Standing on the shoulders of giantesses

America’s first water quality standards, modern sewerage treatment plants, and the term ‘human ecology’ can all be traced back to one person. That person would also likely have been awarded Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) first advanced degree, but for the fact that she was a woman.

That woman was sanitation expert, analytical chemist, and pioneering ecofeminist Ellen Swallow Richards – my favourite historical female scientist.

I recently spoke at an International Women’s Day event held by Sydney Water. I asked for a show of hands from those who had heard of her. No one had. I’d like to change that.

Ellen Henrietta Swallow was born in Massachusetts, USA in 1842. She was the only child of two teachers who firmly believed in the value of education. Critical of the standards of the local village school, they taught her themselves on the family farm. She commenced her formal education at Westford College at the age of 17, showing an aptitude for mathematics and languages, and went to become a tutor and later a teacher.

After graduating, she continued to independently pursue her interest in science, at the time considered a “male” subject. There were few opportunities for further education for women at all, let alone in science.

In 1868, she entered Vassar College for Women as a third-year student. The college had opened in 1865. There she gained a deeper interest in chemistry, taught by Professor Charles Farrar who firmly believed science should be applied to everyday household and community situations. She was also inspired and encouraged by Vassar astronomy professor Maria Mitchell who told her, “You will make valuable discoveries in the course of your life.” Mitchell herself was the first woman elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

At Vassar, she became the first woman to earn a chemistry degree in America, graduating in 1870. She also earned a Master of Arts degree with a thesis on the chemical analysis of iron ore. By now, she had exhausted all of the avenues available to women to study chemistry.

Nevertheless, she persisted.

She approached several commercial and industrial chemistry companies to take her on as an apprentice as a means to continue pursuing her interests, but without success. But one firm made a suggestion – an extraordinary one to make to a woman at the time – that she apply to study at MIT, then an all-male institute that had opened the same year as Vassar. She was accepted as a “special student”. This gave Miss Swallow the benefit of not having to pay tuition fees, and gave MIT the ability to deny they had formally accepted her, should the experiment of taking a female student fail or cause embarrassment!

She completed a Bachelor of Science at MIT in 1873, and continued her studies and analytical lab work. She did original investigative research, analysing a sample of the rare mineral samarskite and identifying an insoluble mystery residue, publishing her findings in the journal of the Boston Society of Natural History. She suspected the residue contained elements as yet unknown to science. She had hoped to work towards a doctorate, but there were too many barriers to women being allowed such an honour. Other scientists isolated two new elements, samarium and gadolinium, from samarskite two years later.

She married Robert H. Richards, chairman of the Mine Engineering Department at MIT, in 1975. She also worked as a chemistry lecturer at MIT from 1873 to 1878 – without pay or formal title.

But it was in the emerging field of sanitation and public health where she really made her mark. She conducted an extensive systematic survey of the waters of Massachusetts for the State Board of Health, taking 40,000 water samples representing the water supply of 82 per cent of the population, conducting the exacting analysis of them, and plotting the chloride concentrations (an indicator of water-quality) of these waters on a map.

Samples had to be taken back to MIT’s sanitation chemistry lab at Cambridge and analysed within a few hours or they would spoil and become useless. Richards often worked late into the night to ensure there would be no gaps in the record. While she worked, she continuously improved the laboratory’s experimental methods and devised new systems of apparatus.

The project took two years and resulted in a water-quality reference map of the whole state. This became known as “Richards’ Normal Chlorine Map”. According to the Chemical Heritage Foundation, “The scale of the survey was unprecedented: it led to the first state water-quality standards in the nation and the first modern municipal sewage treatment plant, in Lowell, Massachusetts.”

Richards then went to work for a large private sanitation chemistry company, conducting water, air and food testing, and also fabric and wallpaper testing for arsenic. This was a time when more than a third of deaths were due to infectious diseases, including typhoid and cholera, which could be spread through unsafe drinking water. She considered it a joy to work in the business world with those dedicated to improving living conditions.

She began teaching sanitation chemistry at MIT in 1884, training a large number of young men who went on to become sanitation engineers in American and overseas. Based on this work, MIT inaugurated the world’s first comprehensive sanitation engineering course in 1890 – something Richards was enormously proud of. Sanitation is one of the main reasons Americans now live 40 years longer than they did on average in 1880. Richards conducted her career in a spirit of public service and considered herself and her former students “missionaries to a suffering humanity.”

Throughout her career, Richards campaigned for the right for women to have a scientific education if they chose to. Her efforts led to the establishment of the MIT Woman’s Laboratory, which served as a bridge to co-education, and was a “founding mother” of the American Association of University Women.

Like Professor Farrar, her first chemistry teacher, she was firmly of the view that science should be applied in the home. She felt that women should be trained in science, recognising the primary role they play in looking after home hygiene and nutrition. Her approach became the field of home economics.

It’s now 2020. I am a woman working in science and technology. I apply things I learnt in my own science degree when I’m working, but also when I’m reading the instructions on family members’ medications, reading between the lines in product advertising, figuring out what my daughter is allergic to, and factchecking coronavirus (mis)information my friends post on Facebook. For me, science has been both delightful and incredibly useful.

There is still a long way to go for equity, diversity and inclusion in science, and in broader society. There is still a gender pay gap, there are still far more white male scientists on TV than women and people of colour, and women are still held back in their scientific careers by systemic inequality and discrimination. At Engineers Australia’s International Women’s Day events I learnt that women comprise only 12 per cent of the engineering workforce in Australia. But the story of Ellen Swallow Richards reminds me of how far we’ve come.

In recent weeks, another woman from Massachusetts – Senator Elizabeth Warren – suspended her US presidential campaign, having shown herself to be one of the most competent candidates but coming up against the challenges of sexism. But, as she told MSNBC TV commentator Rachel Maddow, she’s not done yet:

“That is how we make change. And it feels like we’re never going to make change until we make change. We were never going to elect a Catholic until we elected a Catholic. We were never going to elect a black man until we elected a black man. And we’re never going to elect a woman until we elect a woman. So, we’re just going to stay in this.”

In the 1990s, a TV producer told me that there was no place for an Asian-looking female presenter on primetime Australian TV. And that was true… until it wasn’t.

In 1675, English polymath Isaac Newton said, “If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants.”

My own science career story is that if have travelled further, it is by following in the footsteps of giantesses. It’s by treading a path they fought to carve out.

I am grateful for the giantesses – the pioneering women of science, like Maria Mitchell, Ellen Swallow Richards and Marie Curie. I am grateful for the women who fought for my right to vote, and other rights and provisions; for my own mother who encouraged my interest in health, nature and science. I am grateful that, though I missed out on paid maternity leave, that is something my own daughter can expect, should she decide to have children. I hope she finds an easier path, smoother and wider as more women walk before her and with her.

References:

• Hunt, Caroline Louisa (1912). The Life of Ellen H. Richards (1st ed.). Boston: Whitcomb & Barrows.
• American Chemical Society website: ACS Celebrates the Achievements of Women Scientists in American History - Ellen H. Swallow Richards (1842–1911)
• Dyball, R. and Carlsson, L., 2017. Ellen Swallow Richards. Human Ecology Review, 23(2), pp.17-28.

Images of text are taken from Caroline Hunt's 1912 biography of Ellen Swallow Richards. I highly recommend it. You can download it here.