HOME AND EDUCATION

...About 1896 hearing some one say that it was a pity that the letters which students write from college are usually lost to the world, she looked up those old letters of hers, and after rejecting the long abstracts and the many strictly personal references she had the remainder typewritten...

...Price, $1.50...

...she did belong to the last century, and was part of its struggle...

...But Mrs...

...She was a pioneer, too, in working out methods of teaching by correspondence...

...Richards succeeded in securing, and in November, 1876, the laboratory was opened...

...To-day Eugenics, the science of human improvement through better breeding, and Euthenics, the science of the controllable environment, are contending for first place in the interest of educators...

...Richards' life is interwoven with that of her teachers...

...I feel free, too, to speak of the book because I have no financial interest in it, and because it can almost be said that no one has any such interest...

...There is a moral in this phase of Mrs...

...Theresa H. Elmendorf...

...In the early eighties she herself taught mineralogy to the children in the public schools of Boston...

...Finally she settled upon the word "Euthenics" which she coined and defined as "the science of controllable environment...

...This money Mrs...

...But some one will say: "Mrs...

...A voice is hushed: but ere it failed The listening echoes caught its tone, And now its message clear and keen On every wind of Heaven is blown...

...It would be somewhat unusual even today, but then it was revolutionary...

...Richards had on hand at the time of her death...

...During these seven years she had not only given her services to the laboratory, but had also contributed an average of one thousand dollars a year for its maintenance from money which she earned as an analyst...

...Richards throughout those years cannot be told...

...Richard's life which I thought at first to point out specifically, for there are so many young women to-day who are being hedged in much as she was then, some by their parents who through mistaken ideas of kindness are seeking to protect them from active participation in the world's work, some by public opinion which would prescribe the lines of activity upon which women may enter, and some by the innumerable methods through which society seeks to hamper the human soul in its development...

...They say in their note in the book: "Our existence as a firm is due to her belief in the need for specialized service in the literature of Home Economics...

...Through seven years of development our best business asset was her good will...

...Many people wondered at this during her life, and it was often thought that what she said about household science probably had its origin in theory, but the truth was that from the time of her marriage in 1875 she maintained a perfectly ordered home which was the scene of more genuine hospitality than most of the homes of women of leisure...

...The Woman's Laboratory she sought valiantly to make of service in the solution of the problems of the housekeeper and if she had had her wish there would have been as early as 1876 a place where women could have pursued as advanced work in household chemistry as that offered in any institution to-day...

...Whitcomb and Miss Barrows of the publishing firm of Whit-comb and Barrows who, like myself, were personal friends of Mrs...

...It is said that a book was always open beside her in the store, and that she made the little post office a veritable magazine club and circulating library...

...She entered into all the life of the village, doing whatever her hands found to do, but the hands found nothing commensurate with the power which was felt within her, and her unused energy seems fairly to have turned upon her, and reduced her to a condition almost of invalidism...

...What is needed to-day more than anything else is to instill in the minds of our young the desire above all to build up a character that will win the respect of all with whom they may come in contact, which is vastly more important than a great fortune.—Marshall Field...

...OTHER ENTERPRISES of which she saw the beginning or of which she was a part in the beginning were the various organizations of college women formed for the purpose of improving educational methods...

...The constant and innumerable kindnesses for which we are indebted to Mrs...

...In a sense this is true...

...One wished to make an astronomer of her...

...Richards was not content to be the beneficiary of special privileges, and in 1876 she began a determined campaign to have a laboratory for women opened at the Institute of Technology...

...She was one of the very first to experiment with the introduction of nature study into the schools...

...Richards preached Home Economics...

...No financial return, however great, can ever repay them for the time and thought which they gave to the work...

...The year 1868 saw Miss Swallow, as we must call her for a time, a woman of twenty-five assisting her father in a country store and post office...

...As a result of the reading and study that she had done after leaving the Academy, she was able to complete the course in two years...

...She had received all the formal education which New England offered to women at that time, having graduated in the early sixties from Westford Academy...

...Whitcomb & Barrows, 1912...

...It was because of the criticism which I knew had often been made that I took special pains to show that she had been most carefully trained in all the household arts, and that I gave what may seem to some people unnecessarily minute details about the management of her household...

...Conducted by BELLE CASE LA FOLLETTE and CAROLINE L. HUNT The Life of Ellen H. Richards I DO NOT HESITATE to say that I hope the story of the Life of Ellen H. Richards which has just been published in book form will be widely read, for although I told the story myself and am conscious of many shortcomings in the written record, the life itself was so interesting and inspiring that I feel sure it was beyond the power of any unskillful biographer to conceal the inspiration which it carried...

...the other a chemist, and it was probably, as she said herself, "an unrecognized leaning toward social service that led an enthusiastic pupil of Maria Mitchell to abandon astronomy and study chemistry...

...So far as I now know she was the first person to teach science by the laboratory method through correspondence...

...The Society for the Encouragement of Studies at Home with which she became connected in 1876 sent out apparatus and laboratory material, and conducted courses in various sciences...

...The courses in domestic science now given in almost every school in the country are a monument to her foresight, her zeal and her consecration...

...How I hated to cut out a single word...

...how could she maintain a satisfactory home and do so much outside work...

...to train and to use one's every power in the service of others...

...She was a charter member of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae whose services in raising the standard of scholarship in women's colleges, and in providing fellowships and scholarships for women is too well known to be dwelt upon at length here...

...Richards, entered into the preparation of the book with a keen appreciation of her services, and a desire to make it a fitting memorial to her...

...She was at this time a student in chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology...

...These letters, of which I used long extracts in the Life are probably the best record in existence to-day of conditions in a woman's college forty years ago...

...THE HASTE to become rich at the expense of character prevails to an alarming extent and cannot be too severely denounced...

...During the years which followed her graduation she had been reading and studying by herself...

...LIKE MOST OTHER interesting life stories, the record of Mrs...

...I shall have to confess that I was one of the people who held back, fearing ridicule, but she persisted, and before she died she had the satisfaction of seeing the word recognized and taken into the vocabulary of the people...

...During this period from 1868 1870, she wrote weekly letters home which contained not only the news of her college life, but also long abstracts of lectures to which she had listened, and of books which she had read...

...It was the policy of the New England Kitchen to lay bare all its processes to the public for purposes of education and to invite inspection...

...In 1890 she started the famous New England Kitchen of Boston whose purpose was to prepare the lower-priced food materials according to scientific principles, and to sell the food at cost to people of small means...

...She had a part in extensive survey of the water supplies of Massachusetts which has become historic, and in this work alone by which many lives were doubtless saved she made an important contribution to the life of her times...

...I wrote it for Professor Richards, and any profit that it brings to him will be used in furthering some one of the many lines of work which Mrs...

...I was at a meeting of the Lake Placid Conference on Home Economics when she first announced that she was going to try to get this new word of hers adopted...

...Elmendorf was at one time in charge of the Public Library at Milwaukee and is now vice-librarian of the Public Library at Buffalo...

...Boston...

...Its work continued until in 1883 when the building was torn down, the women having been admitted to the Institute on the same terms as men...

...In the pitifully meager autobiographical notes which she left, she acknowledged her indebtedness to Maria Mitchell, the astronomer, and Professor Farrar, the professor of chemistry at Vassar...

...Richards did not belong to the twentieth century because she took no part in the more modern social movements...

...They did not admit women...

...RICHARDS' LIFE,—not now the written story, but the life itself—has a peculiar interest because it was spent during the years when the hedge which had been built around women was being removed...

...She was born late in the year 1842 on a farm near the tiny village of Dunstable which is situated in one of the farthest townships north in Massachusetts...

...That she considered it so is indicated by the fact that before she died when she was being urged to write the story of her life she got out the correspondence which she carried on in her effort to find a door open for her into an advanced chemical laboratory, and carefully arranged and numbered the letters which had brought to her alternate waves of encouragement and disappointment...

...The Institute offered space in a building it was erecting for temporary use, providing money could be raised for equipping the laboratory and carrying it on...

...Think of it, a woman of twenty-six setting out in the year 1868 for college...

...It is significant that now, twenty years afterwards, there is a movement on foot among those who recognize the menace of dirty restaurants to secure municipal regulations compelling the proprietors of eating places to open their kitchens to public gaze...

...FOR THE FIRST TIME in the history of the American Library Association the meeting this year which was held at Ottawa, Canada, was presided over by a woman, Mrs...

...I traveled over that beautiful, quiet country last summer and in some way I seemed to be able to trace the sturdiness of her character to the strength of the pines which cover its rolling surfaces...

...In the autumn of 1868 having saved a few hundred dollars, and borrowed a few hundred more, Miss Swallow entered Vassar College, just three years after it opened its doors to students...

...The Life of Ellen H. Richards by Caroline L. Hunt...

...Richards, as we must call her from this time on, for in 1875 she was married to Professor R. H. Richards of the Institute of Technology,—Mrs...

...they admitted this one woman only, and in special recognition of the work she had previously done...

...The relation of the publishers also is unusual...

...It is a call to personal responsibility...

...Our first publications were her books...

...MRS...

...Astronomy was a little too far removed from the earth and its needs to command her lifelong devotion, but her work with instruments of precision under Maria Mitchell laid the foundation for her skill as an analyst and for her labors in sanitary science in which she found the much-desired social service...

...She was ahead of her time, however, and having failed to interest women in this subject she wisely decided that a beginning must be made with the children, and from that time forward she labored unceasingly to modify the curricula of the lower schools in such a way as to give children an understanding and a control of the material things about them in order that they might learn how to live...

...Two years after she graduated, in 1872, we find her making the chemical analyses for the first thorough study of drinking waters ever made in the United States...

...At the time she entered the Institution of Technology the faculty distinctively provided that their action in admitting her was not to be taken as a precedent...

...The story of how she became the first woman to enter the Institute of Technology, or for that matter, any strictly scientific school, makes another important chapter in her life...

...But she has a message for the twentieth century which to my mind grows more important as women become free...

...It has been said that Mrs...

...No wonder that with all her varied activities, of which I have mentioned only a small fraction, Mrs...

...Richards sought for some one word which should express her ideals...

...She urged the introduction of cooking and sewing, but she believed that these should be so taught as to create an interest in scientific study...