The article about the Home Economics department represents an interests historical thread that seems to be left out in some categorization schemes for engineering. But something else struck me about the article. Some of the development of the Home Economics department at Iowa State happened at the same time the Seely article examined the move toward more mathematical and theoretical engineering. And if some has information contrary to my impression, please chime in, but it seems like the general practices of other engineering departments as they moved in the directions Seely wrote about and the practices of this Home Economics department differ in one really significant way. Throughout the Home Economics article the author talks about how students in the program are encouraged to use their knowledge to help family members, plan their own family future, answer questions and give information to women who are unsure about purchasing appliances or what appliances to buy, and in some cases graduates went on to take positions at magazines and continued this outreach to the lay public.
At the same, other engineering fields, those that were typically male dominated, where becoming more math based, and it would seem that there wasn't, or at least past work hasn't mentioned, a similar drive in these fields toward public outreach or trying to explain engineering principles for people male engineers know. Of course an engineer from one of these fields may discuss some of these ideas with people they know but the systematic outreach effort from the Home Economics department does not seem to have any equivalent in other engineering departments.
This is interesting, because a common stereotype for women vis-a-vis men is their "nurturing" and "relational" nature. Of course as a new department trying establish and legitimize itself, outreach is one method for improving the departments standing in the public eye. But for a field that was particularly catered to female students, it seems possibly more than coincidental that a systematic outreach effort of this kind was enacted by the department and instilled into the students who went through the program.
