'Fit for future life': The struggle to establish home economics at the University of British Columbia, 1919-1943

From 1919 to 1943 women's groups of British Columbia collectively struggled to establish a home economics program at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The Board of Governors, in a stalling ritual which lasted over twenty four years, repeatedly refused the requests of the home economics movement ostensibly for financial reasons. Budget submissions of the university fail to support this assertion. Instead, the university records reveal a fledgling institution, self-conscious of its newly formed identity, and concerned with its future, which could not permit the intrusion of a subject which would undermine its first class status. UBC viewed home economics as a vocational subject which trained women in the art of housekeeping and which did not fit with the classically based utilitarian mandate which defined the university from its creation in 1911. Committed to utilitarian and not vocational education, the Board of Governors refused to institute home economics until 1943 when the influence of the legislature forced the Minster of Education to ensure its establishment. Women of the province fully endorsed the home economics movement; initially due to the fervor of the moral reform influences of the first generation of home economics advocates, and later as an avenue for expanded career options in which women did not directly compete with men. Inherently questioning the role of women in society, home economics advocates were able to expand the role of women as defined by separate spheres ideology by structuring the debate within separate spheres discourse and using the tools and weapons provided by it--specifically their roles as mothers. Although money was the central defence used by the Board of Governors to prevent its establishment, the struggle for home economics became a discursive site upon which the role of women and the university in society were contested and redefined.