First Flight of Domestic Science

As the child of a Home Economics educator, I grew up keenly aware of the gulf between its popular reputation and its rigorous underpinnings. By the time I hit high school in the 1990s, Home Ec was often viewed as “cooking and sewing class,” though I’m sure this viewpoint had solidified long before. Many students and parents thought the class to be a throwaway, something you had to fit into a schedule because it was a requirement for the school or the state.

Yet my mother would be quick to add to any conversation on Home Economics that its proper name was now Family and Consumer Sciences. In 1994, the American Home Economics Association officially changed its name, becoming the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences.

This switch transpired in part to reflect the broadening of the science, alluding to its reach beyond the home front, but I suspect a side benefit might be a reframing of the branch’s rep. The notion of Home Economics had morphed from a denotation of strict science to the trifling connotation of menial food preparation.

Watching my mother wield her scientific knowledge at home and in the classroom, at times, seemed like magic. I knew there was more to pushing buttons in FCS, but I never really knew how scientific Home Ec was until I investigated the life of its progenitor.

There’s nothing quite like learning about the achievements of extraordinary people who lived before the World Wars to make you feel like you’ve accomplished nothing of value in your modern life. Today, many advances are made by vast teams, as the time of the solitary innovator seems to have passed. But, if you were born in 1842, had the right stuff, and the proper opportunities, you could produce an astounding list of triumphs. Many 21st-century scientists would jump at the shot to list a tenth of the items that would line the resume of Ellen Swallow Richards.

Though she had a name that might have sent her into ornithology, by the time Swallow Richards flew off this mortal coil, she had revolutionized the way we looked at living.

Born in Massachusetts, Ellen Henrietta Swallow had the immense fortune to have a family that valued education. In the 1850s, the Swallows sold their farm so they could move to Westford, where one of the few co-educational secondary schools in America resided. This dedication to a young girl’s scholarship was extremely rare in the world at the time. She excelled in mathematics and language, mastering Latin, French, and German. In the late 1860s, she continued at Vassar College, the second institution of higher learning for women created in the United States. At Vassar, she earned a Master’s degree, analyzing the composition of iron ore.

In doing so, she became the first woman in America to receive a degree in chemistry.

It was just the first in an incredible string of pioneering accolades.

Looking to make a career in chemistry, she contacted a commercial firm in Boston, hoping to become an apprentice. The chemists Merrick and Gray told her their company wasn’t able to support students, but they encouraged her to apply to Boston Tech. They must have been impressed with her acumen because, now known as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the school had never admitted a woman.

Her application surely flummoxed the school. After internal discussion and a faculty vote, Boston Tech allowed this remarkable person to enter its halls, though they really didn’t want to let women in. They stated that “her admission did not establish a precedent for the general admission of females.”

At this prestigious university, Ellen nabbed another Bachelor of Science degree in 1873. She continued her studies to such a high level that she nearly became the first human to receive an advanced degree from MIT. However, the higher-ups felt they couldn’t give the distinction to a woman, so they simply withheld the honor.

To illustrate how far ahead of her time she was, MIT didn’t award advanced degrees to anyone until 1886.

She became a chemistry lecturer at MIT and married a scientist in the Mine Engineering Department, Robert Hallowell Richards. With his support, Ellen opened a “Woman’s Laboratory,” where she instructed schoolteachers. Most of the women she instructed had no formal lab experience, which seemed to ignite in Swallow Richards a key idea: rigor was missing in the “real world.”

One reason for the drift of Home Economics’ modern reputation relies on the drift of our understanding of the word “economics.” Today, the idea conjures thoughts of money, spreadsheets, stocks, and corporate executives.

But when Home Economics first emerged, the term meant something else entirely. The word comes from two Greek roots: oikos and nomos. The ending portion translates to “management,” but oikos has nothing to do directly with money. It means “house!” Though the term as a whole features a redundancy, the phrase was adopted to establish the “art and science of home management.”

To Ellen Swallow Richards, the science of home management was a necessary cog in euthenics, a word that means to be in a “flourishing state.” Live long and prosper. Simplified, “the betterment of living conditions, through conscious endeavor,” will create more vigorous, happier, and healthier humans.

To her, this notion of Home Economics was not limited to cooking better, tending house, or managing assets; it was about the science behind all the things that happen in a person’s day-to-day life. The chemistry behind sanitation and nutrition. How one’s environment affects health.

With this framework in mind, it’s no hyperbole to state that she began to transform the lives of humans on Earth.

She undertook a massive series of tests on the water of Massachusetts, discovering that the amount of chlorides in potable water decreases by a predictable amount the farther one is from the ocean. Farther from the sea, less salt; makes sense. But this chlorine map displayed more than the influence of the ocean. If an area’s water had more chlorides present than it should, based on her map, then it must be polluted by another source, namely, people. Her results prompted the state to adopt the first water-quality standards in the nation, in addition to the first modern sewage treatment plant.

Air quality got the same treatment. She realized cooking with gas caused less exhaust in a house than coal or frying oil. She and her husband pioneered the usage of fans to ventilate a living area.

She pushed for the testing of food, advancing Boards of Health to levels out of the dark ages into competency. She pushed for the testing of arsenic in wallpaper and fabric. She gets credit for introducing the word “ecology” into English, having been coined by a German biologist.

Swallow Richards published a swath of books on all these subjects:

The Chemistry of Cooking and Cleaning
Air, Water, and Food from a Sanitary Standpoint
Euthenics: the science of controllable environment
Food Materials and Their Adulterations

She wrote an essay called “Water and Air as Food.”

This person wasn’t just teaching high schoolers how to make pancakes; she was forging a stringent new world of vigor.

Her investigations led to the creation of the Lawrence Experiment Station at MIT, the epicenter of its burgeoning study of sanitation chemistry.

Throughout her career, she continued to advocate for the advancement of other women and Home Economics. She was a founder of the American Association of University Women. She became the first president of the aforementioned American Home Economics Association, now renamed the American Association of Family and Consumer Sciences. Swallow Richards was the first woman inducted into the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers. She ran the Rumford Kitchen exhibit at the World’s Fair in 1893. She helped start school lunch programs in Boston, which eventually spread nationwide.

By the time she died, in 1911, Home Economics had blossomed into a veritable science.

Today, though, Family and Consumer Science classes have hit a low period, one of many areas that American education has left behind. By some estimates, the number of students in FCS classes has declined by as much as 40% since the start of the century. Only about 6,000 schools offer courses in the science.

Taken from a popular viewpoint, the discipline might seem quaint, but looking at the life of Ellen Swallow Richards illuminates something different. Science permeates everything we do, and following its best practices can help us lead better lives. Without Home Economics, where would the world be in terms of sanitation or nutrition? These sorts of advances are easy to overlook, but the lives of everyday people used to be vastly dirtier and less healthy.

Thanks to Ellen Swallow Richards, we can lead robust lives. Her contributions to Family and Consumer Science easily land her a spot in the Hallowed Halls of Woman Crush Wednesday!