Lady Science Volume II: 2015-2016

By Anna Reser and Leila A. McNeill

Lady Science is an online magazine focusing on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science, technology, and medicine. Each year, our writers and editors publish 22 critical essays on these topics, which we collect into an edited volume available as a free ebook. This second volume of Lady Science, containing essays from 2015-2016, is part of our mission to make important and productive scholarship about women and gender available for free to students and the general public.

The second anthology continues to carry out our mission to write women back into the history of science, technology, and medicine and to expose the structural reasons that they have been excluded or obscured. This entails not only vital recovery work in the area of biography and professional histories of women scientists, but also the application of feminist theory to these histories in ways that help us account for the structural oppressions that condense around race, gender, class, and disability.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anna Reser
• Release date: Jan 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9781370619009

Anna Reser

Anna Reser has a BFA in studio art, an MA in history of science, and is currently pursing a PhD and writing a dissertation about design culture and the built environment in the American space program. Her other writing and research interests include popular culture, critical and literary theory, art history, and women and gender studies. She is a painter, sculptor and printmaker, focusing on the aesthetics of technology and information.

Book preview

Foreword

I vividly recall how much I hated my very first history class. It was in middle school, and it seemed to be nothing more than a dry, endless record of the exploits of dead white men. Worse still, the only thing the class asked us to do was to memorize names and dates. To say I did not see the need for history back then would have been an understatement--in fact, I had a vehement reaction against the entire subject and could not understand why it was still taught. Why had it not gone the way of other anachronistic classes, like Latin?

Given my initial reaction, it may seem odd that I ended up becoming a history professor. My metamorphosis took place relatively quickly over the course of the following year when I was a freshman in high school. During that time, I had one of the best teachers from whom I’ve ever been fortunate enough to learn. His history course actually contextualized what we were learning, allowing us to see the why instead of just the what.

It also paid attention to the people at the margins. We learned as much about women as about men, and Mr. Rogers—yes, that was really his name—repeatedly pointed out the fact that the pioneers in many fields of endeavor were gay. When some students would inevitably titter at the mention of homosexuality, he would muster his background as a naval officer and retort in a low-key but commanding manner: There’s nothing wrong with being gay, and if you’re laughing at it that means there’s something wrong with you. To normalize outsiders, Mr. Rogers would sometimes remark that there was nothing new under the sun. But that didn’t mean his students already knew that. Suddenly, I began to see the purpose of history.

The way Mr. Rogers used his subject in order to teach tolerance rather than trivia was all the more important because my childhood spanned the 1980s and early 1990s. After a decade of seeing the ravages of AIDS on the LGBTQ community, those of us growing up queer were terrified and mostly deep in the closet. The homophobic backlash and the national conversation on AIDS in political circles and the media often positioned gay citizens as vermin-like carriers of disease. I remember one difficult day when, as editor-in-chief of my high school newspaper, I had to fight to reject an op-ed written by a student that proposed solving the AIDS crisis by interning everyone with HIV in concentration camps.

It wasn’t lost on me that it was a history teacher who was the only adult I knew at the time to repeatedly and vociferously stand up for LGBTQ people. That he did this without necessarily knowing who among his students was queer or questioning made this all the more impressive. He knew that we were out there, hiding, afraid, and in desperate need of validation.

The real reason I became a historian was not because I was so terribly interested in the past but because I had had my eyes opened to the uses of history. Now that I had begun to understand how our present experiences were constructed by what happened decades and even centuries before, I finally saw that humanity itself is something that is learned, not something innate that we can take for granted. Suddenly, history became the most important thing in the world because what was actually at stake was teaching people humanity.

In my research, I focus on the hidden stories of women and trans people in the history of technology. I do this because I want to make space in our present technophiliac context for understanding technology as not necessarily progressive, and certainly not an end in itself. Too often, the fiction of steady linear progress clouds our thinking and our understanding of the world around us. My research contradicts the view that with enough time and technology everything gets better; I show how the tools and infrastructures that aid and protect us also shape and control who and what we can be—usually in line with socially regressive norms. By studying and teaching this history, I strive to make space in the present for marginalized people to find their voices, in the same way that Mr. Rogers did for me over two decades ago.

In the years between then and now, I have traveled to many countries for my work and have been educated by some of the foremost scholars in the world. Yet, my first interaction with the subject of history as it should be taught remains one of the most important learning experiences of my life. At base, history is a social justice project: a discipline whose entire reason for existing is predicated on the idea that we can somehow fix the mistakes of the past and lead our societies toward something better. It is not a recording of facts but an exercise in giving voice to ideas that are drowned in din of the present. And above all, it is a reminder that humanity is never something we can take for granted, rather it is something we must constantly relearn.

Today, I strive to replicate this process of epiphany for my students and readers. In the same way, the authors in this volume use the history of gender to remind us that progress is a struggle that requires our participation. In the fragile, imaginary, intellectual space where the past and present collide, historians wrinkle time to show people what they would never live long enough to experience on their own. The essays in this volume are excellent examples of that. I am gratified to be writing this foreword because I know we can only succeed if historians research and write with originality and fearlessness to uncover the voices that echo all around us but are not yet heard.

Marie Hicks

January 1, 2017

www.programmedinequality.com

Acknowledgements

Lady Science is a collaborative project and thus the first and most sincere acknowledgements must be made of our contributing writers. Afton Lorraine Woodward, Sarah Horne, and Joy Rankin have enriched this volume with their thoughtful and rigorous research and writing.

Since the last volume, the Lady Science team has expanded considerably and we are immensely grateful for the hard work of our Contributing Editors, Joy Rankin and Kathleen Sheppard, our Managing Editor Nathan Kapoor, our Copy Editor Stephanie Shasteen, and our Grant Writer Jaime Tillotson.

We are further indebted to Marie Hicks for the generous gift of her time and insight in writing the foreword to this volume.

We dedicate this volume to the women historians whose early work began the ongoing investigation of women in the history of science, without which Lady Science could not exist.

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Women

Gertrude Caton-Thompson, Women's Networks, and Radical Poliitcs in Great Zimbabwe by Leila A. McNeill

The Eighteenth-Century Lady Scientist by Afton Lorainne Woodward

Mad Machines: Women in Art and Technology by Anna Reser

Art is a Science: Women Illustrators Breaking Gender Barriers and the Story of Agnes Chase by Sarah Horne

Vulgar Women, Queer Men, and Unruly Spirits by Leila A. McNeill

Structures

Anthropos-cene by Leila A. McNeill

Monsters, Myths, and Constellations by Leila A. McNeill

Visitation and Violence: Gender and the UFO Phenomenon by Anna Reser

Calving, Cores and Controversy: Feminist Glaciology by Anna Reser

Technology, Food, and Women's Labor by Anna Reser

Astronormate: The Image of Ability in the American Space Program by Anna Reser

Disability, Pregnancy, and the Continued Fight for Worker's Rights by Leila A. McNeill

Writing About Fossils Found by Men by Lydia Pyne

Representation

My Thrilling Adventures Reading About Ada and Charles by Joy Rankin

Romance and Radium: Emotional Histories of Science by Anna Reser

National Geographic and the Modern Lens of Empire by Leila A. McNeill

Picture Protectorate: Power and Postcards in Empire by Anna Reser

A Home in the Heavens: Ecofeminist Thought in Aurora by Anna Reser

Who Killed the World? by Leila A. McNeill

The Lady Detective by Leila A. McNeill

Evidence and Objectivity in CSI: Crime Scene Investigation by Anna Reser

Ways to Please a Lady: Advertisements for the Modern Kitchen by Leila A. McNeill

Bibliography

Introduction

It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.

--Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement (Haymarket, 2016).

Lady Science is an online magazine focusing on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science, technology, and medicine. Each year, our writers and editors publish 22 critical essays on these topics, which we collect into an edited volume available as a free ebook. This second volume of Lady Science, containing essays from 2015-2016, is part of our mission to make important and productive scholarship about women and gender available for free to students and the general public.

The second anthology continues to carry out our mission to write women back into the history of science, technology, and medicine and to expose the structural reasons that they have been excluded or obscured. This entails not only vital recovery work in the area of biography and professional histories of women scientists, but also the application of feminist theory to these histories in ways that help us account for the structural oppressions that condense around race, gender, class, and disability.

This collection is organized into three main sections: the lives and networks of women, structural oppressions and feminist theory, and the popular culture and historical representations of women in science, technology, and medicine. These three sections reflect the overall themes and the theoretical framework of Lady Science. First, we are interested in how women have been active creators of scientific culture, both by performing science in non-traditional and unexpected ways and making inroads into male-dominated fields. Second, we use feminist theory to expose structural oppressions that have kept women out of scientific fields and out of mainstream historical narratives. Lastly,