Introduction: The Euthenics movement failed because it took the radical approach of redefining the home as part of the profes

The first decade of the previous century witnessed vast changes in the American system of public health. New theories of bacteriology had revolutionized understandings of disease and contagion during the nineteenth century. For the first time, the agents of disease could be seen, and a degree of order could be found within what had seemed only random tragedy. In an era where professionalism was at a premium, the new public health rapidly gained status. From the Sanitary Science of the nineteenth century emerged two public health movements, related in their aims but fundamentally different in their underlying philosophies. The first of these was domestic science or euthenics. Championed by Ellen Richards of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, domestic science declared that the home should be governed by scientific principles in order to improve the quality of life of its inhabitants. The second movement, popular in women’s clubs and exemplified by the work of Mrs. William Lowell Putnam, was municipal housekeeping. In the wake of the bacteriological and industrial revolutions, municipal housekeepers argued that in order for women to fulfill their duties as wives and mothers they had to become involved with civic reform and public health movements. Each of these movements carried with it a redefinition of the home and a new mandate for women’s involvement in public health. Ultimately, the domestic science movement failed because it took the radical approach of redefining the home as part of the professional sphere, which violated the still-dominant gender ideology of Victorian separate spheres. The municipal housekeeping movement, on the other hand, succeeded because it assumed the home to be fundamentally gendered and simply extended its boundaries.
To understand the impact of Sanitary Science in the early years of the twentieth century, we must first examine its origins in the sanitation and public health movements in the mid-nineteenth centuries. Through the mid-nineteenth century, sanitarians had little to offer in the way of public health measures and avoiding contagion except to advise healthy members of society to "maintain one’s general health, live in a dry, well-ventilated house, and avoid people who were obviously ill."^[1] Likewise, as Nancy Tomes points out, for most of the nineteenth century the movement focused on private hygiene and voluntary compliance with sanitary recommendations.^[2] However, with the theories proposed in the 1840s and 1850s of zymotic diseases—diseases transferred by air and water—a movement for greater public responsibility for health emerged. Evidence of this trend can be seen in the creation of municipal and state boards of health beginning in 1855.^[3] In addition, the introduction of the germ theory in the 1880s and 1890s, helped give these boards both the scientific and popular authority to increase compulsory regulations. A second common theme within the sanitary science movement was the emphasis on "house diseases." The concept of a house disease stemmed from the sanitarian principle that infectious diseases such as typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever arose from improperly kept houses.^[4] Nancy Tomes points out in her article "Spreading the Germ Theory" that this emphasis on house diseases, "imposed heavier, more constant burdens on women than men" thus making domestic disease prevention "a field in which women could naturally excel as educators and researchers as well as wives and mothers."^[5] Because Sanitary Science and public health were so closely to the home, their existence worked to begin a redefinition of the Progressive Era home.
Throughout the Victorian period the ideal of home had been closely tied to that of femininity through the conceptual framework of separate spheres. With the rapid industrialization which occurred following the Civil War, the home came to be seen as a sanctuary from the storm of business and vice that occurred in the public world. Home became a symbol for what Sarah Stage describes as "a sentimentalized but...potent response to the threat to traditional patterns of living imposed by urban industrialism."
Rather than representing just the physical space of a house, the Victorian Home was instead a "haven from the heartless world."^[6] Furthermore, Burton Bledstein has argued that the Victorian tendency to turn every subject into a natural science prompted Victorians to categorize people by the time and space in which they were located. This, in turn, lent itself to "identifying every category of person who naturally belonged in a specific ground-space: the woman in the residential home, the child in the school, the man in his place of work" and so on.^[7] The combination of these trends led to Victorian conceptions of home and work which were intimately tied to the roles of women and men respectively and which clearly separated the home from the outside world of professionalism and industrialization. All this, however, would change with the introduction of Sanitary Science into the home.
In his book, The Culture of Professionalism, Burton Bledstein has argued that the ideal of professionalism began to emerge in the mid-Victorian period, which he dates as lasting from 1865-1890, in contrast to the Progressive era, which lasted from 1890-1915. During this period, America witnessed a movement toward organization and specialization in spectator sports, as well as within the field of medicine and the social sciences. As Bledstein argues, the movement for professionalism represented an emphasis on democracy and individualism. By becoming a professional, Bledstein argues, one could achieve the democratic ideal of informed and unchallenged autonomy and authority. Likewise, the professional "grasped the concept behind a functional activity, allowing him both to perceive and to predict those inconspicuous or unseen variables which determined an entire system of developments."^[8] In this way, the professional was able to rise above the confusion and chaos of daily life to see the order and truth that lay beneath the surface. A final aspect of the profession was the sense of objectivity and expertise that surrounded it. According to Bledstein, the power of the profession stemmed from "the jurisdictional claim of that authority derived from a special power over worldly experience...the professional person possessed esoteric knowledge about the universe which if withheld from society could cause positive harm."^[9]
The Sanitary science movement, armed with the new developments of bacteriology, fit every one of Bledstein’s characteristics of a profession. Unlike their predecessors, the Progressive Sanitary Scientists possessed the scientific knowledge that allowed them to explain the emergence of disease beyond the "functional level." With this knowledge, the Sanitary Scientists promised to transcend and explain what had heretofore been seen as random deaths due to disease. Finally, through their knowledge of bacteriology and contagion, Sanitary scientists literally held the power to ward off death from society. Sanitary science, then, forced the application of the previously male ideas of professionalism and objectivity onto the physical space of the traditionally female home. This clash between the male and female spheres created tension over where the boundaries between these spheres lay. The two movements that emerged in response to this redefinition attempted to resolve this conflict in two different ways. The first of these movements, domestic science, attempted to promote a redefinition of home as simultaneously professional and private. The second movement, municipal housekeeping, avoided the issue of redefining the home by simply extending the boundaries of the private sphere to include those aspects of the public sphere which directly affected it. The failure of the first movement and the success of the second resulted from both the ideological framework of each as well as the methods each used to achieve its goals.
One of the earliest and strongest proponents of sanitary science as both a private and public enterprise was Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards. Born in 1842, Ellen Henrietta Swallow was educated at home by her parents who felt that the one room school near their home would not provide her with an adequate education.^[10] As a teenager she went on to attend Westford Academy, graduating in 1864. After two years of what she would later describe as "purgatory" caring for her invalid mother, Ellen Swallow enrolled in the new Vassar College where she focused on chemistry.^[11] Upon graduation she applied to, and was rejected from, several chemical firms in the northeast before being accepted at the Institute of Technology in Boston (soon to become MIT). She was accepted, however, as a "special student" and was not required to pay tuition. Initially, Richards believed that she received this status because of her economic situation. As she later discovered, however, its real purpose was so that the president "could say I was not a student should any of the trustees or students make a fuss about my presence." After her graduation in 1873, she was retained at MIT as a staff worker and lecturer on sanitary food conditions. Two years later, Ellen Swallow married Robert Hallowell Richards, the head of the mining and metallurgical engineering laboratory at the Institute. Over the course of her career she would become a paid instructor in chemistry in MIT’s chemistry laboratory for women, as well as an instructor at the country’s first institute of sanitary chemistry at MIT. Although she went on to complete the requirements necessary to obtain a doctorate in chemistry at MIT, she was denied the title because the board did not want to give the university’s first D.S. in chemistry to a woman.^[12] Furthermore, despite her many years as a lecturer she was never given a full professorship at the university.
Despite her lack of tenure, Ellen Richards had a significant influence on one of the earliest movements to integrate the professional and private spheres. Richards’ influence on the creation of the field of domestic science manifested itself in a number of ways. First, her lecturers were a requirement for all MIT students. Because of this she had the ears of the men and women would become some of the nations leading scientists. In addition, Richards published a number of books written for a lay audience on a variety of topics dealing with how to make the home a safer, more efficient and healthier institution. One such book, Sanitation in Daily Life, provides several "illustrative experiments" that the average housekeeper can do using a few Petri dishes (obtained from a bacteriologist and reusable after sterilization in a kitchen oven) to demonstrate to herself that there is more to dirt than just "dust or sand".^[13] Likewise, in First Lessons in Food and Diet, Richards details the classes of food and provides a scientific analysis of several common foods, including a comparison between the composition human milk and of cow’s milk. She then goes on to provide sample diets for families.^[14] A final example of Richard’s influence on the development and popularization of domestic science is her work as chairman of the Lake Placid Conference. These conferences began in 1899 with 11 members including "6...teachers, lecturers and authors...2 in close contact with school work, one with a large heart for the welfare of the race...one with faith in science as a cure all, one wise with the wisdom of the future...one an optimist with...a belief that to know the right thing was to do it, one representing the intelligent housekeeper’s side." The goal of the initial conference was to provide the emerging discipline with a "name and an organized body of knowledge...needed to gain recognition from the intelligent and especially from the academic class."^[15] Later, the annual conference focused on the popularization and further development of the fields of domestic science and home economics. Her work as chairman of the Lake Placid Conference allowed her to influence the course of the movement from inside its leading organization.
The Municipal Housekeeping movement, on the other hand, was exemplified by the lives of women such as Elizabeth Lowell Putnam. Mrs. Putnam was born in 1862, almost exactly two decades after Ellen Richards. The sister of President Lowell of Harvard University and the wife of William Putnam, Elizabeth was active throughout her life in her community and in politics. As one of the most vocal and most prominent members of the Women’s Municipal League of Boston (WMLB), Mrs. Putnam provides an excellent case study in the work and attitudes of clubwomen regarding municipal housekeeping. During her association with the WMLB, Elizabeth Putnam held several prominent positions including the chair of the executive committee of the Dept. of Public Health and the Committee on Prenatal and Obstetrical Care.^[16] In addition to her work with the WMLB, Putnam served on several other organizations created to improve public health, including the executive board of the Massachusetts Milk Consumers’ Association, as well as the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality.
In their attitudes regarding the roles of women in society, two women could not have been more different than Ellen Richards and Elizabeth Lowell Putnam. Richards strongly opposed sexual separatism in both the social and the ideological senses. As a member of Boston’s Woman’s Education Association (WEA) she worked to get Harvard and MIT to provide access to women students. In 1876, when MIT opened a Woman’s Laboratory, Richards did agree to become an instructor there. Nevertheless, she clearly viewed this position and the creation of the laboratory as only temporary steps in women’s progress toward equal access to MIT. Her attitude regarding the matter is best understood through her reaction to the news, three years later, that MIT would allow women to be admitted and examined for degrees on the same grounds as men. Regarding this development (which technically put her out of a job) Ellen wrote that she was "seeing the realization of my hopes and wishes in all directions...this is the great step which I have been waiting for."^[17] Furthermore, in the 1890s when she was asked to serve on the women’s board at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago she replied that she did "not wish to be identified with a body, the very existence of which seems to be out of keeping with the spirit of the times. Twenty years ago I was glad to work on women’s boards for the education. The time is now some years past when it seemed to me wise to work that way (emphasis in original)." From Richards’ point of view, separatism was a mistake that would only limit women’s opportunities. Thus, she explained that she "prefer[ed] to give my time and influence to work in which men and women are in accord."^[18] Accordingly, when she was asked to join the Lake Placid Conference in 1899, she actively recruited men working in the developing field of nutrition including Wilbur O. Atwater, and Alfred C. True.^[19]
Elizabeth Putnam, on the other hand, strongly supported sexual separatism. As an anti-suffragist she wrote articles and speeches on multiple occasions defending the idea that women should not have the ballot because it would constitute a blurring of the roles of the sexes. Interestingly, she often used an evolutionary argument to justify her opinions on women’s suffrage. In a 1910 article for the Boston Common entitled "Women and the Ballot" Putnam argues that,
Far back in the dim past, when life was in the amoeba stage, there was no sex; but as life grew more complex sex gradually emerged. If it had been the best economy to have both sexes do the same work, would sex ever have arisen? Certainly not. Those women now who want to force their sex to do the same work as men think themselves progressive, but if they were to study the course of evolution they would see that they are trying to put life back where it was before sex emerged...the most womanly women are those who are furthest advanced. The highest development of sex is toward the greatest difference of function.^[20]

Furthermore, in an editorial in the Sunday Post she stated her belief that "a feminist is a person so blinded by admiration of the male sex that she cannot conceive of woman’s work except as an imitation of man’s.^[21] Woman’s "first duty must always be at home and her best effort must be given to her own home and what makes for the betterment of homes the world over."^[22] Though Ellen Richards did not align herself with the suffragists, believing that the vote would not be the panacea to bring women equality, the sort of separatism advocated by women like Elizabeth Lowell Putnam constituted exactly the kind of thinking Richards had hoped to eliminate. The attitudes toward the roles of women held by these two women are reflected in their work in public health. Thus, despite the similarities in the material goals between the movements of domestic science and municipal housekeeping, their ideologies and methods would be radically different.
Beginning in the 1890s, Richards began to focus on the practical education of homemakers. Richards believed that the position of housewife was actually quite a powerful one in society. If a homemaker were informed about how to secure a sanitary environment for herself and her family she would be able to eliminate many of the social and medical problems, which Richards argued, stemmed fundamentally from poor living conditions. One example of her work in this field took the form of running the New England Kitchen, a model kitchen and shop, which was designed as "a place for the cooking and sale of certain typical foods. The cooking is done on scientific principles, and in sight of the customers as an object lesson in methods and cleanliness. It is also a kind of household experiment station, where new apparatus may be tested and frank opinions expressed."^[23] Richards hoped that the Kitchen would influence is patrons to apply the scientific methods in their own homes. A second example can be seen in her work with the School of Housekeeping, which she attempted to reform into an institution where educated women could be trained in "home and social economics."^[24] By institutionalizing the skills needed to be a homemaker, Richards attempted to combine elements of the female sphere, such as cooking and cleaning, with those of the male sphere.
One of the major battles that Richards encountered early on was the debate over what to call the new science that she was proposing. Domestic science, Home Economics and Domestic Arts had all been suggested at one point or another. Earlier, Richards had attempted to define the science of understanding the way living and nonliving things interact as "oekology" from the Greek work "oikos" meaning household. As Richards remarked in a speech explaining the implications of this new word, "as theology is the science of religious life, and biology the science of [physical] life...so let Oekology be henceforth the science of [our] normal lives...the worthiest of all the applied sciences which teaches the principles on which to be found healthy and happy life."^[25] It quickly became apparent, however, that the botanists had already claimed this term. When the Lake Placid group met for the first time, they decided that, in order to have a unified movement, a single name had to be agreed upon. During their first year, the organization decided upon home economics, "home meaning the place of shelter and nurture for the children and for those personal qualities of self sacrifice for others for the gaining of strength to meet the world; economics meaning the management of this home on economic lines as to time and energy as well as to mere money."^[26] Although this was the name by which the field would be known, many of the members were not happy with it and through the next few years alternative names were suggested at each annual conference. Ellen Richards expressed the feeling of discontent at the sixth annual conference saying "the name Home economics would not keep coming up every year if we were quite satisfied with it. It is really "education for living" that we wish to express."^[27] Since the botanists had already appropriated ecology, Richards coined a new term, "euthenics" which she defined as the use of the science of a controlled environment in order to achieve a better way of life. She had constructed the term to contrast with Francis Galton’s term eugenics, which expressed the idea that breeding would produce a better race of humans. In contrast to Home Economics, euthenics was not as overtly tied to the home, and consequently not an inherently gendered term. Likewise, euthenics did not limit itself only to work done within the home, but could be applied directly to all work done in the community that affected standards of living. Thus the name was seen as particularly appropriate for courses taught at the college or university level.
Nevertheless, the name "home economics" became the dominant one in the field and its adoption had specific implications for the ways in which both the field and the home were run. The fundamental idea of home economics was that the home should be run in a scientific manner.^[28] For, as Richards remarked, "the twentieth century household demands of its managers, first of all a scientific understanding of the sanitary requirements of human habitation."^[29] This represented a significant departure from earlier, Victorian, ideas of the home that focused on the ideal as a home being a safe haven, a place where women and children were protected from the hazards of the outside world. By pointing out the dangers inherent in that home life, Richards contributed to changing the status of the housewife from a passive nurturer to an active defender of her family’s health and livelihood. Furthermore, by increasing the responsibility laid on the homemaker, Richards promoted the idea that women needed to be equipped to handle these responsibilities. Thus, her work on sanitation and public health also held within it profound implications for changing women’s roles.
Richards’ theories on the way a home should be run paralleled the Progressive Era emphasis on professionalism and an expert culture. In striving to elevate the work of a homemaker, Richards repeatedly focused on the need for professionalization of the home, and borrowed from the Progressive ideology which gave power to the professional. This tactic can be seen clearly in her many battles with the Eastern women’s colleges to get home economics and domestic science recognized as part of the curriculum. For example, in a paper presented to the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA) in 1890, Richards argued that "all merely mechanical repetition of manual work is drudgery.... The woman who boils potatoes year after year with no thought of the how or why, is a drudge; but the cook who can compute the calories of heat which a potato of given weight will yield is no drudge. Knowledge of principles always gives interest to work, and is an incentive to more knowledge."^[30] Here Richards adopts one of the fundamental arguments of professionalism, that knowledge beyond the functional level elevates and enlivens work, to argue for a professionalization of work in the home. Richards maintained that when a housekeeper acquired this knowledge both she and the housework she performed would benefit.
Richards also argued that domestic science encouraged the spirit of the individual college woman by replacing "timidity with confidence."^[31] The young housekeeper, according to Richards, would be faced with a number of domestic trials that would require her to act confidently and without being "afraid of her house and her servants." Without indoctrination into domestic science, these young housewives would falter and "likely come to grief because of the nervous strain she must constantly bear." Furthermore, Richards espoused the argument that the "spirit of the age...rebels against the dictates of the individual but submits freely to the despotism of an organization." However, she felt that the one thing capable of combating the "tyranny" of an organization was knowledge. Only by learning the principles of domestic science could college women be able to master their homes and act independently. After all, "what is our education worth to us if we cannot order our houses in peace and comfort?"^[32]
Finally, she argued that the home economics required a degree of specialized knowledge that would not only empower the individual but would protect society as a whole. In her address to the ACA, Richards argued that there was "a call for...knowledge of the fundamental principles of healthful living and domestic economy. In all work for the amelioration of the condition of mankind, philanthropic and practical, there must be a basis of knowledge of the laws and forces which science has discovered and harnessed for our use"^[33] In this passage, we see Richards arguing that college women, by undertaking domestic science and applying its principles to both in their own homes and their communities, will fundamentally improve society in ways which they could not if they had not had this training. Thus she argues that professionalization of home economics is necessary in order to provide adequate training to members of society who will fulfill a vital role in keeping the society safe from danger.
Despite Richards’ arguments, however, the Eastern colleges were reluctant to include home economics or domestic science in their curriculum. In 1893, Bryn Mawr College rejected the idea of beginning a domestic science department on the grounds that "there are not enough elements of intellectual growth in cooking or housekeeping to nourish a very serious or profound course of training for really intelligent women."^[34] This objection illustrates the idea that Richards worked to disprove; that housework was by its very nature drudgery, devoid of any intellectual aspects.
The second objection raised by the president of Bryn Mawr was that home economics, by it’s very definition was a feminine discipline and, as such, had no place in the curriculum of the women’s colleges created in the image of the all male Ivy League colleges. Here we begin to see the clash between the ideas of male and female spheres and the goal of professionalization of the home. While the Eastern women’s colleges supported women’s efforts to enter the professional sphere, they felt that if they connected themselves with disciplines associated with traditional ideals of femininity it would undermine them as respectable and legitimate institutions of learning. This objection illustrates that Progressive conceptions of the home and of the professional world were both fundamentally gendered and inherently incompatible. At the heart of the objections of the eastern colleges was the idea that although women could, and should, leave the female sphere for the professional world, even a movement to standardize and elevate work in the home could not truly bring it up to the level of the disciplines of the male sphere.
In response to these objections, Richards intensified her work to professionalize household work. One method employed was the establishment of the Lake Placid conferences on home economics Essentially, the Lake Placid members hoped to legitimize the study and practice of the home by creating a coherent profession for it. At the tenth annual convention, Ellen Richards presented the abstract of a paper she had presented to the N.E.A. council regarding the role of domestic science in schools. In it she argues, as she did before the ACA, that the serious study of home economics is needed to offset the "degeneration of home ideals" and the "wasting [of] health, bodily energy, time and brain power" which were together "retarding not only the country’s material development but...limiting the character and force of its people."^[35] Again, by arguing that the domestic scientists possessed an esoteric knowledge necessary to prevent the downfall of society, Richards attempted to argue for the field’s acceptance as a profession. Likewise, she went on to emphasize that a study of domestic science gives "people a sense of control over their environment. To feel one’s self in control of a situation robs it of terror."^[36] Thus she plays upon the ideas of individualism and democracy to indicate the importance of the field of home economics.
Richards’ work in trying to professionalize the field of home economics was successful on several fronts. By 1909, nearly every agricultural or land grant college offered courses in domestic science or home making. Likewise, the establishments of institutions such as the Carnegie Nutrition laboratory testified to the spread and growth of the fields encompassed by the home economics movement.^[37] In advancing home economics as a profession, Richards had hoped that she would be able to persuade the more prestigious Eastern women’s colleges to include it in their curriculum.
Her efforts regarding the professionalization the field ultimately backfired, however, in 1905 when the ACA declared "home economics...has no place in a college course for women" but rather "belongs in a professional course...taken after leaving colleges."^[38] Sarah Stage has argued that this rejection of home economics in the eastern colleges led to a shift in power within the field from Ellen Richards and Boston to the Midwest land-grant colleges and the Department of Agriculture which "actively supported research in home economics through its experiment stations, [and] had the jobs and resources" that allowed them to dictate to a large extent what was researched and taught in the field of home economics.^[39]
The refusal to include home economics or euthenics as part of the curriculum in the eastern women’s colleges served to shift the course of home economics from a movement which had had the potential to be a meeting place between the male and female spheres, to one which remained decidedly in the female sphere. As Ellen Richards had conceived of euthenics, it would have been a synthesis of legitimate natural and social sciences. Furthermore, euthenics would have worked to raise the status of the female sphere to that of the male sphere by applying the standards of professionalism to the home environment. However, without the backing of the more prestigious universities, home economics became more and more closely associated with the traditional, rural ideas of domesticity. Compounding this fact, Sarah Stage has shown that two legislative acts, the Smith-Lever Act and the Smith Hughes Act, passed in 1914 and 1917 respectively, labeled home economics as a rural and vocational discipline at a time when America was becoming more urban and more focused on "pure" science and research.^[40] Because of this, it became easier to marginalize the discipline as women’s work. In fact, euthenics which had been conceived of as a science applicable to the interactions between all aspects of human life and the environments, came to be replaced by two different movements: Home Economics and Municipal Housekeeping. Both of these movements were specifically gendered and removed from the center of American science and public health. Though each field made significant advances during the second half of the Progressive Era, neither was regarded with the same import that Sanitation had offered in the Victorian Era or that Euthenics had attempted to achieve in the early Progressive period.
The foundations of the municipal housekeeping movement actually began in pockets of activism shortly after the rise of sanitary science towards the end of the Victorian period. However, it was only during the Progressive Era that the movement began to gain momentum with the founding of settlement houses and organization of urban women’s clubs. In 1910, Jane Addams articulated the underlying theory of the movement when she stated that "if a woman would keep on with her old business of caring for her house and rearing her children she will have to have some conscience in regard to public affairs lying quite outside of her immediate household."^[41] As America became increasingly urban, the problems associated with urbanization began to encroach upon the Victorian ideal of the home as a sanctuary from the outside world. Crowded tenement buildings, unemployment, crime, lack of parks and playgrounds for children, poor water quality, unsafe food suppliers, inadequate garbage disposal, transportation and emergency relief were just a few of the issues which arose from the developing cities all over America to threaten the serenity of the middle class home.^[42]
The essential goal of the municipal housekeepers was to fulfill their duties to their families by taking an active role in improving the community outside the physical walls of the home. Like the domestic scientists, municipal housekeepers used traditional women’s roles to justify women’s nontraditional involvement in the community. Unlike the domestic scientists, however, the municipal housekeepers did not create a conflict of interest by trying to alter the fundamental qualities of either the female or the male spheres. Rather they simply extended the physical boundaries of the female sphere. Because of this, municipal housekeeping as a movement did not need validation from the institutions of the public sphere such as universities. Essentially, they essentially needed validation from within the female sphere, from their society, to affirm that the work they were doing in their communities did not violate, but rather reinforced traditional gender ideologies.
One of the most common ways in which municipal housekeepers worked for change was through the emerging women’s clubs of the time period. The woman’s club began to emerge as formal organization during the early part of the nineteenth century. Early women’s organizations took the form of voluntary associations for charity work, literary societies, and religious groups.^[43] By the turn of the century organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Young Women’s Christian Association, and the Association for the Advancement of Women were well established, as was the Association of Collegiate Alumnae to which Ellen Richards belonged. Likewise, regional clubs such as the New England Woman’s Club, Mothers’ Clubs and municipal clubs had begun to emerge. One of these clubs was the Women’s Municipal League of Boston, a voluntary organization established in 1908 with the goal of, as one member voiced it, "making Boston a cleaner, healthier and more beautiful city."^[44] In order to achieve these goals, the women organized committees to address the issues of Social Welfare and Public Health. The latter of these committees was further divided into sub-committees which worked on the problems of improving the milk supply, streets and alleys, infant and prenatal care, and waste disposal.
The goals of the municipal housekeepers were reflected in the kinds of reforms they focused on achieving. In general, they tended to focus on areas that had traditionally been closely tied to women’s work in the home. Improving the appearance of streets, the quality of food available for purchase, and the care of infants all had direct analogues in the traditional home setting. However, in order to achieve these reforms, the municipal housekeepers had to use knowledge and methods which had been traditionally quite outside of the female sphere. These methods included charity work, public education campaigns, articles in newspapers and leaflets, lobbying for legislation and use of scientific research, particularly bacteriology.
The charity work of the WMLB is best seen in their establishment of pre-natal care services. In an address read at the Baby Saving Conference in Philadelphia in May of 1912, Mrs. Putnam detailed a three-year long "experiment" conducted by the WMLB to determine "what benefits, if any, would result from careful watching of [pregnant women] by a nurse under the orders of a physician." The women were not removed from their homes because "pregnancy is a normal function, and pregnant women should be surrounded in so far as it is possible by normal surroundings—we wanted only to help them to make their homes as ideal as they could be made." Accordingly a nurse was sent to the homes of each of the patients approximately once every ten days to take the patients blood pressure and test her urine to prevent eclampsia, as well as to provide the patient with advise on exercise, diet and clothing. At the end of one year the program saw a decrease in rates of eclampsia and stillbirths as well as an average birth weight that surpassed the national average.^[45]
A second method used by the WMLB was public education. This often took the form of lectures given in settlement houses. However, other methods such as the sale of "Healthgrams" were also common. A Healthgram, generally speaking, was a small note card containing a short rhyme about the aspect of health that the WMLB wanted to promote. For example, one rather morbid healthgram regarding the quality of milk went as follows:

In addition, cartoons and letters to the editor published in the popular press helped the WMLB to spread its message.
Thirdly, the women of the WMLB repeatedly published articles, editorials and pamphlets to gain public support for their work. One example of this is a two-page article by Mrs. Elizabeth Lowell Putnam published in Collier’s magazine entitled "Pure Milk—and the Way to Get It." In this article, Mrs. Putnam outlines current and proposed legislation regarding the purification of milk in the state of Massachusetts. In addition to quoting numerous statistics about the death rates of infants due to milk-borne pathogens, the article contains several images of the germs which can be found in impure milk such as the "bacilli mesenterici."^[47] Articles such as these reached a wide audience across the state, and certainly outside of Boston and were instrumental in allowing the WMLB to gain a broader basis of support for its work.
Fourth, the WMLB worked to lobby for legislation. Elizabeth Putnam submitted a "Memorandum of Argument before the Committee on Public Health in favor of Senate Bill 92 and House Bill 747" on behalf of the WMLB.^[48] Furthermore, the WMLB introduced several bills to the local legislature. These included the "Private Ways in city of Boston" which permitted the City to enter private ways in order to clean or police them. Likewise, "Sanitary Care and Covering of Food Act", also introduced by the WMLB, authorized the Boards of Health to make and enforce rules on the storage and sale of food.^[49] These actions may seem unusual given Putnam’s views on women in politics. This seeming paradox was reconciled by Putnam’s argument that in order to fulfill her duties as a wife and mother she had to improve the quality of food for her family. In order to accomplish this, she had to enter the world of politics to bring about changes in legislation. Thus we see how municipal housekeeping resolved the conflict between the public and private spheres by claiming that the private sphere now included those aspects of the public sphere which directly affected it.
One final example of the unorthodox methods which municipal housekeepers used to achieve "traditional" goals is Mrs. Putnam’s involvement in the campaign for pure milk provides an excellent of this. The quality of milk in America’s growing cities was of great concern to the municipal housekeepers. As Mrs. Putnam put it in her 1909 Report of the Sub-Committee on the Milk Supply, "most milk is dirty. Berlin is said to consume in its milk 300 pounds of cow dung daily and New York 10 tons of filth and refuse...Babies suffer most from this dirty milk, for the most important factor in the care of infants is their food...where there are many deaths we can be sure that those who live are many of them rendered less fit for life by the struggle which they have made."^[50] This statement is typical of the ways in which municipal housekeepers framed their arguments; it focuses on the "dirty" milk and the care of children, both of which fell neatly within the female sphere. However, in the same article, Mrs. Putnam uses both bacteriological and economic arguments to support her point. "Our law says" she reminds her reader, "that no milk can be sold at a temperature above 50 Fahrenheit, but unless the public is educated this cannot be enforced for fear of a milk famine. If you will help create a demand, the supply will follow."^[51] Furthermore, she quotes numerous statistics regarding the bacterial counts of milk and points out that of the millions of bacteria, "among these germs were many of tuberculosis. One charitable institution for children buying milk which contained tuberculosis germs virulent enough to give the disease to guinea pigs inoculated with the milk."^[52] Both of these statements indicate that, although the women were undertaking this work as a fulfillment of their duties as women, the means to their success and the measures of it were to come from the male sphere.
Despite their nontraditional methods, the work of the clubwomen in public health was initially dismissed and devalued, especially by those men and women trying to end the separatism in the care of the home and family. At the Fourth Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics in 1903 the members of the conference debated the subject of the Women’s Clubs. Ultimately, the conference decided not to send out "for discussion by women’s clubs any syllabus on standards of living" because "the subject of home economics was above the level of most club women. They can write very good papers on art and the Renaissance, but when it comes to a paper on standards of living it is above their intellectual grasp from lack of early education." To put it plainly: "it is a problem for which they are not yet ready.^[53] This attitude reflected a common reception of the work of women in women’s clubs. The name "municipal housekeeping" may have, as Anne Scott maintains, "conferred an air of respectability upon what might otherwise have been considered unseemly public or political activity" but it also undermined and underrepresented the importance of those activities.
Undoubtedly, some of the women involved in the municipal housekeeping movement felt that the movement was a step toward becoming equal citizens and active members of public life. However, because of the air of respectability and affirmation of traditional gender roles it provided, municipal housekeeping often attracted conservative women as well. At its core, the municipal housekeeping movement was based on the Victorian ideal that women’s God-given role was that of homemaker. Because of this, municipal housekeepers often argued that women had a special duty to improve their communities. In an address to the graduating class at Hancock School, Mrs. William Putnam reminded her audience that, "we have a wonderful opportunity to help our city by working to make it cleaner and healthier and a better place to live in. We can do this better than men can because we are women, because we are the housekeepers and the homemakers, and we can do it better than we could anywhere else because we have so many more opportunities given us."^[54] This idea reflects the sexual separatism that Ellen Richards had worked so hard to avoid. However, by making use of the dominant gender ideology, the Municipal Housekeepers were able to draw support from men and women who adamantly believed that women had no place interfering in the male sphere of public life. One such woman was Mrs. Putnam, an ardent anti-feminist, she in a May of 1915 edition of the Sunday Post, she argued against Feminism stating that "a feminist is a person so blinded by admiration of the male sex that she is unable to conceive of woman’s work except as an imitation of man’s."^[55]
Women’s involvement in public health during the early part of the twentieth century was determined by the conflict between two sets of ideals: the Progressive ideals of professionalism and the Victorian ideals of separatism between the male and female spheres. The public health reforms during this period extended those of the mid-Victorian period by further emphasizing sanitation and nutrition in the home and community. Because these reforms were so closely tied to women’s traditional roles in society, the clash between the two sets of ideas was inevitable as the boundaries between the professional and scientific male sphere blurred with the domestic female sphere. The movement for euthenics and domestic science, led by Ellen Richards attempted to resolve this conflict by professionalizing the female sphere. By turning the kitchen into a laboratory and the home into a continuous experiment in bacteriology, Richards hoped to elevate the work of household management to "it’s proper position."^[56] However, without support from outside of the female sphere, the effort soon faded out giving way to the less revolutionary home economics and municipal housekeeping. Rather than attempting to redefine the status of the male and female spheres, the municipal housekeeping movement resolved the ideological conflict by using traditional gender roles to mask the entry of women into the male sphere. By using this less dramatic tactic, the municipal housekeeping movement was able to make use of a broader support base and was ultimately more successful in achieving many of its aims. However, in doing so the women of the municipal housekeeping movement fundamentally circumscribed the areas in which they could hold influence and ultimately helped to marginalize the areas of public health in which women worked.

Defending House and Home:

Women’s Involvement in Progressive Public Health Reform

Defending House and Home:

Women’s Involvement in Progressive Public Health Reform