Ellen Swallow Richards, American Chemist

Ellen Swallow Richards, American Chemist

Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards (December 3, 1842 - March 30, 1911) was an American industrial and environmental chemist. Her pioneering work in sanitary engineering, and experimental research in domestic science, laid a foundation for the new science of home economics. She was the founder of the home economics movement characterized by the application of science to the home, and the first to apply chemistry to the study of nutrition. She was the first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She graduated in 1873 and later became its first female instructor. She was the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to obtain a degree in chemistry, which she earned from Vassar College in 1870. Richards was a pragmatic feminist, as well as a founding ecofeminist, who believed that women's work within the home was a vital aspect of the economy. She died in 1911 at the age of 68 after suffering with angina. Photographed by Bain News Service, undated.

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