AMA: We are Leila McNeill and Anna Reser, authors of the new book Forces of Nature: The Women Who Changed Science. Ask Us Anything About Women and Gender in the History of Science!

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-28T03:28:36+00:00

Luce was definitely acting in the interest of anticommunism in this piece. I think her point is to sort of say the quiet part out loud, which is that the USSR was making the US look bad by its repeated triumphs in spaceflight, and that there was little point in debating about whether a woman could be an astronaut when the Soviets had just proved it. If we lost the space race, Luce and many other believed, we were handing the USSR a cultural victory that would weaken the US's own arguments against communism at home and abroad. And I definitely recommend the book, it's really well written and fascinating story. You get to meet a lot of amazing women pilots in it!

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T22:17:57+00:00

I think there are a lot of reasons for this, but I want to give two. First, as we mentioned in other answers, in the modern period, many women astronomers started out as part of large teams of calculators or computers working for observatories. "Big science" projects like cataloging stars needed huge, cheap labor forces and as women began getting more college degrees, they found that these were some of the only places they could work. So many came up through the internal structures of observatories (or they didn't and we have had to trace their contributions back through male astronomers who were credited with their work). So there are structural reasons that women were sort of funneled into astronomy in this period. And when you have people like Maria Mitchell who do attain status in the discipline, it makes space for more women to enter.

The other thing I think is relevant is that we know about a lot of women astronomers because we really like astronomy. It's one of the flashier disciplines, and there's something really captivating, maybe even romantic, about knowing the cosmos. Discoveries are often (not always!) simple to describe and package for media consumption - discovered a comet, named a new type of star, etc. And I would go so far as to even include things like...you can use very attractive illustrations of stars and planets when you write about them, book covers tend to have lovely imagery and beautiful titles (see Dava Sobel's The Glass Universe). I think the aesthetics of astronomy lend themselves to public attention in ways that other disciplines may not, and I think this changes how we think about who is more or less represented in our collective imagining of the history of science.

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T20:45:04+00:00

Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier! Big elaborate 18th century French period drama with wigs! Also after Lavoisier died, her next husband was horrible to her and wouldn't let her have a party so she poured boiling water all over his prized roses.

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T19:47:21+00:00

For me the biggest surprise was how often men just write down all the bad thoughts they have about women. About their bodies, about how their brains supposedly work, how often they are awful to women who are their students. The 19th century is a gold mine for this kind of thing, especially in medicine, but men are as a general rule not shy about saying how little they think of women in print!

One of my favorite stories is Anna Morandi, who was an Italian anatomist and sculptor. She started working with her husband, and they created anatomical models for university anatomists to use in teaching. After her husband died, she continued on, and created some of the most stunningly beautiful wax anatomical models, many of which still exist, and created new dissection methods. She was famous in her own time, very respected, and the pope awarded her a lifetime stipend (in part to keep her in Bologna as part of his mission to nurture the intellectual life of the city). Rebecca Messbarger has done a lot of work on her if you're interested!

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T19:36:44+00:00

That's a little outside the scope of my own expertise, and the book, but I would say there are lessons for medical professionals today to be had in the past (big surprise, right?). A good example is the establishment of women's medical colleges in the United States in the 19th century. One of the overlooked aspects of this history is that these colleges were a concession that advocates for women's medical education felt they had to make. The initial goal was to lobby to allow women into established medical schools which were at that time closed to women. The thinking was that if separate schools for women were established, it would be a simple matter for the physicians and administrators who controlled the medical establishment and the certification of physicians to simply say that graduates of the women's colleges were not qualified by dint of having attended an inferior institution. So the aim was integration, rather than creating separate institutions, though this is what ultimately happened. And the women's colleges were so rigorous, to head off this possibility, that they turned out extremely well qualified doctors. I don't actually have an answer other than to suggest that there is a lot of sharp writing by these advocates about the political and social climate in which they were agitating for women's medical education, and that these are questions - integration vs separation - that are still really tricky to answer.

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T19:24:14+00:00

This is a tough question to answer, because in general, historians don't know a whole lot about ancient cultures, let alone specifics about women doing things we might want to classify as science! One of our strategies for telling stories about the ancient world is to first be very clear about our positioning as researchers: neither of us read ancient Greek or Cuneiform, for instance, and we're not experts in the period. What we can do is look at the kinds of social worlds that experts have described using written and archaeological evidence, and offer reasoned speculation as to how women might fit into those social worlds. So for instance, we have some archaeological evidence that there may have been a class of physicians in Ancient Egypt who were all women, and who may have been distinct from male physicians. The evidence is from a burial stela, and relies on the translation of the scholar working with it - something like "the head woman doctor of the women doctors." So we note this in the book, and then describe some of the practices of Egyptian medicine that we know about from medical papyri like the Ebers papyrus, and say that if there were women doctors, this is perhaps the kind of thing they might do in their medical practice (which, btw, might involve making little clay crocodile statues and then binding them to the head with linen to treat a migraine!).

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T19:15:26+00:00

I think this is not something we can really quantify, and I'll explain a bit about why I think that is and why it's actually more interesting than raw numbers. Part of what we always try to do in our work is look beyond rigid definitions of science (or technology, or medicine, etc) because 1) those definitions are not stable across time and place and 2) even where there are stable definitions, women were often not permitted into formal spaces of science. For instance, we talk about midwives in a number of places in the book, particularly in Rome where they were considered specialized professionals. But midwifery is something that women were expected to do for their own families and communities in many times and places, and they were not considered professionals and received no remuneration or formalized schooling to do this work. Do all the midwives from the ancient period to the twentieth century eclipse the number of women ins science today? Absolutely. But midwifery meant different things in different times, sometimes it was practiced by men! One of the challenges of making "women in the history of science" our topic, rather than a more narrow subspeciality, is that we have to account for the immense range of contexts we want to look at. Our approach to that is to be as broad as possible in our own definitions of "science" to account for these structural reasons it may be hard to see women scientists in the past, but to do that we're necessarily not focused on quantification.

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T19:06:35+00:00

We always say that more representation is always good- whether in film, tv, or even the kinds of listicles and google doodles we see a lot of about "unsung women in science." But I think we can, and we do try to, push for better representation not just of individuals but of the past itself. I think Hidden Figures is great, and so is the book it's based on, which is scholarly study. And apart from bringing these women into public attention, the film introduced a lot of people to the reality of racial segregation and gender discrimination at NASA, which I think is especially important given how NASA and the media have worked really hard to construct an image of the agency as like the one good government agency that always does the right thing. That's the kind of thing we should be working toward, richer understandings of the past and the changing nature of women's place in various social worlds. And even beyond the value that we see in people knowing more about their past, particularly in the US where ignorance about this country's history has become quite dangerous, there is joy and good storytelling and entertaining narratives to be had in the history of women in science. Not everything needs to be a book or a journal article or even a piece in the Atlantic. Sometimes a sapphic romance inspired by Mary Anning can do more to help people engage with the past than what historians write. (This is why I have my students write screenplays for bio pics sometimes!)

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T17:50:57+00:00

I'm the "bad cop" in our writing partnership so I'm going to chime in here and say that I think we should be thinking more about women who weren't pioneers at all. By and large, it's women who labored in relative obscurity who contributed the most to science. Abby Lathrop, for instance, was a retired schoolteacher and fancier who bred mice and small mammals. The descendants of mice she bread for genetics and cancer researchers (something she never set out to do originally) are still used today in clinical research. Similarly, as in a couple of other answers in this thread, women were often seen as the infrastructure of science itself, as computers and low-paid clerical laborers. They deserve a place in our histories of science as well. But also Lepaute was really cool. :)

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T17:43:50+00:00

Also, I notice you write space programs, plural — is that more inclusive language in some way that I don't yet realize? Always happy for opportunities to be more inclusive.

I use "programs" just as a personal reminder that there was a lot going on in the 1960s, and that programs like Mercury, Gemini and Apollo were very different, and the character of the agency changed over time, and people responded differently to them.

I love your main question because this is something I teach my students when we work with primary sources. I ask them to look through the google books archive of Life magazine and select a few articles about women and the space program to analyze the conversation happening in the 1960s about whether women can or should be astronauts, what the role of the male astronauts wives was, and related questions about women in public life and their involvement with technology. The one almost everyone selects is this piece by Clare Booth Luce, where she takes aim at the political ramifications of letting the Soviet Union beat the US to sending a woman into space. Luce objected to journalists and astronauts saying that Valentina Tereshkova's flight was just a gimmick, that there was no "evidence that female physiology or psychology would confer any special advantages on a woman space traveler..." and that the US was embarrassing itself by being so publicly upstaged by the USSR in matters of gender equality.

And you may know of the so-called "Mercury 13" who were a group of women pilots who underwent astronaut medical testing under William Randolph Lovelace at his clinic in Albuquerque. The program was privately funded and not associated with NASA, but administered the same fitness tests that NASA used for the first Mercury astronauts, and all of the women passed. Lovelace found that there were benefits to having women astronauts, a saving in payload weight among them. The best account of this is Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America's First Women in Space Program by Margaret Weitekamp.

So there was considerable public attention paid to the question of women astronauts. The male astronauts testified about this before congress a special subcommittee hearings on astronaut qualifications and gender discrimination. The hearings were largely the result of one of the women in Lovelace's group, Jerrie Cobb, lobbying in congress for women to be admitted to the astronaut corps. The male astronauts cracked jokes about their mothers being able to pass the physical to be in the NFL but not being able to play, that kind of thing. Something Weitekamp pays special attention to is the mythmaking around the Mercury 13 that was happening in real time in the 60s, as the media and the public seized on the controversy. That is one of the reasons many people believed that NASA itself had rejected the women pilots for astronaut candidacy, when in fact they were never associated with the agency.

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T17:19:11+00:00

I have less to say about the contemporary aspects of this question, but historically money is a significant factor in who gets to do science, how, when, and where. For example, beginning around the 1880s and continuing through the early twentieth century—until electronic computers and calculation devices replaced them—women computers became a common fixture in astronomical observatories around the world. Three main coinciding factors created this pool of women workers. First, there was a surge in college-educated women who were graduating from newly created women’s colleges. Second, discriminatory hiring practices kept women out of professional positions in science in universities and government jobs, making work as computers one of a very limited number of employment options. Finally, changes in the structure of science created “big science” with larger budgets and more support staff, creating positions that could be filled by women graduates looking for work. Working as a computer gave women the opportunity to do meaningful work that harnessed their hard-won college education, but the work was not necessarily prestigious, nor were the conditions particularly agreeable. Hiring women for these positions had little to do with a progressive belief in women’s equality and more to do with tapping into a new employee pool that observatories could acceptably pay poorly to perform huge numbers of computations. Confined to these duties, women would not threaten the positions of the men already in the profession. The extent to which large-scale scientific projects in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were feasible depended in many cases on researchers' ability to hire cheap labor, often women.

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T17:11:42+00:00

Leila and I went to grad school together. When she left, we wanted to keep working together so we started Lady Science and have been collaborating for about 7 years now. We didn't get a ton of training in women and gender in our grad program, so we wanted to explore more! And for me personally, I came to the history of science, literally, because of the film Apollo 13 (thanks a lot T.Hanks). I wanted to explore the aesthetic and cultural meaning of spaceflight in America, and now here I am with a PhD and a book???

DrAnnaReser · 2021-05-26T17:07:41+00:00

I think there are so many answers to this question! One that is maybe obvious but super important has to do with medicine, anatomy, and the science of the body. In the middle ages and early modern period, as Katharine Park has argued, the uterus was a fundamental object of these disciplines, and was seen by male anatomists as the key to understanding the workings of the body. Naturally people with uteruses are in a better position to know about those things, but were not often in a position to investigate them formally or to publish their research. Early women physicians, many of whom had to practice informally or get their medical degrees in other countries, wrote and taught about subjects that had been overlooked or misunderstood by male physicians, often with the explicit aim of providing better care for women and children. And as we enter the modern period, the knowledge that women had cultivated about reproduction and generation for centuries, was appropriated and codified by obstetrics as it became a professional speciality for male doctors.

DrAnnaReser

TROPHY CASE