Keywords

Until the later twentieth century, the history of science largely neglected—or simply did not see—women and their contributions to science. Frameworks of understanding cast the scientific enterprise as intrinsically male, while historiography chose to look mostly in places where women were present historically only informally at the margins, for example élite scientific societies, universities, or aristocratic gentlemen’s laboratories.1 This masculine construction of scientific activity was reinforced by a modern understanding of science as being specific in scope and limited to certain spaces, for instance the institutional laboratory, research department or observatory, and the activities that take place there. This limited perspective emerged partly out of the specialization and fragmentation of science from the late nineteenth century onwards which narrowed the range of activities that counted as science. As a result, women in specialisms such as science writing, translation, collecting and illustration, or practising science within disciplines now classified typically as arts—the study of ancient civilizations and architecture for instance—were excluded. Despite this, specialization also acted to open up some opportunities for women in new scientific disciplines which were yet to establish themselves and so, at their beginnings at least, were less attractive to men.2 In addition, women who pursued their science in the domestic sphere, and/or as part of a family collaborative effort or business, were also obscured from view; a situation exacerbated by ideals of femininity which presented barriers to women seeking to practise science in the public sphere and created tension around the amateur/professional distinction. These ideals also historically prescribed certain branches of science as more suitable for the female sex, such as botany, which for much of the eighteenth century had a special affinity with femininity. In contrast to physics, botany was a taxonomic rather than an experimental science which, to a large extent, remained in the domestic sphere and considered phenomena as they occurred in nature. Ann Shteir (1997) explains how women enjoyed more culturally sanctioned access to botany than to any other science; working in their homes and gardens, women collected plants, drew them, studied them, named them, taught their children about them, and wrote popularizing books on botany.

It may have been hoped that these kinds of associations, and ideas of appropriate branches of science for women and men, would have disappeared by the twenty-first century. However, a look at data on women in STEM across different disciplines illustrates that the gender gap, especially in certain areas of science, persists. When we consider biological sciences and some specialisms in medicine, we find that women worldwide are clustered in these disciplines and are significantly under-represented in physical sciences and engineering. In addition, women of colourearn the smallest share of STEM degrees and represent the lowest numbers of practitioners (Catalyst 2020; UNESCO 2021). When women do achieve degrees in STEM subjects, they often go on to careers in teaching or science communication rather than practising as researchers. This is connected not just to ideas of suitable scientific femininity, but also to educational opportunities and choices, the culture of practice in individual disciplines, and representations of female scientists. Adding another layer of complexity, these issues alter according to culture and place and when considered from a non-Western perspective, as illustrated by chapters in this volume.

Many traditions, however, share a dominant definition of science as an epistemic product—a body of knowledge and technology—which obscures the processes of sciences; that is the methods, practices and teamwork involved in the scientific project. This has rendered invisible the work of assistants and collaborators, especially but not exclusively women. Indeed, we are only just recovering the important work of technicians and laboratory assistants of both sexes who have been essential to the project of science; here, class intersects with gender to limit not only who enjoys access to science, but also who gets the credit.3 This policing of science and marginalizing of women went hand-in-hand with a culture that privileged men as active investigators, and in contrast took woman as its object of scientific enquiry. Ideas of women as less rational and so unsuited for scientific work can be identified from the birth of modern science in the Enlightenment period, through to nineteenth and twentieth century science influenced by evolutionary theory. The impact of these ideas was to limit opportunity for women in the sciences and, sometimes, to prompt scientific women to view themselves as somehow unnatural or different to their sex. For example, Leigh Whaley describes the transient insecurities of two female Enlightenment natural philosophers in her case study on them in this volume. Ideologically informed theories of sexed brains and women’s intellectual deficit are remarkably persistent, as neuroscientist Gina Rippon demonstrates in a text which uses science to effectively debunk these ideas (2019).

The rest of this chapter will introduce the Handbook and illuminate these questions by mapping scholarship on the history of women in science, and by challenging male-focused histories which have misunderstood past landscapes of science and, as a result, ignored women’s contributions. Although we must be careful not to overestimate the numbers of women active in science, one startling realization from the chapters and case studies presented here is that many of the women featured were well known and respected in their own time yet have dropped out of sight, unlike many of their male peers. This raises questions of historiography, how we interpret science and the past, and sociological considerations about the gendered practices, participation, and representations of science today.

From Great Women to a More Nuanced View: Scholarship on Women in Science

Although there have been efforts to reclaim and make visible women scientists of the past, still only a few (white) key figures—‘heroines’ of science such as Polish researcher Marie Skłodowska-Curie and British mathematician Ada Lovelace—dominate the Western popular historical imagination. A comparison of these two women reveals some interesting insights. Skłodowska-Curie (1867–1934) won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1903, alongside Henri Becquereland Pierre Curie, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1911 for her discovery of radium and polonium. If Skłodowska-Curie’s achievements are indisputable, this is not so clear when it comes to Lovelace (1815–1852). Although an interesting footnote in the history of mathematics, her contributions to science were limited to enhancements of Charles Babbage’s plans for an analytical engine, the forerunner of the computer, and the translation of a paper to which she added original notes. The latter imagined what a computer may be capable of and can be regarded as a nascent computer programme. Lovelace was the daughter of the poet Byron and his wife Anne Isabelle Milbanke, ‘The Princess of Parallelograms’ (Woolley 1999, p.14). Once the couple were estranged, Milbanke ensured her daughter was tutored in mathematics as a conscious counter to prevent her developing the turbulent poetic tendences of her father (Toole 2004; Woolley 1999). As Byron’s daughter, Lovelace is a compelling figure whose prominent place in the history of science is due arguably to the romance of being linked to the great romantic poet, rather than to any clear legacy to science or computing.

Echoing the place of Lovelace in the popular imagination, for a long time the recovery of women in science followed the familiar ‘great man’ of science model, with biographers romanticizing the ‘special’, ‘pioneering’ individual women who succeeded in this masculine sphere.4 Although a trope persisting today, this valorization of individual women as heroines of science can be traced back to early in the twentieth century at least. In 1913, scientist and educator Rev. John Augustus Zahm, under the name H. J. Mozens, published Woman in Science With an Introductory Chapter on Woman’s Long Struggle for Things of the Mind—a well-received text which went through a number of editions. In the preface to this, Mozens describes how he was inspired to consider this topic while in the picturesque land of the Hellenes; here, viewing representations of Aspasia ‘the virgin goddess of wisdom and art and science’, he was moved to investigate the intellectual achievements of women. Mozens’ overblown prose describes female scientists, including his contemporaries, in language more applicable to mythical female deities than workaday, serious scientists. Skłodowska-Curie’s experimental abilities are likened to magic as ‘before her deft hands and fertile brain difficulties vanished as if under the magic wand of Prospero’ (Mozens1991, p. 224). In a similar vein, Mozens quotes the gendered praise spoken by the Dean of Faculty when economic entomologist, Eleanor Ormerod, was awarded an honorary Doctor of Laws by the University of Edinburgh in April 1900. Ormerod was ‘entitled to be hailed as the protectoress of agriculture and the fruits of the earth […] a beneficent Demeter of the nineteenth century’ (p. 252).5 This approach—still common in popular history at least—implicitly suggests that only special, exceptional women can succeed in science. As a result, it presents a role model so far beyond the everyday that it may deter, rather than encourage, young women to view science as a career.

This is not to suggest, however, that biographies of individual women of science are not highly valuable. Indeed, there are several chapters in this Handbook which present case studies that illustrate the strategies that women adopted to contribute to science and illuminate the culture and practice of particular disciplines which presented both obstacles and opportunities for them. Instead of taking a biographical approach, other scholarship in the history of women and science aims to develop frameworks with which to understand how everyday women practitioners negotiated their access to and participation in science.6 This project aims to understand women’s place in science by the processes and traditions which have determined women’s access, contribution, and reception. This includes the way that modern science is defined, disciplinary differences, gendered traditions of practice, language and education, the influence of scientific spaces, institutions and networks, gendered representations, who gets scientific credit, and the intersections of science with other activities such as business, writing, translation, teaching or art. This approach is revealing many ‘everyday’ rather than ‘exceptional’ women who contributed to science and who have been obscured from view.

The scope of this Handbook is from 1660 when, in the Western world and beyond, the key institutions of science and the modern experimental method were emerging and establishing themselves. Chapters build on classic feminist critiques of science which demonstrated how, from this time onwards, modern science acquired privileged status as a producer of objective knowledge while simultaneously developing an overt masculine perspective and representation which expunged women and femininity (Merchant 1976; Fox Keller 1985; Schiebinger1991). This scholarship adopted a sociologically informed history of science which lifted the discipline’s veil of objectivity to make visible the masculine constructs within; this work also initiated the development of models and frameworks of understanding that better reveal women’s connections to science. Many of the chapters in this Handbook reflect a Western perspective but, importantly, there are also studies of non-Western experience that provide an invaluable, and often striking, contrast. Caution must be taken when assuming that women’s experience is uniform, even in a European and American context. For example, while women of science struggled to gain entry to scientific institutions and higher education until late in the nineteenth century, some women in Enlightenment Italy pursued a career in science, gained degrees and even a university teaching post. Laura Bassi (1711–1778) held a chair in Experimental Physics at the University of Bologna and was also a member of Italian Institute of Sciences (Findlen 1993). The history of women and science is an extremely large and complex subject and, of course, it has not been possible to cover all aspects, disciplines, and cultures here. Historical and contemporary comparisons of the operations of gender(and race) in science across different cultures is an avenue of enquiry which requires further research, especially in the context of today’s global scientific world.

Part II of this Handbook, ‘Strategies and Networks’, presents analyses of how women negotiated access to science, built their own circles of support, and found ways to participate despite the barriers confronting them due to their sex. Recent scholarship has illuminated the way that ‘male mentors’ with connections, position and scientific facilities helped women without these advantages to access science (Pycior et al. 2006). Certainly, men have a role in supporting scientific women in the case studies presented here. However, the ‘male mentor’ framework of understanding can work to deprive scientific women of agency and diminish their contributions, and this is far from the reality, as this section shows. The scientific women presented here were anything but passive and powerless and, by contrast, actively cultivated networks, and opportunities to steer their careers. Education emerges as another key theme: even élite women such as Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623–1673), felt the limitations and injustice of being locked out of formal intellectual and scientific education due to her sex. Cavendish, thanks to her privileged status, was able to circumvent this and, as Brandie R. Siegfried demonstrates, participated and published as a natural philosopher and equal in prestigious scientific networks during a career which spanned two decades. Sensitive but non-compliant towards gender norms which proscribed women’s engagement in public science, Cavendish used her access to intellectual circles to acquire knowledge and connections, including with men of the newly established Royal Society of London. In this way she engaged in the key debates in natural philosophy of the time, often communicating her scientific ideas through poetry and literature.

Like Cavendish, other female natural philosophers navigating Enlightenment science proactively developed networking strategies to facilitate scientific learning and engagement despite the constraints of their sex. The latter typically included exclusion from formal institutions of science and the facilities that came with them, as well as from more informal spaces where the exchange of ideas took place such as the coffee house or café. As Leigh Whaley, in her chapter on Émilie Du Châtelet (1706–1749) and Madame D’Arconville (1720–1805) explains, women ‘were forced to be creative if they wanted to practice science’. D’Arconville, a chemist and anatomist, was largely self-taught, but she sought out male mentors who could assist her scientific training and collaborated with them. Mathematician and natural philosopher Du Châtelet forged a partnership with Voltaire, but soon surpassed him and established a ‘brilliant salon’ or academy at her country home. Alongside scientific research, both women translated canonical scientific texts and so exploited an acceptably ‘feminine’ route into science, using it to go beyond translation to include extensive commentaries, engage in scientific dialogue, and contribute their own insights. Although Du Châtelet and D’Arconville cultivated relationships with the leading men of science of their day, they did not take a subordinate position to their male ‘mentors’ and their agency and purposeful strategies align them far from the passive, domestic Enlightenment prescription for womanhood.

Alexis Wolf, in her chapter on Margaret Mason, Lady Mount Cashell (1772–1835), introduces us to another woman who was not shy of embodying scientific—in this case medical—authority. Mason, too, adopted strategies including the writing of medical texts and the cultivation of a well-connected male mentor to facilitate her work. Mason practised in the more acceptably ‘feminine’ sphere of maternity and children’s health, but she was also challenging the takeover of midwiferyby men as the tide of professionalism tainted women’s traditional dominance in this sphere as amateurish, and even unsafe. By contrast, Mason insisted that women midwives were just as capable as the professional man; at the same time, she adopted a scientific stance and was concerned with scientific theories of childrearing and medicine developed using observation and experimentation. Mason’s medical text, Advice to Young Motherson the Physical Education of Children (1823), was one of a small body of texts by women that together created an informal network of women disseminating and exchanging professional, medical, literary texts in Europe.

John Croucher presents us with a case study on a woman who, unlike the natural philosophers discussed above, could not rely on privileged social birth to facilitate her access to science. Indeed, the life of Janet Taylor, nautical instrumentmaker and mathematician, is a ‘story of classand gender’. She represents a section of non-élite women working in science and technology, at a craft or guild level, who have been largely neglected until recently. Taylor ran a business providing navigation technology, and technological support and training, to the Navy and merchant shipping, operating from premises in East London. Entrepreneurialism and the needs of industry created opportunities that this able scientific woman was clever enough to exploit. Taylor was not alone in using this strategy; women participated in a thriving scientific instrument trade in Victorian London, offering bespoke and standard products and receiving custom from institutions, laboratories, and individuals. Discounting the ‘invisible’ women who worked with relatives in small businesses, women were registered in their own right as makers of drawing and mathematical instruments and producers of navigation and optical equipment (Morrison-Low 1991). Taylor also cultivated networks that transcended business concerns; these included engaging in scientific correspondence with the Astronomer Royal, participating in urgent debates such as that over the problems of compasses in iron ships, and working with the Admiralty.

Networking was a key strategy for scientific women, no matter their circumstances of birth, class, or discipline. Cynthia Burek’s chapter on women following academic careers in geology around 1900 carefully dissects the strategies they used to facilitate access, support, and scientific exchange. Burek’s analysis illustrates the way networking was indispensable to early female geologists, at the local, national, and international level, and reveals the significant number of women working in geology at the time. As well as slowly gaining entry to traditionally male geological clubs and societies, women—importantly—also created their own parallel formal and informal support networks and worked collectively to overcome the hurdles they faced as women in their discipline. Although acknowledging the support that men acting as mentors, with their privileged access to science and scientific institutions, could offer to women, this chapter also demonstrates how early female geologists identified and responded to their situation and, despite suffering continuing discrimination, were anything but powerless or lacking in agency.

Historian Londa Schiebinger has remarked that for 300 years the only permanent female presence at the élite Royal Society of London was a skeleton preserved in the anatomy cupboard (1991, p. 26). As Part III of this Handbook, ‘Making Women Visible: Institutions, Spaces and Places of Science’, reveals, the more prestigious the institution of science, the more likely was it to be hostile to women’s admission. In Britain, women were not elected to a fellowship of the Royal Society of London until 1945; the French Academy of Science admitted its first female fellow in 1979 (after turning down Nobel laureate Marie Skłodowska-Curie in 1910). In China, the nuclear physicist Zehui He (1914–2011), ‘the Chinese Marie Curie’, was elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences, established in 1949, in 1980 (Fidecaro and Sutton 2011).7 However, the admission of women was a complex issue sometimes ‘fudged’. The élite Royal Astronomical Societygave two women, astronomer Caroline Herschel and mathematician Mary Somerville, honorary fellowships in 1835, but did not admit women to ordinary fellowship until 1915 (Royal Astronomical Society2021). Other learned societies, such as the Royal Microscopical Society, accepted women’s membership fees but did not allow them to attend meetings (Jones 2016). As science continued to specialize and fragment, so new societies emerged specifically to cater for amateurs, including women. For example, the British Astronomical Association was founded in 1890 to provide an alternative to the Royal Astronomical Society and was advertised as ‘open to Ladies as well as Gentlemen’. Several women were active in the Association, participating in expeditions, serving on its council, and editing its journal (Olgilvie 2000, p. 77).

As suggested above, women have always contributed to science but to find them we need to look in the right places. Anne Barrett, in her case study on female scientists in the archives, in particular university archives with a focus on Imperial College London, guides us as to where and how to locate the women. Archives allow scholars to re-evaluate the scope of women’s scientific discoveries across points in time, revealing their significant contributions to models of education and the fields of science, technology and medicine, despite their frequent omission from narratives surrounding breakthroughs. Archives have increasingly become a source for the reclaiming of women’s scientific histories, as evidenced in initiatives set up around the globe by universities and national organizations. These projects seek to interpret and showcase the past achievements of women in science in both specific subjects and more generally. Imperial College’s archives offer an important site for recovery of women’s scientific involvement in an institution historically seen as a male domain. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards, women attended lectures at the College on subjects including geology, natural history and medicine, and later trained as science teachers through constituent colleges. The matriculation of women students towards the end of the nineteenth century led to their greater involvement throughout the twentieth century, with a small but influential group of women excelling in a diverse range of subjects, including engineering, mathematics and climatology. Barrett argues that by examining the archival histories of women in science at all levels—whether they made key discoveries as researchers or supported the scientific milieu as teachers or administrators—it is possible to shape future recruitment and retention of girls and women in STEM.

Sarah L. Evans’ chapter similarly explores how historical documents can reframe narratives about women’s involvement in scientific institutions by highlighting the numerous lectures delivered by women at the Royal Geographical Society (RGS) in the early twentieth century. Twenty-first-century depictions of the RGS have represented women as outsiders, yet the Society’s own printed Geographic Journal as well as its administrative records reveal a much different picture, with a particular group of women geographers frequently presenting the findings of their RGS-supported expeditionary work over a period of several decades. Women took part in global expeditions, often undertaking exploratory travel alongside their husbands or within mixed expeditions, and produced significant scientific fieldwork. Some women supported the lectures of their male expeditionary counterparts through post-lecture discussions while others took the lead in presenting their own findings. Archaeologist Gertrude Caton-Thompson, for instance, repeatedly lectured on her Egyptian expeditionary work, an important example of how women’s scientific practices challenged gendered norms and discourses around geographical capability. Evans recreates the various strategies by which women Fellows of the RGS assimilated within the Society’s practices by adhering to the conventions of lecturing while simultaneously challenging established hierarchies through their work and presence.

Although the first women were not elected as fellows of the Royal Society of London until 1945, Claire G. Jones’ chapter reveals how women participated at the Society’s annual soirées (or conversaziones), both as interested guests, and as exhibitors embodying scientific authority. The ‘ladies’ soirée’ in particular, held each summer from 1876, was a heady mix of science and society which quickly became one of the most coveted invitations of the London season. Guests and exhibitors—roles which blurred as individuals inhabited both—donned their finest dress to be entertained by science as much as to be educated about it. Fusing science and spectacle, the ‘ladies’ soirée’ brought the wives and daughters of scientists and fellows into contact with women exhibitors, though gender inequity frequently led to the exclusion of scientifically-active women, slights which provoked pushback from suffragettes and women’s rights campaigners. Nonetheless, a significant minority of women scientists did exhibit, transgressing women’s exclusion from fellowship of the Royal Society itself by visibly showcasing their collecting practices, artistic interpretations, intellectual observations, and scientific techniques. Their involvement illustrates how women, whether as active scientific agents or as invested observers, helped to cultivate the growing social interest in science that characterized the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Focusing on the period up to the Great War, Jones reveals the importance of networks, collaborative marriages, differing understandings of public and private, and a broad conception of what counted as science, as implicated in recovering women whose scientific expertise was often known and highly respected in their own time.

Concern about the low proportion of women involved in scientific subjects, particularly in STEM education and professions, has risen to the forefront of public debate in recent decades, with new global and national initiatives aiming to promote gender equality in the associated fields. As Naonori Kodate and Kashiko Kodate point out in their chapter, the challenges associated with integrating women within STEM subjects are not new, and can be related to endemic problems such as gendered social expectations, choices of study subjects available to girls and women, and the dynamics of the labour market. These obstacles have historical roots as well as historical remedies, including the use of women-only universities in Japan as a means of ensuring women’s unique and tailored access to a STEM education. Beginning from the late nineteenth century onwards, a number of new Japanese universities were formed to promote a national agenda of educational reform, which did not initially welcome women. While the mainstream view of women’s education promoted their domestic capabilities, women’s teacher-training colleges increasingly enabled women to gain a scientific grounding, with women eventually gaining access to Japan’s Imperial Universities in the early twentieth century. Over the course of the century, women progressed through the university system, gaining doctoral degrees in a wide range of fields and making important advances in their disciplines. Reforms gradually granted women equal access to higher education, including through the creation of women-only universities, which today make up approximately ten per cent of Japan’s total universities, providing a space for women to excel in subjects from which they have traditionally been discouraged or excluded. As Kodate and Kodate’s chapter shows, institutions hold powerful potential for encouraging the growth of women’s involvement in STEM, not only through observing their historical achievements, but also by clearing a path for women’s scientific futures.

The impact of one institution, the ‘little university of Göttingen’, in providing higher mathematical education to women, and so leading the way for other institutions to do the same, is the subject of the chapter by Renate Tobies. Women taking postgraduate degrees at Göttingen in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, then a renowned centre of mathematical research, initially travelled from overseas as German women were not permitted entry to university. This ‘experiment’ with foreign women from America, Britain and elsewhere proved a success and paved the way for German women to officially study mathematics at university-level too. Again, women were supported by male professors, most significantly Felix Klein (1845–1925), who used determination and creativity to bring talented female mathematicians to Göttingen. These women were not passive recipients of male largesse, however; they also supported each other by setting up their own mathematics club and feminine networks, and when professors themselves sent their best students back to Göttingen to undertake postgraduate research. The importance of male mentorsin facilitating women’s access to science has been mentioned several times already (and Klein clearly fulfilled this role); however, women were also vulnerable to the actions of powerful men who had a non-inclusionary agenda. Tobies reveals how the conservative university Kurator of Göttingen was a staunch opponent of women becoming students and prevented at least one suitably qualified American female mathematician from attending lectures there.

Science is a broad term that encompasses many different disciplines—mathematical sciences, technology, biology, physics, astronomy, engineering, medicine and more—each with its own traditions, aesthetics, and gender colouring; these change according to geography too. The idea of hard and softsciences, with the latter particularly suited to women, is a hierarchy which still has meaning today and one which, arguably, reflects the gender balance within each discipline, rather than any intrinsic difficulty. Part IV of this Handbook, ‘Cultures of Science’, presents some analyses and case studies to understand the impact of these differing traditions on women, both positive and negative. The culture of science practised in a domestic setting emerges as a key theme; women who collaborated with men in the home have been typically assigned the role of assistant, regardless of the nature of their participation. This was something identified by Margaret Rossiter in 1993 and coined ‘The Matthew/Matilda effect’ (Rossiter1993). As she explains, this typically works to ensure it is the male collaborator who receives recognition and credit, and who is mostly recovered by the history of science. For example, in 1903 Marie Skłodowska-Curie received the first of her Nobel prizes for her work on radioactivity, but initially only her husband, Pierre, with whom she collaborated, was considered for the award.8 The situation was only resolved after Pierre wrote to the Nobel committee to ask them to consider Marie too (McGrayne 2001).

Issues of collaboration and credit feature strongly in the case studies on early European female astronomers presented by Gabriella Bernardi. These women mostly worked alongside male family members in home-based enterprises and businesses which illustrates the opportunities available to women within artisan, craft and guild traditions. This setting not only facilitated participation in science but also gave girls and women access to an astronomical and mathematical education not commonly considered appropriate for the female sex. Despite the extent of their contributions, these women were subject to the ‘Matthew/Matilda’ effect with credit going to male collaborators. The culture of public and private is implicated here, as it was acknowledged that women did science, but it was not accepted for them to act in the masculine, public sphere. Discussing some productive and successful astronomical dynasties, Bernardi demonstrates how it was the men who assumed professional, visible public position while women worked fully, but in the shadows. These women made observations, produced astronomical calendars, discovered comments, wrote astronomical texts, and undertook complex calculations as computers.9

Pioneering women in the history of science offer highly visible examples of women’s education, practice and recognition across different disciplines, yet their stories are so often the exception rather than the norm and are tied to the specific conditions of gendered possibilities, limitations and perceptions during the period in which they lived. As Emily Winterburn’s chapter on the lives of Caroline Herschel and her indirect female descendants points out, the educational models afforded to one generation of women did not necessarily extend to or benefit her successors. Women’s historical engagement in science is interwoven with the story of education for women and girls, an often-contentious subject that centred on debates surrounding women’s virtue, mental capacity and domesticity. Herschel’s late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century astronomical work stemmed from her informal training as an assistant to the prominent scientific men in her family, a grounding that led to her success in the public sphere. For the subsequent women of the Herschel family, formal education was more widely available, however evolving nineteenth-century expectations about women’s roles as wives and mothers circumscribed the boundaries of their scientific educations and pursuits at a time when science was moving outside the home and into more formal environments. Drawing on the diaries and letters of the Herschel family, Winterburn’s chapter sheds light on how, despite these barriers, women still found personally enriching ways to participate in science, even as their interests and labours often went unnoticed and uncredited.

Women, of course, are not just practitioners of science, but also a favourite object of investigation. The chapter by Amanda Caleb shows how, from the later nineteenth century, a traditional culture of scepticism concerning women’s innate capacity for intellectual work was enhanced and placed on a privileged, scientific footing by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. According to the many scientific and medical followers of Darwin, women’s limited rationality when compared to men made them unsuited to abstract thought, something that precluded women’s serious participation in higher education and scientific pursuits. Indeed, to the scientists and medical men espousing this view, the participation of women in science and scientific institutions may tarnish the image of these places as élite spaces of science. As Caleb demonstrates, women engaged with, and sometimes internalized, these exclusionary ideas. They also responded, at times using literature and poetry to protest and reveal the consequences, for women and men, of this hierarchical and gendered science of sex.

As Corinna Schlombs points out in her chapter on women and computing, gendered perceptions of hierarchies frequently shift over time, and not always in linear progressive ways. Beginning with the computing vision of Ada Lovelacein Victorian Britain and continuing through the nineteenth and early- to mid-twentieth centuries in America, women played an active role in developing modern computer programming, whether through the innovative design of programmes and systems, or through their work in telephone and radio technologies. Yet enduring societal disregard for women’s historical and contemporary contributions to the field ensured that computing did not evolve into a woman’s profession in the post-World War Two period, due in part to an international masculinization of the field that discouraged women’s involvement. While such problems were exacerbated by the so-called software crisis of the 1960s, women’s marginalization from academic computing, and the gendered division of labour that relegated women to low-paid data entry jobs and men to operating and programming, small numbers of women nonetheless remained and thrived in the field. By the 1980s, women began organizing their own creative and collective spaces to learn and share computing skills, including through the network surrounding computerscientist Anita Borg, thereby reshaping computing to suit their own needs and purposes. Challenging the historical gendering of computing technologies, Schlombs highlights how global twenty-first-century initiatives aim to bring women and girls into computing, identifies the work still to be done, and lays the groundwork for a shift in thinking that challenges the dominant gendered hierarchies in computing technologies.

The idea that there is a tension between femininity and mathematics and science is one that has received much attention in the scholarship of women in science; it is cited as one of the reasons why women have been under-represented in many scientific disciplines historically and is associated with the STEM gender gaptoday. However, we must be careful not to impose a Western understanding on other cultures and assume a uniformity than hides the complexity of women’s experience in science. Carol Mukhopadhyay presents an anthropologically informed analysis of the culture of STEM in India which cautions against over generalization and frameworks that assume reasons for the gender gap are constant (even if the gap itself is). As Mukhopadhyay demonstrates, in India complex family requirements, networks, traditions and cultures have affected girls’ and women’s education and professional choices, and together provide a contrasting, social explanation for women’s absence and presence in differing scientific disciplines. Most striking is the absence in India of essentialist beliefs about intrinsic intellectual differences between the sexes and, indeed, the ‘Western gender-differentiated brain theory’ was ‘startling’ to the individuals questioned as part of Mukhopadhyay’s extensive research.

Women’s contributions to science have historically been viewed and represented as marginal across a variety of contexts, yet their presence was vital to the formation of one of the most identifiable symbols in science, as evidenced in Brigitte Van Tiggelen and Annette Lykknes’s chapter on women’s contributions to the periodic system. Dominant narratives historically framed the periodic system through the accomplishments of individual male chemists rather than examining the development of the system over time, which included significant elemental discoveries by a range of women chemists in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Whether working with wet-chemical analyses, or the mixing of substances in their liquid phase, which originated in domestic spaces such as kitchens thereby allowing women a natural point of access, or through the mastery of analytical chemical work, including the determination of measurements such as atomic weights, which required specialist training in laboratories and universities, women chemists found innumerable ways to contribute to the identification and positioning of the periodic system. Looking beyond the more well-known female chemists such as Marie Skłodowska-Curie, Lise Meitnerand Irène Joliot-Curie, this chapter reveals how the meticulous labour of overlooked women chemists in America and Europe enabled the separation and analysis of individual elements. Throughout their chapter, Van Tiggelen and Lykknes highlight the impact of female scientists on the periodic system while also questioning why the stories of these ground-breaking women have not been adequately acknowledged until recently.

Certain spheres of scientific activity across the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries were especially populated by women and understood as complementary to femininity. Women found roles in science as writers, popularizers and translators of science, often writing for an amateur or child audience (Benjamin 1991; Fyfe 2000). For example, between 1806 and 1815, Margaret Bryan published well-received texts on astronomy and natural philosophy (including optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and acoustics) (Ogilvie and Harvey 2003). Jane Marcet’sConversations on Chemistry in which the Elements of that Science are Familiarly Explained and Illustrated by Experiments was an enormous success when published in 1806, and inspired Michael Faraday to take up science (Phillips 1990, pp. 110–11). Mary Somerville’s work is an excellent example of a formof writing that combined ‘vision on a cosmic scale with a restrained poetic quality’ to evoke the ‘scientific sublime’ (Neeley 2001, p. 8), thus making it both imaginatively engaging and scientifically informative. Central to the circulation of scientific ideas, postulates and findings across cultural and linguistic boundaries was, therefore, the ability to communicate them effectively on a visual and textual level, as the contributions to Part V of this Handbook on ‘Scientific Communication and Representation’ show. While the fundamental importance of translation was rarely overlooked by those involved in scientific pursuits, as Alison E. Martin’s chapter shows, the agents responsible for transferring and transforming information from one language into a different language tended to remain near-invisible (Venuti 1995). To some extent, this invisibility served female translators well, given the dictates of female modesty in the public arena of publishing. Yet translation could also be used as a subtle way to display scientific knowledge, and, by strategic use of a translator’s foreword or paratextual additions such as footnotes, could be employed to help women position themselves within scientific economies of knowledge. While women’s translation activities brought texts into international circulation, a passion for collecting scientific artefacts also saw the movement of objects across cultural and geographical boundaries.

As the chapter by Andrea Gáldy and Anne E. Harbers on the Swedish royal collectionsclearly demonstrates, collecting practices also enabled women to partake in the display and representation of scientific knowledge. Focusing on the collectionsof Queen Lovisa Ulrika of Sweden (1720–1782), they investigate how the contents of her exhibition cabinets cast her as a woman of taste and status, who acted as a patron of the arts and literature, but also of science. The busts of Swedish scientists located in these rooms suggest a broader concern to promote her country’s scientific achievements, in particular the work of scholars at Uppsala University, the oldest of Sweden’s seats of learning and an institution with a clear focus on studies in the natural sciences. Her cabinet of natural history also, though, gave insights into her own personal interests, notably a preoccupation with mineralogy. While this collection primarily articulated and embodied the visual communication of expertise in a courtly environment, increasingly diverse audiences (which also included a small percentage of women) were beginning to visit such collections, and therefore they also served to stimulate intellectual curiosity in those who did not belong within the direct sphere of their curators. As such, then, these collections were key nodal points in networks of communication and exchange and the patronage of aristocratic women was essential to their success.

Being well-connected was also of importance to the Victorian traveller and botanical artistMarianne North (1830–90), as the chapter by Philip Kerrigan reveals. The daughter of a Member of Parliament who himself had been a particularly well-travelled amateur naturalist and botanist, North essentially inherited her father’s scientific connections, and these may well have given her the vision to depart from traditional forms of botanical illustration. Travelling unchaperoned, North initially ventured to the United States and Canada, before heading to Australia, Tasmania and New Zealand. While her written outputs have tended to be cast as complicit in the British imperial project, Kerrigan argues that in her artistic contributions she looked beyond the conventional mediaof line and watercolour to work in oils and adopt a looser, more painterly technique. Taxonomic accuracy was still paramount to her, but she was concerned to convey a sense of how it was to paint ‘in the field’ and did not shy away from illustrating specimens with imperfections. Her subjects also included examples of conflict in the plant kingdom, notably parasitic plants and their survival strategies. A woman who was keenly aware of the dangers of what might be deemed ‘unwomanly’ behaviour in an environment adverse to female intervention in a more proficient and professional capacity, her work was extremely well received for its unique and striking representation of the natural world.

Successfully conveying a particular message—whether through a visual or textual medium—was key to women gaining public recognition in science. In a more contemporary setting, the chapter by Jordynn Jack signals the importance of phatic communication—communication used to create goodwill and maintain relationships—in facilitating scientific research pursued by women. Taking the example of the American zoologist Catherine Henley (1922–1999), Jack explores how in the mid-1940s she entered into a scientific field in which women were well-represented but under-acknowledged, with a mere handful of female figures reaching faculty positions in top research institutions. In particular, Jack investigates by using Bruno Latourand Steven Woolgar’s notion of ‘cycles of credit’ how women had difficulties building a career for themselves in an environment that all too frequently relegated them to subordinate positions such as secretarial staff or laboratory technicians, thus placing them at the periphery of cutting-edge research. Conscious self-positioning and social awareness were essential in helping women to acquire intellectual capital in the world of science, while phatic communication also strengthened networks of exchange for women who otherwise lacked the components traditionally needed to launch a scientific career.

The extremely influential, but highly controversial, American science writer and public educator, Rachel Carson (1907–1964), is a fascinating example of how a woman acquired scientific credibility despite her apparent lack of academic credentials. As Ruth Watts notes, Carson did not originally sign up to study biology but English. However, it was precisely this understanding of the importance of language in enhancing scientific accessibility that was central to the career that she forged for herself. First gaining recognition through the radio scripts she wrote for the Bureau of Fisheries, and subsequently working as a civil servant authoring pamphlets on conservation and public resources, she honed her skills at making science accessible to a non-specialist audience through vivid portrayals of the ecology of the seashore. Now best known for Silent Spring (1962), written to alert its readers to the dangers of new synthetic pesticides, she adopted an overtly biocentric, rather than anthropocentric, perspective, to address contemporary concerns about humankind’s unthinking contamination of nature. The chemical industry unsurprisingly sought to undermine the scientific credibility of a woman with no doctorate or university position. But the meticulous nature of her secondary research, the public recognition she had hitherto gained through her prize-winning writing, and her own concern to stay up to date with the latest scientific thinking enabled her writing to give new impetus to the burgeoning conservation movements in the second half of the twentieth century.

The visibility of women scientists in the public sphere today of course owes much to their representation through film and television. The ripple effects triggered by successful female figures in the world of science should not be underestimated, argues Amy C. Chambers, in her analysis of the spectrum of female scientific figures present in the media today. While women in STEM tended to be defined by their relationship to male counterparts, the media representation of women—memorably embodied in the iconic figure of Uhura from Star Trek—has increasingly improved in the last few decades, even if diversity is an issue still side-lined in favour of celebrating the privileged white woman. The intense over-simplification of earlier portrayals of women scientists on screen has since given way to their presentation as complex and capable figures driving plot and action. Nevertheless, women still tend to be characterized in roles associated with the ‘soft’ biosciences, while the ‘hard’ sciences of engineeringand physics still appear to belong within the male domain. More intersectional approaches need to be adopted, Chambers suggests, if we can begin to rethink the expectations of what science constitutes, who scientists are, and how we envisage them.

While the term ‘scientist’ is frequently used in a wide spectrum of contexts—from academic and institutional research to industry and public policy—it pays to reflect on what it has come to represent both regarding routes into scientific professions and issues of gatekeeping. As the contributions to Part VI of this Handbook, ‘Access, Diversity and Practice’, illustrate, women working in the sciences have constantly queried what ‘professionalization’ might mean, particularly where it grants a status and authority which it has proven institutionally difficult for them to acquire. Taking 1833, the date of the alleged coinage of the word ‘scientist’ by the British polymath William Whewell, as a pivotal moment in women’s engagement in science, Mary Orr investigates how Whewell responded in a review essay the following year to Mary Somerville’s On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences (1834). Such position statements by men were, Orr argues, forms of critical reception and evaluation which had powerful potential to facilitate or block women’s presence in the scientific arena, even if the ‘Somerville effect’ triggered women’s conspicuous attendance at meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Taking the case study of Sarah Bowdich (Lee) (1791–1856), Orr demonstrates how women were already well established in the practice of science at the very time that the potentially exclusionary term ‘scientist’ came into being, while the outputs of Margaret Gatty (1809–1873) and Athénaïs Michelet (1826–1899) show how women successfully advanced scientific knowledge through their publishing activities outside institutional frameworks.

Demands for women’s increased political and social action by the end of the nineteenth century were vital in guaranteeing their appointment to positions of authority, even if female professionalization was largely a process of élite formation which also emphasized distinctions between women. In her chapter on women’s access to the medical profession in Britain and Ireland, Laura Kelly investigates how restrictions on women training and qualifying at university medical schools meant that they faced significant resistance in attempting to pursue an institutionally recognized medical career. The legal exclusion of women as ‘outsiders’ to the medical profession and the refusal by British licencing bodies to permit them to take exams saw some British women embrace the internationalization of the medical sciences and study and qualify overseas. Kelly charts how contemporary attitudes in late-Victorian and Edwardian periods in Britain to women’s admission were based not only on proficiency and aptitude but also on gendered subjectivities and sexualized dynamics (notably with regard to the practice of dissection), which would only change at the watershed marked by the First World War.

It is common knowledge that, with the outbreak of war, employment opportunities emerged for women not just in the medical profession, but also in the defence industry. Less well known is the role that women played in aeronautics, as discussed in the chapter by June Barrow-Green and Tony Royle. Innovations in aeronautics, developments in theoretical aspects of aerodynamics and improvements to the strength and integrity of aircraft structures were the main areas in which women mathematicians helped to make significant advances. A key contributing factor was the gradual emergence of educational opportunities for women in the final quarter of the nineteenth century. Women could at last study on the Mathematical Tripos offered by Cambridge University, at that time the fulcrum of British mathematics, through the establishment of the women-only colleges of Newnham and Girton. Likewise, the founding of Bedford College, East London College and Royal Holloway in London enabled a pool of female talent in mathematics to emerge. Job openings at institutions such as the Admiralty Air Department, the National Physical Laboratoryand the Royal Aircraft Factoryensured women could enter traditionally male-dominated domains, and therefore partially overcome the institutionalized prejudices of the era.

Despite this, the interwar period did not necessarily see women’s entrance into science-based professions made significantly easier. Nina Baker argues in her chapter that the two World Wars could be seen as ‘false entry’ points, since women who had taken up jobs in these domains tended to be forced out of work when peace was restored. Particularly in the heroic, ‘muscular’ world of engineering—dominated historically by figures such as James Watt or Isambard Kingdom Brunel—the public persona of the engineer was defined by his ability to achieve in the face of physical adversity. This, coupled with embedded prejudicial structures and social conventions (notably the ‘marriage bar’ which carried the expectation that women would leave their employment once they got married), meant that women had difficulties establishing themselves in engineering, despite the first engineering degree conferred on a woman in the British Isles dating back to the very early years of the twentieth century. It was particularly in emerging fields of engineering post-World War Two—aeronautics, computing and bio-engineering—that women were more successful in gaining a foothold. While progression up the career ladder has subsequently proven easier, women are still frequently stymied at mid-career level by implicit institutional biases which prevent them from rising to the top.

An interesting comparison is offered by Claire Brock’s chapter on the role of women in the surgical sciences in the 1920s and 1930s. The interwar period was characterized by more positive public responses to the notion of women working as surgeons, primarily influenced by the significant contribution they had made during World War One. While voices of dissent queried the rationale behind training women in surgery, given that they were then likely to leave the profession when they married, these were outweighed by the sense that surgery was no longer simply ‘men’s business’. Taking the examples of the careers of Louisa McIlroy (1874–1968), appointed University of London Chair in Obstetricsand Gynaecology in 1921, Louisa Martindale(1872–1966), President of the Medical Women’s Federation and a pioneer in cancer treatment, and the orthopaedic specialist Maud Forrester-Brown (1885–1970), Brock reveals how these women were pivotal in encouraging public confidence in the work of women surgeons, and also enabled a body of experience to grow that later formed the legacy on which other women surgeons would build.

Bringing us into the twenty-first century, the contribution by Wendy DuBow investigates the still largely homogeneous character of the US technology work force, which primarily comprises white or Asian American men. While just over half the professional workforce is made up of women, they only constitute one quarter of the computing workforce. Growing demands for transparency, together with the requirement that employers publish their demographic characteristics, has made the acute lack of diversity in the technology industry even more visible. It in part reflects the fact that women and racial/ethnic minorities are under-represented at degree level, which in turn is due to the choices made at secondary school level, where teachers, parents and careers advisors still tend to guide girls, and girls or boys of colour, towards non-technical areas of study. DuBow argues that this lack of diversity has tended to be tackled through initiatives geared towards individuals, rather than addressing the urgent need for systemic change across the board: only by implementing larger-scale strategies can changes be made that bring diversity to the field of technology, and with them greater stability and economic potential for women and people of colour. DuBow’s chapter serves as an important reminder not only of the centrality of gendered issues to the world of science, but also of racial and ethnic concerns that have still to be addressed in relation to women’s involvement in academic training and industry.

This Handbook therefore traces significant shifts in the self-representation of women in science from the early modern period to the present day. It charts women’s social, political and intellectual activism in seeking to gain acknowledgement, authority and, more concretely, appointment—in scientific professions. Above all, its contributions reflect the importance that researchers are only starting to assign to histories of gender and work. The legacy of women’s involvement in scientific pursuits—whether as amateur or professional—continues to influence their understanding of their role in the sciences today.

Notes

  1. 1.

    Women are often, literally, simply a footnote in landmark texts on the history of science. Just to take examples from the British context, Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan and the Air Pump (2017, p. 30) briefly mentions the visit of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, to the Royal Society of London in 1667, but only in a footnote barely indicates her scientific interest and expertise, instead concentrating on how ‘full of admiration’ she was for what she saw. The masculine perspective of Andrew Warwick’s detailed text on the training of mathematicians at Cambridge University is revealed by its title, Masters of Theory (2003). Even a recent history of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge (Longair 2016) scarcely mentions women at all despite the female researchers in its past; for a discussion of women researchers at the Cavendish in the late nineteenth century see Gould (1997).

  2. 2.

    For example, see Richmond (2001) on women in the early history of genetics and Sanz-Aparicio (2015) on women in the emergence of x-ray crystallography.

  3. 3.

    For example, see Hartley and Tansey (2015) and Iliff (2008).

  4. 4.

    Indeed, one only has to look at the titles of scholarship on Lovelace to recognise this romantic appeal. For example, Woolley’s 1999 biography The Bride of Science: Romance, Reason and Byron’s Daughter. Despite her limited legacy to science, in Britain women in science are celebrated every year, on the second Tuesday of October, with ‘Ada Lovelace Day’. Romantic themes, even with sexual allusions, are popular in titles of works on women scientists, for example Robyn Arianrhod (2012) Seduced by Logic: Emilie Du Chatelet, Mary Somerville and the Newtonian Revolution; and Brenda Maddox (2003) Rosalind Franklin, Dark Lady of DNA.

  5. 5.

    Ormerod is widely understood as a pioneering technological scientist and economic entomologist whose science and science communication activities made her instrumental in establishing and defining the discipline of economic entomology; see Clark (2004).

  6. 6.

    Examples include Patricia Phillips (1990) The Scientific Lady: A Social History of Woman’s Scientific Interests 1520–1918and Londa Schiebinger (1991) The Mind has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science.

  7. 7.

    It is not clear if Zehui He was the first woman elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Science, but she was certainly one of very few women. As well as Skłodowska-Curie and He, in the history of nuclear science the physicist Lise Meitner (1878–1978) must be remembered as the co-discoverer of nuclear fission; see Sime (1997).

  8. 8.

    Data to March 2021 reveals that 4 women and 114 men have won the Nobel Prize in Physics; 7 women and 186 men have won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry; and 12 women and 111 men have won the Nobel Prize in Medicine (Nobel Prize 2021).

  9. 9.

    Before computers came into use, women were often employed as computers to carry out the ‘tedious’ calculations needed by science. For example, early women mathematics graduates in the UK were employed at the Greenwich laboratory in the nineteenth century and later, in the USA, at NASA (Grier 2007; Shetterley 2017).