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 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. At the same time, she did not directly challenge women's place and work in the home, instead emphasizing the need for their involvement in domestic sciences. Through her work she created multiple organizations and published many articles, writing over 100 publications during her lifetime.Sutherland, S. (2017). Discovering science for women: The life of ellen swallow richards, 1842-1911 (Order No. 10270756). Available from GenderWatch Collection; ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I; ProQuest One Academic. (1914677017).
Biography
Early childhood
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. In 1859, the family moved to Westford, and she attended Westford Academy. 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.Ellen Swallow Richards: The Most Influential Scientist You Probably Never Heard Of (Until Now). JOM 66, 15–20 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11837-013-0838-2 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.
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.
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.
In 1865 she spent that year tending the family store and taking care of her ill mother instead of teaching. During the winter of 1865–66, Swallow studied and attended lectures in Worcester.
College education In September 1868, Swallow entered Vassar College, classified as a special student. She saved up the $300 for a year's tuition doing various jobs. After taking the entrance exam, she placed in as a junior, even though she was only formally educated for two years. Somewhat over a year later, she was admitted to the senior class, graduating in 1870 with a bachelor's degree. She then earned a Master of Arts degree with a thesis on the chemical analysis of iron ore. The strongest personal influences during her college years were Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, and Professor Charles S. Farrar (1826-1908), who was at the head of the Department of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Farrar was the one who encouraged her to pursue chemistry as he agreed with Swallow that it should be used to solve practical problems.
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. On December 10, 1870, after some discussion and a vote, the Faculty of the Institute of Technology recommended to the MIT Corporation the admission of Swallow as a special student in chemistry. Swallow thus became the first woman admitted to MIT, although the institution made it clear that "her admission did not establish a precedent for the general admission of females," according to the records of the university's meeting on December 14, 1870. 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. In 1873, Swallow received a Bachelor of Science degree from MIT for her thesis, "Notes on Some Sulpharsenites and Sulphantimonites from Colorado". 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.
Richards served on the board of trustees of Vassar College for many years and was granted an honorary doctor of science degree in 1910.
Marriage and home
On June 4, 1875, Swallow married Robert Hallowell Richards (1844–1945), chairman of the Mine Engineering Department at MIT, with whom she had worked in the mineralogy laboratory. They took up residence in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts. With her husband's support she remained associated with MIT, volunteering her services and contributing $1,000 annually to the "Woman's Laboratory." A program in which her students were mostly schoolteachers, whose training had lacked laboratory work, and who wanted to perform chemical experiments and learn mineralogy.
Career Her first post-college career was as an unpaid chemistry lecturer at MIT from 1873 to 1878.
From 1884 until her death, Swallow now Richards was an instructor at the newly founded laboratory of sanitary chemistry at the Lawrence Experiment Station, the first in the United States, headed by her former professor William R. Nichols.
In 1884, she was appointed as an instructor in sanitary chemistry at a newly formed MIT laboratory for the study of sanitation.
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. At the request of the Massachusetts State Board of Health she performed a series of water tests on 40,000 samples of local waters which served as drinking water for their immediate populations. These led to the so-called "Richards' Normal Chlorine Map" which was predictive of inland water pollution in the state of Massachusetts. This map plotted the chloride concentrations in waters of the state. It illustrated the natural distribution of chlorides from the ocean. (Her survey long preceded the practice of road de-icing with chlorine derivative salts.) Her map plotted greater than 6.5 parts per million (ppm) of chloride near the coast, with Cape Cod concentrations well in excess of 10 ppm and with a near-steady decreasing gradient to less than 1 ppm about the Berkshire Hills in the extreme western end of the state. Thereby waters with chloride concentrations that deviated from the plot could be suspected of human pollution. As a result, Massachusetts established the first water-quality standards in America and the first modern sewage treatment plant was created in Lowell, Massachusetts. Outside of running tests on water and air quality she spent time theorizing that air and water were aspects of nutrition. Swallows emphasized the importance of the cleanliness or air and water in essays like "Water and Air as Food" in Plain Words About Food (1899).
Mineralogy Richards' master's thesis at Vassar was an analysis of the amount of vanadium in iron ore. 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.
She used her own home as a kind of experimental laboratory for healthier living through science. She moved from using coal heating and cooking oil to gas, concerned with the air quality in her home. She and her husband installed fans to pull air from the home to the outside to create a cleaner air environment within the home. She also determined the water quality of the property's well through chemical testing, and to ensure that wastewater was not contaminating the drinking water.
Euthenics
Richards derived the term euthenics from the Greek verb Eutheneo, Εὐθηνέω (eu, well; the, root of tithemi, to cause). To be in a flourishing state, to abound in, to prosper.—Demosthenes. To be strong or vigorous.—Herodotus. To be vigorous in body.—Aristotle. . And from the Greek Euthenia, Εὐθηνία. Good state of the body: prosperity, good fortune, abundance.—Herodotus. The opposite of Euthenia is Penia - Πενία ("deficiency" or "poverty") the personification of poverty and need.
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: 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.