BIOCHEMISTRY 



Its Place in the Curriculum of the College of Liberal Arts 



for Women^ 



MARY LOUISE FOSTER 

 Instructor in Biochemistry, Smith College 



It is with pleasure that I come here to plead for a place for 

 biochemistry in the College of liberal arts for women. I am in 

 hearty sympathy with the recent action of the Association of Col- 

 legiate Alumnse in urging the introduction of Home Economics 

 into our Colleges for women. In 1883, Mrs. Richards was the prime 

 mover of the Sanitary Science Club, a group of women who feit the 

 need of study of this kind and who declared in the introduction to 

 the book which they published later that the "expenditure of time 

 and effort had been amply repaid by positive and satisfactory re- 

 sults." Mrs. Richards was my most honored teacher at the Massa- 

 chusetts Institute of Technology and later I was associated with her 

 on a committee f rom the Women's Education Association appointed 

 to devise a working program for a manual training school for girls 

 in Boston. Our object was to make women efficient in their own 

 domain, efficient at home, and we believed that, with the new knowl- 

 edge which research had made available, training was necessary if 

 this knowledge was to be diffused. It is Instruction along these lines 

 which our alumnae are now urging upon the trustees and faculties 

 of our Colleges. Classically educated myself, I got my first Stimulus 

 from Mrs. Richards for the work which has been a continuous 

 happiness to me. 



Dr. Eliot in an address before the Association of Collegiate 

 Alumnae in 1908, said that the effort in the early years of the 

 existence of women's Colleges was to demonstrate the fitness, the 

 mental capacity of women for the education which men had been 



*Read before the American Home Economics Association in annual Session 

 at Washington, December 28, 191 1. 



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