Lady Science Volume I: 2014-2015

Foreword

When I was in grad school, we had a woman on our faculty.

Note the singular. A woman, out of roughly 15 or more full-time professors. The thing is, within statistical uncertainty this was about the average for astronomy departments at the time; until very recently, the typical university astronomy department faculty ratio was about nine men for every one woman.

The reasons for this are legion; historically, fewer women stay in astronomy, for example. But that just leads to the next question: Why do women leave the field? The reasons for that are legion as well. One study showed a lack of role models led to retaining fewer women over time. Other factors include bias in hiring women, bias in salaries, and the traditional gender roles played out in family life (women who are parents tend to leave science careers at a far higher rate than men).

When you read the essays in Lady Science, the historical roots of these problems become clear. Environmental sexism, stemming from entrenched male scientific authority, was pretty terrible a century ago, and still a huge problem today. I’ll let the men and women who have done the research and written those essays speak for themselves. There are ample examples.

But a point I see brought up in some of the essays is worth noting, and that’s the idea of celebrating firsts. It seems like a good thing, a way of acknowledging women who broke through barriers. Marie Curie, first woman Nobel prize winner; Valentina Tereshkova, first woman astronaut; Sally Ride, first American woman astronaut, and so on.

While it’s important to acknowledge these women and their accomplishments, there’s a series of subtle problems with doing that as well: It spends a lot of energy and effort on only a select few women, it pushes aside the accomplishments of other women in that field who may not have received the spotlight, it implies that there were few or no women before the one woman who made it, and it still categorizes women into a subset of history that could be labeled other.

I’m guilty of highlighting firsts myself, and reading the essays in Lady Science really made me think about the pitfalls of doing that; it seems obvious in retrospect but completely invisible to me at the time.

That’s an especially pernicious aspect of sexism: You sometimes need an outside viewpoint to discover it, and even then it’s not a lock. You have to absorb the ideas, internalize them. That’s why I write about women’s issues in science. When I was younger, I really was totally insulated and blind to the problems women face in life, let alone in pursuing scientific fields. Over the years, many of the wonderful women and men I’ve known have helped me better understand these issues. I’m still walking down that road, but I’m glad I know I’m on that road.

But even after all this time I sometimes stumble, or at least walk right into a pothole I didn’t know was there. The Women’s Firsts is only the most recent one. I think it’s still good to point out woman who break barriers, but we have to be careful not to do so at the risk of minimizing anyone else.

Many of the women in the Lady Science articles are people I had never heard of, and this is a good opportunity to get to know them. If we focus only on the firsts, we lose many of their stories. As time goes on, we then lose the details on the inner workings of how women as a group, as members of a team, participated in and critically supported the greatest scientific achievements of our species.

Incidentally, I just checked: as I write this, my old astronomy department now has 30 faculty, and four women. That’s better than before, and a trend in the right direction. It’s a long ways from parity, but as you’ll read in these articles, and as history has taught us, change rarely happens overnight. We have a long way to go, but increasing awareness may be the most powerful tool we have to help clear the path.

Phil Plait

Fall 2015

Acknowledgements

A number of people who have been essential to Lady Science in its first year. Most importantly, we would like to thank our contributors, who have shared their expertise and their talents with us and with our readers: Emily Margolis, Nathan Kapoor, James Burnes and Joy Rankin have all made Lady Science richer.

We are very grateful to Dr. Phil Plait for his support of this project and the generous gift of his time in writing a foreword for this volume.

We would also like to thank our mentors Dr. Katherine Pandora and Dr. Pamela Gossin for their support, advice, and endless encouragement.

We dedicate this volume to all the astronettes, computers, helpers, typing girls, lady doctors, and housewives.

Contents

Foreword

Dedication

Introduction

Science

Manhattan’s Missing Women, Leila A. McNeill

There’s Something About Mary: The Origins of Paleontology, James Burnes

Surviving the Trenches: Sexual Assault in the Earth Science, Leila A. McNeill

Ladies First: History and the Phenom, Anna Reser

Subversive Science, Leila A. McNeill

Wonder Women of STEM, Leila A. McNeill

X-ing Site Y: Manhattan’s Portrayal of Women at Los Alamos, Nathan Kapoor

Sex Role Reversals and Gender Benders, Leila A. McNeill

Difference Futurism in the Year 2312, Anna Reser

Technology

The Astronaut and the Astronautrix, Anna Reser

To Equality and Beyond!: NASA and Gender in the Civil Rights Era, Emily Margolis

Married to NASA, Leila A. McNeill

The Approximate Perfection of Domestic Engineering, Anna Reser

Queens of Code, Joy Rankin

Science with a Capital S: The Separation of Science and Labor, Leila A. McNeill

Making Role Models on Reddit, Anna Reser

Pink Collars and Programmers in Halt and Catch Fire, Anna Reser

Class and Misogyny in The Bletchley Circle, Joy Rankin

Medicine

Searching for Racial and Sexual Justice in Reproductive Rights, Leila A. McNeill

Medicalization and the Pill, Anna Reser

Mad Medicine: Social Power and Medical Knowledge in Breathless, Anna Reser

Fodder for Progress: Cesarean Patients in The Knick, Leila A. McNeill

Medical Violence in The Knick, Leila A. McNeill

High, Hot and a Hell of a Lot!: Women’s Medical Traditions in Call the Midwife, Anna Reser

Conclusions

Bibliography

Introduction

Lady Science is a multifaceted collaborative writing project focused on women in science, technology, and medicine. Our purpose is to highlight women’s lives and contributions to scientific fields, to critique representations of women in history and popular culture, and to provide an accessible, inclusive, and collaborative platform for writing about women on the web. Unlike other specialized and academic publications, we do not recognize any disciplinary, generic, or stylistic constraints that sometimes curtail the ways in which women’s stories can be written.

The essays in this book were originally published in 2014 and 2015 through a monthly email subscription. In the first year of the project, we published 24 essays on a wide range of topics related to the experiences of women in science, technology and medicine, using a variety of methodologies and approaches. Some of the essays lean toward history of science, while others engage with popular culture or critical theory. This first anthology contains the contributions of four guest authors in addition to essays by the editors.

Lady Science has an agenda. We are neither impartial to nor disinterested in the subjects about which we write. We have stakes in gender equity that we want to make visible through our study of history, and we know that others do as well. Lady Science takes for granted certain ideas and frameworks about women and gender that are still being argued in the pages of scholarly journals. This gives our writing its activist flavor, and most importantly, it allows us to make concrete arguments about the way that science and the popular culture of science, as the essential underpinning of modern society, has accomplished this marginalization. We see the recovery of women’s stories in science as an essential part of the feminist project.

In addition to the conceptual freedoms of this platform, Lady Science puts us in conversation, hopefully, not only with experts, but with anyone who is interested in women in science. Here too, we have a specific agenda. We want to imagine these women in their historical and cultural context, in all their complexities and contradictions. The women in the history of science were sometimes victims of their culture, but more often than not, they were its active creators.

In the early days of the history of science as a legitimate field of inquiry, historians started investigating in the places most familiar to a contemporary mind, the established scientific institutions and the great men of science. Institutions like the Royal Society have a history that can be traced through its record keeping, publications, and correspondence. Great men of science published prolifically throughout their lifetimes and kept notebooks of their work. Studying these institutions and men was and continues to be important work that contributes to our understanding of how science, medicine, and technology have shaped the world in which we live. However, by concentrating solely on these traditional topics, we have for far too long neglected the people and the culture outside those institutions that engaged in scientific inquiry. The image of institutional science, like the great men, is disproportionately white, straight, and male, and the history of them has been as well. Though recent work in the history of science has looked outside the institutions and beyond the great men in order to better understand the larger cultural scope of science, we believe that there is much work to be done.

Professional science has historically determined the physical, social, and rhetorical spaces in which science can occur. In protecting its authority, men of science often used scientific rhetoric to to make claims about the inferior nature of marginalized groups such as women and people of color. By inscribing such biased claims with scientific legitimacy, men of science were successful in keeping women and people of color from their ranks, while also establishing an oppressive social hierarchy that was supposedly grounded in the natural world. By tracing these oppressive social structures back to the history of science, we hope to uncover the root causes of contemporary oppression, challenge its supremacy, and create something new.

Of particular interest to Lady Science are instances when women and marginalized people have invented entirely new structures of scientific inquiry outside the white male mainstream. Women wrote popular treatises on science for general audiences, integrated scientific management and new technology into their homes, made end runs around the government to try to fly in space, and pioneered in computing while their male colleagues could only see them as secretaries. Science fiction and popular television have created new worlds for women and help us to see the ways that our world actively excludes them from the preserves of science. Women’s bodies have been exploited and experimented on by a male medical establishment while midwifery and other traditional forms of medicine were labeled folk remedies and pseudoscience. The essays in Lady Science extend our gaze beyond the popularly accepted borders of science, technology, and medicine, and it is often at the margins that we