Euthenics, Women, and the Making of Better Environments
David PD Munns (City University of New York)

Dates: Monday, 31/8/2026
Start Time: 5:30pm 
Venue: Madsen Building (F09), Room 331
How to register: Free, no registration required

Abstract: In 1904, Ellen Richards introduced “euthenics.” By 1912, Lewellys Barker, director of medicine and physician-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital, would tell the New York Times that the “task of eugenics” and the “task of euthenics” was the “Task for the Nation.” Alongside the emergence of hereditarian eugenics, where fate was firmly rooted in heredity, this talk places euthenics into the same Progressive Era demands for the scientific management over environmental issues like life and labor, health and hygiene, sewage and sanitation. I argue that euthenics not only heralded women as leaders in the quest for what Richards and eugenicists termed “racial improvement” but understood reforms were to come through environmental and educational reform rather than hereditary interventions. Looking to recuperate the figure of Ellen Richards in the history of science, I place Richards and her euthenics more into the debate over eugenics rather than over the emergence of home economics. Building on the work of Donald Opitz, Staffan Bergwik, and Brigette Van Tiggelen, this talk shows, first, how Richards’ career threads the needle between the home and the laboratory as sites of science making, not as separate spheres but as overlapping realms, and helps recover how domestic concerns shaped the focus of the life sciences. Second, this talk shows how euthenics shaped eugenics by looking at the writings of American eugenicists Charles Davenport, Paul Popenoe, and David Starr Jordan on “Eugenics and Euthenics.” Third, I describe how euthenics took root in new academic departments of domestic science, home economics, and departments child welfare and family life in the 1920s and 1930s, most notably the Institute of Euthenics at Vassar College after 1923, where – super twist – Dr Spock taught for two summers, recruited by Margaret Mead.


Short Bio: 

Name: David PD Munns.

Email: dmunns@jjay.cuny.edu

Social media: https://jjay-cuny.academia.edu/DavidMunns ; www.worldoftrons.com

Currently a Professor of the History of Science at the City University of New York, David Munns has taught nearly 10,000 students across 200 classes and authored 7 books, dealing with subjects including radio astronomy, environmental and sanitary engineering, plant physiology, nuclear engineering, Euthenics and Eugenics, and the cultural history of the suffix *tron. He is currently working on a project entitled Big Science, Down Under.