Helen Stuart Campbell was an American author, economist, and editor, as well as a social and industrial reformer. She was a pioneer in the field of home economics. Her Household Economics was an early textbook in the field of domestic science.
Her first literary work was a series of stories for children, which appeared between 1864 and 1870 in Our Young Folks and The Riverside Magazine, and in book form as the Ainslee Series; then, in rapid succession, she published: His Grandmothers; Six Sinners; Unto the Third and Fourth Generation; Four, and What They Did; The Easiest Way in Housekeeping and Cooking; Adapted to Domestic Use or Study in Classes; Patty Pearson's Boy: A Tale of Two Generations; The Problem of the Poor: A Record of Quiet Work in Unquiet Places; Under Green Apple Boughs; The American Girl's Home-Book of Work and Play; The Housekeeper's Year-Book; Mrs. Herndon's Income; The What-to-Do Club: A Story for Girls; Miss Melinda's Opportunity; Prisoners of Poverty: Women Wage-workers, their Trades and their Lives; Roger Berkeley's Probation; Prisoners of Poverty Abroad; Darkness and Daylight; In Foreign Kitchens; Some Passages in the Practice of Dr.