We are trailblazers

As founding director of Cornell’s Housing Research Center, Glenn Beyer helped establish an interdisciplinary, multi-college research focus on the socioeconomic aspects of housing and achieved a position of national leadership and international stature in the field of housing. 

His research and advocacy followed his belief that housing should be user-centered and customizable — designed by collaborative, multidisciplinary teams to account for peoples’ physical as well as psychological needs. 

Beyer received a bachelor’s degree from Augustana University in South Dakota. After receiving his master’s degree from the George Washington University in 1937, he worked for the federal government, including serving as economic and housing analyst for the Federal Housing Administration. He joined the College of Home Economics’ Department of Housing and Design in 1947 and helped establish a strong research focus in the socioeconomic aspects of housing. 

Beyer was project lead on a five-year, multidisciplinary initiative to develop a prefab, mass-market, easy-to-install kitchen that would meet the needs of post-war home kitchen users — from technical requirements to aesthetic and emotional satisfaction. 

He was active in housing issues at the national and international level. In 1961 alone, he led an International Cooperative Administration mission to Venezuela and studied housing for the elderly in 12 European countries on a grant from the Ford Foundation. In 1964-65, he was part of the Ford Foundation mission to India to advise on national housing policy. 

A prolific writer, he was the author of six books, including Housing the Aged in Western Countries, Housing and Society and The Urban Explosion in Latin America. He died in 1969.

Beulah Blackmore understood that fashion is not a frivolous subject. The clothes we wear are an integral part of the human experience. Each piece tells a story about where and how the wearer lived, how they saw themselves and their place in society, as technical details like construction, fiber composition and the method of production.

Blackmore came to Cornell in 1915 as the first full time clothing instructor in what was then the Department of Home Economics. Over a career of 36 years, she led the College’s textile and clothing program as the curriculum expanded from a focus on clothing construction to more advanced study of design, psychology, chemistry and consumer selection in response to changes in clothing production and marketing as well as new technologies like synthetic textiles.

Perhaps Blackmore’s greatest legacy is the Cornell Fashion + Textile Collection (CF+TC), which began in 1916 as a few pieces of clothing and fabrics that she used to illustrate lectures. She added to this teaching collection slowly over the years. Then, in 1936, she embarked on an international tour to learn about dress in different cultural contexts, starting in Cuba and continuing west, through the Panama Canal, to Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Europe. She returned with more than 20 complete ensembles, plus accessories and flat textiles, bringing an entire world of fashion to Ithaca. “We are building a collection of costumes which will give, when completed, a picture of our social history as well as being a very beautiful collection,” she wrote. Today, CF+TC includes nearly 9,000 items of apparel, accessories and flat textiles from the 18th century to present. The items are used for exhibition, research and teaching.

Urie Bronfenbrenner ’38 was a developmental psychologist who transformed the study of human development and connected research and theory to public policy to improve the lives of children and families.

Bronfenbrenner is most well-known for developing the ecological model of human development, which posits that an individual’s development involves interactions between the individual and the contexts in which they live – their family, the family’s place in their neighborhood and community, that community’s place, and macrosystem factors like social policy, the legal system and economic trends.

He later identified the kernel of the theory in his own childhood, growing up at Letchworth Village, a residential institution for mentally and physically disabled people where his father was a clinical pathologist. He saw how quickly otherwise healthy children would decline after being committed to the institution, and how adult residents thrived once they were given meaningful work. 

Bronfenbrenner studied psychology and music at Cornell and then received a master’s degree from Harvard and a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. In 1948, he returned to Cornell as an assistant professor in human development and family studies and psychology. He began conducting field research in different cultural contexts, first in Francophone Nova Scotia and then, beginning in the 1960s, in the former Soviet Union, Israel and other countries. These experiences changed the way he thought about human development. 

“Seen in different contexts, human nature, which I had previously thought of as a singular noun, became plural and pluralistic,” Bronfenbrenner later wrote. “The process and product of making human beings human clearly varied by place and time.”

Working in different societies, Bronfenbrenner also saw the impact of public policy on people’s lives. He began contributing to efforts to develop policies that could help children and their families. In 1964, he testified before Congress that investment in high-quality early childhood education should be part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War on Poverty. He joined the Head Start Planning Committee the following year, and later served on two presidential task forces and numerous scientific advisory groups. 

Bronfenbrenner published The Ecology of Human Development In 1979, formalizing his groundbreaking theory. That theoretical model transformed the way many social and behavioral scientists approached the study of human beings and their environments. It led to new directions in basic research and to applications in the design of programs and policies affecting the well-being of children and families both in the United States and abroad. 

In 1996 he received the first American Psychological Association Award for Lifetime Contribution to Developmental Psychology in the service of Science and Society. This award is now given in his name. 

Bronfenbrenner’s legacy also lives on through the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research in the College of Human Ecology, which consolidated two earlier centers in 2011 and works to translate research findings to develop innovative interventions, practices and policies to improve human health and well-being.

In a career spanning five decades, Joyce Brothers ’47 — better known to millions as Dr. Joyce Brothers — normalized therapy and brought psychological concepts from the psychoanalyst’s couch to the living room, earning her the nickname “the mother of TV psychology.”

Brothers majored in home economics and psychology at Cornell and received her Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University in 1953. In 1955, in a gambit to supplement her husband’s meager medical resident’s salary, she applied to be on “The $64,000 Question,” a popular game show featuring regular people with deep knowledge in an unexpected area. In an early indication of her media savvy, Brothers decided to become an expert in boxing, an especially unexpected topic for a petite, blond woman. She made it through all the rounds, becoming only the second person (the first woman) to win the grand prize – and launching a career in television. 

In 1958, she debuted “Dr. Joyce Brothers,” an afternoon advice show about love, marriage and child-rearing. An evening program about more mature topics soon followed. Then in 1966, Brothers launched the first radio call-in show. Additional shows followed, along with a syndicated newspaper column, a monthly column in Good Housekeeping and eight books. When she wasn’t working on her own shows, Brothers appeared on others, guest starring on programs like Happy Days, Saturday Night Live and The Simpsons, and becoming one of Johnny Carson’s most frequent guests.

In 2002, the American Psychological Association — which had criticized Brothers decades earlier for dispensing psychological advice outside the private office setting — awarded her a presidential citation for her “vital role as a pioneer in media psychology, presenting psychological research and practice to generations of the public.”

“When I first started, if you went in for help you were advertising that you were crazy,” Brothers told Cornell magazine in 1998. “Now people feel very comfortable about going to psychologists or psychiatrists for the problems of everyday life. I think I really had a hand in that.”

To learn more about Brothers, visit the Cornell University Library online exhibition Dr. Joyce Brothers: Mother of Media Psychology.

Henrietta Hoag Guilfoyle ’40 (Onöndowa’ga:’/Seneca, Beaver Clan) was one of five Hodinǫ̱hsǫ́:nih women who came to Cornell between 1929 and 1942 through a scholarship funded by the Daughters of the American Revolution. She was the only one to graduate. 

Guilfoyle was born at Ohi:yo’ (Alleghany) in 1918. She was the granddaughter of William C. Hoag, former president of the Onöndowa’ga:’ (Seneca) Nation, who directed the agricultural surveys Cornell’s College of Agriculture conducted at Ohi:yo’ in 1919. Her family’s role in developing Cornell’s Indian Extension Program is most likely why Hoag applied for the Olive Whitman Memorial Scholarship Fund in 1937. 

While Haudenosaunee students faced considerable bias on campus at the time, Guilfoyle found community through extracurricular activities. She served as vice president of the Cosmopolitan Club, the first club dedicated to international students at Cornell, where she also met her husband Daniel Guilfoyle ’40. She also negotiated the representation of Haudenosaunee aesthetics on campus, donning Onöndowa’ga:’ regalia in the 1937 “Costumes of Many Lands” fashion showcase. 

After graduation, Guilfoyle returned to her grandfather’s farm while her husband served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. She worked for Cornell Alumni News until after the birth of her first son. The couple, who lived in a number of locations in New York and New Jersey, had three sons. While raising them, Guilfoyle volunteered in their schools and local hospitals. She died in 1983.

Over a career of more than 40 years — which included leading the home economics department at Howard University, making vital contributions to the Head Start program and traveling to more than 15 countries — Flemmie Kittrell, M.S. ’30, Ph.D. ’36 demonstrated that the study of home economics was never limited to the home. Instead, inspired by her education at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) and Cornell University, Kittrell saw the rigorous study of fields like child development and nutrition – and the applications of those findings, as an opportunity to improve people’s lives and transform societies.

Kittrell was born in 1904 in Henderson, North Carolina, and received her bachelor’s degree in home economics from Hampton in 1928. Her professors encouraged her to go on to Cornell to continue her education, and in 1936, she became the first Black woman in the country to receive a Ph.D. in nutrition — and the first in any subject at Cornell. She then returned to Hampton to teach nutrition, eventually rising to the dean of women and head of the department of home economics. In 1944, she moved to Howard University, where she worked for the next three decades.

In 1946, the State Department sent Kittrell to Liberia to study nutrition and build education networks. Based on her observations and research, she coined the term “hidden hunger” to describe people who have enough food to feel full but whose limited diets lead to vitamin deficiencies. Three years later, she received Fulbright funding to visit India, where she helped establish a home economics program at a university. 

Over the next decades, Kittrell went on to visit Hawaii, Japan, Sweden and countries throughout West and Central Africa, working on behalf of State Department and government agencies, NGOs, mission groups and the United Nations. She also welcomed international students to Howard and encouraged graduates to seek careers abroad. The editors of the 1956 yearbook declared Howard “A Center of International Education” and dedicated the volume to Kittrell, citing her service to the university as well as to humanity and the cause of “international peace and freedom.” 

In addition to her extensive travels abroad, Kittrell was involved with several studies in the U.S. on Black children’s health, the formation of Head Start, and training for Urban Extension. According to biographer Allison Horrocks, “By studying family dynamics and issues such as children’s nutrition, Kittrell found Home Economics to be a meaningful path into arenas of national policy making and global affairs.”

Kittrell received numerous awards and recognitions, including the Hampton Alumni Award, the National Council of Negro Women’s Scroll of Honor and an honorary degree from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro. She retired from teaching in 1972 but kept working as a visiting fellow at Cornell and then Hampton. She died in 1980. 

Martha Van Rensselaer was a tireless advocate for educating women and helping them improve their own lives by applying scientific rigor to the everyday responsibilities of family and home.

When she came to Cornell in 1900 to develop a reading course for farmers’ wives, Van Rensselaer didn’t have a college degree. Instead, she had experience working as a teacher and elected school commissioner and extensive knowledge of the realities of rural family life. As Liberty Hyde Bailey, the future dean of the College of Agriculture who hired her, wrote, she “came directly from the people.” 

Van Rensselaer launched the reading course by asking women what they wanted to know. The response was overwhelming — in fewer than five years, the program enrolled more than 20,000 members across the state. She invited women to set up study clubs and toured the state visiting them, first by horse and buggy and then by car. 

Inspired by this success, the College of Agriculture (now the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences) began offering credit courses in home economics, and then in 1907, it established the Department of Home Economics. Van Rensselaer and Flora Rose, a Columbia-trained nutritionist and educator, were named co-directors. 

Van Rensselaer received a bachelor’s degree from Cornell in 1909. In 1911, she and Rose became Cornell's first full women professors. Under their leadership, the department grew into a school and then, in 1925, the New York State College of Home Economics. Van Rensselaer and Rose were not only professional partners: they lived together as companions. One colleague even wrote to them as “Miss Van Rose.”

Van Rensselaer was regarded as a leading authority on issues affecting women and families. She served as president of the American Home Economics Association from 1914-1916 and with Rose and Helen Canon, co-wrote A Manual of Home Making, a widely read text on home management. From 1920 to 1926, she was the editor of the Delineator, a popular women's magazine. She also wrote regularly for the Ladies Home Journal, Children's Magazine and Boys and Girls.

During World War I, she directed the Home Conservation Division of the United States Food Administration, and she served with the American Relief Commission in Belgium after the war. In 1930, she returned to Washington, D.C., at the request of President Herbert Hoover to serve as assistant director of the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection. That same year, she successfully lobbied the New York State Legislature for the funds to build a new home economics building, and began treatments for cancer. She died in 1932, just two weeks before the cornerstone for the building bearing her name was laid. While many faculty wanted to call the building Van Rensselaer-Rose Hall, Rose was adamant that it be Martha Van Rensselaer Hall.  

Reflecting on Van Rensselaer’s legacy — what is now the College of Human Ecology — Rose later wrote, “This was truly a great achievement in the cause of bringing scientific and technological progress into closer relationship with human lives in this changing world.”