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Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (1842 - 1911) spent
the early years of her adult life tending to her ill mother,
until in 1868 at the age of twenty-five, she entered Vassar
College as a junior. Following graduation in 1870, she attended
the newly founded Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She
was admitted to MIT as a "special student" without charge. Later
she discovered this was due not to her financial status, as
she had thought, but to her gender. As long as she was not paying
to attend, MIT could keep her name off the student roster, and
thus avoid acknowledging the admission of a female student.
In June 1873 she became the first female graduate from MIT,
and in the same year she received her M.A. from Vassar. She
continued graduate study at MIT for two years, but was unable
to obtain a doctorate in chemistry: MIT was not willing to
grant its first Ph.D. in chemistry to a woman. In 1874, she
was appointed to the institute faculty as an instructor in
sanitary education, a position she was to hold until her death,
twenty-seven years later. In June 1875 Ellen Swallow married
Professor Robert Hallowell Richards, and in November, she
created a Woman's Laboratory at MIT that would remain in operation
until 1883, when women were allowed to join the men in MIT's
classrooms.
In 1890, Ellen Richards began to switch her focus to home
economics with the start of the New England Kitchen and the
Boston School of Housekeeping, which aimed to improve the
standard of American living. Unfortunately, both programs
proved unsuccessful. Starting in 1899, she organized summer
conferences in Lake Placid, New York to work "for the betterment
of the home." Within five years, the attendance at these conferences
grew from the ten original members to over seven hundred participants.
The efforts of these conferences culminated in December 1908
with the establishment of the American Home Economics Association
(AHEA), which was dedicated to "the improvement of living
conditions in the home, the institutional household, and the
community." Richards presided over the AHEA until her retirement
in 1910.
Ellen Richards had "faith in science as a cure-all." She
used this faith to provide new avenues for women in the scientific
arena, and in the process, she created the field of home economics.
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