The domestic science movement represented a further step away from the craft tradition in cookery and emphasized scientific expertise over creativity. Elements of the craft tradition remained, however, in the communal cookbook. Many school, community, and religious groups have published cookbooks as a means of raising funds and consciousness for an institution they believe in. One constant in all these cookbooks is their mission. Beyond merely teaching cooking skills, they teach social expectations, either explicity or implicitly.
Many early books have suggestions on how to treat one's husband or children, for example.
By the mid-1950s, the focus was more on how to be a good hostess. Whenever I've spoken about this material to any audience, it resonates. I'm fascinated by the reading and the writing of this material and what it suggests about women's lives, and how we can use it to piece together a social history. Theophano's research has already done much to illuminate women's domestic lives in the nineteenth century and beyond.