Sutherland, Serenity (Author)
Slaughter, Thomas P. (Advisor)
University of Rochester
Slaughter, Thomas P.
Physical Details: 388 pp.
Language: English
Chemist Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911) was the first female student and first female professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As a scientist, Richards worked in nutritional sciences, water chemistry, sanitary science, home economics, mineralogy and mining engineering. Richards’s interdisciplinary focus was part of her scientific framework. I present Richards’s ability to synthesize and contribute to multiple and sometimes-contradictory scientific frameworks as connected to her internalization of gender ideology in nineteenth-century science. Richards employed essentialist arguments for women’s increased participation in science. Doing this required categorizing women’s skills according to gender stereotypes: women belonged in the laboratory because they were willing to clean it; caring natures made women the perfect fit for analyzing the chemistry of cooking and cleaning; only women who managed households could understand the importance of a clean environment. This essentialist logic existed alongside portrayals of herself as strong and physically fit enough to attend field schools, descending into mines and scaling cliffs to collect mineralogy specimens. Negotiating gender boundaries and moving fluidly between categorical knowledge systems was both her modus operandi and her survival strategy in a masculinized profession. My work traces Richards’s intellectual developments from her girlhood as the daughter of an unsuccessful farmer and grocer, in Chapter 2, to her scientific awakening at Vassar under the tutelage of astronomer Maria Mitchell in Chapter 3. Wanting to improve the lives of humans, Richards decided to focus on chemistry, and Chapter 4 delves into her first coeducational experience at MIT and also demonstrates how, unlike other women of science, Richards’s marriage to Robert H. Richards was one of the sustaining factors of her career. Chapter 5 looks at the formation of the Women’s Laboratory at MIT. During this time, Richards also began doing work in water chemistry, sanitary science and the chemistry of food. Chapter 6 explores her work in early nutritional sciences through her efforts to start the New England Kitchen, a nutritional kitchen that prepared take-home meals for laborers to purchase, and her bourgeoning interest in Progressive-era women’s clubs and reform. Chapter 7 looks at her promotion of Home Economics as a scientific profession for women from 1895-1910. Chapter 8 presents Richards’s theory of euthenics that argued if humans did not clean up the Earth’s air, water, food and soil, the human race would die out. Euthenics served as a summation of Richards’s interdisciplinary theories and is a perfect example of her combination of organismic and mechanistic science.
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