First post/Ellen Swallow Richards

Hi!

So my name's Caroline. I'm sixteen, a junior at a very well-off public high school, and a flaming liberal feminist. 

Sometimes I feel like venting to my friends, but I've recently come to realize that they don't always have time for that. You know, homework and sleep and all that.

I think I'm going to use this blog to keep my ideas about feminism and social equality organized. I felt them slipping away and becoming less defined after election season was over and I no longer went on angry rants to every other person I saw. Feminism is an important part of my identity and I'm not letting it go so easily.

Anyways, I hope to make a post every day about an exceptional woman born on that day in history (I hope. This whole blogging thing might not even last more than a week.) 

03 December:

Ellen Swallow Richards (b. 1842, d. 1911)

Ellen Swallow Richards should probably be more famous than she is. I hadn't heard of her until I was scanning the Wikipedia article on December 3rd for people to admire. 

She was the first woman in America to earn a degree in chemistry and the first woman to be admitted to MIT. For that matter, she was the first American woman to be admitted to any school of science and technology. 

Richards was passionate about the environment in more ways than one. She worked on measuring pollution in waterways and advocated for regulations to keep harmful chemicals out of people's digestive systems. She also believed that the environment was the biggest factor in a person's quality of life, consistently condemning eugenics. Her entire life she was an advocate of conservation and of science education for girls.

Richards was the founder of the "home economics" movement, in which she took "womanly duties" and used science to make them more efficient. While this is reaffirming gender roles, she most likely took this path in order to win allies and hopefully have women be accepted into the world of science.

It worked. In 1876, MIT opened a laboratory for women with Richards as the instructor. Richards stayed as an instructor at MIT until her death in 1911. 

This story is important to me personally because I'm very interested in the sciences. I love observing and understanding the world around me. With my various privileges and the time in which I was born, I have a near 100% chance of getting into a good school and pursuing what interests me. I know that this wouldn't be possible without exceptional people like Ellen Swallow Richards who had the courage, strength, and intelligence to take the first steps into a field full of men and show them what women were capable of.

That being said, science is still incredibly male-dominated. Walk into a children's toy store and you'll see that all the cool toys (science experiments, chemistry sets, things like Legos and Knex and Tinkertoys that encourage building and exploring the laws of physics) are in the boy's aisle, next to Transformers and toy weapons. Girls, on the other hand, get pink and flowery dolls and toy appliances. (Here is an interesting attempt to remedy this) This message that science is for boys sticks, and girls simply feel like they can't be part of this profession. Only 20% of math and science faculty at colleges and universities are women, which leads to even less participation among female students. As for me, since middle school the vast majority of my teachers have been female. However, of the seven science courses that I've taken, five of them were taught by a man. The two that were taught by women were both biology courses that contained little to no math.

It's difficult for someone like me to only see men in the sciences. Don't get me wrong, they've been good teachers and none of them has ever doubted my abilities or discouraged me. It's just that the words "you can be anything you want" ring hollow when faced with such an obvious gender gap

But starting with Ellen Swallow Richards, inequality is being chipped away. The intelligent, exceptional women who have been present and suppressed all through history are coming out of the woodwork and taking their rightful place in laboratories and science classrooms and it makes me pretty damn happy.