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Short Stuff: Ellen Richards · Stuff You Should Know

• 0:04
  Speaker 1: Hey there, Hi there, How they're welcome to short Stuff,
• 0:07
  Speaker 1: the shorter stuffed version of stuff you should know, starring Chuck,
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Jerry and me Josh. This is short stuff on short
• 0:18
  Speaker 1: stuff I do, which is why I despise it. Oh
• 0:25
  Speaker 1: you doing well? I am doing well. I love talking science.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: I also love talking history, and I really love talking
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: hissed sigh as it's called. And I love talking about
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: um undersung women in history and science. For sure. Chuck
• 0:44
  Speaker 1: kicks all those boxes. And what's sad is you could
• 0:47
  Speaker 1: have just said women in science because almost across the board, um,
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: women in science are are undersong or completely unsung. What
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: about Mary Curie? I mean she's such an outlier, Yeah,
• 1:02
  Speaker 1: because like that's the first name that pops into your
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  Speaker 1: head for a reason, right, and it's like, oh, well,
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  Speaker 1: she must have been the only woman scientists in the
• 1:09
  Speaker 1: in the world. No, that's not the case. Supposedly, there
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  Speaker 1: is a longstanding tradition in science of the men in
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  Speaker 1: science taking credit for the work of the women. Whether
• 1:20
  Speaker 1: it's something is like outright fraudulent, is like just basically
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  Speaker 1: taking someone's work and not giving them credit because you
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  Speaker 1: can get away with it because you're a man and
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  Speaker 1: the other person was a woman or just not giving
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  Speaker 1: due credit. And over time, with history favoring men, typically
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  Speaker 1: at least Western history, Um, the original person who laid
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  Speaker 1: the foundation for the woman, um will just kind of
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  Speaker 1: be lost to time. And this is what's called something
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  Speaker 1: something called the Matilda effect. Yeah, and this is very
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  Speaker 1: evident in science. There's a couple of sort of horrifying
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  Speaker 1: UM statistics that they found here. One is that there
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  Speaker 1: was a science of big journal that changed their review process,
• 2:03
  Speaker 1: you know, reviewing things. Are we going to publish it?
• 2:05
  Speaker 1: Are we not? And they switched there's to leave out
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  Speaker 1: the names of the author, so you don't even know
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  Speaker 1: who it is, male or female. And just doing that, uh,
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  Speaker 1: the acceptance rate for women's reports rose almost eight percent.
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  Speaker 1: And Uh. Then a study in two thousand thirteen showed
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  Speaker 1: that the abstracts you know when you google online and
• 2:25
  Speaker 1: you read like the abstract of a science science paper,
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  Speaker 1: it's like sort of like a summary. I guess, Um,
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  Speaker 1: they were seen as uh being of a higher quality
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  Speaker 1: if the author was male and wrote about things stereotypically
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  Speaker 1: you would think of as male subjects like physics or
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  Speaker 1: math or something. Yeah, and this is in two tho. Right,
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  Speaker 1: so it's clearly still going on. And like I said, also,
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  Speaker 1: it's a long standing tradition. And um, it was kind
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  Speaker 1: of given this name, the Matilda effect, back in by
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  Speaker 1: end a storian of science from Cornell named Margaret Rossiter,
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  Speaker 1: and she named it Matilda Effect after a woman named
• 3:01
  Speaker 1: Matilda Jostle Engage who was an abolitionist and suffragists. And
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  Speaker 1: she had written an essay in eightee called Women as
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  Speaker 1: an Inventor, which is basically like it is straight up
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  Speaker 1: b s the way that women scientists are just being
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  Speaker 1: completely left out of history. She had a lot of
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  Speaker 1: foresight at the time, um, and and called this out
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  Speaker 1: and it didn't really get anywhere with it, but at
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  Speaker 1: least documented it as far back as before the turn
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  Speaker 1: of the last century that this was a problem in
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  Speaker 1: an issue. And so this this um, this a hundred
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  Speaker 1: years later, Margaret Rossiter kind of came up with this
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  Speaker 1: thing called the Matilda effect. And there's a lot a
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  Speaker 1: lot of instances in history. It's not sporadic, it's not
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  Speaker 1: you know, kind of scatter shot like, there are a
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  Speaker 1: lot of instances in history of women not getting due
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  Speaker 1: credit for the work that they did. That um established
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  Speaker 1: a field that created multiple fields UM or that their
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  Speaker 1: their work grew to be misunderstood and almost kind of scorned.
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  Speaker 1: And that last one in particular, is very much embodied
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  Speaker 1: by a woman named Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards. That's right. Uh.
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  Speaker 1: She was a woman who UM. She was the first
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  Speaker 1: woman accepted into a school of science, which at the time,
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  Speaker 1: the m I T. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was male only,
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  Speaker 1: and they said, we'll do a little test and see
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  Speaker 1: if this lady can handle m I T. And she
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  Speaker 1: was like great, I handled it. UM. She was one
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  Speaker 1: of the first female chemists in the US. UM. She well,
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  Speaker 1: her her largest contribution. I guess what she's remembered most
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  Speaker 1: for is her contribution to domestic science a k a. Homeck,
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  Speaker 1: which just saying that some people still might dismiss that
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  Speaker 1: as a soft science or non science, but it's not
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  Speaker 1: true because that encompasses everything from hygienic standards in the
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  Speaker 1: home to um the you know, the clothes we wear
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  Speaker 1: being safe and the food we eat being healthy. And
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  Speaker 1: before she came along, not a lot of people were
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  Speaker 1: doing this, and it took her going to Vassar College, UM,
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  Speaker 1: which is it still an all female college, Vassar I
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  Speaker 1: think actually is yeah? Is it? Uh? She got a
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  Speaker 1: degree in chemistry in eighteen seventy and then that's when
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  Speaker 1: m I. T said let me just see if she
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  Speaker 1: can handle this, and she got a Bachelor of Science
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  Speaker 1: and chemistry from there in eighteen seventy three, and then
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  Speaker 1: immediately started working like studying pollution and sanitary chemistry and
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  Speaker 1: things like that, which not a lot of people were
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  Speaker 1: doing it at the time. No, she was almost the first,
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  Speaker 1: if not the first person to say, Okay, we're all
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  Speaker 1: like eating food and drinking water and um. Has anybody
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  Speaker 1: stopped and asked, like, is the food we're eating in
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  Speaker 1: the water we're drinking healthy and impure? Is that toxic? H?
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  Speaker 1: What's the relation to um pollution? What's the relation to
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  Speaker 1: indus tree? Um? She started asking questions and then in
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  Speaker 1: addition to asking questions, you started doing research and study.
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  Speaker 1: And she came up with this field called o ecology
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  Speaker 1: o e k ology, and it was the basis for
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  Speaker 1: what we recognized now as ecology or the study of
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  Speaker 1: the environment UM. And she was the first one to
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  Speaker 1: to to think about this back in I believe the
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  Speaker 1: eighteen seventies UM and it went along for five years
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  Speaker 1: and m I T by this time she was a
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  Speaker 1: um UH an instructor at m I T. And m
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  Speaker 1: I T said, this sounds crack pot and whack stopped
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  Speaker 1: talking about this. We we They literally forbade her to
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  Speaker 1: talk about oh ecology for a year and so her
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  Speaker 1: her this discipline that she launched lasted for all of
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  Speaker 1: five years and just kind of frustrated by that, she
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  Speaker 1: turned her attention instead to home economics, which was basically
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  Speaker 1: taking this idea rather than studying like the water in
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  Speaker 1: the air and all of that, studying the um the
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  Speaker 1: results of the water in the air, like the food
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  Speaker 1: we put in, and like the surroundings we live in
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  Speaker 1: UM and how they impact our health and how they
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  Speaker 1: can be made better. All Right, we're gonna take a
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  Speaker 1: break and we're gonna come back and talk a little
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  Speaker 1: bit more about She about how she managed to bring
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  Speaker 1: science into the household right after this. Alright, so bringing
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  Speaker 1: science into the home environment was very different on the
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  Speaker 1: household level. To do that at the time, it was
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  Speaker 1: it was an unusual thing that she knew was important.
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  Speaker 1: It was a big passion of hers. Uh. She also
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  Speaker 1: you know, homeck also is cooking and cleaning and sewing
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  Speaker 1: and and things like that. And it's not like she
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  Speaker 1: issued those things, but she was like, you know, women
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  Speaker 1: are already in the home doing these things, so why
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  Speaker 1: don't I bring some science to it and talk about
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  Speaker 1: having sanitary conditions and organizing the household and raising a
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  Speaker 1: healthy family with science based techniques. Because, like I said,
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  Speaker 1: it was at the time, and this is in the
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  Speaker 1: you know, late I guess, uh, late nineteenth century, right
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  Speaker 1: when she started out right at the turn. Yeah yeah,
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  Speaker 1: so uh. I mean she has gotten some pushback over
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  Speaker 1: the years from feminists, but I think they got it wrong,
• 8:35
  Speaker 1: you know, man, from what I saw it, they got
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  Speaker 1: it really wrong. Any And like, if you criticize um
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  Speaker 1: Ellen Richards as anti feminists by creating home MEC, it
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  Speaker 1: seems like you just haven't really dug in very deeply
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  Speaker 1: to researcher, because she was a proto feminist to the
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  Speaker 1: first degree. Yeah, Like it would have been really easy
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  Speaker 1: at the time to say, as a as a progressive
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  Speaker 1: of to say, well, you know, women ditch the household
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  Speaker 1: and get out there and try and take the man's job.
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  Speaker 1: But she she knew the reality of things. I think
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  Speaker 1: and she wanted to uplift UH, what women were doing
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  Speaker 1: in the household instead of saying, no, ditch all that
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  Speaker 1: and leave it behind to go take a quote unquote
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  Speaker 1: man's job, Like what you're doing is important, and I
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  Speaker 1: want to uplift that and bring science to it. Well.
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  Speaker 1: And not only did did was it important? She also
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  Speaker 1: realized that that was the reality of the situation, right
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  Speaker 1: like you, I think something like nineties seven percent of
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  Speaker 1: women at the time UM didn't go to college. They
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  Speaker 1: just they they got married and they became homemakers. So
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  Speaker 1: that's what she had to work with. So she was
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  Speaker 1: trying to UM, like you said, uplift women in that sense,
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  Speaker 1: not necessarily because you know she was. She was saying,
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  Speaker 1: this is a woman's lot. It was, this is what
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  Speaker 1: we're working with, so I'm going to try to make
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  Speaker 1: it better. She also very strongly advocated for women to
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  Speaker 1: be college educated. She thought that that should just be
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  Speaker 1: standard practice UM. And she actually set up a lab,
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  Speaker 1: a woman's lab at m I T to teach chemistry
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  Speaker 1: to UM young women who were coming into college UM.
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  Speaker 1: And the lab was only open for a few years
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  Speaker 1: because from her efforts, m I T started to accept
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  Speaker 1: women into the general the general population. It wasn't like
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  Speaker 1: a special track any longer. But she set up a
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  Speaker 1: lab to teach women chemistry and she did it free.
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  Speaker 1: She didn't get any money from it. She and she
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  Speaker 1: taught chemistry for years for for no charge, so that
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  Speaker 1: these um young women could learn chemistry. Yeah. And you know,
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  Speaker 1: despite all this, she's um, I don't know about forgotten,
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  Speaker 1: but largely forgotten in history, especially in science as a
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  Speaker 1: real pioneer, uh and validating the home economic movement and
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  Speaker 1: bringing women into more traditionally male fields of science. And
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  Speaker 1: she doesn't get nearly enough recognition. So uh no, especially also,
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  Speaker 1: I mean like she was she was a pioneer the
• 11:00
  Speaker 1: concept in the study of water quality and like that's
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  Speaker 1: that's huge she was. She had a really deep and
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  Speaker 1: broad scientific career, so I know, she definitely doesn't get
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  Speaker 1: her to you. Yeah, like today she would be on
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  Speaker 1: the front lines in Flint, Michigan, in in newspapers and
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  Speaker 1: on TV shows, but back then she was discounted because
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  Speaker 1: it was kitchen stuff. Yep. So hats off to Ellen
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  Speaker 1: Richards for being just a total top notch scientist. Absolutely,
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  Speaker 1: and uh, if you want to know more about her.
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  Speaker 1: Go check out this article on how stuff Works. How
• 11:32
  Speaker 1: about that agreed? Uh, well, that's short stuff. Send us
• 11:37
  Speaker 1: an email if you like, send it off to Stuff
• 11:39
  Speaker 1: Podcast at how stuff works dot com.