WHAT ELSE COULD A WOMAN WRITE ABOUT?

Don’t be fooled by the quaint title of Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards’ The

Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning (Figure 298),1 published in 1882. Richards was

the first female student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (B.S., 1873),

became an instructor at MIT and founded its women’s laboratory. She bridged

pure and applied chemistry with social science and founded the field of scientificFIGURE 298. -

Title page from Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards’ (“Ellen Richards”)

1882 book The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning. Ms. Richards was in the first graduat-

ing class at Vassar, inaugurated the women’s chemistry laboratory at MIT, and was the

founder of the field of sanitary chemistry, a co-founder of the American Association of

University Women, and an environmentalist many decades ahead of her time. She would

not have been amused by the deceptive advertising for Ozone Is Life bottled water (Fig-

ure 277) or Ozone Soap (Figure 278). home economics. She was a co-founder in 1882 of what would
eventually be-

come the American Association of University Women.2–6

Born to teachers in rural Massachusetts in 1842 (d. 1911), the precocious

Ellen Swallow received a rural education, taught locally, and saved sufficient

money to enter an experimental school for women’s higher education in Pough-

keepsie, New York. Her interest in analytical chemistry was stimulated by Profes-

sor A.C. Farrar. Notes Swallow after her first laboratory exercise: “Prof. Farrar en-

courages us to be very thorough there, as the profession of an analytical chemist

is very profitable and means very nice and delicate work, fitted for ladies’

hands.”5 She was a member of the first graduating class of Vassar College in 1870

and is honored by a plaque in Blodgett Hall.5 The new graduates promised

“cheerful submission to authority, compliance, diligence, and lady-like deport-

ment.”5 In 1871 she entered MIT, excelled in her studies, and met Professor

Robert Hallowell Richards, whom she married in 1875 after she had become a

member of the faculty. A children’s book dramatizes her student days at MIT

with a quaint scene in which she wins the acceptance of the males in her class by

baking cookies for them.6 Richards’ early work in the analytical chemistry of

minerals and water earned her wide respect, but the work in bringing sanitary
chemistry into the home eventually won her worldwide renown.

The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning is slim, economical, and very effec-

tive in its straightforward presentation to its female audience. Here is Mrs.

Richards on the perfidy of manufacturers whose claims about “secret ingredients”

she debunks:

There is, lingering in the air, a great awe of chemistry and chemical terms, an

inheritance from the age of alchemy. Every chemist can recall instances by

the score in which manufacturers have asked for recipes for making some

substitute for a well-known article, and have expected the most absurd results

to follow the simple mixing of two substances. Chemicals are supposed by the

multitude to be all-powerful, and great advantage is taken of this credulity by

unscrupulous manufacturers.

Well, even Ivory Soap is only “ninety-nine and forty-four-one-hundredths per-

cent pure.” And what would she have said about Ozone Soap (Figure 278)?

Discussion of the chemical composition of foods is accompanied by analyses

of their energy contents and the dietary habits of different cultures. It is duly not-

ed that rice, a carbohydrate, is much lower in energy content than fat, explaining

why the former is the dietary staple of tropical cultures while the latter is an im-

portant staple in arctic climates. Indeed, an astute woman, noting that her chil-

dren (or husband) might be accumulating too much “residue” from their diet,

can chemically “titrate” them with oxygen to burn off the excess as CO2 and

H2

O through outdoor activity:

Cooking has thus become an art worthy the attention of intelligent and

learned women. The laws of chemical action are founded upon the law of

definite proportions, and whatever is added more than enough, is in the way.

The head of every household should study the condition of her family, and

tempt them with dainty dishes if that is what they need. If the ashes have ac-

cumulated in the grate, she will call a servant to shake them out so that the

fire may burn. If she sees that the ashes of the food previously taken are clogclogging the vital
energies of her child, she will send him out into the air, with
oxygen and exercise to make him happy, but she will not give him more food.

The 1910 MIT convocation address written by Ellen Swallow Richards was

cited over 60 years later by Yale University scientist Bill Hutchinson as an early

clarion call to conservation and respect for the environment:5,7

The quality of life depends on the ability of society to teach its members how

to live in harmony with their environment—defined first as the family, then

with the community, then with the world and its resources.

Ellen Swallow Richards was an early pioneer in the education of women in

chemistry. Figure 299 shows a photograph, from the Frank Lloyd Wright Founda-

tion, taken between 1900 and 1910.8 The young women are from the Hillside

Home School, Spring Green, Wisconsin. The famous architect’s aunts were sup-

porters of the school, and when it was closed, it eventually became part of the

Frank Lloyd Wright Estate. The picture was probably taken routinely in the

school and eventually became part of the estate’s holdings. Another early pio-

neer was Dr. Edgar Fahs Smith, Professor of Chemistry, University of Pennsylva-

nia. Ten women completed their Ph.D.s with Professor Smith between 1894 and

1908, a number of whom became college faculty members.9 Smith’s collection ofFIGURE 299. -

Photograph of a chemistry class for women at the Hillside Home School

in Spring Green, Wisconsin near the beginning of the twentieth century (courtesy The

Frank Lloyd Wright Archives, Scottsdale, Arizona). chemical books and artwork presently forms the
core of the University of Penn-

sylvania History of Chemistry collection. His sublime book Old Chemistries10 is a

work of warmth and erudition that helped inspire the present book. It includes a

fine discussion of Jane Marcet and her “conversations in chemistry.”