Ellen Swallow Richards

American chemist and social reformer

• Born: December 3, 1842
• Birthplace: Dunstable, Massachusetts
• Died: March 30, 1911
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

The first American woman to become a professional chemist, Richards was a writer, reformer, teacher, and scientist who believed that science should be applied to practical issues. As an advocate for commercial food safety and public sanitation, she helped found the discipline of home economics and played an important role in the passage of public health measures and in the advancement of women’s education.

Early Life

Ellen Swallow Richards was born Ellen Swallow, the daughter of Peter Swallow and Fanny Gould Taylor, who were both New England teachers. As a child, she received home schooling that combined book and practical learning until she was sixteen. Her father then bought a general store in Westford in which Ellen worked, while studying Latin, French, German, classical literature, science, and mathematics at the local academy. At home, she learned the skills of housekeeping. At the store she developed a business sense by keeping the accounts and doing the purchasing, which often required her to travel to Boston. Her observations of housewives debating the relative merits of salertus and baking soda—which she knew were exactly the same substances—helped her to understand of the power of marketing.

In 1868, Ellen entered Vassar College, where she took as many science courses as she could and graduated with a degree in chemistry in 1870. At Vassar, her organic chemistry professor insisted that science should solve practical problems and trained his students to analyze common substances, such as bread. Upon graduation, Ellen could not find employment. One firm encouraged her to further her studies in chemistry. Because no women’s college offered more science than Vassar, from which she had already graduated, she applied to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which had been founded in 1865. After some deliberation, the professors decided to admit her as a special student and waived her tuition.

Ellen entered MIT in January, 1871. To support herself, she tutored, translated scientific articles written in German into English, and ran the boardinghouse in which she lived. Soon, her skills in chemical analysis attracted the attention of William R. Nichols, whom the state board of health had chosen to study sewerage and the watersupply. Nichols made Ellen his assistant and thus enabled her to come into contact with the most advanced work in sanitation. In 1873, she received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from MIT and, concurrently, a master’s degree from Vassar. For two years she remained at MIT, which allowed her to pursue graduate studies but refused to grant her a doctorate. In 1875, she married Robert H. Richards, a mining engineering professor at MIT.

Life’s Work

Ellen Richards’s life’s work reflected her interests in public health, education, nutrition, the environment, and home economics. She was the first woman to earn a degree at MIT, the first to be appointed an instructor in sanitary chemistry there, in 1884, and the first to join the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Her experiences as Nichols’s assistant helped to establish her reputation as an analytical chemist and contributed to her lifelong interest in sanitation and public health. After the Manufacturers’ Mutual Fire Insurance Company hired her as a consulting chemist to study the problem of fires and explosions in textile mills in 1884, she analyzed the combustion points and volatility of the often cheap and low-grade oils and dyes used by the mills. Her findings provided information that the insurers used to force mill owners to purchase better materials and to devise safety standards for their workers.

In 1887, Richards supervised another water study for the Massachusetts Board of Health. Her study produced the first water-purity tables and enabled Massachusetts to pass the nation’s first water-quality standards. It also led to the construction of the world’s first modern sewage treatment facilities. At the annual meeting of the American Public Health Association in Boston in 1896, Richards argued that unhealthy and unsanitary school environments were killing two hundred schoolchildren per year and causing five thousand cases of illness. When local officials refused to act on her recommendations, she and her supporters took the issue to the Massachusetts legislature, which eventually enacted sanitary reforms for all aspects of state schools, from the administration to the students.

Education for both professional women and homemakers occupied Richards’s attention as well. She met with the Women’s Education Association to garner financial support for a woman’s laboratory at MIT, which had offered a space. The laboratory opened in late 1876 under the direction of Professor John Ordway, with Richards as the unpaid assistant. The new lab attracted women who went on to become science teachers at colleges and high schools. In 1883, the lab was torn down, five years after MIT began to admit women into its regular programs.

In 1878-1879, Richards and her MIT lab students tested staple foods that were on the market and discovered significant and widespread adulterations. Massachusetts passed its first food and drug acts in 1882 and 1884, using the chemical analyses detailed in Richards’s report published by the Board of Health. The Women’s Laboratory also analyzed other household substances, including papers, woods, cloth, and furniture and discovered, for example, arsenic in wallpaper and mercury in fabrics. Their findings also elucidated the chemical properties of cleaning agents and the processes of cooking. Richards studied the chemical breakdown of macronutrients, such as carbohydrates, and had a special interest in bread—of which the average American ate one pound every day. Richards developed specific recommendations for wives and mothers on how to bake the better and healthier bread. Richards published her findings in two small books, The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning (1882) and Food Materials and Their Adulterations (1886).

One of Richards’s goals was to educate the working poor on how to achieve the most nutrition for the least money—an expression of her commitment to economy and efficiency. In 1890, she opened the New England Kitchen with a threefold purpose: to collect information on the food supplies and tastes of the working class, to use materials that were usually wasted, and to cook the most economical and nutritious foods to sell for home consumption. This effort led Richards to plan the Rumsford Kitchen for the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where visitors were offered pamphlets on nutrition and could purchase balanced meals, whose food values were computed. Another outgrowth of Richards’s New England Kitchen was the school lunch program. In 1884, the New England Kitchen took over this task from school janitors and ultimately provided five thousand high school pupils with lunches. Many institutions, such as schools and hospitals, consequently consulted Richards for nutritional advice.

In 1892, Richards coined the word “ecology” (borrowed from the German morphologist Ernst Haeckel) for the study of domestic science, and late in her life wrote a book on euthenics, which addressed her concern that environmental degradation injured human health. Richards was involved in many organizations and helped found the American Association of University Women. She also served as the first president of the American Home Economics Association, which was organized in late 1908, and published fourteen books and a number of articles. After leading a busy and productive life, she died of heart failure in Boston on March 30, 1911, during her sixty-ninth year.

Significance

Ellen Swallow Richards’s faith in science and the necessity of reform reflected the spirit of the Progressive movement. Some of her efforts also caused controversies, and her challenges to industry to consider human health and safety met with some resistance. Although her virtual isolation from collegial support and her lack of credentials hampered her efforts, she achieved remarkable success in social reform, public health education, and the popularization of science. She also challenged, less successfully, the prevailing social Darwinist view that so-called inferior genes caused human problems, and argued that poor nutrition and lack of sanitation threatened children’s intelligence. Moreover, she challenged the authorities to understand public health issues and to implement safety measures.

Late twentieth century scholarship reinterpreted Richards’s work in terms of feminism and environmentalism. Challenging prevailing social theory, Richards argued that traditional woman’s work had calculable economic value in the capitalist system. She recognized the changes in gender roles that were brought about by industrialization, and while she seemingly tended to relegate women to the home, she also advocated the sharing of domestic duties by men and desired to empower women by giving them the scientific knowledge to control their immediate environments.

Bibliography

Breton, Mary Joy. Women Pioneers for the Environment. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. Chapter 2 presents an overview of Richards’s work in public sanitation, education, and domestic science.

Clarke, Robert. Ellen Swallow: The Woman Who Founded Ecology. Chicago: Follett, 1973. Focuses on Richards’s role in founding the modern environmental movement in the United States.

Edwards, June. Women in American Education, 1820-1955: The Female Force and Educational Reform. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2002. Chapter 4 examines Richards’s philosophy of teaching, which focused on hands-on experience, as well as her promotion of science education for the public and for women in particular.

Hunt, Caroline L. The Life of Ellen H. Richards, 1842-1911. Washington, D.C.: American Home Economics Association, 1958. First published in 1912, this book is outdated in its writing style but offers a useful perspective on Richards’s role in the development of home economics.

Lippincott, Gail. “Rhetorical Chemistry.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 17, no. 1 (January, 2003): 10-49. Examines how two of Richards’s papers, one addressed to male scientists and the other to clubwomen, employed different rhetorical techniques and concludes that she displayed rhetorical sophistication. Places the analysis in the context of technology, gender, and communication.

Richardson, Barbara. “Ellen Swallow Richards: ’Humanistic Oekologist,’ ’Applied Sociologist,’ and the Founding of Sociology.” American Sociologist 33, no. 3 (Fall, 2002): 21-57. Interpretation of Richards’s work as a scientist and social reformer within a feminist framework. Argues that she challenged academic models of social change. Valuable also for its placement of her work in its historical context.