For many, the term home economics conjures images of sterile classrooms where young girls and women learn to cook dinner and swaddle dolls, far removed from the seats of power.

Keeping the Nation's House unsettles this assumption by revealing how elite Chinese women helped to build modern China one family at a time. Trained between the 1920s and the early 1950s, home economists believed that their discipline would transform the most fundamental of political spaces - the home - by teaching women to nurture ideal families and manage projects of social reform. Although their discipline came undone after 1949, it created a legacy of gendered professionalism and reinforced the idea that leaders should shape domestic rituals of the people.

By focusing on an overlooked group of Chinese women, this book genders the past by showing how these women helped make the present, and it reveals how a group of intellectuals made the transition to the Communist era.