Euthenics, 1904-1911
Rebranding Home Economics
In 1904, at the sixth annual Lake Placid Conference, Richards attempted to replace home economics with the term euthenics, which she defined as: “The betterment of living conditions, through conscious endeavor, for the purpose of securing efficient human beings” (1). In addition to petitioning the American Home Economics Association to change the name of the interdisciplinary field, that year Richards also published The Art of Right Living, which defined and explained the goals of euthenics. While this attempt to replace home economics with euthenics ultimately failed, Richards never let go of the movement and re-launched euthenics in 1910, with the publication of Euthenics: The Science of Controllable Environment. Like The Art of Right Living, this book once again defined the term euthenics and provided an outline of Richards’s preliminary plan for the development of movement and scientific field (5).
No matter how great or how widespread a need might be, she thought there was little use in trying to meet it by organized efforts until public opinion had reached a point where an effective campaign could be made. As long as public opinion was forming she was continually teaching, preaching, and sowing seed by casual suggestion, but she refused to waste her time in trying to work through organizations [such as home economics] until she felt the time was ripe for them (20).
Left: An Advertisement for Richards's final book, Euthenics: The Science of Controllable Environment, n.d., from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/41940/41940-h/41940-h.htm
This advertisement for Euthenics describes the book as follows: This books is a pleas for better living conditions as a first step toward higher human efficiency. It discusses most readably the opportunity for betterment, the need of individual and community effort, the training of the child in the home and the school, stimulative education for adults, the protection of the ignorant, and the responsibility for improving the national health and increasing the national wealth.
Left: Ellen Henrietta Richards Memorial Plaque, MIT, n.d.
What's in a Name?
Richards’s decision to publish a book entitled Euthenics instead of Home Economics, suggests that euthenics was not simply a word Richards intended to be a substitute for home economics, can be found in Hunt’s biography of Richards (20, 29). Hunt distinguished between the two movements when she wrote: “Richards greatest interest…was in [the art of Right Living,] a subject far wider than Home Economics” (20). Moreover, Hunt indicated that Richards was forced to develop euthenics because home economics had become a stagnant movement that was incapable of ridding Americans of their ignorance of nutrition:
Therefore, while Richards may have originally designed home economics as the solution to society’s greatest problem, the movement, according to Hunt, veered away from Richards’s initial vision and was no loner serving its intended purpose. Instead of continuing to teach, preach, and praise home economics to an uninterested public, Richards decided to devote her time to developing the field that had become her greatest interest, euthenics.
Even though euthenics became her preferred solution to what she considered was society’s most damaging problem, she did not discard her other fields, but chose to incorporate aspects of each into euthenics. Euthenics, then, was the culmination of every field she had ever created and therefore was arguably her most comprehensive remedy for people’s nutritional negligence.
Above: Caroline Hunt, n.d., from http:// www.sohe.wisc.edu/history-of-the-school. htm
After Richards's death in 1911, her colleague and friend Caroline Hunt compiled a biography that memorialized her life and work. While she is best known as the author of The Life of Ellen H. Richards, she deserves recognition for writing the first dietary guide for the USDA, How To Select Food, which was published in 1917.
Richards's Legacy
Unfortunately, a year after re-establishing her last movement, Richards Richards died from a heart attack on the evening of March 30, 1911. She was sixty-eight. As a result, euthenics never fully developed during her lifetime. The failure of euthenics has caused historians to ignore this unique Progressive Era reform. Instead they choose to focus on her she is most often remembered as the mother of home economics and as America’s first female scientist, but is not recognized for her other impressive accomplishments.
Richards was dedicated. She was compassionate. She was scientist, who overcame the limits placed on her sex in order to spread the message that people and their homes were a reflection of their diet. Richards was the mother of home economics, oekology, and euthenics. She wrote curriculums. She developed food laboratories and the American school lunch program. She was not afraid to disagree with the more popular mainstream scientific movement of eugenics. Richards was so much more than the mother of home economics, she was an incredibly vocal and active trailblazer of the Progressive Era.