This article examines advice from a century ago that anticipates current calls to relocate the value of technical communication. Chemist Ellen Swallow Richards coined euthenics, the science of controllable environment, and then discussed communication technologies to teach scientific principles to the public. She emphasized women's pivotal role as audience and communicator, helping us understand how to enact the practices of symbolic analysis that give value to our work.

Studying past examples of successful technical communication may offer insight into strategies that worked with technologies and audiences in an earlier time. This article examines the texts documenting a controversy before and during the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Ellen Swallow Richards, chemist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Bertha Honore Palmer, president of the Fair's Board of Lady Managers, had distinctly different visions of how cooking technology should be presented. Palmer invited Richards to create a Model Kitchen in the Woman's Building, but Richards wanted to avoid gendering the new knowledge of nutrition and she fought to control her exhibit. The multimedia Richards used in her resulting Rumford Kitchen exhibit reminds us that sometimes an entertaining but familiar atmosphere might be the best way to introduce threatening new knowledge and technology, particularly to our increasingly international and intergenerational audiences.

This article employs neoclassic and feminist rhetorical perspectives to investigate the persuasive strategies in two scientific articles written in the late nineteenth century by Ellen Swallow Richards. One of the first credentialed female scientists in the United States, Richards wrote about nutrition research she conducted in her experimental food laboratory, the New England Kitchen, to persuade two separate audiences—one predominantly male and the other predominantly female—of the scientific value of nutrition studies. The article adds complexity to our historical underpinnings by querying how gender—of the writer, of the audiences, and in the nature of the topic—contributed to the writer’s rhetorical burdens and provides evidence that women historically have been active knowers and users of science and technology.

This article examines selected texts by Ellen Swallow Richards, a nineteenth-century scientist who wrote for a variety of audiences. Her audience awareness anticipates modem technical communication practices and alerts us to examine gender, class, and other social issues in historical documents as well as current pragmatic discourse.