Mary Lyon and Emma Perry Carr

School can be a pain, but what if you weren't allowed to go? How would you feel if you were forbidden to study certain subjects just because you were a woman?

In the 19th century, most U.S. colleges and universities did not allow women in their science classes, but emerging women's colleges like Mount Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, and Vassar provided places where young women were encouraged to study science. In fact, a chemist, Mary Lyon, founded Mount Holyoke in 1837. Later, Emma Perry Carr helped establish Mount Holyoke as a chemical research center. Carr integrated hands-on laboratory training with classroom teaching, offering her students a then rare opportunity to conduct original research and make their own discoveries.

About Mary Lyon

Mary Lyon (1797–1849) is famous as the founder of Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and as a pioneer in women's education. She deserves every bit of this fame, but given how much she did for women's education, it is easy to miss how much impact she had on chemistry education in general. Lyon didn't just work to see that women were allowed to learn chemistry just like the men were; she also changed how chemistry was taught to both women and men.

Lyon was born in western Massachusetts. Her father was a veteran of the American Revolution who died when she was only five years old. She grew up on her family's farm and did well in school. Because she was a good student, she was offered a job as a teacher in a nearby town when she was 17. (Back in those days, you didn't need any special training to be a teacher.) She started teaching in a one-room schoolhouse and studied on the side at various schools, slowly gaining her higher education. She moved from teaching in country schools to teaching in academies (that's what high schools were called then).

Both images courtesy Mount Holyoke College Archives and Special Collections.

By the time she was in her 30s, she had worked her way up to being an assistant principal at Ipswich Female Seminary. Seminaries like this were colleges for women, but they usually didn't teach the same courses as men's colleges. For example, instead of math and science, the seminaries often taught subjects like needlework. To Lyon, the seminaries were more like finishing schools than real colleges. So in 1837 she left Ipswich to found her own school, Mount Holyoke Seminary. Her goal was to create a college for women that taught the same courses as men's schools. Mount Holyoke was an instant success and was one of the first colleges to grant degrees to women.

Lyon wasn't just the school’s administrator; she also taught chemistry there, and her innovative teaching methods put Mount Holyoke on the cutting edge of science teaching. In an effort to make her chemistry teaching the best possible, she basically invented the lab course. Until then, most colleges taught chemistry only with lectures, but Lyon felt that if students were to learn how matter behaves, they should play with matter and carry out experiments themselves. So she made laboratory exercises and experiments the backbone of her chemistry course at Mount Holyoke. Around the same time, in Germany, a famous chemistry professor named Justus von Liebig was making waves in the academic world by using laboratory research for teaching graduate students. Since lab work was new even to graduate schools, Lyon was quite revolutionary in bringing it to undergraduate teaching. Her method caught on, and today almost every chemistry class in college or high school uses lab work of some sort.

Lyon's school did well in the long term as well. Mount Holyoke Seminary became Mount Holyoke Seminary and College in 1888, then simply Mount Holyoke College in 1893. Lyon and her successors built a strong chemistry department at Mount Holyoke. Many women chemists would be trained there, including and Emma Perry Carr (see below) and Rachel Fuller Brown, the codiscoverer in 1950 of one of the first effective antifungal medicines, nystatin (also called mycostatin).

Lyon’s passion for chemistry and for science in general had a lot to do with her religious beliefs. She was a very devout person, and to her, studying nature was a way of communing with the divine. Lyon died in 1849 at the age of 54.

For Further Reading on the Web

Mary Lyon — a comprehensive online exhibit on her life, work, and times, from Mount Holyoke College.

Teacher Hero: Mary Lyon — by Lu Stone, part of the My Hero Project.

About Emma Perry Carr

 “It was a resistant person who could fail to share her enthusiasm, whether for science, for politics, for her family, for pi electrons, for baseball, or for the circus.”
—An unknown mourner at a memorial service for Emma Perry Carr, quoted in Mount Holyoke Alumni Report, Spring 1972.

Emma Perry Carr (1880–1972) was born in Holmesville, Ohio. Her father and grandfather were both country doctors, and education was valued in her home. When Carr graduated high school, she began her higher education at Mount Holyoke College, and she would be involved with the school for the rest of her life. Oddly, she didn't graduate from Mount Holyoke but transferred first to Ohio State and then to the University of Chicago, where she earned her bachelor's degree in 1905. After spending a short time back at Mount Holyoke as an instructor, she returned to the University of Chicago to earn her Ph.D. in 1910. Then it was back to Mount Holyoke, where Carr joined the faculty.

Mount Holyoke had a long tradition of training women chemists, and Carr set out to make the program even stronger. She was an involved and dedicated professor. She personally taught freshman general chemistry, a task that would normally have fallen to a junior instructor. But Carr personally wanted to ensure that the students’ first exposure to chemistry was one that would get them excited about the topic.

Even so, Carr felt that having a good classroom teacher wasn't enough for students. Because chemistry is a hands-on science, she believed students should be engaged in real research to learn firsthand how chemistry works. This led her to start a research program at Mount Holyoke. She became interested in ultraviolet spectroscopy, a method for studying materials by looking at how they respond to ultraviolet radiation. In 1919 she spent a year working in a lab at Queen's University in Belfast, in what is now Northern Ireland, to learn more about the technique. This led to more international collaboration, and a few years later she spent a year in Switzerland working at the University of Zürich. Her research led to a better understanding of the nature of double bonds between carbon atoms in molecules.

Later, during World War II, her research program expanded to drug research. Women chemists were suddenly in demand, since men were off fighting the war. Carr's group tried to synthesize drugs for treating malaria. Quinine, the most effective antimalarial drug, is a natural drug made from the bark of the cinchona tree. Most of the world's cinchona trees were grown in southeast Asia, which was conquered by the Japanese army, cutting off the United States from most of its sources of the drug. Substitutes were badly needed, but sadly Carr's group never found one during the course of the war.

Carr retired in 1946, the year after the war ended, but stayed engaged with science and education until her death in 1972.