Ellen Swallow was born in 1842 in Dunstable, Massachusetts, the daughter of two schoolteachers. Not until 1868, at age twenty-five, did Swallow go off to Vassar, one of the few options for women wishing to attend college in the East. Vassar was becoming an important center for women's education in the sciences during this time, and when Swallow was graduated in 1870, she was determined to continue her pursuit of scientific inquiry. Although there were no careers available to women in the sciences in the late nineteenth century, she was admitted as a special student and the first woman in the new Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), then only five years old. She received a bachelor of science degree from MIT and then did graduate study there in chemistry for an additional two years. She married a young member of the MIT faculty, metallurgical engineer Robert Hallowell...