Your Friendly Neighborhood Home Economist

Betty Crocker, Aunt Sammy, and selling Culinary Authority in the 1920s

Aug 28, 2023

1936 Betty Crocker Portrait — The first portrait of Betty Crocker (created in 1936 by Neysa McMein). This version bears a striking resemblance to Christine Frederick, the home economist and *Ladies’ Home Journal* contributor who became a leading voice in advertising on the subject of women consumers in the 1930s.

In the 1920s, the two most popular people in American culinary culture were both imaginary, one created by a consumer food packager and the other by a federal bureau of research and communications. You probably already know about the former: Betty Crocker first appeared in 1921 following a contest in the Saturday Evening Post (best known for its iconic covers by Norman Rockwell) inciting readers to complete a puzzle in order to win a prize from the Washburn Crosby Company (later known as General Mills). Her identity was part-fact, part-fantasy: her surname came from the company’s former director, William Crocker, while “Betty” was selected as a wholesome, all-American name. Crocker gained a voice before she had a face: a friendly, warm tone that reached through The Cooking School of the Air via the Minneapolis radio station WCCO. But Crocker was a composite creation of the home economists working for the company, ensuring that what General Mills shared spoke directly to ordinary women—their interests, anxieties, and unidentified needs.

The first woman to voice Crocker on the radio was Marjorie Child Husted, who earned her degree in German and home economics from the University of Minnesota and directed Washburn Crosby’s home service department. Yet Husted never put herself at the forefront of the radio program, instead promoting Crocker as a mouthpiece for the company’s on-staff authority to the broader public. As Husted put it in 1948, in an article in the Journal of Home Economics titled “Would You Like More Recognition?”, her savvy was not in promoting herself, but in promoting the broader cause of home economics. “If you would really like more recognition for home economics,” she wrote, '“learn the ‘what,’ ‘how,’ and ‘when of public relations.” How home economists talked, it seemed, was even more important than what they had to say.

The second most popular figure of the era was not clad in Crocker’s string of pearls and girlish bob, but wore her cotton wash dresses with an equal amount of flair. “Aunt Sammy” was a co-creation of the USDA’s Bureau of Home Economics and the Farm Radio Service, launched on the air in 1926 as a featured segment in the popular radio program Housekeeper’s Chat. Unlike Betty, Aunt Sammy was part of the larger effort to engage rural households in nutritional, hygenic, and industrial reform. The research underpinning her scripts was conducted by home economists at the USDA led by Louise Stanley, the first woman to lead a Bureau of the U.S. Government and the former chair of the department of home economics at The University of Missouri. As a native of rural Tennessee, Stanley understood firsthand that rural women faced distinct challenges from urban and suburban middle-class women. Not only were rural families slower to acquire radios than urbanities, but rural households also remained in the “dark land”, with far less consistent access to electricity, running water, and “modern” appliances to lighten the load of daily housekeeping. Directing two of her best staffers at the Bureau—Ruth van Deman and Fanny Yeatman—to develop the scripts and content for the series, Stanley aimed to create a program built on the irrefutable authority of the Bureau’s research. However, they carefully scripted the character of Aunt Sammy to never mention her own career or education. In order for Sammy to be an effective intermediary between the Bureau and the rural women of America, she had to be an “every-woman,” someone who found meaning through her friends and family, not through her professional expertise.

Aunt Sammy did just that—as a character with her own universe of friends, family, and nosy neighbors, but located squarely in the rural experience, she didn’t bother with offering trendy advice or faddish recipes. Her voice was tailored to each of the 194 radio stations distributing her episodes, with different actresses used to speak in the regional accents and colloquialism of each audience. She spoke candidly about the problem-solving required of all women to meet the shifting demands of their families and communities, offering up-to-date guidance on minimizing waste, preserving, and innovating with ingredients from 1926 to 1934. (By the outset of the Great Depression, author Justin Nordstrom has noted, Aunt Sammy was no longer a named segment on the Housekeeper’s Chat, possibly because her cheerful tone might have seemed out of step with the era.) She advised young brides on how to set up their households, chided her children for not eating their balanced school lunches, and gave her neighbors ideas for assembling menus for holiday feasts. She was even candid about the social and emotional challenges of cooking with modern conveniences in a society that had significant symbolic ties to tradition. Rather than treating all rural women as a single backwards monolith, Aunt Sammy became a voice of one of many women seeking community and comfort in their daily labors, eager to swap recipes and share guidance across the radio waves.

Why, you might ask, did Betty Crocker and Aunt Sammy become household names, while Marjorie Child Husted and Louise Stanley remained in the background? Both Husted and Stanley had abundant expertise and held positions of significant professional authority, they had more than a justifiable claim to public recognition. So why then did they choose to speak in the voices of fictional characters? Despite their extensive experience, these women lacked certain essential details in their personal biographies. For though their work concerned the domestic sphere, many of the most notable figures in the home economics movement led lives that privately or publicly eschewed the heteronormative conventions of the age. (Catherine Beecher, who evangelized about domestic education in her 1841 book A Treatise on Domestic Economy, never married and dedicated her adult life to her work promoting women’s education. Ellen Swallow Richards, considered the mother of home economics following her studies in chemistry at MIT, married young but never had children. Martha van Rensselaer, co-director of the College of Home Economics at Cornell, maintained a longstanding romantic partnership with her co-director Flora Rose and actively questioned the constraints of marriage and motherhood in her coursework and research.)

For people like Husted and Stanley (the former had no children, and the latter never married but adopted a daughter in 1929), the creation of a fictional landscape for domestic expertise might have seemed an easier sale. Though Crocker’s imaginary husband or children were never directly addressed by her authors, she was forever portrayed as a woman whose expertise came from her familiarity with other women, her knowledge emerging wholly from the private sphere rather than from a systematic education in household science, economics, or other disciplines. Similarly, Aunt Sammy’s authority positioned her as a fellow beneficiary, rather than author, of government-sanctioned advice—she encouraged the women listening to do as she did and consult with USDA experts for guidance. By creating fictional ambassadors of advice rather than authors in their own right, Husted and Stanley softened their pedagogical approach, creating personas through which guidance could be offered rather than dictated.

There may never have been a good time to be a woman in journalism, and certainly many women in food media have always experienced their work as a double-edged sword, as their work is constantly navigating a line between efficiently delivered and easily digested “just the recipe” content and nuanced and deeply researched reportage. And certainly this would have been the case in even in Husted and Stanley’s time, a period when, as the food writer Laura Shapiro noted, “good cooks of both sexes derided women’s culinary follies.” Yet Crocker, Shapiro noted, represented “someone who wasn’t a joke and who never, ever insulted women for being women.” One could see how Crocker’s presence on the radio, speaking as a (composite) woman to women would have felt like a radical, intimate approach to media, one that honored women’s interests and needs rather than disparaged them. Yet it would be unfair to think of that exchange as a direct and true facilitation of women’s media—especially when only a certain kind of womanhood was allowed to make it into fiction.

Looking at the portrait of Betty Crocker, first painted in 1936 by New York illustrator Neysa McMein, one can see the slow-burning realization that affability, rather than authority, would be a key ingredient in the production of culinary pedagogy in the early 20th century. The first depiction features a pursed lip, starched collar, and plucked eyebrows on the face of a relatively young woman, her face radiating sincerity and professionalism, but not much maternal warmth. The revised portrait of her in 1955 shows a considerable shift—her eyebrows are thicker, hair greying at the temples and softly set, her mouth open in a gentle smile. The hard professional edges of Crocker’s expertise were erased for the sake of approachability—and with them went the touch of realism that so many women would have appreciated, then and now.

French Fries and Martinis

Discussion about this post