February 6, 2019 • 11 mins
Who is Ellen Richards? One of the most unsung scientists of all time, that's who. Her contribution? Bringing real science into the household and forcing the world to take "home-ec" seriously. We celebrate her today on Short Stuff.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey there, Hi there, How they're welcome to short Stuff,
the shorter stuffed version of stuff you should know, starring Chuck,
Jerry and me Josh. This is short stuff on short
stuff I do, which is why I despise it. Oh
(00:25):
you doing well? I am doing well. I love talking science.
I also love talking history, and I really love talking
hissed sigh as it's called. And I love talking about
um undersung women in history and science. For sure. Chuck
kicks all those boxes. And what's sad is you could
(00:47):
have just said women in science because almost across the board, um,
women in science are are undersong or completely unsung. What
about Mary Curie? I mean she's such an outlier, Yeah,
because like that's the first name that pops into your
head for a reason, right, and it's like, oh, well,
she must have been the only woman scientists in the
(01:09):
in the world. No, that's not the case. Supposedly, there
is a longstanding tradition in science of the men in
science taking credit for the work of the women. Whether
it's something is like outright fraudulent, is like just basically
taking someone's work and not giving them credit because you
can get away with it because you're a man and
the other person was a woman or just not giving
(01:32):
due credit. And over time, with history favoring men, typically
at least Western history, Um, the original person who laid
the foundation for the woman, um will just kind of
be lost to time. And this is what's called something
something called the Matilda effect. Yeah, and this is very
evident in science. There's a couple of sort of horrifying
(01:55):
UM statistics that they found here. One is that there
was a science of big journal that changed their review process,
you know, reviewing things. Are we going to publish it?
Are we not? And they switched there's to leave out
the names of the author, so you don't even know
who it is, male or female. And just doing that, uh,
the acceptance rate for women's reports rose almost eight percent.
(02:19):
And Uh. Then a study in two thousand thirteen showed
that the abstracts you know when you google online and
you read like the abstract of a science science paper,
it's like sort of like a summary. I guess, Um,
they were seen as uh being of a higher quality
if the author was male and wrote about things stereotypically
(02:39):
you would think of as male subjects like physics or
math or something. Yeah, and this is in two tho. Right,
so it's clearly still going on. And like I said, also,
it's a long standing tradition. And um, it was kind
of given this name, the Matilda effect, back in by
end a storian of science from Cornell named Margaret Rossiter,
and she named it Matilda Effect after a woman named
(03:01):
Matilda Jostle Engage who was an abolitionist and suffragists. And
she had written an essay in eightee called Women as
an Inventor, which is basically like it is straight up
b s the way that women scientists are just being
completely left out of history. She had a lot of
foresight at the time, um, and and called this out
(03:22):
and it didn't really get anywhere with it, but at
least documented it as far back as before the turn
of the last century that this was a problem in
an issue. And so this this um, this a hundred
years later, Margaret Rossiter kind of came up with this
thing called the Matilda effect. And there's a lot a
lot of instances in history. It's not sporadic, it's not
(03:43):
you know, kind of scatter shot like, there are a
lot of instances in history of women not getting due
credit for the work that they did. That um established
a field that created multiple fields UM or that their
their work grew to be misunderstood and almost kind of scorned.
And that last one in particular, is very much embodied
(04:05):
by a woman named Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards. That's right. Uh.
She was a woman who UM. She was the first
woman accepted into a school of science, which at the time,
the m I T. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was male only,
and they said, we'll do a little test and see
if this lady can handle m I T. And she
(04:29):
was like great, I handled it. UM. She was one
of the first female chemists in the US. UM. She well,
her her largest contribution. I guess what she's remembered most
for is her contribution to domestic science a k a. Homeck,
which just saying that some people still might dismiss that
(04:50):
as a soft science or non science, but it's not
true because that encompasses everything from hygienic standards in the
home to um the you know, the clothes we wear
being safe and the food we eat being healthy. And
before she came along, not a lot of people were
doing this, and it took her going to Vassar College, UM,
(05:12):
which is it still an all female college, Vassar I
think actually is yeah? Is it? Uh? She got a
degree in chemistry in eighteen seventy and then that's when
m I. T said let me just see if she
can handle this, and she got a Bachelor of Science
and chemistry from there in eighteen seventy three, and then
immediately started working like studying pollution and sanitary chemistry and
(05:36):
things like that, which not a lot of people were
doing it at the time. No, she was almost the first,
if not the first person to say, Okay, we're all
like eating food and drinking water and um. Has anybody
stopped and asked, like, is the food we're eating in
the water we're drinking healthy and impure? Is that toxic? H?
What's the relation to um pollution? What's the relation to
(05:59):
indus tree? Um? She started asking questions and then in
addition to asking questions, you started doing research and study.
And she came up with this field called o ecology
o e k ology, and it was the basis for
what we recognized now as ecology or the study of
the environment UM. And she was the first one to
(06:20):
to to think about this back in I believe the
eighteen seventies UM and it went along for five years
and m I T by this time she was a
um UH an instructor at m I T. And m
I T said, this sounds crack pot and whack stopped
talking about this. We we They literally forbade her to
talk about oh ecology for a year and so her
(06:43):
her this discipline that she launched lasted for all of
five years and just kind of frustrated by that, she
turned her attention instead to home economics, which was basically
taking this idea rather than studying like the water in
the air and all of that, studying the um the
results of the water in the air, like the food
(07:03):
we put in, and like the surroundings we live in
UM and how they impact our health and how they
can be made better. All Right, we're gonna take a
break and we're gonna come back and talk a little
bit more about She about how she managed to bring
science into the household right after this. Alright, so bringing
(07:41):
science into the home environment was very different on the
household level. To do that at the time, it was
it was an unusual thing that she knew was important.
It was a big passion of hers. Uh. She also
you know, homeck also is cooking and cleaning and sewing
and and things like that. And it's not like she
issued those things, but she was like, you know, women
(08:03):
are already in the home doing these things, so why
don't I bring some science to it and talk about
having sanitary conditions and organizing the household and raising a
healthy family with science based techniques. Because, like I said,
it was at the time, and this is in the
you know, late I guess, uh, late nineteenth century, right
(08:25):
when she started out right at the turn. Yeah yeah,
so uh. I mean she has gotten some pushback over
the years from feminists, but I think they got it wrong,
you know, man, from what I saw it, they got
it really wrong. Any And like, if you criticize um
Ellen Richards as anti feminists by creating home MEC, it
(08:45):
seems like you just haven't really dug in very deeply
to researcher, because she was a proto feminist to the
first degree. Yeah, Like it would have been really easy
at the time to say, as a as a progressive
of to say, well, you know, women ditch the household
and get out there and try and take the man's job.
(09:06):
But she she knew the reality of things. I think
and she wanted to uplift UH, what women were doing
in the household instead of saying, no, ditch all that
and leave it behind to go take a quote unquote
man's job, Like what you're doing is important, and I
want to uplift that and bring science to it. Well.
And not only did did was it important? She also
realized that that was the reality of the situation, right
(09:28):
like you, I think something like nineties seven percent of
women at the time UM didn't go to college. They
just they they got married and they became homemakers. So
that's what she had to work with. So she was
trying to UM, like you said, uplift women in that sense,
not necessarily because you know she was. She was saying,
this is a woman's lot. It was, this is what
(09:50):
we're working with, so I'm going to try to make
it better. She also very strongly advocated for women to
be college educated. She thought that that should just be
standard practice UM. And she actually set up a lab,
a woman's lab at m I T to teach chemistry
to UM young women who were coming into college UM.
(10:11):
And the lab was only open for a few years
because from her efforts, m I T started to accept
women into the general the general population. It wasn't like
a special track any longer. But she set up a
lab to teach women chemistry and she did it free.
She didn't get any money from it. She and she
taught chemistry for years for for no charge, so that
(10:32):
these um young women could learn chemistry. Yeah. And you know,
despite all this, she's um, I don't know about forgotten,
but largely forgotten in history, especially in science as a
real pioneer, uh and validating the home economic movement and
bringing women into more traditionally male fields of science. And
(10:53):
she doesn't get nearly enough recognition. So uh no, especially also,
I mean like she was she was a pioneer the
concept in the study of water quality and like that's
that's huge she was. She had a really deep and
broad scientific career, so I know, she definitely doesn't get
her to you. Yeah, like today she would be on
the front lines in Flint, Michigan, in in newspapers and
(11:15):
on TV shows, but back then she was discounted because
it was kitchen stuff. Yep. So hats off to Ellen
Richards for being just a total top notch scientist. Absolutely,
and uh, if you want to know more about her.
Go check out this article on how stuff Works. How
about that agreed? Uh, well, that's short stuff. Send us
(11:37):
an email if you like, send it off to Stuff
Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
Hey there, Hi there, How they're welcome to short Stuff,
the shorter stuffed version of stuff you should know, starring Chuck,
Jerry and me Josh. This is short stuff on short
stuff I do, which is why I despise it. Oh
(00:25):
you doing well? I am doing well. I love talking science.
I also love talking history, and I really love talking
hissed sigh as it's called. And I love talking about
um undersung women in history and science. For sure. Chuck
kicks all those boxes. And what's sad is you could
(00:47):
have just said women in science because almost across the board, um,
women in science are are undersong or completely unsung. What
about Mary Curie? I mean she's such an outlier, Yeah,
because like that's the first name that pops into your
head for a reason, right, and it's like, oh, well,
she must have been the only woman scientists in the
(01:09):
in the world. No, that's not the case. Supposedly, there
is a longstanding tradition in science of the men in
science taking credit for the work of the women. Whether
it's something is like outright fraudulent, is like just basically
taking someone's work and not giving them credit because you
can get away with it because you're a man and
the other person was a woman or just not giving
(01:32):
due credit. And over time, with history favoring men, typically
at least Western history, Um, the original person who laid
the foundation for the woman, um will just kind of
be lost to time. And this is what's called something
something called the Matilda effect. Yeah, and this is very
evident in science. There's a couple of sort of horrifying
(01:55):
UM statistics that they found here. One is that there
was a science of big journal that changed their review process,
you know, reviewing things. Are we going to publish it?
Are we not? And they switched there's to leave out
the names of the author, so you don't even know
who it is, male or female. And just doing that, uh,
the acceptance rate for women's reports rose almost eight percent.
(02:19):
And Uh. Then a study in two thousand thirteen showed
that the abstracts you know when you google online and
you read like the abstract of a science science paper,
it's like sort of like a summary. I guess, Um,
they were seen as uh being of a higher quality
if the author was male and wrote about things stereotypically
(02:39):
you would think of as male subjects like physics or
math or something. Yeah, and this is in two tho. Right,
so it's clearly still going on. And like I said, also,
it's a long standing tradition. And um, it was kind
of given this name, the Matilda effect, back in by
end a storian of science from Cornell named Margaret Rossiter,
and she named it Matilda Effect after a woman named
(03:01):
Matilda Jostle Engage who was an abolitionist and suffragists. And
she had written an essay in eightee called Women as
an Inventor, which is basically like it is straight up
b s the way that women scientists are just being
completely left out of history. She had a lot of
foresight at the time, um, and and called this out
(03:22):
and it didn't really get anywhere with it, but at
least documented it as far back as before the turn
of the last century that this was a problem in
an issue. And so this this um, this a hundred
years later, Margaret Rossiter kind of came up with this
thing called the Matilda effect. And there's a lot a
lot of instances in history. It's not sporadic, it's not
(03:43):
you know, kind of scatter shot like, there are a
lot of instances in history of women not getting due
credit for the work that they did. That um established
a field that created multiple fields UM or that their
their work grew to be misunderstood and almost kind of scorned.
And that last one in particular, is very much embodied
(04:05):
by a woman named Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards. That's right. Uh.
She was a woman who UM. She was the first
woman accepted into a school of science, which at the time,
the m I T. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was male only,
and they said, we'll do a little test and see
if this lady can handle m I T. And she
(04:29):
was like great, I handled it. UM. She was one
of the first female chemists in the US. UM. She well,
her her largest contribution. I guess what she's remembered most
for is her contribution to domestic science a k a. Homeck,
which just saying that some people still might dismiss that
(04:50):
as a soft science or non science, but it's not
true because that encompasses everything from hygienic standards in the
home to um the you know, the clothes we wear
being safe and the food we eat being healthy. And
before she came along, not a lot of people were
doing this, and it took her going to Vassar College, UM,
(05:12):
which is it still an all female college, Vassar I
think actually is yeah? Is it? Uh? She got a
degree in chemistry in eighteen seventy and then that's when
m I. T said let me just see if she
can handle this, and she got a Bachelor of Science
and chemistry from there in eighteen seventy three, and then
immediately started working like studying pollution and sanitary chemistry and
(05:36):
things like that, which not a lot of people were
doing it at the time. No, she was almost the first,
if not the first person to say, Okay, we're all
like eating food and drinking water and um. Has anybody
stopped and asked, like, is the food we're eating in
the water we're drinking healthy and impure? Is that toxic? H?
What's the relation to um pollution? What's the relation to
(05:59):
indus tree? Um? She started asking questions and then in
addition to asking questions, you started doing research and study.
And she came up with this field called o ecology
o e k ology, and it was the basis for
what we recognized now as ecology or the study of
the environment UM. And she was the first one to
(06:20):
to to think about this back in I believe the
eighteen seventies UM and it went along for five years
and m I T by this time she was a
um UH an instructor at m I T. And m
I T said, this sounds crack pot and whack stopped
talking about this. We we They literally forbade her to
talk about oh ecology for a year and so her
(06:43):
her this discipline that she launched lasted for all of
five years and just kind of frustrated by that, she
turned her attention instead to home economics, which was basically
taking this idea rather than studying like the water in
the air and all of that, studying the um the
results of the water in the air, like the food
(07:03):
we put in, and like the surroundings we live in
UM and how they impact our health and how they
can be made better. All Right, we're gonna take a
break and we're gonna come back and talk a little
bit more about She about how she managed to bring
science into the household right after this. Alright, so bringing
(07:41):
science into the home environment was very different on the
household level. To do that at the time, it was
it was an unusual thing that she knew was important.
It was a big passion of hers. Uh. She also
you know, homeck also is cooking and cleaning and sewing
and and things like that. And it's not like she
issued those things, but she was like, you know, women
(08:03):
are already in the home doing these things, so why
don't I bring some science to it and talk about
having sanitary conditions and organizing the household and raising a
healthy family with science based techniques. Because, like I said,
it was at the time, and this is in the
you know, late I guess, uh, late nineteenth century, right
(08:25):
when she started out right at the turn. Yeah yeah,
so uh. I mean she has gotten some pushback over
the years from feminists, but I think they got it wrong,
you know, man, from what I saw it, they got
it really wrong. Any And like, if you criticize um
Ellen Richards as anti feminists by creating home MEC, it
(08:45):
seems like you just haven't really dug in very deeply
to researcher, because she was a proto feminist to the
first degree. Yeah, Like it would have been really easy
at the time to say, as a as a progressive
of to say, well, you know, women ditch the household
and get out there and try and take the man's job.
(09:06):
But she she knew the reality of things. I think
and she wanted to uplift UH, what women were doing
in the household instead of saying, no, ditch all that
and leave it behind to go take a quote unquote
man's job, Like what you're doing is important, and I
want to uplift that and bring science to it. Well.
And not only did did was it important? She also
realized that that was the reality of the situation, right
(09:28):
like you, I think something like nineties seven percent of
women at the time UM didn't go to college. They
just they they got married and they became homemakers. So
that's what she had to work with. So she was
trying to UM, like you said, uplift women in that sense,
not necessarily because you know she was. She was saying,
this is a woman's lot. It was, this is what
(09:50):
we're working with, so I'm going to try to make
it better. She also very strongly advocated for women to
be college educated. She thought that that should just be
standard practice UM. And she actually set up a lab,
a woman's lab at m I T to teach chemistry
to UM young women who were coming into college UM.
(10:11):
And the lab was only open for a few years
because from her efforts, m I T started to accept
women into the general the general population. It wasn't like
a special track any longer. But she set up a
lab to teach women chemistry and she did it free.
She didn't get any money from it. She and she
taught chemistry for years for for no charge, so that
(10:32):
these um young women could learn chemistry. Yeah. And you know,
despite all this, she's um, I don't know about forgotten,
but largely forgotten in history, especially in science as a
real pioneer, uh and validating the home economic movement and
bringing women into more traditionally male fields of science. And
(10:53):
she doesn't get nearly enough recognition. So uh no, especially also,
I mean like she was she was a pioneer the
concept in the study of water quality and like that's
that's huge she was. She had a really deep and
broad scientific career, so I know, she definitely doesn't get
her to you. Yeah, like today she would be on
the front lines in Flint, Michigan, in in newspapers and
(11:15):
on TV shows, but back then she was discounted because
it was kitchen stuff. Yep. So hats off to Ellen
Richards for being just a total top notch scientist. Absolutely,
and uh, if you want to know more about her.
Go check out this article on how stuff Works. How
about that agreed? Uh, well, that's short stuff. Send us
(11:37):
an email if you like, send it off to Stuff
Podcast at how stuff works dot com.
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