Euthenics

Thirty-five married women, 25 children, three husbands, nine unmarried women and a grandmother assembled last week at Poughkeepsie, N. Y., for a new kind of Institute. The children were put in a special school, the husbands loitered near, while President Henry Noble MacCracken of Vassar College explained to the attentive women: "It is an endeavor to answer the criticism that women's higher education does not have anything to do with her principal occupation* the family." We are not training cooks; we are not training welfare workers. We are giving women a liberal outlook upon the problem of the modern home in society. . . . 'Euthenics' is taken from the Greek, meaning 'good adjustment of life. . . . ' "

It was the fruit of a $550,000 endowment given Vassar last year by her trustee, Mrs. John W. Blodgett of Grand Rapids, Mich. In the autumn, Euthenics at Vassar will come fully into its own with many courses in the regular curriculum, and a Euthenics laboratory. The courses begun last week were under two heads: family relationships, and the family as an economic unit. There were to be lectures by hygienists and sociologists, including Mrs. Margaret Sanger of the Birth Control League, on the psychological and physiological adjustments of husbands and wives, mothers and children, fathers and children. Economists were to elucidate family production, consumption, and community life.

*It will be recalled that students at the University of North Carolina last May obtained by petition a series of lectures on the wedded state (TIME May 31).