Forces of Nature The Women who Changed Science

by Reser, Anna; McNeill, Leila

• ISBN13: 9780711248977
• ISBN10: 0711248974
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2021-05-25
• Publisher: Frances Lincoln

Summary

From the ancient world to the present women have been critical to the progress of science, yet their importance is overlooked, their stories lost, distorted, or actively suppressed. Forces of Nature sets the record straight and charts the fascinating history of women’s discoveries in science.
 
In the ancient and medieval world, women served as royal physicians and nurses, taught mathematics, studied the stars, and practiced midwifery. As natural philosophers, physicists, anatomists, and botanists, they were central to the great intellectual flourishing of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. More recently women have been crucially involved in the Manhattan Project, pioneering space missions and much more. Despite their record of illustrious achievements, even today very few women win Nobel Prizes in science.
 
In this thoroughly researched, authoritative work, you will discover how women have navigated a male-dominated scientific culture – showing themselves to be pioneers and trailblazers, often without any recognition at all. Included in the book are the stories of:

• Hypatia of Alexandria, one of the earliest recorded female mathematicians
• Maria Cunitz who corrected errors in Kepler’s work
• Emmy Noether who discovered fundamental laws of physics
• Vera Rubin one of the most influential astronomers of the twentieth century
• Jocelyn Bell Burnell who helped discover pulsars

Author Biography

Anna Reser is an American historian of science and technology. She holds a PhD in the history of science, technology, and medicine from the University of Oklahoma. She is the co-founder co-editor in chief  of Lady Science magazine, and her writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Real Life, StarTrek.com, Technology’s Stories and more.
 

Leila McNeill is an American writer, editor, and historian of science. She is an Affiliate Fellow in the History of Science at the University of Oklahoma and the co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science magazine. She has been a columnist for Smithsonian.com and BBC Future, and she has been published by The Atlantic, The Baffler, JSTOR Daily, amongst others.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Section 1: Ancient Period to Middle Ages 

Chapter 1: Records and Gaps, Astronomers and Myths
Addresses the difficulty of writing histories of women in male-dominated fields and the way historians read both records and the gaps in records to recover these stories. Uses the biographies of two ancient women astronomers, and shows how these stories have been obscured by the way women are mythologized in even the earliest astronomical discourse. 

Chapter 2: Physicians and Midwives
Details some of the ways that women participated in medicine in the ancient period, especially as midwives, and how they acquired and codified specialized knowledge about women’s bodies.
        
Individual Biography: Trota of Salerno

Chapter 3: Witches and Mystics
Explores how the ancient witches of Thessaly and women mystics of the Middle Ages harnessed the supernatural to gain authority in scientific matters. 

Section 2: The Renaissance & Enlightenment 

Chapter 4: Women Mathematicians and Astronomers
Noting the persistent myth that women are unsuited to mathematics, this essay addresses several early modern mathematicians who worked on synthesizing, simplifying, and correcting the work of men, important unrecognized work that helped secure fame and acceptance for the ideas of people like Kepler and Newton.

Individual Biography: Maria Cunitz 

Chapter 5: Wives, sisters, helpers
This essay addresses how and why women in science have been left out of historical record in their roles as assistants or helpers while their more famous male relatives have received recognition. 

Chapter 6: Early Modern Anatomy and the Female Body
Addresses the early-modern understanding of the female body as it was enabled through practices of dissection and the science of anatomy, including the work of women anatomists and physicians.

Chapter 7: Colonialism and Scientific Travel
In the nineteenth century, scientist explorers traveled to all corners of the world collecting specimens and observing unfamiliar people, a pursuit that was overwhelmingly male. This essay shows how the theme of scientific exploration has always been coded male, but also how some women were able to break through barriers to explore unknown frontiers.

Section 3: The Long 19th Century 

Chapter 8: 19th century Popularizers and Natural Theology
In traditional 19th century gender roles, women were seen as natural religious teachers and nurturers. This essay shows how these seemingly regressive beliefs about women’s roles made them particularly suited to adapt materialistic scientific theories. 

Individual Biography: Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy 

Chapter 9: Collecting and crazes as feminine pursuits
This essay explores nineteenth century natural history culture, known for its fossil collecting and botany crazes. As predominantly female pursuits, women were able to make names for themselves in scientific fields. This essay explores the ways that botany came to be regarded as an appropriate scientific practice for women, and how this association subsequently feminized the field within the larger scientific establishment. Male scientists and writers initiated a public campaign to reclaim botany for male practitioners.

Chapter 10: Nursing
This essay details how in the nineteenth-century nursing became an established professional field with formal training and nursing societies. It was considered a field of medicine particularly suited to women and allowed them an entry point into medical science.

Chapter 11:  Lady Doctors
In the nineteenth century, there was an international movement advocating for women to be allowed to obtain medical degrees in order to treat and care for other women. This essay explains how this movement was an essential cultural moment in which women were for the first time able to enter medical science in large numbers. 

Chapter 12: Women’s Medical Education and Missionary Medicine
During the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, women from around the world entered the United States to study medicine. This essay explains how, despite superficial impressions of racial and gender equality, these medical programs outreach to international women was an attempt at Protestant religious imperialism. 

Individual Biography Anandi Joshee 

Section 4: The 20th Century
    
Chapter 13: Women Computers at Harvard/genetics
Tells the history of the Harvard Observatory and the many women astronomers, known then as human computers, who catalogued the night sky. Links the cataloguing and classifying of natural history to the computers of the 20th century but also the ones who worked with Margaret Dayhoff, Lois Hunt to compile genetic databases.

Chapter 14: Domestic Science and Engineering
This essay explores the ways that science was introduced into the household, and how women created scientific practices for themselves within a domestic context.

Chapter 15: Bad Women
Just as some men have used science to justify or enable practices that we now condemn, such as forced medical experimentation and eugenics, women have also been involved in the darker side of science throughout history.

Chapter 16: Archeology & Anthropology
Until the 20th century, the connected fields of archaeology and anthropology were dominated by white male practitioners, which influenced the way the fields constructed cultural beliefs about women and indigenous people. When women started to enter the field, they changed this perception. 

Chapter 17: The Manhattan Project and the Nuclear World
Women were deeply involved with the creation of the atomic bomb, and studying its effects. 

Section 5: The 20th Century - Post WWII 

Chapter 18: Refugee scientists
A number of Jewish women refugee scientists immigrated to the United States to flee the Holocaust, but unlike their male colleagues, they faced unique challenges in securing visas and employment.

Chapter 19: Environmentalism and Ecofeminism
Women scientists and feminists helped to shape the early environmental movement at the beginning of the twentieth century, and were instrumental in its flourishing in the post war period. 

Chapter 20: Science during Jim Crow/Civil Rights
Addresses the specific barriers that Black women pursuing scientific careers faced during the Jim Crow era and Civil Rights period in the United States.

Individual biography: Mamie Phipps

Chapter 21: Women in the space program: Women Astronauts
Details the struggle women faced in being included in the American space program and the extremely macho culture of early human spaceflight. This also highlights the integral roles that women played in the space program as clerical workers, programmers, and food scientists.

Chapter 22: Psychology and Social Sciences
Explores how women challenged dominant narratives in psychology and the social sciences that marginalized women and people of color and how they opened up new avenues of inquiry in gender and race.

Chapter 23: Female Firsts
Explores the way that women’s history was originally written and on women whose groundbreaking science was passed over by the establishment, whose male colleagues received recognition and prizes while they remain in relative obscurity.