Ellen Swallow Richards

Written By Daisy Zeijlon

Written by Stefanie Golberg & Daisy Zeijlon

Source: MIT Web Museum

Source: MIT Web Museum

 
 

b. December 3, 1842 | d. March 30, 1911

While there was no single originator of domestic science, Ellen Swallow Richards was a public health expert whose career was dedicated to applying scientific principles to home life. Her approach was simultaneously constructive for and damaging to women, which makes her legacy challenging to untangle.  

 

Bio

Born in Dunstable, Massachusetts, Ellen Swallow Richards had no formal education as a child. She experienced ill health in her early youth and as a consequence spent plenty of time outdoors—perhaps a precursor to her later investment in environmental and public health. Her academic pursuits began in earnest in 1868 when she was accepted to Vassar, the competitive and recently opened women’s college. She went on to apply to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) which at the time only admitted men. Richards was its first woman student and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry in 1873. She continued her work in chemistry as the first woman faculty member at MIT, where she opened a women’s laboratory in 1876 specifically for students interested in pursuing postgraduate work in the subject. 

Richards was intently focused on pollution and public health, and became one of the country’s leading sanitation engineers. A survey she conducted in 1890 led to the first state water quality standards in the nation. Richards was incredibly pragmatic, applying her knowledge of science to the home and domestic sphere to make it available to women en masse; beyond science, she believed in domesticity as a way to engage in social reform (Stage). Though not met with great success, Richards was able to test her scientific theories of nutrition and professionalization of domestic science through her work at the New England Kitchen and the Boston School of Housekeeping (Stage). It was in 1899 when she was invited by Melville Dewey to the first Lake Placid meeting of the National Household Economic Association that she had the opportunity to steer the infancy of domestic science away from the fledgling organization. Her emphasis on professionalism and education found success in the establishment of the American Home Economics Association in 1909, of which Richards was elected the first president (Dyball and Carlsson). Up until her death in 1911, Richards devoted her life to work at the household level. She recognized the reciprocal impacts between household activities and the social and ecological environment, and she urged women to make careers of carrying the values of the home into the community at large.

A Scientist First

Richards was, first and foremost, a scientist. Much of her research at MIT was concerned with industrial pollutants in the region’s urban water sources (Dyball and Carlsson). It was Richards who undertook the first ever test of the Massachusetts water supply and personally collected and analyzed more than 2,500 samples (Stage). Her career as a chemist and public health expert has been overlooked and is worthy of significantly more attention than scholarship has given it so far. Her achievements in this field are particularly exceptional because science in the late nineteenth century was a wholly masculinized profession, which meant that Richards was never able to enter it fully. She was admitted to MIT as a “special student”: a title that permitted the university to deny that a woman had ever been enrolled should the experiment of her presence go badly (Stage). Aware of her  vulnerable position, Richards made an effort not to appear radical by performing traditionally feminine care work—sweeping lab floors and repairing her professors’ buttons—throughout her time as a student (Shapiro). By operating within these confines of femininity she was actually able to subvert them, forging a new path for herself and for generations of women scientists who followed. Case in point: by 1883 the dedicated women’s laboratory at MIT (which Richards had founded) was torn down, no longer needed as women were finally permitted to join men’s classrooms. 

Richards was amongst the first to apply scientific discipline to household life. Her goal was twofold: firstly, she aimed to carve out a niche for herself in a field that was determined to exclude her. Secondly, and more significantly, she strived to do work that would uplift (white, middle class) women’s place in society. Richards believed that housekeepers were scientists and as such could have a significant impact on their built environments. The best way to equip them for this important work was through scientific training. At MIT, for example, she developed an advanced curriculum for “household chemistry” which included handbooks on bacteria and sanitation, plumbing, nutrition and food adulteration (Shapiro). This syllabus is an example of Richards’ wide definition of home, which she broadened to include public health, nutrition and ecology. In this sense, Richards was again able to broaden women’s sphere of influence without challenging the domestic status quo (Dyball and Carlsson). 

Getting Comfy with the Problematic

It is unquestionable that Richards’ contribution to the domestic science landscape was significant, and a large part of paving the way for many women to come. That being said, it is important to consider the deficiencies and limitations of her work and contributions. To start, the field of domestic science as a whole lacked intersectionality and diversity. Consider something like the Lake Placid conferences, of which Richards was a founding member. These conferences excluded Black women and Jews ("Easy A"); these gatherings were spaces that catered to a white audience. Richards and other leaders in the movement approached domestic science from a narrow viewpoint, their scope considering white, American, middle and upper-middle class women. We can look to the Boston School of Housekeeping as another example. Richards helped revamp this institution into “a ‘professional school for home and social economics’ designed to train educated women for household and institutional management” (Stage 24). That the training was professionalized speaks to an exclusively white audience, as the domestic work of Black women and other women of color was simply work. This school was a space for white women with financial stability who had the luxury of time to learn a trade without pay. 

Euthenics, concerned with the polluting processes at municipal and local levels, was defined throughout Richards’ scientific work as “the science of the controllable environment” (Dyball and Carlsson 21). This idea of what was “controllable” crept into the home, as Richards believed that environments constructed by humans in which the problem of health and well-being were due to human activity could and should be controlled (Dyball and Carlsson 21). Though Richards’ attempt to coin the term “euthenics” was ultimately unsuccessful, its existence and intended meaning is troubling. Similar to the former paragraph, there is a way in which the implementation of such changes or improvements as dictated by a white woman has an incredibly narrow lens. Euthenics’ idea of control has embedded in it markers of “whiteness” and higher class distinctions as civilized and a way to improve humanity’s condition.

In the book Rethinking Home Economics, Sarah Stage wrote, “Richards was able to broaden woman’s sphere into municipal housekeeping without directly challenging the doctrine of domesticity” (30). What Stage is referring to is the 19th century evolution of the separation of spheres, wherein men lived in the public, political sphere and women in the private, domestic one. Richards did not challenge this ideology. She was squarely a woman in her time who believed in the gendered nature of the home and the trifecta of femininity, domesticity, and morality (Stage). She believed in elevating a woman’s status within the home, but not beyond it. In many ways, Richards expanded the scope of what was available to women within the framework of that era–she couldn’t have the profession of a chemist, a physicist, or a biologist, but she could bring science and that field of study into the woman’s sphere of influence - the home. Given the existing and limiting structures during the late 19th-early 20th centuries, perhaps this was the most realistic and pragmatic choice for Richards. Though grounded in gender norms, Richards’ expansion of the scope of domesticity gave women access to power and authority that brought them closer and closer to the male sphere. 

Conclusion

Richards’ contributions to domestic science were significant, in good ways and bad. She carved out a space within which women could come as close to being scientists as possible, and she was deeply committed to furthering education and career opportunities for women. However, she failed to include non-white women in her work and ultimately believed that the proper place for women was the home. As this scholarship continues to evolve, it is imperative that we consider the complexity of her legacy for the way it both helped and harmed women.

Sources

Daisy Zeijlon
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