Flemmie Kittrell and the Preschool Experiment

Alexis Pedrick joins Katie Hafner to bring you an episode from The Lost Women of Science Initiative, a non-profit educational organization dedicated to telling the forgotten or untold stories of remarkable female scientists and their groundbreaking work through history.

The episode, which originally aired in October 2023, is about Flemmie Kittrell, the first Black woman to earn a PhD in Home Economics. In the early 1960s, Flemmie decided to see what would happen if you gave poor kids a boost early in life, in the form of a really great preschool. Every day for two years, parents would get free childcare, and their kids would get comprehensive care for body and mind—with plenty of nutritious food, fun activities, and hugs. What kind of difference would that make? And would it matter later on?

Credits

Host: Alexis Pedrick

Executive Producer: Mariel Carr

Producer: Rigoberto Hernandez

Associate Producer: Sarah Kaplan

Music by Blue Dot Sessions

Resource List

Flemmie Kittrell audio interviews, Black Women Oral History Project Interviews, 1976–1981, the Harvard Radcliffe Institute's Schlesinger Library Institute

Kittrell, Flemmie, "The Negro Family as a Health Agency," The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 18, No. 3, The Health Status and Health, 1949

Baure, Lauren, "Does Head Start Work?," The Brookings Institution, 2019