Ellen Swallow Richards

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy V. Wilson,
and I'm Holly Fry. A few weeks ago, I spent
some time on the MIT campus for the MIT Mystery Hunt,

(00:22):
and while I was walking down the hall, I saw
like labeling that was kind of partially blocked by just
the architecture of where I was, so all I could
see were the words Ellen and Lobby, And I was like,
is that a lobby named for Ellen Swallow Richards? And
I just kept walking a little farther to see what

(00:42):
it was. It indeed was the Ellen Swallow Richards Lobby.
And then my brain like started fishing around trying to
connect to, like, of all the people that I know
from history, which one was this one. So Ellen Swallow
rich has come up briefly on our show before, in

(01:03):
our twenty twenty episode on the Bureau of Home Economics.
She was a big part of the establishment of home
economics as a field. Among other things, she convened a
series of conferences known as the Lake Placid Conferences, and
that's where the term home economics was chosen to signify
this field. This work is probably what she is best

(01:27):
known for today, but it happened actually pretty late in
her life and career, and before she even got to
that point, she broke a lot of ground and in
a lot of ways was just way ahead of her time.
Ellen Henrietta Swallow was born on December third, eighteen forty two,
in Dunstable, Massachusetts, a rural community not far from the

(01:47):
border with New Hampshire. Her parents were Peter and Fanny G. Swallow,
both of whom had experienced as school teachers, and as
school teachers, they had strong opinions about how Ellen should
be educated. They were worried that the local school would
not be rigorous enough for her academically, so for the
first years of her life they taught her at home.

(02:08):
When she was little, a doctor told Ellen's parents that
she should be encouraged to play outside and to be
physically active for the sake of her health, so she
spent a lot of time exploring the farms and the
woods of the area. An early twentieth century biography described
her as quote perilously close to being a tomboy. She

(02:29):
particularly loved learning about and taking care of plants and flowers,
and that's something that would bring her a lot of
joy for her whole life. She didn't spend all of
her time outdoors, though. She also learned to cook and clean,
and to do all the other domestic tasks that were
part of maintaining an efficient and orderly and well kept home.

(02:50):
In eighteen fifty nine, when Ellen was sixteen, her parents
moved to Westford so she could attend Westford Academy. It
had been open to students regardless of their set since
its founding in seventeen ninety two. Ellen excelled as a student,
particularly in Latin, which gave her a foundation to also
learn German and French, and she also started picking up

(03:11):
new skills outside of school. Her father opened a store,
and she spent as much time helping with the business
as she spent helping at home. She also took on
new responsibilities at home as her mother experienced a series
of illnesses, so she was really starting to manage their household.
This was a lot of work beyond her schoolwork. She

(03:33):
was described as always having a book open beside her
whatever she was doing. By this point, she was already
forming some strong opinions about things like sanitation and hygiene,
and that would go on to be a big focus
in her life. For example, the family store sold tobacco.
That's something she didn't really like, but it was necessary

(03:54):
to keep the business going. It really wasn't unusual for
men to come in by their tabacco and then sit
around the stove in the store and just talk while
smoking their pipes. At one point, Ellen complained about this,
and one of the men asked why the store sold
to macco if they didn't want people to use it.
She said, well, we sell you molasses too, but we

(04:16):
don't expect you to stay here and cook it up.
Ellen was at Westford Academy until the spring of eighteen
sixty two. After that, she planned to start teaching, but
her plans were temporarily disrupted when she contracted measles. Teaching
was never her long term goal, though she wanted to
go to college, she just didn't have the money to

(04:36):
start right away. It's possible that the Civil War was
affecting her financial situation that spanned from eighteen sixty one
to eighteen sixty five, but none of the sources that
were used in this episode really talk about the war
at all, so unclear exactly how those two might have
impacted each other. I found the war to be weirdly
absent in all the accounts. Saving up enough money for

(05:01):
college took years, and Ellen worked at a variety of
jobs to do it. She was a nurse, a housekeeper,
a teacher, and a language tutor, and she also kept
on studying on her own, so much so that when
she finally had enough money to start at Vassar at
the age of twenty six, her scores on her entrance

(05:21):
exams placed her as a third year student. Once again,
she excelled at school. Her best subjects were astronomy with
Professor Maria Mitchell, and chemistry, which was taught by Charles Farrar.
Her biggest complaint was, in her words, quote, they won't
let us study enough. They are so afraid we shall
break down. And you know, the reputation of the college's

(05:43):
at stake. For the question is can girls get a
college degree without injuring their health? Ellen Swallow graduated in
eighteen seventy and once again she planned to teach, but
this was still meant to be a temporary step. She
was hoping that a teacher position might open up opportunities
for advanced scientific work and to that end, she got

(06:06):
a contract to go to Argentina along with a group
of other American teachers. President Domingo Sarmiento was campaigning to
reform Argentina's education system and to open new schools, so
all of these teachers had been hired for that purpose,
but he wound up canceling their contracts before they left
the United States. Sources agree that this was because of

(06:30):
a war, but they don't say which one, and I'm
a little fuzzy on the exact timing of when this
decision was made. The War of the Triple Alliance ended
in eighteen seventy, and an uprising that's generally considered to
be part of the Argentine Civil Wars started in that
same year. After the contract in Argentina fell through, she

(06:51):
tried to find an apprenticeship as a chemist. While she
loved astronomy, she thought chemistry had more practical, day to
day applications, especially ones that could help make the world better,
which was what she really wanted to do with her life.
But she wasn't considered suitable as an apprentice because she
was a woman. Finally, one of the chemical companies that

(07:13):
she had applied to suggested that she might continue her
studies at the newly opened Massachusetts Institute of Technology MIT
had started holding classes in a building on Boylston Street
in Boston's Back Bay in eighteen sixty five. Aside from
the money that she needed for tuition, though, there was
just one problem. The institute had not admitted any women

(07:36):
as students, and it wasn't sure that it wanted to.
The Committee of the School of Industrial Science discussed Ellen
Swallow's application and ultimately decided to allow her to enroll
as a special student, quote, it being understood that her
admission did not establish a precedent for the general admission
of females. The faculty was also quote of the opinion

(08:00):
that the admission of women as special students is as
yet in the nature of an experiment, that each application
should be acted on upon its own merits, and that
no general action or change of the former policy of
the Institute is at present expedient. As a special student,
Ellen didn't have to pay tuition, and at first she

(08:20):
actually thought her designation as a special student was solely
about her economic situation, but really it meant that the
university could allow her to attend classes without having to
list her on the student roster or otherwise formally acknowledged
that a woman was attending the school home. Economist Caroline

(08:41):
Louisa Hunt, who published a biography of Ellen Swaller Richards
in nineteen eighteen, summed it up as quote, so it
came about that the answer to her question our women
admitted was not they are, but you are. Ellen wrote
this in a letter to her friend after being accepted. Quote,
you will know that one of my delights is to

(09:03):
do something that no one else ever did. I have
the chance of doing what no woman ever did, to
be the first woman to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
and so far as I know, any scientific school, and
to do it by myself alone, unaided to be welcomed
most cordially. Is this not honor enough for the first
six months of post collegiate life. She started at MIT

(09:27):
in eighteen seventy one, and we'll talk more about her
time there after a quick sponsor break. While she was
still a student at Vassar, one of Ellen Swallow's many
many letters back home to her parents talked about how

(09:50):
busy she was, how she was just taking on too
much in pursuit of training herself for her future. She
ended this letter with quote, I would like to enjoy
the quiet with you a little while, but my life
is to be one of active fighting. She didn't start
her time at MIT by fighting, though. While she wasn't

(10:12):
totally aware that her special student designation was away for
the university to avoid acknowledging that it had admitted a woman,
she did know that there were plenty of people who
did not think she should be there, so she tried
to make herself as unthreatening as possible and to continually
demonstrate that while she was doing something considered to be

(10:33):
unwomanly by attending the university, she still had a lot
of the traits and skills that were expected of a woman,
and a letter dated February eleventh, eighteen seventy one, she
wrote quote, I try to keep all sorts of such
things as needles, thread pens, scissors, et cetera, rounds, and
they are getting to come to me for everything they want.

(10:54):
They leave messages with me and come to expect me
to know where everything and everybody is. So you see,
I am useful in a decidedly general way, so they
can't say study spoils me for anything else. It may
feel disheartening to think that she was having to act
out feminine stereotypes to smooth her way at the university,

(11:16):
but she also saw this as a means to an end.
In that same letter, she also said, quote, I hope
that I am winning away which others will keep open.
Perhaps the fact that I am not a radical and
that I do not score womanly duties but deem it
a privilege to clean up and supervise the room and
so things, etc. Is winning me stronger allies. She also

(11:39):
faced some personal hardship during her first year at MIT.
In March of eighteen seventy one, her father died four
days after being struck by a train. She had to
travel back and forth between Boston and her family home
in Worcester every day to care for her father in
the last days of his life, to see to his
affairs after his death, and to care for her mother,

(12:00):
who was chronically ill. And although there were certainly people
who tried to make her feel welcome at MIT, almost
none of them were women, which felt lonely. There were
literally almost no other women there. She did become friends
with Margaret Stenson, who was MIT's first and at this
point possibly still the only woman employee, Margaret Stenson, managed

(12:25):
the supplies for the chemistry department. Ellen once again excelled
as a student in In eighteen seventy three, a committee
voted to allow her to present herself as a candidate
for a degree and to take the exams required to
earn that degree. She graduated in eighteen seventy three with
a bachelor's degree in chemistry, making her the first woman

(12:46):
to graduate from MT. Based on the content of her thesis,
Vassar also awarded her a Master of Arts degree, and
she really wanted to go on to pursue a PhD.
Various sources suggest that MIT balked at the idea of
possibly awarding its first PhD in chemistry to a woman,

(13:07):
but she also just didn't have the money to continue
to pursue her education. While studying an MIT, Ellen had
met doctor Robert H. Richards, head of the Department of
Mining Engineering. Again. In the words of biographer Caroline Louisa Hunt, quote,
Miss Swallow and Professor Richards, differing widely in temperament, she

(13:27):
being quick to see, to move, and to act, he slow,
deliberate and judicial in his mental attitude, had met upon
the common ground of interest in scientific pursuits and had
fallen in love with each other. Robert proposed to Ellen
in the lab in eighteen seventy three, but she did
not give him an answer. He was not her first suitor,

(13:50):
and she had seen a lot of women's lives completely
changed after getting married because at that point they were
expected to start focusing exclusively on their homes and families.
She wanted to be sure that a marriage to Robert
Richards would not put an end to her educational and
scientific pursuits. In the interim, she established a private practice

(14:12):
in sanitary chemistry, doing things like testing food for adulterance,
checking wallpaper and fabric for arsenic and measuring air and
water quality. Although she did this to earn a living,
she also worked for free for people and organizations that
were struggling. In eighteen seventy five, Ellen agreed to marry
Robert Richards, and they made it pretty clear pretty much

(14:35):
immediately that their marriage would not derail her work. Ellen
and Robert worked together often throughout their marriage, and their
honeymoon was a working trip to Nova Scotia with his
mining students. They were touring a bunch of mines and
taking samples and purse supervising all these college kids, isn't
it romantic? Ellen and Robert moved into a home in Jamaica,

(14:59):
plane and until Ellen's schedule got to the point that
she needed full time help around the house, she allowed
women students to board with them in exchange for helping
with housekeeping. She also wanted their home to be comfortable, sanitary,
and welcoming. As we said earlier, she loved plants, and
she turned their dining room into a conservatory space that

(15:21):
had potted plants on seemingly every surface. She was also
focused on cleanliness and air quality, switching from a coal
stove to a gas stove, and installing skylights, vents, and
screened windows for ventilation. People talked about her immense hospitality.
Sometimes she would welcome so many guests into their home

(15:41):
that she had to give up her own bed, and
she would sneak out to stay in a hotel after
everyone else had gone to sleep. I have a fine note.
Her focus on ventilation was huge. At one point, she
wrote quote once breathed air is as much a waste
as once used water and should be allowed to escape.

(16:02):
Sewers are built for draining away used water. Flues are
just as important to serve as sewers for used air.
Since Robert was a department head, he earned enough money
to support them both, but Ellen had no intention of
stopping working. In conjunction with the Woman's Education Association of Boston,

(16:24):
she launched the MIT Women's Laboratory, a facility specifically for
women to study science, which opened in eighteen seventy six.
Many of the students at the Women's Laboratory were teachers
who wanted to improve their knowledge of the sciences, although
some were studying out of personal interest and others were
hoping to pursue a career in science or medicine. Richards

(16:46):
was on the faculty, making her MIT's first woman faculty member,
although she did not draw a salary and even contributed
about a thousand dollars a year to the lab's operation.
Helen Swallow Richards didn't just want to open up opportunities
for women to study science at MIT. She also wanted
to make scientific study accessible to women who couldn't go

(17:09):
to college, So also in eighteen seventy six, she started
working with the Society to encourage studies at home, eventually
becoming head of its science section. She developed science curricula
that people could pursue at home. By correspondence, this society
had been founded in eighteen seventy three, following the example

(17:29):
of Britain's Society for the Encouragement of Home Study. But
while the British Society was primarily focused on the education
of upper class women, it's American counterpart wanted to make
education accessible to women of any class. Ultimately, all kinds
of people were taking these classes at home, older people
who were looking for something to enrich their time, disabled people,

(17:53):
people with chronic illnesses, children whose local schools didn't have
the resources to teach particular subs. In detail, black women
and girls who were shut out of whites only schools,
and women and girls who faced discrimination at school because
of their gender. Also, in eighteen seventy six, Ellen accompanied
her husband on a work trip to Germany, and there

(18:15):
she learned about naturalist zoologists and physician Ernst Heckel's ideas
around ecology, which he spelled oekology. He described this as
the study of organisms in their own environment. After getting
back to the United States, Richards built on this to
formulate her own ideas of ecology, which she described as

(18:38):
quote the science of the conditions of the health and
well being of everyday human life. Her ideas on this
had connections to later movements for environmental activism and conservation.
She thought humans were interacting with, rather than acting on,
the world around us, and her ideas of ecology encompassed

(18:58):
the home and the built world, not just what we
would think of as nature. Although the word ecology still
carries this sense today in terms like urban ecology, it
pretty quickly became more widely used in a sense that's
more about the natural environment than the built environment. But
for the rest of her career, Richard's ideas on things

(19:19):
like sanitation and conservation were more holistic, including not just
household cleanliness, but also clean air, clean water, and clean
streets in public spaces. As just a glimpse of how
she talked about these ideas, here is something she had
to say about water. Quote. Water is held to be
a gift of nature to man for use by all,

(19:41):
and therefore not to be diverted from its natural channels
for the pleasure of or profit of anyone, to the
exclusion of the rest. Neither has won the right to
return to the channel water unfit for the use of
his neighbor farther down the stream in eighteen se seventy eight.
In eighteen seventy nine, Richards studied the quality and purity

(20:04):
of food at the request of the Massachusetts Board of Health,
which had been founded in eighteen sixty nine. Her results
were published in the first annual report of what was
then known as the State Board of Health, Lunacy, and
Charity under the title the Adulterations of Some Staple Groceries.
Her work suggested that when food was adulterated, the adulteration

(20:25):
happened during manufacturing, not at the grocer's who sold the
product to consumers. She outlined various adulterants that she had
found in staples like flour, sugar, and baking powder, as
well as her conclusion that supposedly better equality products were
often chemically identical to cheaper ones, so people were paying
more for something that they thought was more pure but

(20:48):
really wasn't. Richards later studies of food adulteration would uncover
some dramatic examples, like mahogany sawdust used in place of cinnamon.
Richard's work in this area is often cited as a
reason that Massachusetts passed a Food and Drug Act in
eighteen eighty two, more than twenty years before the Federal
Pure Food and Drug Act of nineteen oh six. In

(21:09):
eighteen eighty one, Ellen Swallow Richards, Alice Freeman Palmer, and
others came together to establish the Association of Collegiate Alumna
which later became the American Association of University Women. A
year later, with the help of the Women's Education Association,
she established the Summer Seaside Laboratory on Cape Ann in Massachusetts,

(21:31):
and that was one of the marine research laboratories that
eventually became part of Woods Whole Oceanographic Institution. In eighteen
eighty two, Richards also published her first book, The Chemistry
of Cooking and Cleaning, a manual for Housekeepers, which described cooking, cleaning,
and sanitation in terms of applied science. It had four

(21:53):
chapters Starch, sugar and Fat as Food, Nitrogenous Food, and
the Chemistry of Nutrition, The Chemistry of cleaning, and Chemicals
for household use. She also published a pamphlet called First
Lessons in Minerals, which was a guide for teachers that
she had developed by working with classes of elementary school
children in Boston. Not long after this, the women's lab

(22:16):
at MIT closed, which we will get to after another
sponsor break. In eighteen eighty three, MT started enrolling women
as regular students, and the women's laboratory closed. Since women

(22:38):
were being enrolled as part of the regular student body,
there was no longer a separate laboratory needed. Richards said
of this quote, I feel like a woman whose children
are all about to be married and leave her alone
so that she is to move into a smaller house
than a new neighborhood. You see it as quite a
change for me, and though I knew it was coming,

(22:58):
I cannot at once fit all the corners. My work
is done and happily done, but the energy will have
to be used somehow, And that is the question. That
question was because at first it seemed like the lab's
closure meant that Richards wouldn't have a job at MT anymore.
But in April of eighteen eighty four, a committee voted

(23:19):
to appoint her as an assistant under chemistry Professor William
Ripley Nichols, where she would teach a course in sanitary
chemistry at a salary of six hundred dollars per year.
A month later, the committee revised that amount to one
thousand dollars, and once again described MIT's relationship with her
as an experiment which quote in no way commits itself

(23:42):
to the continuance of this instruction in sanitary chemistry unless
encouraged by the results of this year of trial. She
also acted as the Dean of Women, although she was
not formally given that title. This experiment was a success.
Richards taught at MIT for the rest of her life.
She had previously worked as a chemist for the Massachusetts

(24:03):
Sport of Health, and in eighteen eighty seven she was
asked to undertake a comprehensive study of drinking water quality
in Massachusetts. This built on work that she had done
assisting Professor Nichols at MIT while she was a student,
although that had been on a much smaller scale. At
the Sanitary Chemistry Lab at MIT, she examined roughly twenty

(24:25):
thousand water samples from all over the state. One thing
she was looking at was chlorine, which was an indicator
of both industrial and household water pollution. To that end,
she created a normal chlorine map, which showed how much
chlorine should be in a water supply based on things
like how far it was from the ocean, if a
water supply had more chlorine than it should, that suggested

(24:48):
the presence of other pollutants. This was the first known
study of drinking water quality of this scale, and it
is also credited with both water quality laws and the
establishment of a municipal sewage treatment plant in Lowell, northwest
of Boston. She continued to work for the Board of
Health as a water analyst for the next ten years. Yeah,

(25:09):
we haven't explained specifically what sanitary chemistry means, but it
includes all of this kind of stuff like examining air
quality and water quality and waste disposal, and it also
extends into things like cleanliness and hygiene. It's a pretty
broad field that touches on all of those things. In

(25:32):
eighteen ninety, Richards helped establish the New England Kitchen, which
we talked about in our previous episode on the Bureau
of Home Economics. This kitchen was meant to serve multiple purposes.
It would provide inexpensive, nourishing foods to supplement the diets
of Boston's poor and working class residence, and it would
also demonstrate cooking and sanitation techniques. One of the tools

(25:56):
that it used was the Aladdin oven invented by Edward Atkinson,
which burned kerosene rather than coal and was a lot
more efficient. It was estimated that a pound of kerosene
burned and an Aladdin oven could replace as much as
seventy pounds of coal in a traditional oven. The Aladdin
oven was used for slow cooking, so that allowed the

(26:18):
staff at the kitchen to slow cook cheap cuts of
meat until they were tender and at least in the
minds of the staff, delicious. However, the New England kitchen
was also preparing what was described as Yankee cuisine, foods
that often had British roots, sometimes influenced by cuisine from

(26:38):
indigenous nations living in the northeastern US, as in quote
beef broth, vegetable soup, pea soup, cornmeal, mush boiled hominy, oatmeal,
mush pressed beef, beef stew, fish chowder, tomato soup, Indian pudding,
rice pudding, and oatmeal cakes. Case you don't know, what's
called Indian pudding is a baked zert made with cormeal

(27:01):
and molasses. But most of the people the kitchen was
trying to feed were immigrants from other parts of Europe
who just had very different tastes. Many found the menu
at the New England Kitchen to be unappealing based on
what they could make at home. Although the New England
Kitchen did not become popular as just a go to
source of food for local workers, it did have an

(27:24):
impact in other ways. It was eventually taken over by
the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, and it was under
contract to provide school lunches to the Boston School Committee
for years. It also informed the Rumford Kitchen, which was
named for Sir Benjamin Thompson, count Rumford, which was a
display kitchen that was set up at the Massachusetts State

(27:46):
Fair and then at the eighteen ninety three World's Fair
in Chicago that both fairs, this kitchen offered food to
visitors and also conducted demonstrations of things like cooking and
sanitation techniques. Research into nutrition was also conducted at the
New England Kitchen, the Rumford Kitchen, and at MIT. This

(28:07):
was very early in the establishment of nutrition as a science.
The term vitamin had not been coined yet, and although
various minerals like iron and potassium had been isolated, vitamins
had not. Research into nutrition was critically important, For example,
today we know that vitamin C deficiency causes scurvy, vitamin

(28:28):
D deficiency causes rickets, and niacin deficiency causes pelagra, all
of which can be life threatening. But at this point
people only knew that these diseases existed, not what was
causing them or how to treat or prevent them. But
this also paved the way for things like government dietary guidelines,
which have a very complicated history. Yeah, I feel like

(28:52):
that's the whole other digression. In eighteen ninety four, Richards
was elected to be an alumna trustee at vass One
of her first tasks as part of that body involved
dealing with a sewage crisis at the college. Vassard's sewage
system had been put in place in eighteen sixty five,
and after converting a lot of solid waste into fertilizer,

(29:13):
it then discharged the remaining liquid into nearby creeks. Local
residents were tired of the sewer water in their creeks.
They were demanding some other solution, and a proposal had
been made to build a pipeline to instead carry the
waste runoff to the Hudson River just dump in another
body of water it's fine, Dad was the plan. Richards

(29:37):
convinced the trustees to instead implement a plan that involved
creating a drain field that would be less expensive and
less destructive. In her words, quote, this is a valuable
record of the possibility of sewage utilization without offense, and
of the right principle in taking care of the wastes
of an establishment by itself, instead of fouling a stream

(29:58):
to become a menace to the health of others and
an expense to helpless dwellers further down. It is thus
in the line of modern economic and sociological investigation, a
line which must be followed up if the land is
to remain safely habitable. Yeah, she was very frustrated that
there was even a plan being discussed to build this
pipeline to the Hudson River. She was like, as a university,

(30:21):
we should be taking a leadership role in disposing of
this waste in like a sanitary, non polluting way as
much as possible. It was also around this same time
that two overlapping fields were evolving that would be a
big part of Richard's career for the last fifteen years
of her life. One was home economics, as we set

(30:43):
up at the top of the show. Richards convene the
conference in Lake Placid, New York, in eighteen ninety nine.
That is where the name home economics was coined and
agreed upon to represent this field. Annual conferences followed, and
in nineteen o two, delegates the conference agreed on this definition.
Quote one, home economics, in its most comprehensive sense, is

(31:07):
the study of laws, conditions, principles, and ideals which are
concerned on the one hand, with man's immediate physical environment
and on the other hand, with his nature as a
social being. And is the study specifically of the relation
between these two factors. Two. In a narrow sense, the
term is given to the study of the empirical sciences,

(31:28):
with special reference to the practical problems of housework, cooking, etc.
As was the case with the term ecology, Richard's ideas
about home economics were really broader than this. She had
envisioned a field that was focused on applied science in
the context of people's everyday lives. She had hoped that

(31:49):
the field would encompass things like sanitation, air quality, water
quality conservation, and preserving the natural world through science. This
would certainly involve the home, something that she hoped would
both make women's lives easier and more efficient, and would
offer mental stimulation and enrichment through the learning of science.
But it wouldn't just be about housework or things that

(32:12):
were considered women's work. That brings us to the other field,
which was euthenics, which she coined to mean quote the
science of controllable environment. Euthenics incorporated sanitary science, education, and
practical applications of sciences to everyday life, all folded together

(32:32):
with progressive social reform. She hoped that euthenics would similarly
lead to laws that would prevent disease by preventing contamination
to the soil, water, and food by requiring things like
waste removal and ventilation and buildings, and she hoped that
this would bring an efficiency to those same goals conserving

(32:54):
resources and preserving the natural environment. One of the reasons
that Richards was involved in the home economics movement was
that she thought it might help bring euthenics into a
wider use. You can see where there's like some overlap
in them. Both of the home economics movement and euthenics
were connected to the idea of racial improvement. This was

(33:18):
during the eugenics movement in the United States, which was
a movement that was racist, classist, and ablest, but also
incredibly widely accepted and normalized. This was rooted in the
idea that humanity could improve itself through so called good breeding,
which ultimately involved everything from encouraging the so called right

(33:39):
people to have more children to forcibly sterilizing disabled people,
people of color, and others perceived as undesirable. Although this
basic concept was applied across races, it was also threaded
through with the idea that the white race was superior
and needed to be kept pure. So we've talked about

(33:59):
this we've met a number of times on the show before,
including in our episode The Calcax and the Eugenicists, which
we are actually rerunning as an upcoming Saturday Classic. The
eugenics movement in the United States went on to influence
the Nazi Party's ideas on race science, and that led
to hundreds of thousands of forced sterilizations as well as murders.

(34:24):
Most of the most horrific outcomes of the eugenics movement
took place after Ellen Swallow Richard's death, but its core
ideas of better breeding and racial purity were part of
her work in both home economics and euthenics. She saw
euthenics as a more efficient way to reach the same
outcomes as the eugenics movement was proposing. In particular, she

(34:46):
thought it would take many generations to improve humanity through
better breeding, but that euthenics could have a more immediate impact.
Steps like removing pollutants from the soil, water, and air,
requiring building to be well ventilated, removing garbage from streets
and alleys, and encouraging people to eat nutritious food and

(35:07):
keep their homes clean and sanitary would all play a
role in improving the human race. And we should also
take a moment to note that beyond this connection to
like racial purity and eugenics, Richard's work was primarily focused
on white middle class women. Like that menu at the
New England kitchen that we talked about earlier, she really

(35:28):
thought that that kind of food was standard and was
what immigrant families should be encouraged to eat. Sometimes she
could be disparaging and how she talked about sanitation as
it applied to immigrants, to poor people, to people of color.
It was kind of contradictory. Sometimes she would simultaneously recognize

(35:48):
that people were living in a society that forced them
to live in substandard housing in neighborhoods that didn't have
things like running water or proper disposal of garbage, but
it all most the exact same time. She would kind
of assume that a lack of sanitation in these people's
homes was due to their own ignorance if you just
tried harder, right. Ellen Swallow Richards spent the last decade

(36:13):
or so of her life traveling extensively doing research work, lecturing,
attending scientific meetings, and connecting with faculty members from other
universities and other figures within the home economics movement. She
continued to advocate for euthenics and to incorporate it in
other areas of her work. For example, it was incorporated

(36:34):
into her nineteen oh five book The Cost of Shelter,
which was an exploration of the idea of home, the
role that home plays in society, and the cost per
person of various types of shelter. She also published Euthenics,
The Science of Controllable Environment in nineteen ten. That same year,
she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Smith College. She

(36:57):
also spoke at MIT's convocation year, saying, in part quote,
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. In the last

(37:17):
few months of her life, Ellen Swallow Richards started to
show signs of heart disease, and her friends noticed her
struggling to do things that she had been able to
do before. She died on March thirtieth, nineteen eleven. Her husband, Robert,
later remarried. He died in nineteen forty five. Although the
field of euthenics did continue after Ellen Swallow Richard's death,

(37:40):
it was largely overshadowed by home economics. There were many
reasons for this, including the decline of public support for
eugenics after the horrors of the Nazi eugenics program. Eugenics
and euthenics just sounded so similar that it was really
not possible to separate the two of them in people's mind.

(38:00):
The home economics field also continued to diverge from the
more broad science based scope that Richards had envisioned for it,
and gradually it became mostly focused on homemaking. I think
those of us have an age to remember homemet classes
in high school. Remember that it was like a practical
class about cooking and cleaning and sewing. Although things like

(38:21):
those home economic classes have really declined in recent decades,
a lot of the fields that were originally considered to
be part of home economics, like food science and textile
science and child development, like those individual fields are still
thriving to some extent. The field of family and consumer
sciences is like the successor to home economics as a field,

(38:45):
and of course a lot of Richard's work on things
like ventilation and water pollution are just still incredibly relevant today.
Over the course of her career, Ellen Swallow Richards wrote
or co wrote eighteen books in addition to the ones
we've already mentioned. Some others were The Cost of Living,

(39:05):
Industrial Water Analysis, and Conservation by Sanitation. MIT established the
Ellen Swallow Richards Professorship to recognize distinguished women faculty members
in nineteen seventy three. I love a whole lot of
things about her life and career, and I wish there
had not been eugenics. Yeah, which is the case with

(39:27):
just a lot of nineteenth and early twentieth century people
and movements. Yes, I also have some listener mail. Our
listener mail is from Kristen, and Kristen wrote, Dear Holly
and Tracy, I recently acquired several boxes of early twentieth
century sheet music. I happened to be in the middle
of going through it right when Irving Berlin came up?

(39:49):
Is your subject? What a fun coincidence. Beer discussion of
sheet music, both during the episode and in the behind
the scenes mirrored some of my own discoveries of the
trends of the time. Bright colored covers, the love of
the quote, exotic, sexual innu window, and sometimes racially problematic
lyrics are all fairly common. Most have advertisements for music

(40:10):
from the publisher on the inside front cover. Some have
a full page sample. I've also found that many have
an introduction that's meant to repeat until your performers are ready.
The most charming trend that I've run across is the
common inclusion of a ukulele part. Maybe that'll be the
next instrument I shall learn. Of course, the box of
sheet music contained an Irving Berlin, which I've pictured below

(40:33):
with some other examples from my box of Treasures one
more thing being of that same certain age as you
find Ladies. I immediately had to pause the episode to
watch Fozzy Bear sing simple Melody with Gene Stapleton. A
Muppet break is always welcome if you notice Fozzy is
playing a ukulele. I find all of your episodes enjoyable,
but this one felt like a study guide for my

(40:54):
latest musical project. Thank you so much for all you do.
I've attached my pet pick of zach our one ear up,
one ear down, German Shepherd sharp a mix. This is favorite,
yet not so convenient spot to sit and people watch
Best Wishes Kristen. So Zach is sitting on the stairs
kind of looking out through the banister, which my cats

(41:15):
also do, except they also stick their heads out of
the banister sometimes, which is occasionally cute and also sometimes alarming,
because there are spots on the banister that are just,
in my opinion, too high up for them to be
potentially jumping down off of. Also, one of the many
things in that episode that wound up being cut out

(41:36):
for sake of time was that a lot of music
out of tenpenn Alley had a very similar structure, and
I don't want to call it a formula because I
feel like that has negative connotations. But there was a
pattern that was recognizable, and it was an introduction, a
short vamp that drew from the melody and the rhythm
of the rest of the song at least two verses,

(41:56):
and then a chorus with two different endings, one that
was going to be used if you were repeating the
chorus and another if you were instead looping back to
the introduction or the vamp. So like that is a
you see that same pattern over and over. Also, if
I had to speculate, there's probably a lot of ukulele
parts because the ukulele is a very inexpensive instrument, which

(42:19):
made it a lot easier for folks to get their
hands on than something that might cost a little bit
more or money, like a violin or a guitar as
examples of things that I feel like are a little
more expensive than the Ukuleleas So, anyway, that's my conjecture.
Don't cite that as like historical fact. If you'd like

(42:39):
to write to us about this or any other podcast
or history podcast at iHeartRadio dot com and also on
social media, that's where you'll find our Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,
and Instagram, and you can subscribe to our show on
the iHeartRadio app or wherever else you like to get
your podcast. Stuff in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.

(43:02):
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

All Episodes

Episode Transcript

Stuff You Missed in History Class News

Follow Us On

Hosts And Creators

Holly Frey

Tracy Wilson

Show Links

Popular Podcasts

24/7 News: The Latest

Therapy Gecko

The Joe Rogan Experience

.css-15opob5{left:0;position:absolute;top:0.8rem;} All Episodes

.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Ellen Swallow Richards