The Danish Home Economics Movement between Nation-state Formation and Women's Citizenship at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

Home economics was a knowledge area that gained much attention and underwent major changes in the early twentieth century. This interest unfolded in most of the Western world in many different contexts, where actors involved in politics, education, and the women’s movement argued for the importance of this domain of knowledge for the state as well as for individual women and families. It developed into a movement urging women to band together to raise the level of their skills within this field and prompted the development of more educational opportunities for adult women. <br/>Strong ideas about the development of home economics, from an area without much formalised education and low status into a professional and academic field, spread from that time, ultimately turning into a movement focused on the home economics issue and aimed at reforms in that area. In a general sense, knowledge and education relate to power and social structures that can increase the status of professions and the people working within them, and this also applies to home economics. The corresponding conceptions of who is responsible for this practice and who deals with the different tasks and in what ways have historically been, and still are, focal points for the definition of social roles and hierarchies in society that are associated with the exercise of powerful discourses and forms of knowledge.<br/>