Ellen Swallow Richards

Ellen Swallow Richards (born December 3, 1842, Dunstable, Massachusetts, U.S.—died March 30, 1911, Boston, Massachusetts) was an American chemist and founder of the home economics movement in the United States.

Ellen Swallow was educated mainly at home. She briefly attended Westford Academy and also taught school for a time. Swallow was trained as a chemist, earning an A.B. from Vassar College in 1870 and, as the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a B.S. in 1873. Vassar accepted her master’s thesis the same year. She remained at MIT for two more years of graduate studies, but she was not awarded a Ph.D. In 1875 she married Robert Hallowell Richards, an expert in mining and metallurgy at MIT.

In November 1876, at her urging, the Woman’s Education Association of Boston contributed funds for the opening of a Woman’s Laboratory at MIT. There, as assistant director under Professor John M. Ordway, she began her work of encouraging women to enter the sciences and of providing opportunities for scientific training to capable and interested women. Courses in basic and industrial chemistry, biology, and mineralogy were taught, and through Ordway a certain amount of industrial and government consulting work was obtained. Richards published several books and pamphlets as a result of her work with the Woman’s Laboratory, including The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning (1882; with Marion Talbot) and Food Materials and Their Adulterations (1885).

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From 1876 Richards was also head of the science section of the Society to Encourage Studies at Home. In 1881, with Alice Freeman Palmer and others, she was a founder of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae (later the American Association of University Women). The Woman’s Laboratory closed in 1883, by which time its students had been regularly admitted to MIT. In 1884 Richards became assistant to Professor William R. Nichols in the institute’s new laboratory of sanitation chemistry, and she held the post of instructor on the MIT faculty for the rest of her life. During 1887–89 she had charge of laboratory work for the Massachusetts State Board of Health’s survey of inland waters.

In 1890, under Richards’s guidance, the New England Kitchen was opened in Boston to offer to working-class families nutritious food, scientifically prepared at low cost, and at the same time to demonstrate the methods employed. From 1894 the Boston School Committee obtained school lunches from the New England Kitchen. Richards lobbied for the introduction of courses in domestic science into the public schools of Boston, and in 1897 she helped Mary M.K. Kehew organize a school of housekeeping in the Woman’s Educational and Industrial Union that was later taken over by Simmons College. In 1899 Richards called a summer conference of workers in the fledgling field of domestic science at Lake Placid, New York. Under her chairmanship the series of such conferences held over the next several years established standards, course outlines, bibliographies, and women’s club study guides for the field, for which the name “home economics” was adopted. In December 1908 the Lake Placid conferees formed the American Home Economics Association, of which Richards was elected first president. She held the post until her retirement in 1910, and in that time she established the association’s Journal of Home Economics. In 1910 she was named to the council of the National Education Association with primary responsibility for overseeing the teaching of home economics in public schools. Among her other published works were Home Sanitation: A Manual for Housekeepers (1887), Domestic Economy as a Factor in Public Education (1889), The Cost of Living (1899), Sanitation in Daily Life (1907), and Euthenics: The Science of Controllable Environment (1912).