Euthenics, Women, and the Making of Better Environments

In the first half of the twentieth century, the new science of controlled heredity, “eugenics,” was shaped from the beginning to the middle of the twentieth century by another new science of controlled environments, the science of “euthenics.” Euthenics, Women, and the Making of Better Environments describes the founding of euthenics by Ellen Henrietta Richards, one of the most significant American scientists of the late-nineteenth century, well known as a key founder of Home Economics. Richards’ euthenics grew out of Progressive Era demands for the scientific management over environmental issues like life and labor, health and hygiene, sewage and sanitation.

Author David Munns unites women’s history, environmental history, and the history of science to show how euthenical conceptualizations of environments shaped ideas and practices of eugenics, heredity, nature, and nurture. Munns reinterprets American eugenics as a program seen on all sides to be in competition with a now-forgotten, environmentally focused rival, euthenics, and so throws new light on one of the most important social movements of the twentieth century. He reveals how the struggle between euthenics and eugenics fills in several well-known historiographical lacunae, including a fixation only on the genetics half of the study of life and the under a lack of the study of women’s roles in environmental thinking. Finally, in describing euthenics’ institutional shape at the Vassar College Institute of Euthenics, where figures like Margaret Mead and Benjamin Spock taught in their summers, we see a time when the environment held the potential for change.