Ellen Swallow Richards Biographer, Relative Visit Campus

“Don’t roil the waters.”

This was the directive given by Ellen Swallow Richards ‘(18)73 to other young female scientists in the late 19th century. Ellen was a pioneering applied scientist who influenced early work on issues such as water quality, environmental science, public health, and nutrition. And she did this at a time when gender could dictate an individual’s potential.

The Division of Student Life sponsored a series of events, including a campus visit by Pamela Curtis Swallow, Richard’s relative and author of The Remarkable Life and Career of Ellen Swallow Richards: Pioneer in Science and Technology. The book relates Richard’s remarkable progression from farmgirl in Dunstable, Massachusetts, to the labs of MIT, where she was both the Institute’s first female graduate and its first female instructor.

Ellen was an only child, and both her parents were teachers. Her father especially encouraged her. As biographer Pam Swallow describes it, her father “knew his daughter was one rural student who definitely should go on for further schooling. He understood her thirst for knowledge.” Her drive and persistence led to extraordinary achievements; Ellen contributed to emerging fields such as sanitary engineering, and water quality, and marine biology, laid the foundation for what would later become the fields of environmental science and of home economics, and was a trailblazer for women in science and technology.

Caution against “roiling the waters” may seem odd for someone fiercely forging a path for women in exclusively male domains. However, Richards was smart and savvy; she knew that women daring to venture into math, science, and technology would be scrutinized by the exclusively male establishment, and that the smallest misstep could derail progress and hinder subsequent generations of women from success in those fields. Richards lived at a time when women who worked did so only until marriage. The vast majority of women were homemakers. Typically young women received no formal education beyond primary school, and rarely did they study math or science. No American colleges offered courses in these disciplines for women until the founding of Vassar College in 1861.

Upon hearing of about Vassar and its science, math, and technology curriculum for women, Richards applied and excelled, completing her bachelor’s degree in two years. She immediately embarked on a Master of Arts degree, capping her work with a thesis on a chemical analysis of iron ore. After a failed attempt to obtain an apprenticeship with Boston chemists Merrick and Gray, Richards applied to MIT—then Boston Tech—to continue her studies in chemistry.

After much debate on MIT’s part, Ellen was admitted and her tuition was waived, making her a “special student” and keeping her off the Institute’s official roll; she was the “Swallow experiment, in the words of Dr. John Runkle, MIT’s second President from 1870 to 1878. This was a hedge against the established belief that women lacked the intellectual capacity for math and science. Her time at MIT was marked with isolation and discrimination from the all-male student body and faculty, especially in the first semesters. But as Pam Swallow relates, Ellen’s intelligence and ability won people over, as “One by one, the men realized what a remarkable young woman they had at the Institute.” 

When Ellen graduated in 1873, she also became the first female graduate from a technical college in America. Shortly afterward Richards embarked on an extensive study of water quality in Boston. At a time when overcrowding and factory pollution was making cities sick and when more than half of the Irish children born in Boston did not live past six years old, her research helped drive innovations in public health, water quality, and fire prevention.

For her many practical contributions, Richards may be best remembered as a pioneer for women’s equality, and an advocate for women in math, science, and technology. “I hope in a quiet way, I am winning a way in which others will keep open,” she said of her work. Today, nearly 150 years after her graduation from MIT, women make up nearly half of MIT’s undergraduate population and a third of its graduate students. Following in Ellen Swallow Richards’s footsteps, MIT women’s extraordinary achievements in science, technology, and math will continue to address the world’s greatest challenges, roiling the waters in the best possible ways.