Dr. Margaret Calder is a scientist. Or she was, until the late 1960s decided her career would look better on a man.
Now she has a new assignment: a government-sponsored home economics initiative. Syndicated columns. Instructional pamphlets. A daytime television segment designed to make housework feel cheerful and unthreatening. Her job, essentially, is to explain recipes and smile more.
Margaret does not smile more.
Instead, she treats every segment like a laboratory. Thermodynamics in the kitchen. Systems engineering in household management. Chemistry in the products women are sold but never taught to question. She doesn't call it subversion—she simply refuses to dumb it down.
As her audience grows, something unexpected happens. Women start asking questions. Girls start imagining futures that don't require permission. And the men who designed this tidy little program start to realize they may have miscalculated.
Complicating Margaret's carefully ordered life is her runaway niece—a sharp-eyed teenager who absorbs every lesson, intended and otherwise, and has no patience for her aunt's talent for strategic silence.
The Chemistry of Care is a novel about what happens when a woman who was told to make science palatable decides to make it powerful instead.
