The Remarkable Life and Career of Ellen Swallow Richards: Pioneer in Science and Technology

Chapter 14

MIT’s First Woman Instructor

“I feel like a woman whose children are all about to be married and leave her alone.”

~ Ellen Swallow Richards

The Woman’s Laboratory was closed and torn down in 1883. Though grateful to still have her long-distance learning students, Ellen missed the day-to-day teaching and working along-side the students in her laboratory. Feeling adrift, she wrote in a letter, “You see it is quite a change for me, and though I knew it was coming, I cannot at once fit all the corners.”

Forty-one-year-old Ellen thrived on being extraordinarily busy, and although still involved in more projects than most people could possibly manage, without the Woman’s Laboratory she didn’t feel productive enough. “Then change always disturbs me,” she continued in her letter, “Professor Richards’s work this summer is on an electrical process and I cannot help him much, and he can’t give me time to go to drive or to look over the library papers and drawers and my day does not seem to amount to anything. … I should be perfectly happy anywhere if I could have him with me, for we always harmonize; but to have him charged with electricity so that he cannot think of anything else, and to have no definite plans and heaps of things to do and no life to do them is a little hard. … Everything seems to fall flat and I have a sense of impending fate which is paralyzing.”

Ellen’s miserable, frustrated feeling ended when MIT’s newly established Laboratory of Sanitary Chemistry opened ...