Recovering the life of a woman who believed science could and should change the world

In May 1921, Marie Curie stood at Carnegie Hall and accepted a prize named for a woman she had never met. Ellen Swallow Richards had been dead for ten years, but her network of college-educated women had raised $2,000 to fund Curie’s research into the medical uses of radium. In Pursuit of a Useful Science offers a richly layered biography of Richards: the first woman to study and teach at MIT—a pioneer of nutrition science, water chemistry, sanitation, and what would now be called science communication.

At the heart of this book is Richards’s defining conviction that science should be useful—applied to the everyday problems of real people, from baking bread to safe drinking water to the management of sewage—and communicated clearly to the public. She tested nutrition science in a public kitchen, researched sewage treatment at a physical water treatment plant, and proved that women could study science without threat to their health at MIT’s Woman’s Laboratory. She published over one hundred works for public audiences, organized exhibits and lectures, and at the end of her life gathered her wide-ranging work into one of the first scientifically informed calls to protect the natural environment.

As Serenity Sutherland shows, Richards grappled with the gap between scientific authority and everyday practice, even as she rarely confronted how her own assumptions shaped the knowledge she advanced. Drawing on extensive archival sources, this study situates Richards within the expanding role of women in science and the rising cultural authority of scientific expertise in American life.

SERENITY SUTHERLAND is associate professor of communication studies at SUNY Oswego.