This is an important work written in the early 1900s about choosing a household staff, what to look for, and what questions to ask. Through this work, Helene Barker also attacks the Washington D.C. laws regulating industrial cleaning employees but neglecting domestic cleaning employees who were 'abused' by lack of regulations that led to unfair pay, extraordinarily long work days, and sometimes harsh demands by the employer. The references to the events of the time in the U.S. made this work historically significant.

In her 1917 work, Clara Barker applies business principles to the domestic sphere, helping women to free themselves of doing the housework by turning the running of the household into an efficient business model.

American eating changed dramatically in the early twentieth century. As food production became more industrialized, nutritionists, home economists, and so-called racial scientists were all pointing Americans toward a newly scientific approach to diet. Food faddists were rewriting the most basic rules surrounding eating, while reformers were working to reshape the diets of immigrants and the poor. And by the time of World War I, the country's first international aid program was bringing moral advice about food conservation into kitchens around the country. In Modern Food, Moral Food, Helen Zoe Veit argues that the twentieth-century food revolution was fueled by a powerful conviction that Americans had a moral obligation to use self-discipline and reason, rather than taste and tradition, in choosing what to eat.