Work Quote by Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards

There is a quiet provocation in choosing a week of surveying over a week of “fashionable society,” especially when the speaker bothers to specify “even of the best class.” Ellen Henrietta Swallow Richards isn’t merely declaring an introvert’s preference; she’s taking aim at the social economy that defined respectable womanhood in the late 19th century. “Best class” signals a world that claims refinement but often functions as soft coercion: time-consuming, status-obsessed, and designed to keep certain people (particularly educated women) busy performing agreeableness instead of producing knowledge.

Surveying, by contrast, is a verb with muscles. It implies measurement, fieldwork, maps, a literal engagement with the material world. Richards helped invent what we now recognize as home economics and environmental/public health thinking: applying science to daily life, sanitation, water quality, nutrition. In that light, “surveying” reads as both pleasure and strategy. She’s aligning herself with a kind of modern authority that comes from instruments, data, and direct observation, not from being socially vetted.

The line’s power is its refusal to be defensive. She doesn’t apologize for disliking society; she ranks it. The subtext is almost scandalously simple: the “best class” is still, in her calculus, less interesting than work that yields a usable picture of reality. It’s an early statement of a professional identity built against genteel expectations, and it lands because the insult is delivered with the calm precision of someone used to taking measurements.