How Trailblazing Women Harnessed the Power of Home and Changed the Way We Live By Danielle Dreilinger In 1972, I was the overeager student who always raised her hand and preferred reading the encyclopedia to doing “something creative.” So I was not happy to be told that my seventh-grade courses would include home economics. It sounded dumb. “There are not enough elements of intellectual growth in cooking or housekeeping to nourish a very serious or profound course of training for really intelligent women,” M. Carey Thomas, the president of Bryn Mawr, declared when the college rejected the field in 1893. Twelve-year-old me would have agreed.