Home economics, Dorothy Canfield Fisher, & Montessori education
Often, when looking for personal inspiration to spark research ideas, I look through my sorority's list of notable members. On the list of Kappa Kappa Gamma members that were notable authors, was Dorothy Canfield Fisher. This blog post explores Fisher's life between 1900 and 1929, seeking to place her work on Montessori teaching and her theories about economics within the broader context of American economic trends and home economics at large.
Dorothy Canfield was born in Lawrence, Kansas in 1879. She was well-educated and well-traveled and received her doctorate in Romance Languages from Columbia University in 1904.
She studied and taught, married, and raised a family. But what she is known for the most is her writing. Fisher wrote both fiction and nonfiction, fiction as Dorothy Canfield and nonfiction as Dorothy Canfield Fisher. She penned several novels, short stories, essays, articles, and books on a variety of topics, but some themes thread throughout her body of work, like self-reliance and consumerism.
Fisher, writing in the early twentieth century, was a "New Woman," educated, traveled, and a wage-earner in addition to the more traditional roles of wife, mother, and woman. In Children's Literature Association Quarterly, Elizabeth J. Wright described her work as "a vehicle to instruct her mostly Anglo, female, and middle-class readers about a number of subjects, including how to cultivate equality in a marriage, how to manage money, and how to raise children so that they grew up to be independent, yet civic-minded, adults." (1) Some of these works are shown below. (2)
As demonstrated in the titles above, the majority of Fisher's work was related to the Montessori method of education. Fisher is often credited with bringing the Montessori method to the United States and devotedly working to increase its use. The Montessori method allows students to drive their own learning through individualized projects. Students of various ages learn together. And, there is a strong emphasis on self-reliance through learning to perform practical tasks, focus, and understand social and civic responsibility. These are values that shine throughout Fisher's work and that bleed into her economic perspective on consumerism. (3)
By 1930, Fisher had experienced first-hand the industrialization of America, the Gilded Age, the Progressive Era, World War I, woman suffrage, and the roaring '20s. In addition to being the period in which Fisher published over half of her works, this period also gave rise to the modern business enterprise structure, which allowed businesses to expand vertically and horizontally, carrying their businesses across larger regions and controlling the supply chain as much as possible within their organization. (4) Also, from the mid-1800s, advertising had been on the rise. When these two worlds of business optimization and marketing collided, what is recognized today as American consumerism came into being. Dorothy Canfield Fisher, who was certainly not the first, wrote in opposition to this consumerism, in both fiction and nonfiction.
In her 1916 Self-Reliance, Fisher wrote, "[T]he fact that so often in modern America one may press a button and be served, seems to relieve one of any responsibility about what goes on behind the button. It is also apparent that for the naturally indolent mass of humanity and for children with no experience in life, there is great danger of coming to rely so entirely on the electric button and its slaves that the wheels of initiative will be broken." (5)
"There is great danger of coming to rely so entirely on the electric button and its slaves that the wheels of initiative will be broken." - Dorothy Canfield Fisher, in Self-Reliance (1916)
Her stance on transparency, understanding, and civic responsibility extended into her 1917 novel, Understood Betsy. Wright argues that this work served a dual purpose, "to show how Montessori principles may be used to counter early twentieth-century patterns of consumption, in which girls were taught a new approach to buying that emphasized purchasing items on the basis of desire rather than need." (6). To accomplish this, Fisher linked children's health, both physical and mental, to spending judiciously. Although Betsy was not ill, she was "skittish and easily frightened," because her mother was so attentive to her and never let her go outside. The mother hopes to spend money to solve this problem, but only experience could build the self-confidence Betsy needed. Fisher argued against the assumed fragility of children, which allowed mothers to free themselves from the fear-mongering that promoted consumption. (7) This is still a topic of much debate today, as seen in Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt's The Coddling of the American Mind. Long before it was given a name, Fisher demonstrated the phenomenon now known as helicopter parenting, showing that it can stifle children's development. She argued that women should give their children autonomy and independence, through which they can grow in themselves. (8)
Most coming-of-age novels or Bildungsromane, of the time, dime novels, and girls' magazines, promoted consumerism, including Anne of Green Gables, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, and the periodicals consumed by young girls. Understood Betsy was intended to share a different message through the creation of a young woman who becomes Fisher's ideal of a productive member of society. (9) Civic virtue and self-reliance are the pillars that support Betsy's development.
Ideas like these, and writings rooted in practical learning and civic responsibility made Dorothy Canfield Fisher a household name for many years. Awards and educational programs were named for her. However, in recent years, her reputation has been diminished. Controversy has encompassed her body of work due to her portrayal of other races and some alleged ties to eugenics. Her name has been removed from many programs. However, the ties to eugenics have not been confirmed and much of her work still heralds valuable virtues, even if diversity is not one of them. Many of the topics Dorothy Canfield Fisher emphasized remain relevant in today's social and cultural studies, and using her work as historians, these kinds of cultural, social, and economic issues can be traced back over time to identify trends, proposed and attempted solutions, and those concerns that remain unresolved.
Works Cited
Elizabeth J. Wright, "Home Economics: Children, Consumption, and Montessori Education in Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Understood Betsy," Children's Literature Association Quarterly 32, no. 3 (Fall 2007): 213.
Images of Fisher's works were sourced from www.archive.org and www.gutenberg.org.
Elizabeth J. Wright, "Home Economics," 213-214.
Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. "Scale, Scope, and Organizational Capabilities," in Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1990): 14-46.
Dorothy Canfield Fisher, Self-Reliance, quoted in Nicholas Sammond, "Manufacturing the American Child: Child-Rearing and the Rise of Walt Disney," Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (1999): 38. (29-55)
Elizabeth J. Wright, "Home Economics," 214.
Ibid., 214-216.
Dorothy Canfield, Understood Betsy, Project Gutenberg.
Elizabeth J. Wright, "Home Economics," 214.