Euthenics: The Science of Controllable Environment

Chapter IX

There is responsibility as well as opportunity. The housewife an important factor and an economic force in improving the national health and increasing the national wealth.

It would indeed seem that opposition to woman’s participation in the totality of life is a romantic subterfuge, resting not so much on belief in the disability of woman as on the disposition of man to appropriate conspicuous and pleasurable objects for his sole use and ornamentation. “A little thing, but all mine own,” was one of the remarks of Achilles to Agamemnon in their quarrel over the two maidens, and it contains the secret of man’s world-old disposition to overlook the intrinsic worth of woman.

W. I. Thomas, Women and Their Occupations,
American Magazine, October, 1909.

The president of the British Medical Association about 1892 said, “I wish to impress it upon you that the whole future progress of sanitary movement rests, for its permanent and executive support, upon the women of our land.”

In a letter to Madame Bodichon, dated April 6, 1868, George Eliot writes: “What I should like to be sure of as a result of higher education for women—a result that will come to pass over my grave—is their recognition of the great amount of social unproductive labor which needs to be done by women, and which is now either not done at all or done wretchedly.”

Quoted by Mrs. Nixon in a paper before the Conference
of Women Workers in England, 1904.