In this paper, I look into the papers of Fannia Cohn, an immigrant labour organizer, who served the Education Department of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union (ILGWU) between 1918 and 1962 and became one of its few women vice-presidents. As an internationally recognized figure in the history of workers' education, Cohn left a rich…

This article examines the relationship between skill acquisition and the constitution of economic selfhood in Trinidad. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork among garment workers in a context of industrial decline, I show how their formal, informal, and illicit means of acquiring sewing skills are inextricably linked to the fragmented and unstable…

In August 1922 a young woman was writing a letter to her comrade and colleague in a New York garment shop. The sender was Rose Pesotta, writing from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where she had just completed a summer school for women workers. Short as it is, the letter brings together a cluster of themes, ideas, and practices that were…

In 2009, Andre Andrade was convicted for the murder of Angie Zapata, an 18-year-old Latina transgender woman living in rural Colorado. This essay traces the way Angie's friends, family, and community countered the assertion of transphobia in the courtroom and larger public discussion by circulating self-portraits of Angie on t-shirts at community…

This essay reveals the importance of investigating mundane internal documents, particularly when considering muted rhetors, who may use such texts strategically in an attempt to subvert the status quo. It does so by examining the first and second women presidents of NCTE and their efforts to professionalize the organization and to strengthen the…

Progress in home economics education has been marked in recent years. To the normal rapid increase in the number of high schools offering courses, the extension of systematic training in home making into the lower grades, the establishment of new courses in liberal arts colleges, and the more adequate support of departments previously organized…

In America, the home is the most important of all institutions. In the home, children receive the most important part of their education. It is there that physical, mental, and moral health is established. The experiences of home constitute the raw material of education. The character and the teaching, conscious or unconscious, of the home…

This chapter of the "Biennial Survey of Education in the United States, 1928-1930" focuses on the following topic areas as they relate to homemaking education: Part I: Present trends, contains the following: (a) Contributions rendered; (b) Philosophy changes; (c) Expansion of home economics in our public schools; (d) Home economics required; (e)…