Hazel Kyrk's Intellectual Roots: When First-generation Home Economists Met the Institutionalist Framework

In the years following the publication ofA Theory of Consumption(1923), Hazel Kyrk’s book became the flagship of the field that would later be known as the economics of consumption. It stimulated theoretical and empirical work on consumption. Some of the existing literature on Kyrk (e.g.,Kiss & Beller, 2000; Le Tollec, 2020;Tadajewski, 2013) depicted her theory as the starting point of the economics of consumption. Nevertheless, how and why it emerged the way it did remain largely unexplored. This chapter examines Kyrk’s intellectual background, which, we argue, can be traced back to two main movements in the United States: the home economics and the institutionalist. Both movements conveyed specific endeavors as responses to the US material and social transformations that occurred at the turn of the 20th century, notably the perceived changing role of consumption and that of women in US society. On the one hand, Kyrk pursued first-generation home economists’ efforts to make sense of and put into action the shifting of women’s role from domestic producer to consumer. On the other hand, she reinterpretedVeblen’s (1899) account of consumption in order to reveal its operational value for a normative agenda focused on “wise” and “rational” consumption. This chapter studies how Kyrk carried on first-generation home economists’ progressive agenda and how she adapted Veblen’sfin-de-sièclecritical account of consumption to the context of the household goods developed in 1900–1920. Our account of Kyrk’s intellectual roots offers a novel narrative to better understand the role of gender and epistemological questions in her theory.