About Her Life
Rachel Holloway Lloyd (1839–1900) was born in Flushing, Ohio, to a Quaker family who lived on a farm. Her early life was filled with tragedy. She was one of four children, but all her siblings died in infancy. She lost her parents early as well, her mother dying when Rachel was 5 and her father when she was 12. She married Franklin Lloyd when she was 20. They had two children, both of whom died in infancy, their father following them in death not long after.
A widow in her early 20s, Rachel Lloyd decided to become a teacher, first teaching at a school for women in Philadelphia. Her husband had been a chemist, and she became interested in taking up his old profession. From 1875 to 1883 she spent her summers studying chemistry at Harvard. She did research as well during these summers and cowrote three published papers. While she didn’t earn a degree at this time, she became sufficiently qualified to become a chemistry teacher at two different women's colleges in Louisville, Kentucky.
Wanting to teach at a university, Lloyd traveled to Switzerland in 1885 to earn a Ph.D. at the University of Zürich. She studied organic chemistry and the chemical reactions of phenol (the active ingredient in sore throat sprays among other important uses). She completed her degree in only two years at the age of 48, after which she worked in London before returning to the United States to become a professor of chemistry at the University of Nebraska.
Lloyd was well loved by the students at Nebraska. She also had an impact on life off campus. In the 1890s sugar beets were a new crop in the United States. A lot of Nebraska farmers were interested in the beets but needed to know more about them before taking the risk of growing them on a large scale. Lloyd began a huge research program that studied everything from the sugar content of the different beets to the soil chemistry in which they thrived. She determined just about everything farmers would need to know to grow sugar beets successfully. Within a few years sugar beets became one of Nebraska's biggest crops, which is still the case today.
In 1891 Lloyd became the second woman to join the American Chemical Society. She taught chemistry at Nebraska until she retired in 1894 for health reasons and then moved back to Philadelphia. She died in 1900. |
