During a 12-year tenure there, she created a nursery center that trained parents and provided child care. Nutrition and Black familiesĪfter her 1928 graduation, Kittrell briefly taught at a high school before becoming the director of home economics and dean of women at Bennett College, a historically Black college in Greensboro, North Carolina. With a growing belief that the home and family were the basis of society, Kittrell chose to major in home economics rather than political science or economics. Furthermore, women who majored in the subject could then pursue sciences that were closed to them because of their gender. Kittrell realized that the field was about more than cooking and sewing.
Resolutionized nutrition professional#
Swallow Richards, the first woman to attend Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one of the nation’s earliest female professional chemists. She initially rejected the suggestion, claiming the home was “ just so ordinary.” Kittrell reconsidered once she learned about Ellen H. In 1919, Kittrell enrolled at Hampton Institute, a small historically Black Virginia college that later became Hampton University.Ī professor encouraged her to major in home economics. She began working as a nursemaid and cook when she was only 11 years old. Kittrell, the eighth of nine children born to a sharecropping family, grew up in Henderson, North Carolina. I was also stunned by the Black nutritionist’s commitment to shattering traditional assumptions about home economics and improving the health of low-income families around the globe, especially for people of color.
I was struck by her pragmatic approach to foreign relations, which emphasized women, children and the home as the keys to good living and national and global peace and security. State Department, women’s organizations and church groups. While researching Black women’s global activism for rights and freedom, I became aware of Kittrell’s work on behalf of the U.S. Kittrell went further, by making the case for healthy and strong families a tool for diplomacy.
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