I have long been aware of women in positions of importance in academia and other forms of learning. Caroline Herschel, sister of Wlliam Herschel, discoverer of Uranus. Caroline was an astronomer of some importance in her own right. Henrietta Leavitt, the early 20th century astronomer who first worked out the absolute luminosity/period of variation rule of Cepheid variable stars. When seeking a history of the Statute of Laborers (1351) by which the wealthy lords of England sought protection from the peasants who survivesd the Black Death demanding higher wages, I ran into a book by Bertha Haven Putnam: The Enforcement of the Statute of Laborers (1908). Dr. Putnam taught at Mount Hokyoke College.
My latest sterling discovery: I am reading Msrtin Dugard's Into Africa: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingston (2003( (a Father's Day gift from my aon). The prominent man who paid for some of the early efforts to find Livingston was a Mr. Murchison who after squandering his inheritance, took his wife's advice and became a gentleman scientist. "She had studied science, especially geology and it was chiefly owing to her example that her husband turned his mind to those pursuits in which he afterward obtained such distinction," and then mentioned Mrs. Murchison's friend, "physicist Mary Somerville." (p. 27) Thst name was unfamiliar to me but she was apparently quite important in her time:
"Her book Physical Geography was published in 1848 and was the first English textbook on the subject. It remained in use until the early 20th century.["
It is very easy to accept this "women have always been repressed by men," and there were certainly obstacles on thr way, but there are examples if you do a bit of reading that women sometimes were treated as important players in science and other academic pursuits. The past is a bit more complex than the black and white portrayal that some feminists insist on using as a bludgeon.
Mdme. Currie?
ReplyDeleteMany such examples in medicine, as well. My favorite is Rosalind Franklin, a British chemist who deserved to share the Nobel for the discovery of the helical structure of DNA...she's the one who actually led the X-ray crystallography efforts that showed it, and Maurice Wilkins, who showed Crick the photo without permission was awarded the share. The photo was actually taken by Franklin's student, Raymond Gosling.
So, steal a photo, win a Nobel?
But she unfortunately died from abdominal cancer (possibly affected by exposure to x-rays?) prior to the award, and was not mentioned.
Curie only won two Nobel Prizes. Not much of a scientist. :-)
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