SPOTLIGHT ON Industrial and Environmental Chemist

 1862 – Graduated Westford Academy  First American woman to obtain a degree in chemistry, which she earned from Vassar College  1873 – Graduates from MIT, first woman admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She then becomes its first female instructor.

 Laid a foundation for the new science of home economics. She was the founder of the home economics movement characterized by the application of science to the home, and the first to apply chemistry to the study of nutrition.  In 1876, she established a woman's laboratory at MIT, where she subsequently taught. She also set up a program in the Boston public schools to prepare young women for education in the sciences.  Ellen Richards taught sanitary chemistry at MIT.

 1878 – After conducting a pioneer survey of Massachusetts' inland waterways, she established the first program in sanitary engineering at MIT.  A leader in establishing a scientific basis for home economics, with such projects as her studies in the adulteration of groceries and the arsenic content in wallpaper and fabrics, as well as her promotion of good nutrition.  She conceived and directed the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics ( ), which coined the term home economics, and developed standards for training professionals.

 Woman's Laboratory assistant instructor  American correspondence school instructor  American Association of University Women  Teachers' School of Science  New England Kitchen of Boston  Rumford Kitchen – 1893 Worlds Fair  American Public School Lunch Program  Lake Placid Conference  American Home Economics Association

 Ellen Richards and Marion Talbot (Boston University class of 1880) became the "founding mothers" of what was to become the American Association of University Women (AAUW).  They invited fifteen other women college graduates to a meeting at Talbot's home in Boston, on November 28,  The group envisioned an organization in which women college graduates would band together to open the doors of higher education to other women and to find wider opportunities for their training.  The Association of Collegiate Alumnae (ACA), AAUW's predecessor organization, was officially founded on January 14, 1882.

If you keep your feathers well oiled the water of criticism will run off as from a duck's back.