The Girl Who Tested the Waters: Ellen Swallow, Environmental Scientist

“more attention needs to be paid to the craft of the picture book and the power of its very specific format. A good subject is only the first step.”

Patricia Daniele makes her debut with the story of Ellen Swallow, the first woman admitted to MIT in 1871 and the first women to get a degree in a scientific field in the county. Swallow is an inspiring, ground-breaking figure, who used her knowledge of chemistry to make people's lives healthier and safer.

Her first opportunity to work on air and water quality came when she was still a college student. Her chemistry professor assigned her to work on a water survey for Boston.

"People stared as Ellen, in all kinds of weather, scrambled over slippery rocks, bent over muddy rivers and streams, and collected thousands of samples throughout the city and surrounding neighborhoods. With her bags full of small bottles, Ellen hurried back to the lab. The water had to be analyzed within a few hours of being collected or it was useless."

Descriptions of the analysis follow, measuring, filtering, weighing.

"For two years, she worked seven days a week, often late into the night until her eyes blurred and her body ached for rest. Sometimes she got only four hours of sleep a night. After one-late-night session, she looked at all the bottles of water that still needed examining. Her shoulders slumped. She wished she were triplets."

The author finishes all this work with "Ellen had done it! With unwavering persistence, she proved which rivers and streams contained pollution and which ones were clean."

That's not the end of the book, however. The rest of Swallow's career is laid out like an encyclopedia entry over a few pages.

"Ellen came to think of her approach to improving living conditions as a new kind of science and borrowed a German term to describe it: ecology. She saw it as the study of how people and organisms relate to one another and the environment. She believed it was essential for all branches of science to work together to find solutions for environmental problems—for the sake of people now and for future generations."

More follows in this vein about Swallow's "different approach," finishing with how Swallow used science "to create a safer environment for others."

Some judicious editing could have pared these words into a picture book text. As it is, this is a chapter book text or a magazine article, formatted as a picture book. The story is too long and unnecessarily detailed for a picture book audience, even an older one. It lacks the tight narrative arc such a book demands. There is no sense of Swallow's personality, just a list of the things she did and her drive to do them. Much of the details, including the long section on her childhood, would have worked better as part of the author's note than as an overly long introduction.

The illustrations don't add to the story by giving any deeper sense of Swallow or her accomplishments than what is said in the text. They echo exactly what is said, nothing more. The magic of a picture book is that the art should expand on the words, bring something new to the story. As this book stands, one can read the words without looking at the pictures without any loss of effect.

MIT Press is clearly trying to encourage women to enter STEM fields. It's an admirable aim, but more attention needs to be paid to the craft of the picture book and the power of its very specific format. A good subject is only the first step.