Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2025
A book called Women, Plumbers, and Doctors attracts our attention with its mysterious title, signifying something of interest in the association between three normally unconnected occupations. And indeed, Mrs Harriette M. Plunkett, who published the book in 1885, saw a very intimate connection between women, whom she declared should make plumbing their business, and preventive health, which she saw as curtailing the demand for doctors: a wise sanitary woman would keep the doctors away. The book's subtitle, Household Sanitation, stated its allegiance to the emerging movement for domestic science. It wasn't a proper movement yet, but there were signs all over the place: there were the cooking schools and the cooking classes; the tide of enthusiasm for girls’ domestic education; the first textbooks were emerging; and European and North American reformers were busy meeting to exchange ideas.
This chapter engages with several important preludes to the academic household science movement. The emergence of germ theory, which happened just as Harriette Plunkett was preparing her text, revolutionised the scientific underpinnings of housework. As germs appeared on the landscape of conversations about housework, servants increasingly, but coincidentally, disappeared. The conjunction of these two historical moments created a stage on which women reformers’ espousal of sanitary reform could more easily penetrate the private world of the home. At the close of the 19th century, this strengthened scientific rationale for housework formed the basis of a ground- breaking meeting of household science reformers at Lake Placid in the United States. The Lake Placid convention was a launch moment for all kinds of energetic currents and ideas that helped to propel household science into the world of higher education. Most importantly, the subject acquired an evidence- based theoretical approach which was a great aid to countering the dismissive derisions of those critics who saw housework as merely women's work and not worthy of any serious academic attention at all.
The trouble with drains
Harriette Plunkett was a woman with ideas. A respected New England matron, she wrote her book in the middle of a typhoid epidemic, and in it she grappled with that iconoclastic historic moment when the old miasma theory of disease was giving way to the new knowledge about germs.
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