Introduction

Notes Introduction 1 Marie Corelli, or Mary Mackay (1855–1924) was a successful romantic novelist. The quotation is from her pamphlet, Woman or – Suffragette? A Question of National Choice (London: C. Arthur Pearson, 1907). 2 Sally Ledger and Roger Luckhurst, eds, The Fin de Siècle: A Reader in Cultural History c.1880–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. xii. 3 A central text is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air- pump: Hobbes, Boyle and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 4 Otto Mayr, ‘The science-technology relationship’, in Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science, ed. by Barry Barnes and David Edge (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982), pp. 155–163. 5 Nature, November 8 1900, News, p. 28. 6 For example Alison Winter, ‘A calculus of suffering: Ada Lovelace and the bodily constraints on women’s knowledge in early Victorian England’, in Science Incarnate: Historical Embodiments of Natural Knowledge, ed. by Christopher Lawrence and Steven Shapin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), pp. 202–239 and Margaret Wertheim, Pythagoras’ Trousers: God, Physics and the Gender Wars (London: Fourth Estate, 1997). 7 Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics (New York: Wiley, 1968), pp. 649–650. 8 For the social construction of mathematics see David Bloor, ‘Formal and informal thought’, in Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science, ed. by Barry Barnes and David Edge (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1982), pp. 117–124; Math Worlds: Philosophical and Social Studies of Mathematics and Mathematics Education, ed. by Sal Restivo, Jean Paul Bendegem and Roland Fisher (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993). 9 Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985) and Ruth Watts, Women in Science: A Social and Cultural History (London: Routledge, 2007). 10 Marsha L. Richmond, ‘“A lab of one’s own”: The Balfour biological laboratory for women at Cambridge University, 1884–1914’, in History of Women in the Sciences: Readings from ISIS, ed. by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 235–268; Paula Gould, ‘Women and the culture of University physics in late nineteenth-century Cambridge’, British Journal for the History of Science, 30 (2) (1997), 127–149; Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack and Pnina G. Abir-am, eds, Creative Couples in the Sciences (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996) and Pnina G. Abir-am and Dorinda Outram, eds, Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 208 Notes 209 11 Hertha always referred to herself as ‘Mrs. Hertha Ayrton’ instead of the more conventional ‘Mrs. William Ayrton’. 12 For example Mary R.S. Creese, Ladies in the Laboratory? American and British Women in Science, 1800–1900: A Survey of Their Contributions to Research (London: Scarecrow Press, 1998); Bettye Anne Case and Anne M. Leggett, eds, Complexities: Women in Mathematics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, Women in Science, Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century: A Biographical Dictionary with Annotated Bibliography (Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1991). 13 In particular Andrew Warwick, Masters of Theory: Cambridge and the Rise of Mathematical Physics (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003). Chapter 1 1 Grace Chisholm Young commented of fellow mathematics student, Isabel Maddison, that she had ‘… the glamour of ‘probably a wrangler’ about her’. A ‘wrangler’ was the holder of a first-class pass in the Cambridge mathematical tripos. Liverpool University, Special Collections and Archives (LUSA), Papers of W.H. and G.C. Young (Young Papers) D140/12/22 (Grace’s autobiographical notes). 2 Emily Davies, ‘Special systems of education for women’, in The Education Papers: Women’s Quest for Equality in Britain, 1850–1912, ed. by Dale Spender (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), pp. 99–110 (p. 105). 3 Laurence Chisholm Young, Mathematicians and Their Times (Amsterdam: North-Holland, 1981), pp. 267–268. 4 Since the mid-eighteenth century Cambridge mathematics graduates were divided by class of degree into wranglers (first class), senior optimes (second class), junior optimes (third class) and pollmen (pass). For details of high offices held by senior wranglers see D.O. Forfar, ‘What became of the Senior Wranglers?’, Mathematical Spectrum (29) (1) (1996). 5 For teaching see Sheldon Rothblatt, The Revolution of the Dons: Cambridge and Society in Victorian England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); for relationship with the natural sciences tripos see David B. Wilson, ‘Experimentalists among the mathematicians: Physics in the Cambridge Natural Sciences tripos, 1851–1900’, Historic Studies in the Physical Sciences, 12 (2) (1982), 325–371; for bodily/mental training see Andrew Warwick, ‘Exercising the student body: Mathematics and athleticism in Victorian Cambridge’, in Lawrence and Shapin, pp. 288–326. 6 Fiona Erskine, ‘The Origin of Species and the science of female inferiority’, in Darwin’s ‘The Origin of Species’: New Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. by David Amigoni and Jeff Wallace (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), pp. 95–121. 7 Sara A. Burstall, Retrospect and Prospect: Sixty Years of Women’s Education (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1933), p. 88. 8 Barbara Bodichon (1827–1891) was one of the founders of Girton College; she was involved in many feminist and educational projects including suffrage petitions, reform of the Married Women’s Property Act, the Langham Place Group and the English Woman’s Journal. 210 Notes 9 Numa Hartog, 1846–1871. Despite being senior wrangler, he was prevented from taking a fellowship by his inability to subscribe to the required religious test. He was a prominent figure in the movement for Jewish emancipation until his untimely death from smallpox. Joseph Jacobs and Goodman Lipkin, ‘Hartog, Numa Edward’, in Jewish Encyclopedia.com <http://www.jewish- encyclopedia.com>[accessed February 7 2005]. 10 By 1925, Karl Pearson at University College London had illustrated with extensive statistics the inferiority of Jewish children with regard to intel- ligence, cleanliness of hair and tendency to breath through mouths, see David Albery and Joseph Schwartz, Partial Progress: The Politics of Science and Technology (London: Pluto, 1982), p. 176. 11 Judith Halberstam, ‘Technologies of monstrosity: Bram Stoker’s Dracula’, in Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, ed. by Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 248–266. 12 John A. Garrard, The English and Immigration, 1880–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 16–25. 13 M.C. Bradbrook, ‘That Infidel Place’: A Short History of Girton College, 1869–1969 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1969), p. 62. 14 Sharp, Hertha Ayrton, p. 54. 15 Ibid., p. 46. 16 Ibid., p. 136. 17 Burstall, Retrospect and Prospect, p. 78. Burstall reports that at Girton a ‘legend’ was current that Hertha was used by George Eliot (Marian Evans) as the model for ‘Mirah’ in Daniel Deronda; Hertha was known to Evans as the latter contributed to the funds Barbara Bodichon raised to support Hertha in her studies. 18 Linda Hunt Beckman, ‘Leaving the tribal duck pond’: Amy Levy, Jewish self- hatred and Jewish identity’, Victorian Literature and Culture, 27 (1) (1999), 185–201 (p. 195). However, there are examples of male Jewish scientists who did not relinquish their religion yet achieved success in the same scientific environs as Hertha, for instance Raphael Meldola (1849–1915), Professor of Chemistry at Finsbury Technical College. Women, as Levy indicates, have special responsibility for family and domesticity within Judaism and this makes it more difficult for them to combine a Jewish identity with work beyond the family sphere. 19 Edith Ayrton Zangwill, The Call (London: Allen and Unwin, 1924). In this account Hertha/Ursula’s family celebrate Christmas. 20 Sharp, Hertha Ayrton, pp. 27–28. 21 Ibid., p. 25. 22 This painting seems to be depicting the legend of Veronica, the pious woman of Jerusalem, who gave Jesus her handkerchief as he carried the cross. 23 LUSA, Young Papers, D140/12 (Grace’s autobiographical notes). 24 Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1994), p. 39. 25 LUSA, Young Papers, D140/12/23 and 22 (Grace’s autobiographical notes). 26 LUSA, Papers of Mrs. R.C.H. Tanner (Tanner Papers), D599/6 (Grace’s autobi- ography). Grace records that she was unable to purchase tea or other items for personal use at Girton, ‘the principle of the College being that all stu- Notes 211 dents are on an equal footing and that richer students could not obtain privileges over poorer ones by paying for them’. 27 LUSA, Young Papers, D140/12/22-23 (Grace’s autobiographical notes). 28 Sharp, Hertha Ayrton, p. 64. 29 Isabel Maddison (1869–1950). After becoming a wrangler in the mathematics tripos of 1892, Maddison joined Charlotte Angas Scott at Bryn Mawr to undertake doctoral study (supervised by Scott) where she won a fellowship to study abroad and joined Grace at Göttingen. Maddison returned to Bryn Mawr, completed her doctorate in 1896, and took a post on the staff where she remained until retirement. 30 Unlike Cambridge, Oxford did not formally recognise the women’s halls and imposed no residency requirement on women taking their examinations. 31 This consisted of a watch spring fastened over the artery on the wrist with a marker (paint brush) attached to the other end of the spring which oscillated with the pulse. When a paper was pulled across the marker/paint brush at a uniform rate the pulse was recorded. 32 Burstall, Retrospect and Prospect, pp. 87–88. Emily Davies wrote in com- miseration ‘I have no doubt that in spite of this misfortune, you have a useful and honourable career before you …’.

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