Frances Stern, a social worker and dietician who researched the nutrition of low-income workers and established the Food Clinic at the Boston Dispensary, died at 74 on this date in 1947. Stern was a pioneer in home economics, helped to found the American Home Economics Association in 1908, and wrote an influential book in 1917, Food for the Worker. The Food Clinic, writes John Livingston at the Jewish Women’s Archive, “served not only as a center for dispensing practical advice on food and meal preparation for outpatients and their families, but also as a center for research on the relationships among health, nutrition, class, and ethnicity. Typical of many enterprises associated with the reforms of the Progressive Era (1900–1920), the Food Clinic effectively combined scientific methods with a moral commitment to social betterment . . . [and] provided women opportunities to participate in the progressive movement, which combined their traditional tasks as homemakers with new public roles as scientific experts.”
“[I]f children were properly trained in home-making, they could help to lead the world to the ‘art of right living.’” —Frances Stern