Ellen Swallow Richards (left), the first female student and instructor at MIT, was one of the first to use the term, while Julia Clifford Lathrop (right) continued to promote it in the form of an interdisciplinary academic program later to be mostly absorbed into the field of home economics.
"Eugenics deals with race improvement through heredity. Euthenics deals with race improvement through environment. Eugenics is hygiene for the future generations. Euthenics is hygiene for the present generation. Eugenics must await careful investigation. Euthenics has immediate opportunity. Euthenics precedes eugenics, developing better men now, and thus inevitably creating a better race of men in the future. Euthenics is the term proposed for the preliminary science on which Eugenics must be based."
In a New York Times article of May 23, 1926, Rose Field notes of the description, "the simplest [is] efficient living".[3] It is also described as "a right to environment",[4] commonly as dual to a "right of birth" that correspondingly falls under the purview of eugenics.[5]
Euthenics is not normally interpreted to have anything to do with changing the composition of the human gene pool by definition, although everything that affects society has some effect on who reproduces and who does not.[6]
Etymology
The term was derived in the late 19th century from the Greek verb eutheneo, εὐθηνέω (eu, well; the, root of τίθημι tithemi, to cause). (To be in a flourishing state, to abound in, to prosper.—Demosthenes. To be strong or vigorous.—Herodotus. To be vigorous in body.—Aristotle.)[1]
Also from the Greek Euthenia, Εὐθηνία. Good state of the body: prosperity, good fortune, abundance.—Herodotus.[1]
The opposite of Euthenia is Penia, Πενία ("deficiency" or "poverty") the personification of poverty and need.[7]
History
Ellen Swallow Richards (Born in 1842–died in 1911; Vassar Class of '70) was one of the first writers to use the term, in The Cost of Shelter (1905), with the meaning "the science of better living".[8] It is unclear if (and probably unlikely that) any of the study programs of euthenics ever completely embraced Richards' multidisciplinary concept, though several nuances remain today, especially that of interdisciplinarity.
Vassar College Institute of Euthenics
After Richards' death in 1911, Julia Lathrop (1858–1932; VC '80) continued to promote the development of an interdisciplinary program in euthenics at the college. Lathrop soon teamed with alumna Minnie Cumnock Blodgett (1862–1931; VC '84), who with her husband, John Wood Blodgett, offered financial support to create a program of euthenics at Vassar College. Curriculum planning, suggested by Vassar president Henry Noble MacCracken in 1922, began in earnest by 1923, under the direction of Professor Annie Louise Macleod (Chemistry; First woman PhD, McGill University, 1910).[9]
According to Vassar's chronology entry for March 17, 1924, "the faculty recognized euthenics as a satisfactory field for sequential study (major). A Division of Euthenics was authorized to offer a multidisciplinary program [radical at the time] focusing the techniques and disciplines of the arts, sciences and social sciences on the life experiences and relationships of women. Students in euthenics could take courses in horticulture, food chemistry, sociology and statistics, education, child study, economics, economic geography, physiology, hygiene, public health, psychology and domestic architecture and furniture. With the new division came the first major in child study at an American liberal arts college."[10]
For example, a typical major in child study in euthenics includes introductory psychology, laboratory psychology, applied psychology, child study and social psychology in the Department of Psychology; the three courses offered in the Department of Child Study; beginning economics, programs of social reorganization and the family in Economics; and in the Department of Physiology, human physiology, child hygiene, principles of public health.[11]
The Vassar Summer Institute of Euthenics accepted its first students in June 1926. Created to supplement the controversial euthenics major which began February 21, 1925, it was also located in the new Minnie Cumnock Blodgett Hall of Euthenics (York & Sawyer, architects; ground broke October 25, 1925). Some Vassar faculty members (perhaps emotionally upset with being displaced on campus to make way, or otherwise politically motivated) contentiously "believed the entire concept of euthenics was vague and counter-productive to women's progress."[12]
Having overcome a lukewarm reception, Vassar College officially opened its Minnie Cumnock Blodgett Hall of Euthenics in 1929.[9] Dr. Ruth Wheeler (Physiology and Nutrition – VC '99) took over as director of euthenics studies in 1924. Wheeler remained director until Mary Shattuck Fisher Langmuir (VC '20) succeeded her in 1944, until 1951.[12]
The college continued for the 1934–35 academic year its successful cooperative housing experiment in three residence halls. Intended to help students meet their college costs by working in their residences. For example, in Main, students earned $40 a year by doing relatively light work such as cleaning their rooms.[13]
In 1951, Katharine Blodgett Hadley (VC '20) donated $400,000, through the Rubicon Foundation, to Vassar to help fund operating deficits in the current and succeeding years and to improve faculty salaries.[14]
"Discontinued for financial reasons, the Vassar Summer Institute for Family and Community Living, founded in 1926 as the Vassar Summer Institute of Euthenics, held its last session, July 2, 1958. This was the first and last session for the institute's new director, Dr. Mervin Freedman."[15]
Elmira College
Elmira College is noted as the oldest college still in existence which (as a college for women) granted degrees to women which were the equivalent of those given to men (the first to do so was the now-defunct Mary Sharp College).[16] Elmira College became coeducational in all of its programs in 1969.
A special article was written in the December 12, 1937 The New York Times, quoting recent graduates of Elmira College, urging for courses in colleges for men on the care of children. Reporting that "preparation for the greatest of all professions, that of motherhood and child-training, is being given the students at Elmira College in the Nursery School which is Conducted as part of the Department of Euthenics."[17]
Elmira College was one of the first of the liberal arts colleges to recognize the fact that women should have some special training, integrated with the so-called liberal studies, which would prepare them to carry on, with less effort and fewer mistakes, a successful family life. Courses in nutrition, household economics, clothing selection, principles of foods and meal planning, child psychology, and education in family relations are a part of the curriculum.[17]
The Elmira College nursery school for fifteen children between the ages of two and five years was opened primarily as a laboratory for college students, but it had become so popular with parents in the community that there was always a long waiting list.[17]
The New York Times article notes how the nursery had become one of the essential laboratories of the college, where recent mothers testified to the value of the training they received while in college. "Today," one graduate said, "when it is often necessary for young women to continue professional work outside the home after marriage, it is important that young fathers, who must share in the actual care and training of the children, should have some knowledge of correct methods."[17]
Today
Many factors led to the movement never getting the funding it needed to remain relevant, including: vigorous debate about the exact meaning of euthenics, a strong antifeminism movement paralleling even stronger women's rights movements, confusion with the term eugenics, the economic impact of the Great Depression and two world wars. These factors also prevented the discipline from gaining the attention it needed to put together a lasting, vastly multidisciplinary curriculum. Therefore, it split off into separate disciplines. Child Study is one such curriculum.[10]
Martin Heggestad of the Mann Library notes that "Starting around 1920, however, home economists tended to move into other fields, such as nutrition and textiles, that offered more career opportunities, while health issues were dealt with more in the hard sciences and in the professions of nursing and public health. Also, improvements in public sanitation (for example, the wider availability of sewage systems and of food inspection) led to a decline in infectious diseases and thus a decreasing need for the largely household-based measures taught by home economists."[18] Thus, the end of euthenics as originally defined by Ellen Swallow Richards ensued.
The influential historian of education Abraham Flexner questions its scientific value in stating:
[T]he “science” is artificially pieced together of bits of mental hygiene, child guidance, nutrition, speech development and correction, family problems, wealth consumption, food preparation, household technology, and horticulture. A nursery school and a school for little children are also included. The institute is actually justified in an official publication by the profound question of a girl student who is reported as asking, “What is the connection of Shakespeare with having a baby?” The Vassar Institute of Euthenics bridges this gap![19]
Eugenicist Charles Benedict Davenport noted in his article "Euthenics and Eugenics," reprinted in Popular Science Monthly:
Thus the two schools of euthenics and eugenics stand opposed, each viewing the other unkindly. Against eugenics it is urged that it is a fatalistic doctrine and deprives life of the stimulus toward effort. Against euthenics the other side urges that it demands an endless amount of money to patch up conditions in the vain effort to get greater efficiency. Which of the two doctrines is true?
The thoughtful mind must concede that, as is so often the case where doctrines are opposed, each view is partial, incomplete and really false. The truth does not exactly lie between the doctrines; it comprehends them both.
[...] [I]n the generations to come, the teachings and practice of euthenics [...] [may] yield greater result because of the previous practice of the principles of eugenics.[20]
Along similar lines argued psychologist and early intelligence researcherEdward L. Thorndike some two years later for an understanding that better integrates eugenic study:
The more rational the race becomes, the better roads, ships, tools, machines, foods, medicines and the like it will produce to aid itself, though it will need them less. The more sagacious and just and humane the original nature that is bred into man, the better schools, laws, churches, traditions and customs it will fortify itself by. There is no so certain and economical a way to improve man's environment as to improve his nature.[21]
Eugenics is a set of beliefs and practices that aim to improve the genetic quality of a human population. Historically, eugenicists have attempted to alter the frequency of various human phenotypes by inhibiting the fertility of people and groups they considered inferior, or promoting that of those considered superior.
Granville Stanley Hall was an American psychologist and educator who earned the first doctorate in psychology awarded in the United States of America at Harvard College in the nineteenth century. His interests focused on human life span development and evolutionary theory. Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University. A 2002 survey by Review of General Psychology ranked Hall as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with Lewis Terman.
Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards was an American industrial and safety engineer, environmental chemist, and university faculty member in the United States during the 19th century. Her pioneering work in sanitary engineering, and experimental research in domestic science, laid a foundation for the new science of home economics. She was the founder of the home economics movement characterized by the application of science to the home, and the first to apply chemistry to the study of nutrition.
Katharine Burr Blodgett was an American physicist and chemist known for her work on surface chemistry, in particular her invention of "invisible" or nonreflective glass while working at General Electric. She was the first woman to be awarded a PhD in physics from the University of Cambridge, in 1926.
Robert William Fogel was an American economic historian and winner of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As of his death, he was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and director of the Center for Population Economics (CPE) at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is best known as an advocate of new economic history (cliometrics) – the use of quantitative methods in history.
York and Sawyer was an American architectural firm active between 1898 and 1949, subsequently as the Office of York & Sawyer, Architects; Kiff, Colean, Voss & Souder into the mid-1950s; and was succeeded by Kiff, Colean, Voss & Souder, who were active as late as 1965. The firms' early work is exemplary of Beaux-Arts architecture as it was practiced in the United States. The original partners Edward York and Philip Sawyer both trained in the office of McKim, Mead & White in the 1890s. In 1898, they established their independent firm, based in New York City.
Tezukayama University is a private university in Nara, Japan. Tezukayama University has two campuses—one in Gakuen-mae (学園前) in Nara city, and the other in eastern Ikoma (東生駒). Tezukayama University has many facilities in a historical setting.
Helen Dean King was an American biologist. She was involved in breeding the Wistar lab rat, a strain of rats genetically homogeneous albinos intended for use in biological and medical research.
American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences (AAFCS) is an American professional association that networks professionals in the area of family and consumer science. It was founded in 1908 as the American Home Economics Association by Ellen H. Richards. In 1994 it changed its name to the current one.
Katharine Bement Davis was an American progressive era social reformer and criminologist who became the first woman to head a major New York City agency when she was appointed Correction Commissioner on January 1, 1914. Davis was a former school teacher from upstate New York, who later became one of the nation's first female doctorates when she received her Ph.D. in economics from the University of Chicago in 1901. Davis was also known for her work as an American penologist and a writer who had a long-lasting effect on American penal reform in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Mary E. Sweeney was a home economics professional who was head of the home economics section of the United States Food Administration during World War I. Sweeney was President of American Home Economics Association.
Herbert William Conn was an American bacteriologist and educator.
Minnie Cumnock Blodgett (1862–1931) graduated from Vassar College in 1884, later becoming a trustee (1917–1931). She is the mother of Katharine Blodgett Hadley, who was also a Vassar trustee (1942–1954), and was chairman of the Board (1945–1952).
Pauline Gracia Beery Mack was an American chemist, home economist, and college administrator. Her research in calcium, nutrition, radiation, and bone density began during the 1930s, and culminated in work for NASA when she was in her seventies.
Jessie Stanton was an American authority on pre-school education and author closely associated with the Bank Street School.
Mabel Newcomer (1892–1983) was an economics professor at Vassar College from 1917 to 1957. She also taught courses in finance and corporations. Newcomer was known among the Vassar economics department as the best "tax man" during her time there.
Ruth Wheeler was an American chemist specialising in the field of nutrition and public education.
Annis Bertha Ford Eastman (1852–1910) was an American Congregational minister, and one of the first non-Quaker women in the United States to be ordained. She ministered at several churches in New York State, including Park Church in Elmira. She was a popular speaker, as well. In 1893, she spoke at the Congress of Women, held at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. She presented at the National Council of Women of the United States in 1895.
The Lake Placid Conferences (1899–1909) established home economics as a formal discipline in the United States. Following a meeting of the Lake Placid Club in 1898, trustees including Ellen Swallow Richards, Melvil Dewey, and his wife Annie Godfrey Dewey planned a formal meeting to discuss home economics issues in the United States with leaders in the field. Among the topics discussed at the first Lake Placid Conference in September 1899 were preparing women for leadership, distribution of educational bulletins, development of laboratories, teacher training in domestic science, and kitchen gardening.
1 2 Vassar Historian. "A Documentary Chronicle of Vassar College". Retrieved 16 July 2024. A Division of Euthenics was authorized to offer a multidisciplinary program focusing the techniques and disciplines of the arts, sciences and social sciences on the life experiences and relationships of women. Students in euthenics could take courses in horticulture, food chemistry, sociology and statistics, education, child study, economics, economic geography, physiology, hygiene, public health, psychology and domestic architecture and furniture. With the new division came the first major in child study at an American liberal arts college.
University of Minnesota, General College (c. 1934). Euthenics: Home Management, the House, Textiles, Food and Nutrition. Minneapolis: s.n. p.174.
Conklin, Edwin Grant (1935). Freedom and Responsibility: A Biographical View of Some Problems of Democracy. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. OL17976912M.
Dixon, Maloise Sturdevant (1936). Fundamentals in Personal Euthenics. Minneapolis, Minn: Burgess publishing company, Mimeoprint and photo offset publishers. OL16772279M.
Gurley, Jack (1962). Euthenics Can Assure Peace, and John's Rare Date. New York: Graphic Press. OCLC17988501. OL5855756M.
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