She was an ardent co-worker with her husband in his laboratory and materially aided him in his labors. Under his direction she wrote the results of the experiments that were made, as is evidenced by the records of his work. As a pupil of the illustrious painter, David, she was naturally skillful in drawing. Besides this, she was a good engraver, and it is to her that are due the illustrations in Lavoisier's great Traité de Chimie, which contributed so much toward revolutionizing the science of chemistry. It was, indeed, the first work that deserved to be regarded as a textbook of modern chemistry. Among her drawings are two of special interest. They represent her as seated at a table in the laboratory, taking notes, while her husband and his assistant, Seguin, are making an experiment on the phenomena of respiration.[158]
All Mme. Lavoisier's writings testify to her great admiration of the genius of her husband. Intimately associated with him in his work, she combatted for the triumph of his ideas and sought to make converts to them. One of her most notable converts was the Swiss chemist, de Saussure. "You have, Madame," he writes her, "triumphed over my doubts, at least in the matter of phlogiston, which is the principal object of the interesting work of which you have done me the honor of sending me a copy."
After Lavoisier's tragic death on the guillotine, it was his devoted wife who edited his Memoirs on Chemistry, of which Lavoisier had himself projected the publication. The two volumes constituting this work were not for sale, but were gratuitously distributed by the bereaved widow among the most eminent scientific men of the epoch. Cuvier, in acknowledging the receipt of these precious memoirs, declares: "All the friends of science are under obligations to you for your sorrowful determination to publish this collection of papers and to publish them as they were written—a melancholy monument of your loss and theirs—a loss which humanity will feel for centuries."
To realize the importance of the work in which Mme. Lavoisier participated, it suffices to recall the fact that her husband, as one of the creators of modern chemistry, was the first to demonstrate the existence of the law of the conservation of matter, which declares that in all chemical changes nothing is lost and nothing is created. The co-discoverer with Scheele and Priestly of oxygen, he was the first one to exhibit the rôle of this important element in the phenomena of combustion and respiration and the first, also, to lay the foundations of a chemical nomenclature. We are not, then, surprised to learn that Mme. Lavoisier's salon, even long after her lamented husband's death, was frequented by the most eminent savants of the time. For here were gathered such scientific luminaries as Cuvier, Laplace, Arago, Lagrange, Prony, Berthollet, Delambre, Biot, Humboldt, and others scarcely less brilliant.
After the conclusion of Mme. Lavoisier's work in the laboratory of her husband, little was accomplished by women in chemistry for more than half a century. The reason was simple. Chemistry was not a part of the curriculum of studies for girls either in Europe or America. Even "during the sixties," writes a teacher of one of the prominent female seminaries of the United States, "the study of chemistry was mostly confined to the textbook, supplemented once a year by a course of lectures from an itinerant expert, who with his tanks of various gases produced highly spectacular effects."
When one recollects that the first institution in America—Vassar—for the higher education of women was not opened until 1865, one will understand that there were previously to this date few opportunities for women to study either chemistry or any of the other sciences.
The first scientific institution to open its doors to women was the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was on May 11, 1876, when the governing board of the institute decided that "hereafter special students in chemistry shall be admitted without regard to sex." In less than a year after this event every department of this institution was open to women, and any one who could pass the requisite examination was admitted as a student.
Five years, however, before women were formally admitted to the courses of chemistry an energetic young graduate from Vassar, eager to devote her life to the pursuit of science, had, as an exceptional favor, been allowed to enter the Institute as a special student in chemistry. As she was the first woman in the United States to enter a strictly professional scientific school, her entrance marks the beginning of a new epoch in the history of female education. The name of this ardent votary of science was Miss Ellen Swallow, better known to the world as Mrs. Ellen H. Richards.
Mrs. Richards had not devoted herself long to the study of her favorite science before she resolved to apply the knowledge thus gained to the problems of daily life. She saw, among other things, the necessity of a complete reform in domestic economy, and resolutely set to work to have her views adopted and put in practice. She was, in consequence, one of the first leaders of the crusade in behalf of pure food, and her lectures and books on this all-important subject contributed greatly toward the diffusion of exact knowledge respecting the dangers lurking in unwholesome food.
She was likewise one of the first to apply the science of chemistry to an exhaustive study of the science of nutrition—to the study of food and the proper preparation of food materials. In this she was eminently successful, and was able to achieve for home economics what the illustrious Liebig had many years before accomplished for agricultural chemistry—put it on a firm and lasting basis. To her the kitchen was the center and source of political economy.