Library catalogs archive of one of first groups to represent professional women

Cornell's Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections has completed the cataloging of the archives of the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences (AAFCS), one of the first national organizations to represent professional women.

AAFCS was founded in 1909 as the American Home Economics Association. Its history is intimately intertwined with that of the College of Human Ecology. Martha Van Rensselaer, a pioneer in the founding of the College of Human Ecology, was a charter member of the AAFCS and served as its president, 1914-16. Members researched and developed public education programs focusing on home economics, including food and nutrition, parenting and early childhood development, consumer science, family finances, art and interior design, and textiles and construction.

In 2004 the association designated Cornell the repository of its archives and secured funding to hire a full-time archivist, Sarah Keen, to organize and catalog the collection. Cornell was chosen partly because it already holds some 60 other collections relating to the history of the field of home economics.

Keen arrived to find about 350 boxes of correspondence, reports, publications, photographs, sewing samplers, scrapbooks and other records documenting the operation of the association, including the correspondence of such early leaders as Ellen H. Richards and Van Rensselaer. She has spent the past three years organizing the material and creating a catalog, a process she described as "an exercise in controlled chaos," that involved deciding how to sort the material into categories, then finding surprises when trying to make everything fit. But eventually, "everything found a home, and now it's up to the researchers to find what they're looking for." The catalog she compiled can be found on the Web at http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/htmldocs/RMM06578.html.

From here on, AAFCS will continue to send its current records to Cornell, keeping the collection up to date. Guides to Cornell's other human ecology/home economics collections are available at http://rmc.library.cornell.edu/EAD/ browselists/humec.html.

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