters. In 1920, Carrie Chapman Catt founded the League of Women Voters during the convention of the NAWSA six months before the ratification of the 19th Amendment. Prominent female leaders of social reform in New York attended its meetings at Eleanor's Roosevelt's home in Hyde Park, including shown here from left to right: Mrs. Henry R. Hayes, Miss Martha Van Rensselaer, Mrs. Casper Whitney, general regional director of the League of Women Voters, Mrs. Samuel Bins, Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Mrs. Henry Goddard Leach, the State Chairman who presided at the meeting.
Carrie Chapman Catt Letter
After women's suffrage had been achieved, its leaders branched out to support other movements that aided the advancement of women in society. Consequently, the contacts made by Cornell home economics department in the suffrage movement promoted home economics during the 1920s. In 1925, Carrie Chapman Catt chose to visit Cornell's College of Home Economics to observe how the college's programs for farm wives respond to the media's influences on a person's interpretation of information. She wrote to Van Rensselaer: "...I might come up to Ithaca and pay you a visit for a few days in order to study what your department of Household Science is doing for the adjusted relations of women to new conditions. I regard your department as the most forward in the entire country and I thought I ought to find it there."