Educated Women, Sanitation and the Home: Ellen Richards and the Theory of Euthenics, 1900-1911

• In Event: Discourses of nature and gender

Abstract

Scientist and reformer Ellen Richards (1842-1911) worked during the early Progressive Era in the sciences. While Richards wrote on the environment for her entire professional career, her final book Euthenics (1911) synthesizes her life-long beliefs on the environment and humanity’s role in preserving environmental and human health. Richards defined euthenics as dealing “with race improvement through environment” as “the betterment of living conditions…for the purpose of securing efficient human beings.”[1]

Richards was also a proponent of women's higher education and she envisioned her theory of euthenics as a place for women to play a leadership role. Euthenics first started in the home where women had the most authority. Beyond the home, it was the educated woman who would work in settlement houses, higher education, public schools and other professional spaces open to women and convince the public of euthenics’ logic. In addition to Progressive-era constructs of gender, race also played a role in Richards's euthenics in that Richards argued euthenics was for the entirety of the "human race," not just white men and women. That euthenics phonetically sounded so similar to eugenics was strategic. Hoping to capitalize on the interest eugenics garnered, Richards’s deliberately mimicked the “race-saving” promises while eliminating the need for “improvement through heredity.” Instead she focused on the environment which she and other Progressive reformers believed to be controllable through human manipulation.

The goal of this paper will be to parse euthenics as a theory of gender and the environment: How did Richards see women as the leaders in this movement? Did she sense any contradictions in her promotion of women within the home while she herself actively worked outside the home at MIT and touring the lecture circuit? Richards's published monographs and her manuscripts will serve as the source material.

Author

• Serenity Sutherland, SUNY Oswego