Ellen Swallow
Swallow, Ellen (also known as Ellen Swallow Richards) (1842-1911) was an American chemist and sanitarian and a pioneer in the field of home economics.
Ellen Henrietta Swallow was born in Dunstable, Massachusetts, and received most of her early education at home. In 1868, she entered the newly established Vassar College as a special student, and she received a B.A. degree in 1870. That year she became the first woman to be admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). She studied chemistry and in 1873 she earned a B.S. degree from MIT as well an M.A. degree in chemistry from Vassar. She continued her studies at MIT, but never earned a doctorate. In 1875, Swallow married Robert Hallowell Richards, a professor at MIT.
Regular degree programs were not yet available for women at MIT, and in 1876 Swallow was instrumental in the establishment of a women's laboratory there, and she became an assistant instructor—without pay—in chemical analysis, industrial chemistry, mineralogy, and biology. The lab continued until 1883, when MIT began directly admitting women. The following year, MIT opened the nation's first laboratory for the study of sanitation, and Swallow was appointed instructor and assistant in sanitary chemistry. She assisted with a two-year survey by the Massachusetts Board of Health on the condition of the state's inland water supply. Swallow's work on that survey was an important contribution to the new science of ecology.
Swallow applied her background in science to nutrition, housekeeping, sanitation, and other domestic issues. She wrote The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning: A Manual for Housekeepers (1882), Food Materials and Their Adulterations (1885), and numerous other books. She established a series of summer conferences at Lake Placid, New York, which led in 1908 to the establishment of the American Home Economics Association, of which she became the first president.
She was also one of the founders of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, the forerunner of the American Association of University Women, and was the first woman elected to the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers.