Campbell, Helen Stuart (1839-1918)

A group of leaders of the early home economics movement. Helen Campbell is probably seated in the front row, second from the right, in a black skirt. Next to her, wearing a dark bow, is Ellen Richards.

If it had been up to Helen Stuart Campbell, the first lecturer in domestic science at UW, the School of Human Ecology would have celebrated its centennial almost a decade before 2003.

In 1894, the progressive professor of economics Richard Ely convinced the university’s Regents to invite Campbell to present two courses of lectures at the university the following spring. She had been a student of his in 1893 and he had written a foreword to her 1893 work, Women Wage Earners. The 1894-95 course catalog listed the courses that she gave, entitled “Women wage-earning” and “Domestic Science,” under the sociology department. According to a letter that she wrote to Ely, she accepted her payment of $200 “with the understanding that it was prelude to the longer work, and a formal chair in your department of social economics.”

The following year, Campbell published the lectures she had given under the title Household Economics: A Course of Lectures in the School of Economics of the University of Wisconsin. But despite her offers to give several more lectures so that the topic would not be dropped, her work did not lead to the permanent establishment of a domestic science department nor her employment at the UW, although she taught briefly at Kansas State Agricultural College.

Prior to the 1870s, when Campbell became interested in both the nascent home economics movement and in the living conditions of the poor, she had written several children’s books. In 1878, she began teaching in the Raleigh Cooking School in North Carolina and in 1881 she published a textbook entitled The Easiest Way in House-Keeping and Cooking. But Campbell was best known for a series of works on economics that she wrote, including The Problem of the Poor (1882), Prisoners of Poverty (1887), and Women Wage Earners (1893), the last of which won an award from the American Economic Association. In these works she demonstrated her concern with the appalling conditions in which the poor lived, and in particular with the effects of low wages on women factory workers.