The Vassar Chronicles | Euthenics is Introduced at Vassar

Jon Cruz Columnist

The debates over bills of fare for nineteenth century Thanksgiving dinners seemed quaint and simplistic to Vassar girls in the middle of the twentieth century. By the turn of the twentieth century, debates had shifted primarily to student eating habits specifically and nutritional concerns in general. Writers from the last century, most notably Michel Foucault, have commented on the apparent drive in the Victorian era to make nearly everything a science. One of the foremost of these new sciences, and perhaps one of the most legitimate, was nutritional science. Before it existed as a distinct and respected field, however, it was included under the umbrella of another, now-defunct, field of inquiry: euthenics.

Designed to be a discipline that applied scientific principles to everyday living, euthenics was conceived of and promoted by Ellen Swallow Richards, a member of Vassar's Class of 1870 and a nationally-renowned chemist; she had earlier gained fame as both the first female to study and teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as the scientist who founded the discipline of ecology. To her, euthenics was the pinnacle of her career: in an effort to carve out a sphere in the sciences for women, she had called for the control of both the natural and social environment through the latest advancements in health and hygiene. She had transformed the traditional role of women into a profession. For a woman in the Progressive Era, promoting a professional "woman's sphere" was seen as liberal and, in fact, quite controversial.

The science itself was slow to catch on, even if its tenets were not. Home economics, a branch of the field, was quickly adopted and accepted at institutions of secondary and higher education across the nation; Richards received numerous accolades and became a major leader in several national organizations designed to promote the science. As far as euthenics, though, few institutions of higher education wished to teach it.

That is, until Vassar did.

There was a great deal of disdain about the formation of the euthenics program on campus in the 1920s, as I have discussed in previous columns. These contemptuous feelings was not limited to the campus; the media ridiculed it as well. The New York Times's coverage of the College's growing program--headlined as "Vassar Girls to Study Home-Making as Career"--in May of 1926 presented the program in largely neutral language, but placed a great deal of emphasis on its vocational aspects, rather than its scientific angles. "Men worry about the extravagances of their wives," commented a Vassar professor in the article, "because women haven't learned to live efficiently."

The implication, of course, was that euthenics was training housewives to more efficiently spend their husbands' money. The same article made concerted efforts to identify the husband as breadwinner and the wife as consumer. So much for abandoning stereotypes.

Although the program--based in Blodgett Hall, which was constructed specifically to house it--was largely abandoned within a decade, its great influence was felt on campus. Students conducted fairly high-profile studies of campus nutrition and student health. These were so well-received that they were frequently professionally published. There were experiments with forms of nutrition that departed from the campus dining system; early studies in cooperative living became the prototype for Ferry House several decades later.

The experiments and studies indicated that there could be a great deal of improvement in the state of campus health. While old favorites such as cakes, pig knuckles, and broth had given way to more recognizable college fare, students were still not getting the proper balance of food in their diet. (In fairness to the young ladies on campus, of course, nutritional science was still in its nascent form.)

The decentralized campus dining system of early Vassar was a large contributor to the problems of a balanced diet. When we speak of "Camp Vassar" today, we conjure up images of Freshman Orientation; early in the last century, however, we might have been speaking of the dining experience. Students were expected to act as servers and helpers, assisting the dorm chef in distribution of meals. A chef in each dining hall had his (or, in some rare cases, her) own kitchen, and thus the workload could vary tremendously. The Nov. 16, 1952 issue of Poughkeepsie Sunday New Yorker described the situation and its impacts on student health.

"For one thing," the paper reports, "each girl had to be scheduled as to which day of the week should be waitress, dishwasher or bus boy. For another, dinner time became a race to see which table could be cleared first. Since each girl knew she would be the 'employe' [sic] another time, she would 'cooperate' with the day's waitress by gulping down her food and clearing out post haste, hoping that the girls would do the same on 'her day.'

"These factors, combined with the typically heavy academic load which Vassar students are required to shoulder, led...to a 'hectic state of mind caused by too little time spent at meals.' The cafeteria was conceived as a cure for these problems."

Nutrition-minded voices on campus organized against this system. By 1952, the campus experienced the most major change in dining services since the college opened its doors: each dining hall in each dorm was converted to cafeteria-style dining service. Architecture was altered somewhat to allow for the ease of trays and, even more importantly, students coming to the servers, instead of vice versa.

Fortunately, spiffy new trays and a more leisurely dining experience were not the only benefits of the conversion. The aforementioned New Yorker explains, "by far the most striking feature of all the dining facilities [is] the spotlessness of the equipment...and cleanliness...is the watchword."

This system, of course, pointed in the direction of our modern dining system. As Vassar marched to coeducation, familiar features of campus life began to fall into place: more food in the library, students dining more frequently off campus, and, before long, students hanging out in the back of Main Building at the Retreat. (Not in its current form, of course, as the College Center extension had yet to be built.)

When men did arrive permanently on campus in 1969, the College was in something of a quandary. It hoped to expand its student body dramatically, but it had nowhere to house them: the slipshod creation of the terrace apartments and town houses was a quick solution to this problem. Once they had places to house the co-ed population, the college realized it had no place to feed them. The inner dining halls of the dorms simply could not fit all of the new students (who, of course, were often housed in rooms that were not designed to be doubles).

What to do? One plan, favored by a surprising number of people, was to demolish the valued grass space on the Quad by erecting a dining center in the middle. Some versions of this plan called for a webbed walkway leading from each dorm to the central dining facility. Fortunately, individuals with greater respect for Elizabethan architecture prevailed and the plan was thrown out.

Unfortunately, the replacement plan resulted in another architectural travesty: the beautiful Students Building was gutted, cut in half, and expanded out the sides, crudely plopping a kitchen where a massive student dance space and auditorium area once existed. Rather than build the kitchen off to the side, the revisionist architects chose to place dining centers there, preventing the creation of a dining space that would make use of the beautiful Adams plaster ceiling and a gorgeous set of interior balconies. The All-Campus Dining Center--ACDC--was born.

Fortunately, that debate has been made partially moot by the recent creation of an awkwardly-unnamed student space (Students Center? The Straus Center? UpCDC?) on the top floor of what is once again called the Students Building.

Unfortunately, in opening a centralized dining service in a time of increased student involvement on campuses everywhere, the college also opened itself to amplified amounts of student complaints. (But, to the school's credit, it also opened itself to increased amounts of student participation in campus dining.)

But more on that next time.