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Mathlide Hader Autobiography
Date(s)
- 1800-1979 (Creation)
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Consists of the transcript of an interview with noted home economist Mathilde Hader. This interview was conducted July 22, 1979. Mathilde's husband John asked the questions and the recorded interview was later transcribed.
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Biographical Note
Mathilde Georgine Christiansen Hader was born July 25, 1897, in Christiania (Oslo), Norway, and grew up in Tønsberg. Her father, who from 1922-1927 was a member of the Norwegian Storting (Parliament), had told his daughter that he would pay for her education but that she would have to support herself. As a young woman, a book by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, titled "The Home: Its Work and Influence", inspired her to study home economics as a means of work simplification. Mathilde had always felt that Norwegian women were too tied to their homes and kitchens. She attended a finishing school in Copenhagen, spent a year at Kings College for Women in London, and then trained to become a home economist at Stabbekk, a teachers' college of home economics just outside Oslo. She took a teaching job there in 1924.
Deciding that she could learn more about her chosen field in the United States, she left Norway in March, 1925, arriving in the States in time to attend the inauguration of President Calvin Coolidge. After a tour of the United States, she returned to teaching in Norway, where she also did lab work comparing the quality of different electric ovens. In 1926 she returned to New York, married John Hader, and took a job as a nutritionist with the Association for Improving the Condition of the Poor. Soon afterward she began studying for her master's degree at the Columbia University Teachers' College, and around the same time she began teaching at New York University. She made the acquaintance of consumer advocates Stuart Chase and Fred Schlink, authors of "Your Money's Worth: a Study in the Waste of the Consumer's Dollar," and when they founded Consumers' Research she became their first executive secretary. Her husband also worked part time for Consumers' Research.
In the 1950s in Norway Mathilde started a group of homemakers working on principles of work simplification, and later started a course on that subject which was offered in Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, Georgia. With her Norwegian editor she also collaborated on a booklet on Work Simplification for Homemakers which was translated into Finnish and Icelandic.