Euthenics /juːˈθɛnɪks/ is the study of the improvement of human
functioning and well-being by improvement of living conditions. Affecting the
"improvement" through altering external factors such as education and
the controllable environment, including the prevention and
removal of contagious disease and parasites, environmentalism,
education regarding employment, home
economics, sanitation, and housing.
Rose Field notes of the definition in a May 23, 1926 New
York Times article, "the simplest being efficient living." A
right to environment.
The Flynn effect has been often cited as an example of
Euthenics. Another example is the steady increase in body size in industrialized
countries since the beginning of the 20th century.
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.
Origin of the term
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.)
Also from the Greek Euthenia, Εὐθηνία.
Good state of the body: prosperity, good fortune, abundance.—Herodotus.
The opposite of Euthenia is Penia, Πενία
("deficiency" or "poverty") the personification of poverty and need.
History
Ellen H. Swallow Richards (1842–1911; 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".
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), one of Vassar's most distinguished alumnae,
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).
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."
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.
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."
Having overcome a lukewarm reception, Vassar College
officially opened its Minnie Cumnock Blodgett Hall of Euthenics in 1929. 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.
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.
Tuition at Vassar for 1934 was $500 and, including fees for
room and board, the fixed cost for the year was about $1,000. The New
York Times
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.
"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."
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). Elmira College became
coeducational in all of its programs in 1969.
A special article was written in the December 12, 1937 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."
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.
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.
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."
Euthenics today
Vigorous debate about the exact meaning of euthenics, a
strong antifeminism
movement paralleling even stronger women's
rights movements, confusion with the term eugenics, followed by the Great
Depression and two world wars, where among the many factors which led to
the movement never really getting the funding, nor the attention needed to put
together a lasting, vastly multidisciplinary curriculum, but instead, split
off into separate disciplines. Child Study is one such curriculum.
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." Thus,
the end of euthenics as originally defined by Ellen Swallow Richards ensued.
Euthenics vs. eugenics
According to Ellen Richards, in her book Euthenics: the
science of controllable environment (1910):
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The betterment of living conditions, through conscious
endeavor, for the purpose of securing efficient human beings, is what the
author means by Euthenics.
“Human vitality depends upon two primary conditions—heredity and hygiene—or
conditions preceding birth and conditions during life.”
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.
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Debate, misconceptions and opposition
Debate over misconceptions about the movement started almost
from the beginning.
In his comparison Eugenics, Euthenics, And Eudemics,
(American Journal of Sociology, Vol.
18, No. 6, May 1913), Lester F. Ward of Brown
University opens the second section regarding euthenics lamenting:
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Is there, then, nothing to do? Are we to accept that modem
scientific fatalism known as laissez
faire, which enjoins the folding of the arms? Are we to preach a gospel
of inaction? I for one certainly am not content to do so, and I believe that
nothing I have thus far said [about eugenics] is inconsistent with the most
vigorous action, and that in the direction of the betterment of the human
race. The end and aim of the eugenists cannot be reproached. The race is far
from perfect. Its condition is deplorable. Its improvement is entirely
feasible, and in the highest degree desirable. Nor do I refer merely to
economic conditions, to the poverty and misery of the disinherited classes.
The intellectual state of the world is deplorable, and its improvement is
clearly within the reach of society itself. It is therefore a question of
method rather than of principle that concerns us.
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Ward later noted about the organic environment that:
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Darwin has taught us that the chief barrier to the
advance of any species of plants or animals is its competition with other
plants and animals that contest the same ground. And therefore the fiercest
opponents of any species are the members of the same species which demand the
same elements of subsistence. Hence the chief form of relief in the organic
world consists in the thinning-out of competitors. Any species of animals or
plants left free to propagate at its normal rate would overrun the earth in a
short time and leave no room for any other species. Any species that is
sufficiently vigorous to resist its organic environment will crowd out all
others and monopolize the earth. If nature permitted this there could be no
variety, but only one monotonous aspect devoid of interest or beauty.
Whatever we may think of the harsh method by which this is prevented, we
cannot regret that it is prevented, and that we have a world of variety,
interest, and aesthetic attractiveness.
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Vassar historians note that "critics faulted the new
program as a weakening of science and a slide into vocationalism. The
influential educator and historian of education, Abraham
Flexner—one of the founders of the Princeton Institute for Advanced
Study—attacked the program, along with other “ad hoc” innovations like
intercollegiate athletics and student governments, in Universities, American,
English, German (1930)."
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“Well, what is euthenics? Euthenics is the ‘science of
efficient living;’ and the ‘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…. 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!”
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In the summer of 1926, Margaret
Sanger created a stir when she gave a radio address, called “Racial
Betterment,” in the first Euthenics Institute, where she praised attempts to “close our gates to
the so-called ‘undesirables’” and proposed efforts to “discourage or cut down
on the rapid multiplication of the unfit and undesirable at home,” by
government-subsidized voluntary sterilization. (from The
Selected Papers of Margaret Sanger, vol. 1 (2003), Esther Katz, ed.)
Eugenicist, Charles Benedict Davenport, noted in his
article "Euthenics and Eugenics," found reprinted in the Popular
Science Monthly of January 1911, page 18, 20:
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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. What a child becomes is always the resultant of two sets of forces
acting from the moment the fertilized egg begins its development—one is the
set of internal tendencies and the other is the set of external influences.
What the result of an external influence—a particular environmental
condition—shall be depends only in part upon the nature of the influence; it
depends also upon the internal nature of the reacting protoplasm.
Incest, cousin marriage, the marriage of defectives and
tuberculous persons, are, in wide circles, taboo. This fact affords the basis
for the hope that, when the method of securing strong offspring, even from
partially defective stock—and where is the strain without any defect?—is
widely known, the teachings of science in respect even to marriage matings
will be widely regarded and that in the generations to come the teachings and
practice of euthenics will yield grater result because of the previous
practice of the principles of eugenics.
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In a New York Times op-ed dated October 24, 1926, entitled
"Eugenics and euthenics," in response to an op-ed entitled
"Bright Children Who Fail" which appeared the previous October 15,
student of child psychology, Joseph A. Krisses observes:
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From intensive study we realize the importance of
eugenics—the right of birth, and also the subject of euthenics—the right to
environment. Too little credit is given to environment when we speak of
children having hereditary traits as "Like father, like son," or
"Chip off the old block." Such phrases have their origin from the
study of eugenics. No one has ever taken an Edwards baby and reared it in a Jukes
environment.
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Quotations
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"Not through chance, but through increase of
scientific knowledge; not through compulsion, but through democratic idealism
consciously working through common interests, will be brought about the
creation of right conditions, the control of the environment." (Ellen H. Swallow Richards)
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"Right living conditions comprise pure food and a
safe water supply, a clean and disease free atmosphere in which to live and
work, proper shelter and adjustment of work, rest, and amusements." (Ellen H. Swallow Richards)
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"Probably not more than twenty-five percent in any
community are capable of doing a full days work such as they would be capable
of doing if they were in perfect health" (Ellen H. Swallow Richards)
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"Men ignore nature's
laws in their personal lives. They crave a larger measure of goodness and
happiness, and yet in their choice of dwelling places, in their building of
houses to live in, in their selection of food and drink, in their clothing of
their bodies, in their choice of occupations and amusements, in their methods
and habits of work, they disregard natural laws and impose upon themselves
conditions that make their ideals of goodness and happiness impossible of
attainment." (George E. Dawson, The
control of life through Environment)
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"It is within the power of every living man to rid
himself of every parasitic disease." (Louis
Pasteur)
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