Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Ellen Richards

Episode Date: February 6, 2019

Who is Ellen Richards? One of the most unsung scientists of all time, that's who. Her contribution? Bringing real science into the household and forcing the world to take "home-ec" seriously. We celebrate her today on Short Stuff.  Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, hi there, ho there, welcome to short stuff, the shorter stuff version of stuff you should know, starring Chuck, Jerry, and me, Josh.

You get third billing? This is short stuff. And short stuff I do, which is why I despise it. Oh, you doing well? I am doing well. I love talking science. I also love talking history, and I really love talking HIST sai, as it's called.

And I love talking about undersung women in history and science. For sure, Chuck. This ticks all those boxes. And what sad is, you could have just said women in science. Yeah, that's a good point. Almost across the board, women in science are undersung or completely unsung.

And what about Mary Curie? I mean, she's such an outlier, it's crazy. Yeah, because 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 scientist 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 as 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, the original person who laid the foundation for it, the woman, will just kind of be lost to time. And this is what's called something called the Matilda effect. Yeah, and this is very evident in science. There's a couple of sort of horrifying statistics that they found here.

One is that there was a scientific journal that changed their review process, reviewing things, are we gonna publish it, are we not? And they switched theirs to leave out the names of the authors, so you don't even know who it is, male or female. And just doing that, the acceptance rate for women's reports rose almost 8%.

And then a study in 2013 showed that the abstracts, you know, when you Google online and you read like the abstract of a science paper, it's like sort of like a summary, I guess. They were seen as 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 2013. Right, so it's clearly still going on. And like I said, also it's a longstanding tradition. And it was kind of given this name, the Matilda effect back in 1993 by an historian of science from Cornell named Margaret Rosseter. And she named it the Matilda effect after a woman named Matilda Jocelyn Gage,

who was an abolitionist and suffragist. And she had written an essay in 1893 called Woman as an Inventor, which is basically like it is straight up BS the way that women scientists are just being completely left out of history. She had a lot of foresight at the time 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 and an issue. And so this 100 years later, Margaret Rosseter 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 kind of scattershot.

Like there are a lot of instances in history of women not getting due credit for the work that they did that established a field that created multiple fields or that 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, she was a woman who, she was the first woman accepted into a school of science, which at the time, the MIT Massachusetts Institute of Technology was male only. And they said, we'll do a little test and see if this lady can handle MIT. Watch this. And she was like, great, I handled it.

She was one of the first female chemists in the US. She, well, her largest contribution, I guess what she's remembered most for is her contribution to domestic science, AKA HOMEK, 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 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, which is it still an all female college? Vassar, I think actually is, yeah. Is it?

She got a degree in chemistry in 1870 and then that's when MIT said, let me just see if she can handle this. And she got a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry from there in 1873 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 has anybody stopped and asked like, is the food we're eating in the water we're drinking healthy and pure? Is it toxic? What's the relation to pollution?

What's the relation to industry? She started asking questions and then in addition to asking questions, she started doing research and study and she came up with this field called Oecology, O-E-K-ology. And it was the basis for what we recognize now as ecology or the study of the environment. And she was the first one to think about this

back in, I believe the 1870s. And it went along for five years and MIT, by this time she was an instructor at MIT. And MIT said, this sounds crackpot and whack, stop talking about this. They literally forbade her to talk about O-E-K-ology for a year. And so her discipline that she launched

lasted for all of five years and she's kind of frustrated by that. She turned her attention instead to home economics, which is basically taking this idea rather than studying the water and the air and all of that, studying the results of the water and the air, like the food we put in and the surroundings we live in 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 how she managed to bring science into the household, right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews,

co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger

and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll wanna be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s.

Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, so bringing science into the home environment was very different on the household level to do that at the time. It was an unusual thing that she knew was important. It was a big passion of hers.

She also, you know, home ec also is cooking and cleaning and sewing 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? Right. Because like I said, it was at the time, and this is in the late, I guess, late 19th century, right? Yes, right at the turn, yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, she has gotten some pushback over the years from feminists, but I think they got it wrong, you know?

Oh man, from what I saw, they got it really wrong. And like if you criticize Ellen Richards as anti-feminist by creating home ec, 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 progressive, to say,

well, you know, women ditch the household and get out there and try and take the man's job, but she knew the reality of things, I think, and she wanted to uplift 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 was it important, she also realized that that was the reality of the situation, right? Like you, I think something like 97% of women at the time didn't go to college. They just, they got married and they became homemakers. So that's what she had to work with.

So she was trying to, like you said, uplift women in that sense, not necessarily because, you know, she was saying, this is a woman's lot. It was, this is what we're working with, so I'm gonna 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. And she actually set up a lab, a woman's lab at MIT to teach chemistry to young women who were coming into college. And the lab was only open for a few years because from her efforts, MIT started to accept women into 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. And she taught chemistry for years for no charge so that these young women could learn chemistry. Yeah, and you know, despite all this, she's, I don't know about forgotten, but largely forgotten in history, especially in science,

as a real pioneer in validating the home economic movement and bringing women into more traditionally male fields of science. And she doesn't get nearly enough recognition, so. No, especially also, I mean, she was a pioneer in the concept in the study of water quality. And that's huge, she had a really deep and broad scientific career.

So I know she definitely doesn't get her, do you? Yeah, like today she would be on the front lines in Flint, Michigan 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 if you want to know more about her, go check out this article on how stuff works. How about that? Agreed. Well, that's short stuff. Send us an email if you like. Send it off to stuffpodcast at howstuffworks.com. If you want to know more about how to craft grade

for almost all those students you're thinking in the text class, then post up to how much they've been doing, and just what they're doing. And I'll see you guys at the next episode. Bye. Bye.