Ellen Swallow Richards

Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards ( Swallow; December 3, 1842 – March 30, 1911) was an American industrial and safety engineer, environmental chemist, and university faculty member in the United States during the 19th century. Her pioneering work in sanitary engineering, and experimental research in domestic science, laid a foundation for the new science of home economics. She was the founder of the home economics movement characterized by the application of science to the home, and the first to apply chemistry to the study of nutrition.

Richards graduated from Westford Academy (second oldest secondary school in Massachusetts) in 1862. She was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She graduated in 1873 and later became its first female instructor. Richards was the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to obtain a degree in chemistry, which she earned from Vassar College in 1870.

Richards was a pragmatic feminist, as well as a founding ecofeminist, who believed that women's work within the home was a vital aspect of the economy. She made strides forward in the area of women's education, specifically in developing laboratory skills. Through her work she created multiple organizations and published many articles, writing over 100 publications during her lifetime.

Biography

Early childhood

thumb|upright|Daguerreotype of Ellen Henrietta Swallow, c. 1848

Richards was born in Dunstable, Massachusetts. She was the only child of Peter Swallow (b. June 27, 1813, Dunstable; d. March 1871, Littleton, Massachusetts) and Fanny Gould Taylor (b. April 9, 1817, New Ipswich, New Hampshire), both of whom came from established families of modest means and were believers in the value of education.

Early life and education

Swallow was home-schooled in her early years. She was prone to sickness, so her parents felt that home-schooling her would keep her healthy, since the local school often had children suffering from diseases. This was one of the few co-educational secondary schools in the nation at the time. Peter Swallow sold the family's farm and moved to the town just so she could attend the school. Studies at the academy included mathematics, composition, and Latin, similar to other New England academies of the time. Swallow's Latin proficiency allowed her to study French and German, a rare language north of New York. Due to her language skills she was much in demand as a tutor, and the income earned from this made it possible for Swallow to further her studies.

thumb|Old Westford Academy

In March 1862, she left the academy. Two months later, in May, she developed the measles, which set her back physically and interrupted her preparations to begin teaching.

thumb|upright|Miss Ellen Henrietta Swallow, c. 1864

In the spring of 1863, the family moved to Littleton, Massachusetts, where Mr. Swallow had just purchased a larger store and expanded his business. In June 1864, Swallow, now twenty-one, took a teaching position.), who was at the head of the Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics.

In 1870, she wrote to Merrick and Gray, commercial chemists in Boston, asking if they would take her on as an apprentice. They replied that they were not in a position to take pupils and that her best course was to try to enter Boston Tech, or as it is now known, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) as a student. Since she was admitted as a "special student" she did not have to pay tuition, and so the university had to keep no record of her attendance. Through her studies there she faced a lot of segregation with the faculty worried that her presence might alarm the male students. She continued her studies at MIT and would have been awarded its first advanced degree, but MIT balked at granting this distinction to a woman and did not award its first advanced degree, a Master of Science in chemistry, until 1886.

Mrs. Richards was a consulting chemist for the Massachusetts State Board of Health from 1872 to 1875, and the Commonwealth's official water analyst from 1887 until 1897. She also served as nutrition expert for the US Department of Agriculture.

Scientific experiments

Air and water quality

In the 1880s, her interests turned toward issues of air and water quality.

She performed numerous experiments in mineralogy, including the discovery of an insoluble residue of the rare mineral samarskite. This was later determined by other scientists to yield samarium and gadolinium. In 1879, she was recognized by the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers as their first female member.

Home sanitation

Richards applied her scientific knowledge to the home. Since women were responsible for the home and family nutrition at the time, Richards felt that all women should be educated in the sciences. She wrote books about science for use in the home, such as The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning, published in 1882. Her book Food Materials and Their Adulterations(1885) led to the passing of the first Pure Food and Drug Act in Massachusetts. And from the Greek Euthenia, Εὐθηνία. Good state of the body: prosperity, good fortune, abundance.—Herodotus.

In her book Euthenics: the science of controllable environment (1910), she defined the term as the betterment of living conditions, through conscious endeavor, for the purpose of securing efficient human beings.

Vigorous debate about its exact meaning, confusion with the term eugenics, followed by the Great Depression and two world wars, were among the many factors which led to the movement never really getting the funding, nor the attention needed to put together a lasting, vastly multidisciplinary curriculum as defined by Richards. Instead, different disciplines such as Child Study became one such curriculum.

Martin Heggestad of the Mann Library notes that:<blockquote> Starting around 1920, however, home economists tended to move into other fields, such as nutrition and textiles, that offered more career opportunities, while health issues were dealt with more in the hard sciences and in the professions of nursing and public health. Also, improvements in public sanitation (for example, the wider availability of sewage systems and of food inspection) led to a decline in infectious diseases and thus a decreasing need for the largely household-based measures taught by home economists.</blockquote>

Richards was the first writer to use the term euthenics, in The Cost of Shelter (1905), with the meaning "the science of better living".

Laboratory work

After her first experience as water analyst under Professor Nichols, Richards began a large, private practice in sanitary chemistry, including testing water, air and food, and the testing of wallpapers and fabrics for arsenic. In 1878 and 1879 she examined a large number of staple groceries for the state. The results of her investigation were published in the first annual report of the Board of Health, Lunacy and Charity, which had succeeded the earlier Board of Health.

Women's education

Woman's Laboratory assistant instructor

Mrs. Richards appeared before the Woman's Education Association of Boston on November 11, 1875, and in an address, which made a deep impression, set forth the needs of women. She expressed the belief that the governing board of the Institute of Technology would provide space for a woman's laboratory if the Association would supply the necessary money for instruments, apparatus, and books. She said that scholarships would be indispensable. when they invited fifteen other women college graduates to a meeting at Marion Talbot's home in Boston, on November 28, 1881. The group envisioned an organization in which women college graduates would band together to open the doors of higher education to other women and to find wider opportunities for their training. The Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), AAUW's predecessor organization, was officially founded on January 14, 1882.

Teachers' School of Science

Lucretia Crocker, along with women's clubs and other help in the Boston area, created a "Teachers' School of Science" in Back Bay at the New Museum of the Boston society. Along with Mrs. Richards, Crocker created a mineralogy course for teachers. Scientists in the Boston area offered their teaching services for the school, allowing teachers to easily take such courses.

New England Kitchen of Boston

On January 1, 1890, Richards collaborated with Mary Hinman Abel (1850–1938) to found the New England Kitchen of Boston, at 142 Pleasant Street. Using volunteers of modest circumstances, they experimented with ways to prepare the most inexpensive, tasty and nutritious food.

thumb|228x228px|Photo from Rumford Kitchen Leaflets by Ellen Swallow Richards (1899)

<blockquote>The exhibit known as the Rumford Kitchen is the outgrowth of the work, in the application of the principles of chemistry to the science of cooking, which has for three years been carried on as an educational agency by Mrs. Robert H. Richards and Mrs. Dr. John J. Abel, with pecuniary assistance from certain public-spirited citizens of Boston.

The Massachusetts Board of World's Fair Managers, ... believing that such practical demonstration of the usefulness of domestic science could not fail to be of advantage to multitudes of visitors to the Columbian Exposition, have invited the ladies named to open the Rumford Kitchen as a part of the exhibit of Massachusetts in connection with the Bureau of Hygiene and Sanitation.

In order to reduce, in some degree, the expenses of this exhibit, the food cooked in the Rumford Kitchen will be sold under a concession from the administration of the Exposition; but it should be understood that this is not a money-making exhibit; that nothing is cooked for the sake of being sold; and that the enterprise is to be regarded as absolutely a scientific and educational one.

The purpose of the exhibit in the Rumford Kitchen is two-fold: First, to commemorate the services to the cause of domestic science rendered by Count Rumford one hundred years ago[;] ... second, to serve as an incentive to further work in the same direction, as he expressed it," to provoke men to investigation," "to cause doubt, that first step toward knowledge."</blockquote>

The first commercially available "modern" kitchen ranges began to appear around 1800, they were the invention of an American named Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count von Rumford.

American Public School Lunch Program

A major program was started in some Boston high schools in 1894 to provide nutritional meals at low prices to children who would not normally have them. Due in large part to Ellen Richards and Edward Atkinson, the New England Kitchen ran the program as a 'private enterprise' that paid for itself many times over. The lunches never became effective instruments for teaching the New Nutrition the founders had envisaged. However, the program provided nutritious meals children would otherwise not have, so it became the main justification for similar lunch programs in other cities."

In 1946, President Harry S. Truman signed into law the National School Lunch Program to provide low-cost or free school lunch meals to qualified students through subsidies to schools. The program was established as a way to prop up food prices by absorbing farm surpluses, while at the same time providing food to school age children. It was named after Richard Russell, Jr.

Lake Placid Conference

Early in September 1899, trustees of the Lake Placid Club (in the Adirondacks) thought it was the right time to bring together those most interested in home science, or household economics and sent out many invitations for the Lake Placid Conference scheduled to take place September 19–25, 1899. Melvil Dewey, one of the club's trustees, personally invited Richards to attend. She gave a lecture on standards of living and was elected chairman of the conference.

American Home Economics Association

In 1908, Richards was chosen as the first president of the newly formed American Home Economics Association, She is buried in the family cemetery in Gardiner, Maine.

Legacy

The Ellen Swallow Richards House was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1992.
In 1925, Vassar College, based around alumna Richards' ideas, began an interdisciplinary curriculum of euthenics studies located in their recently constructed Minnie Cumnock Blodgett Hall of Euthenics, which was officially dedicated in 1929.
In her honor, MIT designated a room in the main building for the use of female students and, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Richard's graduation in 1973, established the Ellen Swallow Richards professorship for distinguished female faculty members.
In 1993, Richards was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.
In 2011, she was listed as number eight on the MIT150 list of the top 150 innovators and ideas from MIT with the tag line, "Drink up", in reference to her work on assuring the safety of the domestic water supply.
She is commemorated on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.
Swallow Union Elementary School in her hometown of Dunstable, Massachusetts is named in her honor.

Selected works

.
Richards, Ellen (1906?). Meat and drink. Boston: Health-Education League.
Richards, Ellen (c.1908). The Efficient worker. Boston: Health-Education League.
Richards, Ellen (c.1908). Health in labor camps. Boston: Health-Education League.
Richards, Ellen (1908 or 1909). Tonics and stimulants. Boston: Health-Education League.
with Alpheus G. Woodman.
.
Sumida, Kazuko, ed. (2007) Collected Works of Ellen H. Swallow Richards. (5 vols.) Tokyo: Edition Synapse.

Manuscript collections

Richards's manuscripts are contained in various collections throughout the United States and beyond. Aside from those listed below, manuscripts can be found within collections related to the organizations Richards was associated with, such as the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences, whose manuscripts are housed in several collections at Cornell University, Iowa State University, etc.

References

Sources

External links

Ellen Richards papers from Vassar
Ellen Swallow Richards and the Progressive Women's Reform Movement
Ellen Swallow Richards and the Progressive women's reform movement
National Women's Hall of Fame biography of Ellen Richards
The Revenge of Ellen Swallow
Tributes to Ellen Swallow Richards
Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards papers at the Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College Special Collections