ELLEN SWALLOW RICHARDS (1842-1911)

Biography:

 Daughter of Peter Swallow, a teacher; and Fanry Gould Taylor, a teacher also.
 Born on December 03, 1842, at Dunstable Massachusetts, United of America.
 Died on March 30, 1911, at Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts, United States of
America.

Educational Background:

 Studied at New Ipswich through her family for a high education.

 1864
o Westford Academy
o Attended and taught at the same for few months.
 1868
o Worchester Academy
o She studied here while waiting for her marriage.
 Vassar School
o She studied here and she left very much the pioneer, not only for foolhardily but
she must go to the west.
 Most Influential Professors at Vassar of Academy
o 1.) Maria Mitchell (astronomy professor)
o 2.) Professor Farrar (Science and Mathematics professor)
 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, she studied chemistry in this school
 1873
o the first who wrote for admittance to Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
where she is the first women who enrolled and given the opportunity at this field
of academe and to pursue her chemistry study.
o At the same year, she also reached and directed a large of chemist on doing
analytical studies of water, minerals, air, and food

Marriage Background:

 Ellen Swallow married Robert Hallowell Richards, head of M.I.T’s Department of

Mining Engineering, and her professor, in 1875.
 They live in Jamaica with simple house when she is 33 years old and Robert in his 35
years of age.
 Mrs. Richards worked in the Boston at the same time as William James.
 Mrs. Richards is the living example of James ideas and the “very advance position” of
her prof. Farrar.
  She fount out scant evidence that time while James knew of the home economics
movement or its embodiment ideas.
 James record in a letter that time while lecturing at Chatauqua, he learned to make a
whole wheat bread.
 There were also a year in Boston after John Simmons had left his fortune to establish a
college to educate young women to provide for their own live hood.

Ellen Richards:

 She was the prodigious “founder” of home economics, of the American Association of
University Women.
 Was a living pragmatist, she wanted to make application of knowledge he was turning
out to every problem in human life.
 In renewing the work of the lake placid conferences, Mrs. Richard once said “the
movement took rise in the same realization of the inconvenience of ignorance that John
led Eliot the apostle to Indians to found a school in 1690 to do away with it.
 Champion of education for women; crusader for improved life for the poor; indefatigable
practical scientist who lectured, wrote, travelled, organized, activated and influenced the
world.
 Mrs Richards was the first woman in America accepted to any school of Science and
Technology
 Richards was a pragmatic feminist, as well as founding ecofeminism, who believed that
women’s work within the home was a vital aspect of the economy.

1899

 Form of ignorance had grown as inconvenient as to call for united effort to do away with
it, was that connected with household administration under the new conditions which
great social and industrial changes social and industrial changes brought.

 The flow of industry had passed 0n and left idle the loom in the attic.
 To Mrs. Richards the fact of science were vehicles of social service that must related to
practical affairs.
 She stressed the importance of controllable environment the control of external for the
benefit of all people.