Euthenics, the science of controllable environment / A plea for better living conditions as a first step toward higher human efficiency

by Ellen H. Richards

Infant mortality is controllable through the training of the mother and nurse. Unsanitary houses are the results of careless housekeeping, usually a product of apathetic fatalism. Landlords assume that the woman will submit. When she has a woman sanitary inspector to appeal to, matters will take on a different aspect.

Unsanitary alleys exist because the abutters do not complain loudly enough to the right authorities. Dirty markets have been so long tolerated because women buyers carried the same fatalism to the stalls—“what is, has to be.”

Society is only just beginning to realize that it has at its command today for its own regeneration a great unused force in its army of housewives, teachers, mothers, conscious of power but uncertain how to use it. Perhaps the most progressive movement of the times is one led by women who see clearly that cleanness is above charity, that moral support must be given to those who know but do not dare to do right, and that knowledge must be brought to the ignorant. Nothing can stop this most notable progress but a relapse into apathy and fatalism of the vast army of women now being enlisted to fight disease.

The opportunity has come, the responsibility is woman’s hereafter. No one can take it from her; she has knowledge. The door has opened, she has taken the weapons in hand, is learning to use them. Will she falter on the eve of victory simply because it involves some sacrifice of prejudice or tradition? Must she not boldly accept the twentieth century challenge and fight her way to victory, even at some æsthetic sacrifice? In another hundred years, then, Euthenics may give place to Eugenics, and the better race of men become an actuality.

The keeping of the house, the laundry work, the cleaning, the cooking, the daily oversight, must have for its conscious end the welfare of the family. It cannot be done without labor, but the labor in this as in any process may be lightened by thought and by machinery.

Knowledge of labor-saving appliances is today everywhere demanded of the successful establishment EXCEPT of the family home. Is it not time that it came in for its share? If the housewife would use wisely the information at her hand today, it is safe to say that in six cases out of ten she could cut in half the housekeeping budget and double the comfort of living.

As conditions are, the twentieth century sees a strange phenomenon—the most vital of all processes, the raising of children, carried on under adverse conditions; human labor and life being held of as little account as in the days of building the pyramids.

Women may be trained to become the economic leaders in the body politic. It is doubtful if life will be anything but wasteful until they are trained to realize their responsibility.

The housewife was told that she must stay at home and do her work. This was preached at her, written at her, but no one of them all, save, perhaps, the Englishmen Lecky and H. G. Wells, saw the problem in its social significance, saw that the work of home-making in this engineering age must be worked out on engineering principles, and with the coöperation of both trained men and trained women. The mechanical setting of life is become an important factor, and this new impulse which is showing itself so clearly today for the modified construction and operation of the family home is the final crown or seal of the conquest of the last stronghold of conservatism, the home-keeper.

Tomorrow, if not today, the woman who is to be really mistress of her house must be an engineer, so far as to be able to understand the use of machines and to believe what she is told. Your ham-and-eggs woman was of the old type, now gone by in the fight for the right to think.