Feminist and women scholars in all disciplines have challenged the traditional masculist "lens of analysis" and have sought to bring into focus the "missing text" of female experience. This paper proposes an alternative to gender-bound lens of analysis because either or both masculist and feminist lenses are too limited to focus adequately on the new knowledge. Also examined is the unique position in which women and men in the female-defined discipline of home economics find themselves in relation to male-defined disciplines which incorporate a masculist view of the world and assume it to be "human." To gain a fresh perspective, the work of the "Annales" historian Fernand Braudel is examined. One goal of the "Annales" school was to reconstruct the past to recover the lost dimensions of everyday life and thereby "demasculinize" history (Stoianovich, 1980). In this model, the two spheres of human action are the private, identified with Hestia, the Greek goddess of hearth and home, and the public, identified with Hermes, the Greek messenger god. A Hestian hermeneutic is applied to Catherine Beecher's "Treatise on Domestic Economy" in order to reconstruct her intent. Beecher's message is that daily life involves both reproductive and productive processes, and that education must enable us to meet both demands. (BZ)