Wisconsin magazine of history: Volume 57, number 1, autumn, 1973

              Decorative headpieces by Kathe-
rine   R.   Wireman   accompanied
Nellie Kedzie Jones's column in
the 1912 Country Gentleman.
Nellie Kedzie Jones's Advice to Farm Women: Letters from Wisconsin, 1912-1916
Edited by Jeanne Hunnicutt Delgado
D
URING the years 1912 to 1916, rural women all over America anticipated the arrival of the next issue of The Country Gentleman—dind its page of ad¬ vice emanating from a farm in Marathon County, Wisconsin. Deceptively down-to-earth and good-humored in style, the columns, pre¬ sented under the title "The Country Gentle¬ woman," were entirely serious in intent. Through them Nellie Kedzie Jones was at¬ tempting to share some of the basic precepts and principles she had acquired in her dis¬ tinguished career as a pioneer in the develop¬ ing field of home economics.
Born Nellie Sawyer on August 2, 1858, on a farm near Madison, Maine, she lived there until she was eleven, when her family moved to a farm in Kansas. Although she said that she was not a very healthy child, she found the energy to earn her B.A. degree from the new Kansas State Agricultural College at Man¬ hattan by the time she was eighteen.  For the
note: The Nellie Kedzie Jones Papers originally were examined and excerpted by Jeanne Delgado as a part of a long-term research effort by the Society's Research Division to provide the authors of the six-volume His¬ tory of Wisconsin with a broad base of new research. The Jones Papers have yielded rich information on rural life for the study of Wisconsin's agricultural history.
next five years she taught in both country and city schools. In 1881, she was married to chem¬ istry professor Robert Fairchild Kedzie, but the marriage was ended abruptly by his death. The following year, the twenty-four-year-old widow was invited to become Kansas State College of Agriculture's first woman professor. Her task was stated very simply: she was to found, administer, and teach all courses in a new department of domestic economy which was to supersede the college's simple offering of a sewing and a cooking course.
The difficulty in organizing a new domestic economy department was, as she later said, that "there was no such thing." With help from the college president and her father-in- law, who was a doctor, she chose and organ¬ ized her subjects, then proceeded to educate herself in some of her choices, such as nutri¬ tion and human health problems. Her basic guide in building her department was a re¬ markably practical imagination: she imagined the best and easiest way for a woman to keep an efficient and pleasant home, considered in detail what knowledge was needed for each ideal step in her imagined ideal home, then arranged for the knowledge to be included in a course. The method was as successful as the department chairman's logic, which apparent¬ ly was excellent.