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#40 Ellen Richards: Scientist and First Home Economist
Ellen Swallow Richards, 1842-1911, a brilliant chemist and progressive leader, founded the home economics movement. Home economics 140 years ago was not the prosaic domain of bored middle-school girls, but rather a powerful engine of social change, designed to kick human health onto a shining, new hygienic plane.
Richards led 19th century women out of the morass of never-ending housework into a new realm of precision and efficiency in the domestic realm. She believed that the application of science to domestic work would give middle-class women more time for loftier pursuits.
Chemists like Richards deconstructed food into nutritional components. They identified dangerous adulterants added to manufactured food, well before there were any governmental checks on food safety.
As social historian Susan Strasser notes, "In 1900 [Richards] envisioned 'the home of 1920,' in which the kitchen would be connected by pneumatic tubes to a supply station that would distribute prepared foods." Move over Blue Apron.....
Richards, along with Mary Abel and Edward Atkinson, founded The New England Kitchen, which offered low-cost, nutritious food to poor immigrants. Part of the concept was to enable immigrants to assimilate faster, by eating -- and learning how to cook -- hygienically, efficiently prepared food that followed white, established middle-American norms.
If Ellen Richards was a teensie bit compulsive about putting things around her "to rights," she turned her desire for an ordered life outward to help others. Her brilliant, solidly scientific, pioneering work in water sanitation, food adulteration, and precise measurements for consistent, easily replicated food preparation laid the foundation for the federal Food and Drug Administration as well as the modern processed food industry. (Though she would have been horrified at how her well-meaning precepts morphed into systemic problems.)
Not least, she led women into a new era of equality. She smashed MIT's glass ceiling of the time, not by strident demands, but by kick-ass great intellectual achievements along with a friendly character that charmed the male chauvinists in their ivory tower and broke down their resistance to female colleagues in unexpected ways.
The First Female Student at MIT Started an All-Women Chemistry Lab and Fought for Food Safety
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Ellen Swallow Richards, 1842-1911, a brilliant chemist and progressive leader, founded the home economics movement. Home economics 140 years ago was not the prosaic domain of bored middle-school girls, but rather a powerful engine of social change, designed to kick human health onto a shining, new hygienic plane.
Richards led 19th century women out of the morass of never-ending housework into a new realm of precision and efficiency in the domestic realm. She believed that the application of science to domestic work would give middle-class women more time for loftier pursuits.
Chemists like Richards deconstructed food into nutritional components. They identified dangerous adulterants added to manufactured food, well before there were any governmental checks on food safety.
As social historian Susan Strasser notes, "In 1900 [Richards] envisioned 'the home of 1920,' in which the kitchen would be connected by pneumatic tubes to a supply station that would distribute prepared foods." Move over Blue Apron.....
Richards, along with Mary Abel and Edward Atkinson, founded The New England Kitchen, which offered low-cost, nutritious food to poor immigrants. Part of the concept was to enable immigrants to assimilate faster, by eating -- and learning how to cook -- hygienically, efficiently prepared food that followed white, established middle-American norms.
If Ellen Richards was a teensie bit compulsive about putting things around her "to rights," she turned her desire for an ordered life outward to help others. Her brilliant, solidly scientific, pioneering work in water sanitation, food adulteration, and precise measurements for consistent, easily replicated food preparation laid the foundation for the federal Food and Drug Administration as well as the modern processed food industry. (Though she would have been horrified at how her well-meaning precepts morphed into systemic problems.)
Not least, she led women into a new era of equality. She smashed MIT's glass ceiling of the time, not by strident demands, but by kick-ass great intellectual achievements along with a friendly character that charmed the male chauvinists in their ivory tower and broke down their resistance to female colleagues in unexpected ways.
The First Female Student at MIT Started an All-Women Chemistry Lab and Fought for Food Safety