Ellen Swallow's Background

• Born in 1842 in Dunstable, Massachusetts, Ellen Swallow was the only child of two teachers, Peter and Fanny. She was home schooled by her parents until she was 16 when she went to an academy to study French, Latin and mathematics in Westford, Massachusetts. Her family wasn't wealthy and Ellen paid for her own education by teaching and cleaning houses. By the time she was in her mid twenties, Ellen had saved $300, enough to pay for two years at Vassar women's college in New York.
  
  

America's First Female Science Student

• Ellen studied chemistry and astronomy at Vassar and was mentored by America's first female professional astronomer, Maria Mitchell. She flourished under her strong teacher but met resistance after graduation when she was rejected for work with several industrial chemists. When one suggested she apply to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as a special student, however, Ellen Swallow became the first woman in America to be accepted into a science school. She earned a second bachelor of science degree at MIT and then a master's from Vassar for her thesis on iron ore.
  
  

Sanitary Engineering Innovation

• From 1884, Ellen Swallow Richards -- now married to Robert Hallowell Richards, the head of MIT's mining engineering department -- was an instructor in the college's sanitary chemistry laboratory, the first of its kind in America. In 1887, she conducted the largest ever survey of local waters, most of which were badly polluted, for the Massachusetts State Board of Health. The survey established national standards of water quality and led directly to the first modern municipal sewage treatment plant. Richards' public health breakthrough was the use of normal chlorine in water treatment and she invented the word "ecology" to describe the study of water, air and minerals.
  
  

Home Economics

• Ellen Swallow Richards believed the reason she was allowed to progress in such a male-dominated field was that she worked within the parameters of acceptable female behavior. Instead of threatening the gender status quo, she sought to reinforce household ideals by using science to improve domestic life. Richards saw the home as a rich well of scientific potential, not a humdrum house of chores. She set up a laboratory in her own home and called it the Center For Right Living. This became America's first consumer testing laboratory for nutrition and efficiency and MIT students were employed to scientifically test food, utilities and appliances. Richards created an exact science of domestic life, calculating in great detail the fuel, time and money needed to do every single task around the house.