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It is quite likely that Rachel Abby Holloway Lloyd was the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry. Early in her professional career, she studied and conducted research for six summers (1876–1884) at Harvard University’s summer schools. She never received an undergraduate degree; however, from her work at Harvard, she published three articles in the American Chemical Journal in 1881, 1882, and 1884.
Born in Flushing, Ohio on January 26, 1839 to Robert S. Holloway and Abby Taber Holloway, Rachel Abby Holloway was the only one of four siblings to survive into adulthood. Both her parents died before she was twelve; her stepmother raised her after that. In 1859, she married a chemist, Franklin Lloyd, who lived and worked in Philadelphia. Their children died in infancy; Franklin Lloyd died in 1865.
Rachel A. Lloyd held a variety of teaching positions until 1885 when she began studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, the only university at the time that would grant a doctoral degree to women. She studied with V. Merz, carrying out research on the high-temperature conversions of phenols to aromatic amines. She was awarded her Ph.D. in 1887.
Back in the United States, Rachel A. Lloyd began work on July 1, 1887 as both an associate professor of analytical chemistry at the University of Nebraska and as an assistant chemist at the Nebraska Agricultural Experimental Station. Because there were only two faculty members in the chemistry department, she carried a heavy teaching load. Rachel Lloyd was an inspirational teacher, especially to women.
Rachel Lloyd’s research focused on the viability of sugar beets as a crop in Nebraska. She and her colleague, H. H. Nicholson, conducted a thorough study, including the analysis of sugar beets for their specific gravity, total solids, percent sucrose, and reducing sugars, and “coefficient of purity”. Based on this work, three sugar factories were built in Nebraska. Lloyd and Nicholson continued their research and published twelve bulletins in the Sugar Beet Series; their work is credited as the first scientific research project west of the Mississippi. Rachel Lloyd continued to carry out research until 1891; she retired from teaching in 1894.
After retirement, Rachel Lloyd moved back to the Philadelphia area where her Lloyd relatives lived. She died in Beverly, New Jersey on March 7, 1900.
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