Short Stuff: Ellen Richards

kicks all those boxes. And what's sad is you could have just said women in science because almost across the board, um, women in science are are undersong or completely unsung. What about Mary Curie? I mean she's such an outlier, Yeah, because like that's the first name that pops into your head for a reason, right, and it's like, oh, well, she must have been the only woman scientists in the

in the world. No, that's not the case. Supposedly, there is a longstanding tradition in science of the men in science taking credit for the work of the women. Whether it's something is like outright fraudulent, is like just basically taking someone's work and not giving them credit because you can get away with it because you're a man and the other person was a woman or just not giving

due credit. And over time, with history favoring men, typically at least Western history, Um, the original person who laid the foundation for the woman, um will just kind of be lost to time. And this is what's called something something called the Matilda effect. Yeah, and this is very evident in science. There's a couple of sort of horrifying UM statistics that they found here. One is that there was a science of big journal that changed their review process,

you know, reviewing things. Are we going to publish it? Are we not? And they switched there's to leave out the names of the author, so you don't even know who it is, male or female. And just doing that, uh, the acceptance rate for women's reports rose almost eight percent. And Uh. Then a study in two thousand thirteen showed that the abstracts you know when you google online and you read like the abstract of a science science paper,

it's like sort of like a summary. I guess, Um, they were seen as uh being of a higher quality if the author was male and wrote about things stereotypically you would think of as male subjects like physics or math or something. Yeah, and this is in two tho. Right, so it's clearly still going on. And like I said, also,

it's a long standing tradition. And um, it was kind of given this name, the Matilda effect, back in by end a storian of science from Cornell named Margaret Rossiter, and she named it Matilda Effect after a woman named Matilda Jostle Engage who was an abolitionist and suffragists. And she had written an essay in eightee called Women as an Inventor, which is basically like it is straight up b s the way that women scientists are just being

completely left out of history. She had a lot of foresight at the time, um, and and called this out and it didn't really get anywhere with it, but at least documented it as far back as before the turn of the last century that this was a problem in an issue. And so this this um, this a hundred years later, Margaret Rossiter kind of came up with this thing called the Matilda effect. And there's a lot a

lot of instances in history. It's not sporadic, it's not you know, kind of scatter shot like, there are a lot of instances in history of women not getting due credit for the work that they did. That um established a field that created multiple fields UM or that their their work grew to be misunderstood and almost kind of scorned. And that last one in particular, is very much embodied by a woman named Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards. That's right. Uh.

She was a woman who UM. She was the first woman accepted into a school of science, which at the time, the m I T. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was male only, and they said, we'll do a little test and see if this lady can handle m I T. And she was like great, I handled it. UM. She was one of the first female chemists in the US. UM. She well,

her her largest contribution. I guess what she's remembered most for is her contribution to domestic science a k a. Homeck, which just saying that some people still might dismiss that as a soft science or non science, but it's not true because that encompasses everything from hygienic standards in the home to um the you know, the clothes we wear

being safe and the food we eat being healthy. And before she came along, not a lot of people were doing this, and it took her going to Vassar College, UM, which is it still an all female college, Vassar I

think actually is yeah? Is it? Uh? She got a degree in chemistry in eighteen seventy and then that's when m I. T said let me just see if she can handle this, and she got a Bachelor of Science and chemistry from there in eighteen seventy three, and then immediately started working like studying pollution and sanitary chemistry and things like that, which not a lot of people were doing it at the time. No, she was almost the first, if not the first person to say, Okay, we're all

like eating food and drinking water and um. Has anybody stopped and asked, like, is the food we're eating in the water we're drinking healthy and impure? Is that toxic? H? What's the relation to um pollution? What's the relation to indus tree? Um? She started asking questions and then in addition to asking questions, you started doing research and study. And she came up with this field called o ecology o e k ology, and it was the basis for what we recognized now as ecology or the study of

the environment UM. And she was the first one to to to think about this back in I believe the eighteen seventies UM and it went along for five years and m I T by this time she was a um UH an instructor at m I T. And m I T said, this sounds crack pot and whack stopped

talking about this. We we They literally forbade her to talk about oh ecology for a year and so her her this discipline that she launched lasted for all of five years and just kind of frustrated by that, she turned her attention instead to home economics, which was basically taking this idea rather than studying like the water in the air and all of that, studying the um the results of the water in the air, like the food we put in, and like the surroundings we live in

UM and how they impact our health and how they can be made better. All Right, we're gonna take a break and we're gonna come back and talk a little bit more about She about how she managed to bring science into the household right after this. Alright, so bringing science into the home environment was very different on the household level. To do that at the time, it was it was an unusual thing that she knew was important.

It was a big passion of hers. Uh. She also you know, homeck also is cooking and cleaning and sewing and and things like that. And it's not like she issued those things, but she was like, you know, women are already in the home doing these things, so why don't I bring some science to it and talk about having sanitary conditions and organizing the household and raising a

healthy family with science based techniques. Because, like I said, it was at the time, and this is in the you know, late I guess, uh, late nineteenth century, right when she started out right at the turn. Yeah yeah, so uh. I mean she has gotten some pushback over the years from feminists, but I think they got it wrong, you know, man, from what I saw it, they got

it really wrong. Any And like, if you criticize um Ellen Richards as anti feminists by creating home MEC, it seems like you just haven't really dug in very deeply to researcher, because she was a proto feminist to the first degree. Yeah, Like it would have been really easy at the time to say, as a as a progressive of to say, well, you know, women ditch the household and get out there and try and take the man's job.

But she she knew the reality of things. I think and she wanted to uplift UH, what women were doing in the household instead of saying, no, ditch all that and leave it behind to go take a quote unquote man's job, Like what you're doing is important, and I want to uplift that and bring science to it. Well. And not only did did was it important? She also realized that that was the reality of the situation, right like you, I think something like nineties seven percent of

women at the time UM didn't go to college. They just they they got married and they became homemakers. So that's what she had to work with. So she was trying to UM, like you said, uplift women in that sense, not necessarily because you know she was. She was saying, this is a woman's lot. It was, this is what we're working with, so I'm going to try to make it better. She also very strongly advocated for women to be college educated. She thought that that should just be

standard practice UM. And she actually set up a lab, a woman's lab at m I T to teach chemistry to UM young women who were coming into college UM. And the lab was only open for a few years because from her efforts, m I T started to accept women into the general the general population. It wasn't like a special track any longer. But she set up a lab to teach women chemistry and she did it free. She didn't get any money from it. She and she taught chemistry for years for for no charge, so that

these um young women could learn chemistry. Yeah. And you know, despite all this, she's um, I don't know about forgotten, but largely forgotten in history, especially in science as a real pioneer, uh and validating the home economic movement and bringing women into more traditionally male fields of science. And she doesn't get nearly enough recognition. So uh no, especially also, I mean like she was she was a pioneer the concept in the study of water quality and like that's

that's huge she was. She had a really deep and broad scientific career, so I know, she definitely doesn't get her to you. Yeah, like today she would be on the front lines in Flint, Michigan, in in newspapers and on TV shows, but back then she was discounted because it was kitchen stuff. Yep. So hats off to Ellen Richards for being just a total top notch scientist. Absolutely, and uh, if you want to know more about her. Go check out this article on how stuff Works. How

about that agreed? Uh, well, that's short stuff. Send us an email if you like, send it off to Stuff Podcast at how stuff works dot com.