The Madame Curie Complex

The Hidden History of Women in Science

Julie Des Jardins

• Publisher: The Feminist Press at CUNY
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781558616134
• eBook ISBN: 9781558616554
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

The historian and author of Lillian Gilbreth examines the "Great Man" myth of science with profiles of women scientists from Marie Curie to Jane Goodall.
 
Why is science still considered to be predominantly male profession?  In The Madame Curie Complex, Julie Des Jardin dismantles the myth of the lone male genius, reframing the history of science with revelations about women's substantial contributions to the field.
 
She explores the lives of some of the most famous female scientists, including Jane Goodall, the eminent primatologist; Rosalind Franklin, the chemist whose work anticipated the discovery of DNA's structure; Rosalyn Yalow, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist; and, of course, Marie Curie, the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer whose towering, mythical status has both empowered and stigmatized future generations of women considering a life in science.
 
With lively anecdotes and vivid detail,  The Madame Curie Complex reveals how women scientists have changed the course of science—and the role of the scientist—throughout the twentieth century. They often asked different questions, used different methods, and came up with different, groundbreaking explanations for phenomena in the natural world.

I	ASSISTANTS, HOUSEKEEPERS, AND INTERCHANGEABLE PARTS: WOMEN SCIENTISTS AND PROFESSIONALIZATION, 1880–1940

THE YEAR WAS 1921. THE PHYSICIST ROBERT MILLIKAN ANNOUNCED that the nation’s expanding technostructure required better “selection and development of men of outstanding ability in science.” His call for “men” was not accidental; he imagined the best candidates to be masculine, rugged types and likened them to “explorers” in search of “nature’s gold.” Thomas Alva Edison, holder of more than one thousand American patents and the most widely recognized scientist in the country, embodied this enterprising pioneer as he attempted to recruit young men in his mold to develop technologies in his research facility in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison wouldn’t settle for small-time thinkers; his team of “A-class men” would be drawn from applicants who passed a rigorous test he had devised. But his recruitment efforts proved disappointing: of the five hundred men who applied for positions, only 6 percent passed his exam. His own son failed to earn a place in his ranks of A-Class men.¹

Test takers grew defensive; they were not common street folk, but graduates of science programs in the most prestigious universities in the country. The problem lay not with them, they claimed, but rather with Edison’s arbitrary criteria for gauging scientific competence in the modern age. Some of the questions on his exam were what they were used to: “What pinch pressure at the driving wheels does a 23-ton locomotive require when drawing a load of 100 tons on level track?” Others, however, seemed highly irregular for testing scientific competence: “Who was Leonides?” “What is the name of a famous violin maker?” “What is felt?” One stumped job applicant wondered, “How many $10,000 per annum men … could have answered 50 percent of those tomfooleryisms.” Another dismissed the test as “vulgar,” an insult to his educated sensibility. “Who cares who wrote ‘Home Sweet Home,’” a college graduate lashed out. “We are in an age of specialization, and men are being trained to do things in certain lines of work that do not allow them to waste time and gray matter on general knowledge that can be had by referring to an encyclopedia.”²

Not all reactions to Edison’s questions were defensive; some thought that the test proved just how “amazingly ignorant” college men had become. “I think that any man who cannot give a prompt answer to 75 percent of the questions at least is lacking in education, and, if a college man, had wasted his time in college,” asserted an anonymous reader of the New York Times. Another reader thought the questions answerable “by any well-read and average intelligent man or woman,” regardless of college credentials. Some thought it refreshing that Edison looked for men who didn’t have “one-track minds,” who sought to expand their mental storerooms rather than let them atrophy. A doctor from New York believed that more test takers would have passed had they devoted time to book reading rather than ball games, moving pictures, the sporting news, and other preoccupations of American males. Readers who followed the story flexed their cerebral muscles by taking the exam themselves. Men congregated in subways, clubrooms, college dorms, and hotel lobbies, jotting down answers to questions they speculated had been on the exam. People were wholly invested in establishing whether or not the exam tested scientific competence, and those with and without college training were curious about how they would perform on it if it did.³

As erudite as Edison appeared through all this, people seemed to forget that he had become who he was without the assistance of professional degrees of any kind. He never went to college; as a boy he was homeschooled and thrown quickly into business ventures to fend for himself. He observed the world around him and learned through reading and hands-on experimentation. As an established inventor he still boasted a subscription list of sixty-two periodicals, most of them scientific but also economic and legal and others oddly eclectic. Science and technology fascinated him, but so did geography, literature, and music—realms of knowledge that academic specialists considered “generalized trivia” in the technological age.⁴

Edison’s hands-on experience of science reinforced his opinion that academic specialization, the hallmark of the modern university, had stifled human curiosity and compartmentalized men’s thoughts until they knew lots about minutiae and nothing about anything else. He doubted that a modern college man could come close to filing a patent portfolio as large and varied as his, for it was unlikely that he was as inquisitive about the natural world. He put college men on the defensive at a time when they had sought authoritative status as experts. His exam had burst open a pregnant debate about college versus practical industrial training, but it also brought to the surface questions about the intellectual equipment of educated American men. In determining that his applicants were ill equipped to handle modern-day problems, Edison had essentially emasculated them.

Women observed these debates from the periphery and had their own opinions. “It is the men to whom we are accustomed to look for intellectual guidance who say the test could only be met by an ‘encyclopedic mind,’” reflected Ellen Lynch of New York. She thought it “a matter of unsentimental fact” that there was “not a question in the list that could not be answered correctly by any well-trained boy or girl of 16.” Who are the real best and brightest, another woman posited: masters of some atomized niche or broad thinkers with the capacity to draw knowledge from many parts of the social and natural world? Female readers of the Times seemed to relish the opportunity to respond sanctimoniously to these questions. Edison’s test may have been of deeper significance to them than their husbands and fathers supposed, for it challenged the assumption that academic channels open almost only to men were requisites to a scientific mind. Perhaps women’s hands-on study of nature—unpaid, without title, without resources, and outside the university—was of value after all. For a long time women had been told otherwise.⁵

The notion that women and science didn’t mix had deep roots, traceable to Aristotelian and Platonic ideas about nature and knowing and Enlightenment views that supposed men and women’s inherent traits to be complementary and oppositional. The Greeks linked femaleness with passive, indeterminate matter (and maleness with active, determinate forms), and in later generations the observation of fertilization under microscopes (interpreted as a motile sperm penetrating a passive egg) seemed affirmation. Eventually Kant, Rousseau, and other liberal philosophers (male by definition in this tradition) insisted that women were anti-intellectual by anatomy and default. They were lovers and feelers; men, thinkers and doers. Early positivists such as Newton, Descartes, and Locke also conceptualized links between external disinterestedness and male knowing and internal subjectivity and female knowing. They grew confident that Nature was knowable through the senses or experiment; but only men, not women, were equipped to unlock its mysteries. Philosophers from Bacon to Goethe to Nietzsche all assumed that the prerogative of Rational Man was dominance over female nature; the mastery of nature and woman was essentially one and the same.⁶

As the ideas of the scientific revolution took hold, they fostered the rise of industrial capitalism, which in turn privatized family households. Poor and working-class women and men went to work in factories, though among the burgeoning industrial middle class the divisions of labor and spheres of influence were more clearly distinguishable between the sexes. Ideal men occupied the public realms of learning, politics, paid work, and eventually professional science, while ideal women occupied the supposedly subjective and sentimental domestic sphere. Women were said to excel in such activities as cooking, cleaning, nurturing, and soothing daily quarrels; good science, as mirrored in the male professional, however, required unemotional and empirical thinking in abstract and universal terms. Whether or not individual women—or men—possessed traits to support such binary views was irrelevant, for cultural stereotypes possessed logic of their own.⁷

In the eighteenth century, a knowledge of “natural history” had become part of the intellectual equipment of well-to-do women, and it continued to be a popular subject of the lyceum circuit through the nineteenth century. Botany in particular had long been cast as an avocation of women with leisure and means sufficient to cultivate herb gardens and collect specimens for men to analyze. Editors of such domestic periodicals as Godey’s and The Ladies Repository encouraged women to attend public lectures that would help them to nurture their children’s love of plants, assuming that women readers were sentimentally drawn to the care of living things. Mrs. C. M. Badger illustrated lithographs of flowers and shrubs, requiring painstaking classification of genus and species. In the taxonomy of professional men, however, her books were classified as nonscience; they were creative endeavors inspired by a female love of beauty rather than by a penchant for scientific truth.

Jane Marcet was among the women who wrote best-selling science books in the nineteenth century—astonishingly, in the field of chemistry, not botany. Her success can be ascribed to the appropriately pedagogical tone and style of her work, often organized as conversations between mother and child. Her timing, too, was critical to her success, since she published before she could become associated with the concepts of amateurism that stigmatized women later in the century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the woman scientist had become the ultimate oxymoron; one science editor likened a woman’s fondness for experiment to a perversion that needed to be concealed. Normal women were nurturing and noncompetitive, but modern science was imagined as the opposite. Women like Marcet were acceptable because they wrote watered-down science for children, busying themselves with the common work of popularization to free men to conduct prestigious research.⁸

Professional men accepted women curators and collectors, textbook writers, and illustrators, since such work dovetailed neatly into the work of women custodians, pedagogues, and helpmeets. Anna Botsford Comstock drew flora and fauna for the textbooks of her husband and eventually became one of the most recognizable science writers for children and lay people in the United States. American schoolteachers referred to her Handbook of Nature Study as the “Nature Bible,” and she became so influential a lecturer and writer that the League of Women Voters chose her as one of the twelve greatest women in the United States. But her greatness was rarely couched in terms of science. In the minds of men, the pedagogue, popularizer, editor, and engraver of natural history was literary and sentimental, at best an amateur.⁹

The associations between amateur science and womanhood rigidified as men enjoyed more government funding in public universities to which women had little access. The American Association for the Advancement of Science divided itself into specialized societies of men, each of which established specialized journals and agendas. And yet discussion about women’s scientific abilities in popular journals such as Scientific American and Popular Science Monthly indicated that there was no total consensus on the issue. After the Civil War, women’s colleges, among them Mount Holyoke, Wellesley, and Barnard, offered science courses in particular fields that aspired to the rigorous standards of male institutions. By the 1890s some of the nation’s most prestigious universities—Cornell, Chicago, Berkeley, and others—accepted women students, several of whom aspired to be scientists. Harvard medical professor Edward Clarke insisted that women engaged in such pursuits to the detriment of their reproductive health, but social scientists, many of them women, made a more compelling argument for the environmental underpinnings of gender difference than biological rationales.¹⁰

With degrees in hand, modest numbers of women began to enter scientific institutions that were originally bastions of men—albeit in marginalized capacities as librarians, computers, secretaries, and assistants. They had the academic credentials but not the titles and salaries of scientists. They were segregated within fields but also across fields—horizontally as well as vertically. Women were ejected from fields deemed “hard” in the name of higher standards—essentially a strategy of containment. Professionalization continued to be a gendered and gendering process, one designed to ameliorate softening by reinstating masculine status in some fields over others.¹¹

Several meanings are implicit in the metaphorical use of “hard” and “soft”: Hard science came to be understood as intellectually and physically rigorous, fortified by airtight, indestructible positivist methodology. Subjects of “hard” research were physically inanimate, not squishy, oozing, or alive; results of “hard” research were consequently “hard and fast,” versus the ambiguous findings of social scientists or other increasingly female investigators. Hardness and softness had long been assigned gendered connotations (the penetrating mind and hard muscles of men and the sentimental thinking and soft curves of women), and now through associative logic men funneled women into “softer” fields of lesser prestige. At some universities, including Yale, New York University (NYU), Cornell, MIT, and the University of Chicago, women instructors filled niches of expertise in hygiene; nutrition; and “social,” “physiological,” and “domestic” science.¹²

One of the pioneers of female science in the late nineteenth century was Ellen Swallow Richards, a woman who had worked with astronomer Maria Mitchell as an undergraduate at Vassar. When she couldn’t find a job after college she decided to study chemistry at MIT, where she was admitted as a “special student” so that her name wouldn’t appear on the university roster. She sewed buttons and swept floors to gain men’s acceptance in the lab. For decades the university used her services as an instructor of chemistry and engineering, most of the time without compensation or title. As muc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Through the Lives of Women Scientists
• I. Assistants, Housekeepers, and Interchangeable Parts: Women Scientists and Professionalization, 1880–1940
• II. The Cult of Masculinity in the Age of Heroic Science, 1941–1962
• III. American Women and Science in Transition, 1962–
• Conclusion: Apes, Corn, and Silent Springs: A Women’s Tradition of Science?
• Acknowledgments
• Index