To supplement her father's meager income she worked as a housekeeper to the economics professor Leon Carroll Marshall while attending the university.
[1] When the United States entered World War I in 1918 Kyrk moved to London to work as a statistician at the American Division of the Allied Maritime Transport Council.
[3] Kyrk fused the emerging field of social psychology with economics and analyzed the impact of regulated consumption in wartime England.
[2] In 1923 Kyrk found employment as an economist at the Food Research Institute at Stanford University where she co-authored The American Baking Industry, 1849-1923.
[3] Kyrk served as principal economist in the United States Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Home Economics between 1938 and 1941.
She argued for better standards in consumer goods and urged a slower rate of price decontrol during World War II.
As chair of the technical advisory Kyrk also worked on the revisions of the consumer price index to reflect post-war inflation.
[4] In 1952 Kyrk retired from the University of Chicago and moved to Washington D.C. She finished writing and published the textbook The Family in the American Economy.
In the 1920s and 1930s this theoretical approach to explaining consumption by establishing the accepted standard of living was widely adopted.
Kyrk's central theoretical argument was further developed by Theresa McMahon and Jessica Blanche Peixotto.
Kyrk critiqued household production, arguing that it could not be efficient in a business sense, given the fixed overhead costs and the dispersion of tasks in a typical homemaker's day.
[5] Kyrk argued that specialized machinery and labor that could be utilized to full capacity under centralized management would lead to gradual shift away from household production.