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Four Heroines of Science
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
Henry EtzkowitzCarol KemelgorBrian Uzzi |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
In the early part of the twentieth century, science laboratories moved out of workshops and kitchens and into research centers and universities. As a result, women working in science found themselves largely excluded from scientific careers. In this essay, Henry Etzkowitz, Carol Kemelgor, and Brian Uzzi present the inspiring work of women who challenged these gender-based barriers to scientific achievement. Lise Meitner, Maria Goeppert Mayer, Rosalind Franklin and Rachel Carson helped to make female scientists more than an anomaly. |
 ven as they overcame the obstacles in their path, the most successful female scientists were constricted by their gender. The careers of Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin and Rachel Carson provide us with benchmarks of how much has been achieved during the past century and how far the distance to equality was in each of their experiences. Indeed, the entry of women into scientific careers, as more than an anomaly, is a relatively recent phenomenon. |
Just a century ago women were barred from seeking degrees and advanced training in the sciences in most universities in Europe. In their youth, during the late nineteenth century, Marie Curie and Lise Meitner received some of their training in so-called 'flying universities' through courses offered in the living rooms of homes by sympathetic male academics (Susan Quinn, Marie Curie, 1995). Other, less sympathetic, men believing that women's nature fitted them mainly for family and home, accepted female candidates only under exceptional circumstances, and still others, not at all. |
Lise Meitner
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| Lise Meitner: an outsider all her life. | |
When Lise Meitner emigrated to Germany from Austria to pursue a scientific career, she received financial support from her family that made it possible for her to pursue advanced studies. To Max Planck, the doyen of German physics in the late nineteenth century, Lise Meitner appeared to be one of those exceptional women and he allowed her into his advanced courses and, most importantly, his laboratory, a training experience that an improvised university could not provide (Ruth Sime, Lise Meitner, 1996). |
During the nineteenth century women could attend German universities only as unmatriculated auditors. Baden was the first German state to open its universities to women in 1900. Prussia, where Lise Meitner aspired to follow her vocation for physics in Berlin, followed in 1908 and was by no means the last. Perhaps ironically, in the eighteenth century many laboratories, especially in chemistry, had been in kitchens in the home and thus more accessible to women's participation (Pnina Abir-Arn and Dorinda Outram, Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives, 1986). |
The professionalization of the sciences and their incorporation into the universities during the nineteenth century placed the increasingly technologically sophisticated experimental sciences beyond the reach of most interested women. It was not until the 1970s that female access to the laboratory bench again reached the level that it had attained in the eighteenth century, a less institutionalized era in the sciences when upper-class women, at least, had open access to scientific work through their family and social connections (Andrea Gabor, Einstein's Wife: Work and Marriage in the Lives of Five Great Twentieth-Century Women, 1995). Although women gained formal access to university-level scientific education in the late nineteenth century, informal barriers have persisted into the twenty-first century. |
Such barriers are not so obvious as the rule that, even when she attained a research position, restricted Lise Meitner's presence at the Chemistry Institute in Berlin to a makeshift basement laboratory. Despite exclusion from the other laboratories and meeting places of her erstwhile colleagues, Meitner informally guided the investigations of male peers such as Otto Hahn through the force of her theoretical insight, combined with careful experimentation. Hitler's persecution finally drove her from her laboratory at virtually the last moment that a person of Jewish background could openly escape from Nazi Germany. Nevertheless, through clandestine contacts, she continued to advise her former colleagues on their research program. Always careful to soothe the male ego, Meitner negotiated a precarious path in German science, contributing at the highest level but receiving recognition at a somewhat lower level than her accomplishments warranted. |
Meitner remained an outsider all her life, perhaps most poignantly during her years in Sweden, which provided a haven from Nazi persecution. Although she had a post at a research institute, she lacked access to support staff and research resources. Excluded from the Noble Prize for the work she did with Hahn, Meitner received fuller recognition only late in life in the form of an Institute named jointly for her and Hahn, several individual scientific awards and a street named after her in Berlin. Nevertheless, she has perhaps only received full recompense from Ruth Sime, her excellent biographer (1996). |
Maria Goeppert Mayer
Despite the difficulties she encountered, Meitner was the key person in a leading German research center for much of her work life. Nazi persecution, and the war that marginalized Meitner, ironically brought another female scientist to the forefront. Until very late in her professional life, Maria Goeppert Mayer (later a Nobel prizewinner) pursued an outsider career even more on the margins of U.S. academia than Meitner's place in the German research system. Maria Goeppert grew up in an academic family in Göttingen and when she showed an aptitude for physics had access to leading scientific figures in the community such as Max Born who became her mentor. Nevertheless, when she married Joe Mayer, an American chemist, and moved to the United States in the early 1930s, her Ph.D. and advanced knowledge of theoretical physics only landed her an unpaid position in the physics department at her husband's university. |
With his support and encouragement she was able to pursue a research career at the margins of Johns Hopkins University and then at the universities of Columbia and Chicago (Gabor, 1995). The war-time emergency that drew many women into the workforce also opened up a place for Goeppert Mayer in the Manhattan project, where her previous research meshed with the needs of the crash-program to develop the atom bomb. Until 1959, on the eve of receiving the Nobel Prize, when she left the University of Chicago with her husband to move to the University of California at San Diego, she held no full-time, fully remunerated academic position. She wanted nothing more than to be 'one of the boys, ' fully accepted in scientific conversation. |
To a great extent she achieved that goal. In discussions in the early 1950s with Enrico Fermi, the Italian physicist then at the University of Chicago, he encouraged her to formulate her ideas and set forth a claim to scientific recognition for her elucidation of the structure of the nucleus. Although she was granted a full academic position only late in life, Mayer can be seen as the prototypical traditional woman scientist, devoted to her work to the virtual exclusion of all other aspects of life. Only through far superior work could she be recognized as an equal. |
Mayer's later career coincided with the beginning of the opening up of academic science to women's participation, often through pressures from the Equal Employment Opportunities process. Despite formal, tenured positions achieved by a growing minority of women, the way the world of academic science works still marginalizes women. Nepotism rules that prohibited universities from hiring husbands and wives were only the most overt of the many social and cultural restrictions on women's full participation in academic science. Nepotism rules are gone but reminders that science is a man's world persist even as women strive to make it their own. |
Rosalind Franklin
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| Rosalind Franklin, co-discoverer of the chemical compostition of DNA. | |
In the early post-war era, when a London college's common rooms were still sex-segregated, men could take advantage of scientific women and get away with it by disparaging their femininity. This is how James Watson treated Rosalind Franklin in his autobiographical account, The Double Helix. Franklin concentrated on developing a data base of X-ray crystallography photographs to elucidate the structure of DNA but was reluctant to specify a structure until she could be confident of her results. |
James Watson and his colleague Francis Crick were more willing to put forth speculative hypotheses but they needed access to her data to guide their model building efforts. Watson attempted to wheedle out the necessary information from her without offering collaboration and joint publication, the overt coin of the scientific realm. Rosalind Franklin, the co-discoverer of the chemical composition of DNA, relatively unacknowledged by her male peers and unavoidably passed over by the Nobel Prize committee, owing to her untimely death, had to wait for recognition from her biographer, Ann Sayre. |
Rachel Carson
Rachel Carson, the biologist and author of Silent Spring, was widely recognized during her lifetime. However, her fame did not derive from research findings, in the traditional sense, but rather from analytical and literary accomplishments. Carson drew together and synthesized a broad body of evidence on the deleterious effects of chemical production processes and their effluents on the natural environment and human health. Indeed, Carson's own research career was stunted by the social environment of advanced academic science that made it difficult for a woman to find a Ph.D. advisor and be taken seriously as a scholar. |
Despite her mother's unstinting encouragement and the availability of a female academic scientist (who herself experienced great difficulties in her research career) as a role model during her undergraduate years, Carson was precluded from a conventional research career by the obstacles she encountered as a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University during the 1920s. Instead, as is still the case for many women who wish to pursue scientific careers, she found a job at the outskirts of conventional science, in her case in a government bureau as a writer of pamphlets on ecology and wildlife. |
Collecting the data for her writing projects through field trips and personal observation as well as from sources among a wide variety of researchers, provided the basis for her evocative and precise depictions of The Sea Around Us and other ecological themes that combined metaphorical insight and scientific acuity (Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, 1997). Perhaps ironically, Carson's career on the periphery of science has become an exemplar of a new type of scientific careers that emphasizes the relationship between science and society, rather than the traditional pursuit of research in isolation from its uses (Tobias, 1998). |
Conclusion
Science writing, research management, technology transfer and science policy analysis are becoming careers in their own right rather than offshoots of research career lines. As science becomes more important to the political and economic spheres, the career lines that embody these intersections become less exceptional and more important. If traditional practices hold, however, one indicator of the increasing acceptance of such occupational endeavors will be their being taken up by an increasing number of men as well as women. If traditional discriminatory practices persist, the removal of women as leaders, if not practitioners, of these occupations, is also likely to take place. |
This is an extract from pages 17-22 of Athena Unbound: The Advancement of Women in Science and Technology, by Henry Etzkowitz, Carol Kemelgor, and Brian Uzzi, published by Cambridge University Press. Copyright Henry Etzkovitz, 2000.
Image of Lise Meitner reproduced with the permission of Churchill Archives Centre. Original material held at Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge, CB3 0DS United Kingdom (www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives). Not to be copied, distributed, published or sold without the permission of Churchill Archives Centre. |
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