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.”

Additional resources about Martha Van Rensselaer include a faculty biography in the exhibition From Domesticity to Modernity: What was Home Economics? from the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, and the documentary Martha Van Rensselaer: A Vision for the Ages.