Women in Science: Historical Perspectives 11 WOMEN IN SCIENCE: HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES 1 Londa Schiebinger Before I turn to the substance of my remarks let me test your knowledge of women in science by lo oking at what every American should know ab out milestones in the history of women in science. Let us b egin with the world's ma jor scienti c academies of science. These were founded in the seventeenth century|the Royal So ciety of Lon- don (the oldest continuous so ciety of science) in 1660, the Parisian Academie Royale der Sciences (p erhaps the most prestigious academy of science) in 1666, the Akademie des Wissenschaften in Berlin in 1700. These academies are to day over 300 years old. Here's the question. When was the rst woman admitted to the prestigious Academie des Sciences in Paris? Not until 1979, just 13 years ago, when physicist and mathemati- cian Yvonne Cho quet-Bruhat was admitted, and she was the daughter of a prominent mathematician and the wife of an academy memb er. A second question. When was the rst b o ok written on the problem of women in science? Extra credit if you know what it was. Already in 1405, Christine de Pizan asked in her Book of the City of Ladies if women had made original contributions in the arts and sciences. She answered the question p ositively by emphasizing women's contribution to the invention of writing and calculation, and also to practical arts such as the making of bread, the invention of knitting, and making of ne tap estries. Women scientists have b ecome the ob jects of a new eld of study in the academy. In the last fteen years a whole new eld of inquiry known di erently as \women and science," \gender in science," or any combination of those, has sprung up in the US. Many b o oks have b een published on the sub ject; you can take University courses in it. These new studies ask a numb er of questions|each lo oking in a di erent way at the inequalitie s women su er in the professional world of science. First|a historical question|is women's participation in science ancient, or has it b ecome imp ortant only in the twentieth century? In other words, have women b een scientists for a long time and we just don't know ab out them, or is women's participation a phenomenon of the twentieth century? A second question: where is women's participation the greatest| in Britain, India, the U.S., China, or France? More imp ortant than the empirical questions are the analytical ones. How could greater participation of women in science b e achieved? What conditions foster greater participation of women in the sciences? And a nal question, one which is the sub ject of hot debate and one which alarms a numb er of p eople b ecause our culture has invested so heavily in it not b eing true: Would science b e any di erent if women played a greater role|are men's and women's style of scholarship di erent, or are their research interests, priorities, and ways of lo oking at problems completely interchangeable as we have b een led to b elieve? In other words, would women tackle di erent problems and go at it a bit di erently if their presence in science were the norm and not the exception? I want at least to touch on each of these questions, but let's b egin with a historical excursion. The rst p oint to appreciate is that women's participation is not new, or the achievement of the mo dern world, but is, in fact, ancient. One of the earliest women Women in Astronomy C. M. Urry, L. Danly, L. E. Sherbert, S. Gonzaga 12 Londa Schiebinger in science in the West was the mathematician and astronomer Hypatia. Hypatia lived in Alexandria (part of mo dern Egypt) in the 4th century. She followed her father as a professor of mathematics and philosophy at the university. According to So crates, students o cked to hear her lectures. Hypatia authored a numb er of mathematical texts, though most were lost to history when the great Alexandrian library was sacked and burned. All was well|Hypatia was well resp ected at the university and among civic leaders|but she had not long to live. Hypatia was murdered, not b ecause she was a woman but b ecause she had b ecome enmeshed in the p olitical struggle b etween neo-platonists and Christians dividing Alexandria at the time. Christian leaders in the city considered Hypatia's philosophy heretical and, Hypatia|an outsp oken teacher and exp onent of ancient philosophy|l ost her life in the repression of the neo-platonists in 412. As the rep ort tells us: During the holy season of Lent, Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripp ed naked, dragged to the church and killed by the mob. During the middle ages, the church dominated learning in the West, and contri- butions by women came mostly from learned nuns. I'll mention only Hildegard von 2 Bingen, the noted cosmologist of the twelfth century. With the emergence of mo dern science in the 17th century, the institutional base of science shifted. The domination of learning by monasteries and universities gave way to scienti c academies|the Royal So ciety of London, the Academie des Sciences in Paris, and the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin. As noted earlier, women were not to b ecome memb ers of these so cieties for over 300 years. Why were women denied memb ership in the scienti c academies of Europ e for so long? Were there no quali ed women scientists when these academies rst op ened their do ors? Evidence from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries do es in fact reveal a small, but signi cant numb er of women active in science waiting to take their place in the new institutions of science. The German astronomer Maria Winkelmann is a case in p oint. Again Winkelmann was not an exception: as extraordinary as it seems to us to day, of German astronomers working in the early eighteenth-century, 14 p ercent were women. In 1710, Maria Winkel- mann p etitioned the Berlin Academy for an app ointment as assistant astronomer and calendar-maker. Already a seasoned astronomer when her husband and Academy as- tronomer (Gottfried Kirch) died in 1710, Winkelmann asked the Academy to app oint her calendar-maker in her husband's stead. She had, in fact, publishe d astronomical observations under her husband's name while he was ill and dying. Despite the fact that the great Leibniz, then President of the Academy, was among her backers, her re- quest was denied. In denying her request, Academy ocials set an imp ortant negative precedent for women's participation in scienti c institutions. The rst working woman scientist to b ecome a memb er of this academy was physicist Lise Meitner (who along with Otto Hahn discovered nuclear ssion) in the 1940s{and then she was admitted 3 only as a corresp onding memb er. Last example from the eighteenth century|Bassi. Laura Bassi b ecame the rst woman in mo dern times to teach at a university; again her eld is one which by mo dern standards is dicult for women to enter|physics. After a public disputation in Latin (the usual practice at the time) she was awarded her do ctorate and app ointed by the Pop e to teach at the University of Bologna. Bassi is also rep orted to have had twelve children, a burden which seems not to have interfered with her scienti c pro ductivity| each year she published the results of a new study on electricity, the e ects of air pressure, and the like. Women in Astronomy C. M. Urry, L. Danly, L. E. Sherbert, S. Gonzaga Women in Science: Historical Perspectives 13 The example of Laura Bassi raises two further issues. First, how did she manage to have twelve children and also remain active in research and teaching. In part, no one knows; hers is a story that remains to b e told. In part, di erent ways of dealing with child rearing made it p ossible. It is imp ortant to rememb er that child care was p erhaps less a burden for upp er-class women of the eighteenth century than it is for upp er-class women to day. In the eighteenth century, the child was handed over so on after birth to a governess or wet nurse and reared in the countryside. A mother might not see the child again until age seven|ab out the time b oys were sent away to b oarding scho ol. Though prerogatives of class allowed Bassi to b e b oth scientist and mother, the imp ortant p oint is that the burden of child care most commonly falls on the woman. One could study di erent solutions women have devised across the centuries for dealing with the uneasy t b etween repro duction and professional life. Yet the fact remains that science, like professional life in general, has b een organized around the assumption that so ciety need not repro duce itself, or that scientists are not among those involved in repro duction. This assumption has structured institutions of science. If women had b een fully integrated into science from the b eginnin g, we might not now b e faced with the kinds of con icts women nd themselves in concerning child-b eari ng/rearin g and professional life.