Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911)

Founder of the home economics movement

Source

Scientific Inquiry. Ellen Swallow was born in 1842 in Dunstable, Massachusetts, the daughter of two schoolteachers. Not until 1868, at age twenty-five, did Swallow go off to Vassar, one of the few options for women wishing to attend college in the East. Vassar was becoming an important center for women’s education in the sciences during this time, and when Swallow was graduated in 1870, she was determined to continue her pursuit of scientific inquiry. Although there were no careers available to women in the sciences in the late nineteenth century, she was admitted as a special student and the first woman in the new Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), then only five years old. She received a bachelor of science degree from MIT and then did graduate study there in chemistry for an additional two years. She married a young member of the MIT faculty, metallurgical engineer Robert Hallowell Richards, and they worked together experimenting with various ways to transform metal compounds. Her work was rewarded by her election to the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers as its first woman member.

Scientific Education for Women. By the 1880s Ellen Richards became increasingly interested in the education of women in science and scientific issues. She organized a science section of the Society to Encourage Studies at Home, and she arranged to establish a Woman’s Laboratory at MIT. When MIT established a chemical laboratory to study problems in sanitation in 1885, Richards was named as assistant there, primarily because she had published a manual on the chemistry of cooking and cleaning in 1882. She was soon named a faculty member at MIT, where she worked on a wide range of projects in sanitation engineering and taught courses in analysis of environmental problems to a generation of students who went on to careers in public sanitation.

The Home Economics Movement. Ellen Richards’s principal contribution to American life was her introduction of the home economics movement. She was greatly concerned about the squalid conditions in the nation’s urban slums, and she reasoned that the principles of sanitation and other household arts should be taught in the public schools. She helped establish a series of classes in housekeeping at the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union in Boston, and in 1893 she ran a kitchen as an exhibit in the Chicago World’s Fair featuring detailed information about the nutritional values of different foods. In 1899 she helped organize a series of annual summer conferences in Lake Placid, New York, aimed at improving home life in modem society. It was at these meetings that the term “home economics” was coined and the essential ideas of the home economics movement were developed. After the turn of the century Richards became president of the newly formed American Home Economics Association and then published a widely used textbook on home economics and sanitary science. In her opinion, everyone needed to become something of a sanitation engineer if society were to contend successfully with the mounting problems of waste and unhealthful living. Her work gave impetus to the home economics movement that was soon instituted in high schools across the country.

Source

Maxine Seller, Women Educators in the United States: 1820-1993 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994), pp. 413–419.