The Mother Of Ecology Euthenics

Beginning in 1976, and for more than a decade following, I taught U.S. history at the Collegium Excellens with Leonard Pitt's We Americans as the primary textbook. As was my wont, We Americans was a maverick among college history texts. Pitt, with the guidance of his editor, Douglas Mitchell (later editor at the University of Chicago Press), created a topical history of the United States that eschewed the linear 1492-onward chronological approach used in mainstream textbooks. One of the topics that Pitt presented was the Environment from beginnings to the present. In the segment of environmental history in the early 20th century, Pitt supplied a one-age biography of Ellen Swallow Richards. I hadn't thought of the old girl in years until I read an editorial in today's New York Times that used Richards to swipe at Lawrence Summers, the Harvard prexy, who has become as controversial as Ward Churchill in the groves of academe. To her credit, Richards — the first woman on the faculty at MIT — delivered a scientific paper inn 1873 in which she proclaimed the birth of the new science of "oekology."

Pitt (and I, in my ignorance) interpreted this as the premature birth of "ecology," in the contemporary environmentalist sense, but what Richards was actually unveiling was the infant version of the "science of right living"; or as she put it then "the science to teach people how to live," which was to blend chemistry, biology, and engineering principles into practical guidelines for daily life. The scientific establishment was not, however, taken in by Richards' strategem, and dismissed "oekology" as a kind of hokum like faith healing and patent medicine. Later Richards tried to launch the "science of right living" again under the new label of "euthenics"; and was again rebuffed. The scientific community which had rejected her for trying to be a scientist now turned against her for not being scientific enough."

Ellen Swallow Richards (1842 - 1911) may not have been the "mother of ecology" that Pitt labeled her, but she did found the science of home economics. We can call this a science because she made of study of determining how to systematize and simplify housework and how to provide nutritious meals at reasonable cost. She saw this as simply arming oneself with the knowledge to overcome the ignorance and greed of others. She felt that women should arm themselves with knowledge of chemistry as well as "mechanical and physicals laws."

Richards was one of the founders of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, which later became the American Association of University Women. The organization was founded in part to fight the myth that it was not healthy for young women to engage in serious study.

Richards was the first woman to enter a technical institute, MIT, as an accepted student in 1870, receiving her degree in 1873. There she studied chemistry. She was not charged tuition, which she assumed to be simply financial aid. She came to find out later that it was so the Institute president could claim she was not really a student should any trustee or other student make a fuss about her.

She held a variety of jobs around the MIT laboratories after that as well as doing consulting work testing commercial products and doing quality tests on air, water and soil.

She was the first women elected to the American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers (1920s).

Richards was one of the pioneers in the Progressive environmental movement and belongs in the company of Gifford Pinchot and John Muir. If this is (fair & balanced) hagiography, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
The Revenge of Ellen Swallow

Back in the post-Civil War era, Ellen Swallow yearned to get a graduate degree in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which did not admit women. She wangled her way into classes by doing housework for her professors. "Perhaps the fact that I am not a Radical," she optimistically wrote to her parents, "and that I do not scorn womanly duties but claim it as a privilege to clean up and sort of supervise the room and sew things is winning me stronger allies than anything else." Faculty members, it turned out, were happy to let her keep darning their socks but not to give her an advanced degree. Eventually, thwarted in her attempts to get a job in chemistry, she married a metallurgy professor and invented home economics.

Generations of women with a bent for science managed to get college teaching jobs because Ellen Swallow Richards figured out a way to connect their field to the analysis of cleaning products. It was something, but not exactly ideal. Today - after another century of discrimination and sexual harassment in the laboratory - female scientists are getting an increasingly large percentage of all undergraduate degrees and they get a little prickly if an extremely powerful man raises the question of whether their field has an inherent sexual divide.

All of which, of course, takes us to Lawrence Summers and his china-smashing remarks on gender and academia. Back in January, the president of Harvard shared his thoughts on why so few women get tenure at the best schools at a conference on "Diversifying the Science and Engineering Workforce." His conclusion - couched in many assurances that the jury was still out - was that female scientists are distracted by the demands of family, and that "there are issues of intrinsic aptitude."

Dr. Summers told his audience that he wanted to be controversial, and if that's so he must be extremely gratified by the results. Several apologies and clarifications later, Harvard now has two brand-new task forces on recruitment of women and a restive faculty that seems to be teetering on the verge of revolt. Last week's release of the long-sought transcript of his remarks is not likely to improve things much. Dr. Summers compared the shortage of female scientists at the highest ranks of academia to, among other things, the shortage of Jewish farmers, and white men in the National Basketball Association. (Coming soon: Female Biologists Can't Jump.)

Dr. Summers's defenders say he is being tarred for the very intellectual openness that places like Harvard are supposed to encourage. Even in the best of circumstances, it's questionable whether the head of an institution that has a bad reputation when it comes to promoting female scientists was the perfect person to free-associate on why women have trouble getting tenure. However, the transcript provides the best possible refutation of the charge of political correctness. Whatever Dr. Summers was doing at the conference, it had nothing to do with serious intellectual inquiry. "I don't think anybody actually has a clue" was one operative phrase. "I don't remember who had told me" was another. It was every woman's nightmare of what a university president thinks privately about equal opportunity.

We have been informed many, many times in the past that Dr. Summers likes to make waves, and who could blame him? It's fun to toss out provocative ideas and watch as everyone's ears redden and all eyes turn to the daring speaker who started the hubbub. But it's an exercise better restricted to radio talk show hosts than the heads of major academic institutions. Harvard is supposed to be teaching its students not just how to start a controversy, but also how to have an intelligent conversation.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company