Title Page ‘All your dreadful scientific things’: women, science and education in the years around 1900 Claire G. Jones Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Liverpool, UK Email:
[email protected] Abstract In the years around 1900 more women were benefitting from a university education and using it as pathway to acquiring research expertise and contributing to the development of scientific knowledge. Although numbers are small compared to men, it is clear that the idea of a female researcher was no longer an oddity. As illustrated by biographies and an analysis of 3 fictional texts featuring a female scientist, the increasing visibility of women did little to challenge the masculine colouring of science. A dissonance can be identified between femininity and science, even in settings sympathetic to a woman’s scientific activities. Particular unease is discernible when women are placed within the material culture of the laboratory and make use of the instruments of experimentation. The problem of a woman embodying scientific authority, especially at the time when science was professionalizing and institutionalizing, adds an additional layer of complexity to discussions about women, science and education in the late Victorian and Edwardian period. Keywords: Women; higher education; nineteenth century; 1900s; representation; laboratory 1 ‘All your dreadful scientific things’: women, science and education in the years around 1900 When H.G. Wells’ eponymous heroine, Ann Veronica, embarks on a course of comparative anatomy in a novel published in 1909, she finds that the study of science has a special and singular connotation. In particular, the advanced laboratory - with its material culture organised for the sole purpose of uncovering truth - provides a beacon of rationality and clarity which is in stark contrast to the confusion of life beyond the experimental space.