Ellen Swallow Richards claimed a number of ‘firsts’ in her lifetime. Not only the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she was the first American woman to earn a bachelor’s degree in chemistry, and is regarded as one of the foremost environmental chemists of the 19th century.
Despite her earlier bachelor’s education with MIT, Ellen’s request to enter the doctoral program was denied, with MIT not awarding its first doctorate to a woman until some years later. Nevertheless, with her partner Robert Hallowell Richards behind her, Ellen appealed to the Woman’s Education Association and successfully secured the resources to set up the MIT Women’s Laboratory – a specialised programme to support women in their access to scientific education.
Ellen was taken on as an assistant instructor (albeit without pay) to teach chemical analysis, industrial chemistry, mineralogy and applied biology to the women – however, the laboratory was closed in 1883 after MIT began awarding undergraduate degrees to women regularly, and the requirement for a special track was eliminated. When MIT later opened the nation’s first laboratory of sanitary chemistry in the following year, Ellen was appointed a full instructor, becoming the first woman to hold such a position in the university and remaining in the role for the remainder of her life.
It was in this position that Ellen and her assistants performed a large-scale survey of the quality of Massachusetts’ inland bodies of water, of which many were polluted with industrial waste and sewage. Analysing more than 100,000 samples over two years, Ellen’s work with colleague Thomas Drown produced the world’s first water purity tables, led to the first state water-quality standards in the nation, and the development of the first modern municipal sewage treatment plant. For ten years, Ellen served as an official water analyst for the State Board of Health and co-published a classic text in the sanitary engineering field in 1900: Air, Water and Food from a Sanitary Standpoint.
Though Ellen had long left her days at the Women’s Laboratory, she remained concerned about barriers that would allow women more time for pursuits outside of cooking and cleaning. Good nutrition, sanitation, fitness and time-efficient practices were goals she envisioned to make women’s lives easier in the home – with this in mind, she became passionate towards applying scientific principles to domestic topics, and eventually published The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning: A Manual for Housekeepers in 1882. Ellen continued to establish new programmes of study, organise conferences on the topic, and campaigned tirelessly to establish home economics as a new discipline. From her efforts in this area, the American Home Economics Association was formed in 1908, with Ellen as its first president.
Ellen is also remembered as one of the founding mothers of what was to become the American Association of University Women, where she united female graduates to work together in opening the doors of higher education for other women. As an environmentally minded scientist and a pragmatic feminist, Ellen is celebrated both as a trailblazer who set new national standards for hygiene and sanitation, and for her lifetime efforts to build a more open future by knocking down the barriers to women’s education.
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