Lady Science Volume III: 2016-2017

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 2016-2017, 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 15, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370152445

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.

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Acknowledgements

We offer our sincerest gratitude to all of our supporters, whose contributions through one-time donations and monthly pledges have sustained the project and allowed us to grow.

We’d also like to acknowledge all of the skilled writers, editors, and brilliant thinkers who have contributed their work to this volume.

We dedicate this volume to the women who have worked under the threat and reality of harassment and violence, to those who came forward and to those who still cannot.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Women and Science

Florence Nightingale: Of Myths and Maths by Joy Lisi Rankin

Mary Somerville, a Domestic Icon of Science by Michal Meyer

Forced into the Fringe: Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult Hypothesis by Kathleen Sheppard

The History of Data is the History of Labor: Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Creation of a truth truer than a poem by Deanna Day

Feminism, Fascism, and Frogs: The Case of Bertha Lutz at the United Nations by Cassia Roth

Emma Allison, a Lady Engineer by Robert Davis

What Does a Woman Know? by Kathleen Sheppard

Plants, Domesticity, and the Female Poisoner by Afton Lorraine Woodward

Gendered Bodies, Disabled Bodies

Seducing the 'Feeble-minded' by Adam Shapiro

Eugenics: Policing Everything by Joy Lisi Rankin

Talking like a Princess: What Speaking Machines Say About Human Biases by Meryl Alper

The Cost of Disclosure: On Being a Woman with a Disability in Geophysics by Jesse Shanahan

Unacceptable Bodies by Anna Reser

The Profession and Women's Work

Lady Wranglers by Joy Lisi Rankin

Why Are We Still Talking About the Naughty Nurse? Jenna Tonn

The Personal in the Professional: a 19th-Century Hangover by Amanda Barnett

Feminist Anthropology Part I by Emma Louise Backe

Feminist Anthropology Part II: Violence in the Field, Violence in the Academy by Emma Louise Backe

Life and Death in Dioramas by Hillary Moses Mohaupt

Healing History: Women in Medicine by Abby Norman

Toward a Feminist Astrobiology by Anna Reser

Bibliography

Introduction

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 monthly critical essays on these topics, which we collect into an edited volume available as a free ebook. This volume of Lady Science, which contains essays from 2016-2017, is part of our mission to make important and productive scholarship about women and gender available for free to students and the general public.

In this third anthology, our contributors continue their work 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 to help us account for the structural oppressions that condense around race, gender, class, and disability.

This collection of essays features work on a wide range of topics in science, technology, and medicine by scholars, journalists, scientists, and historians. This collection is separated into three sections: Women and Science; Gendered Bodies, Disabled Bodies; and The Profession and Women’s Work. Each section applies critical gender analysis to historical research in our usual mode, but this year we have also published interviews with working scientists, critical studies of disability, analyses of literature and popular culture, and work on the intersection of gender, science and politics.

Women and Science

While the essays in this section focus on individual women, each essay explores the structural barriers and cultural context in which of these women lived and worked. Some of these women, like Florence Nightingale and Mary Somerville, are well-known women in the history of science, but as the writers show, gender stereotypes and systemic inequalities in science and society and the stories that we tell about science perpetuate their marginalization. Other essays focus on virtually unknown women like inventor Emma Allison and archaeologist Caroline Ransom Williams, and these writers investigate the cultural and social context that relegated these women to the margins in their own time and have kept them unknown to us now.

In Florence Nightingale: Of Myths and Maths, Joy Rankin shows a different, less well-known side of Florence Nightingale as a queer statistician, not as a mythologized nurse. In Mary Somerville, a Domestic Icon of Science, Michael Meyer writes about astronomer and mathematician Mary Somerville, who, despite being hailed as one of the great luminaries of her time, was both esteemed and excluded as a woman in science. Kathleen Sheppard in Forced to the Fringe: Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult Hypothesis writes about archaeologist Margaret Murray and her work on witchcraft and folklore, work for which she was marginalized and that was ultimately appropriated by a man. In The History of Data is the History of Labor: Mary Putnam Jacobi and the Creation of a truth truer than a poem," Deanna Day writes about Mary Putnam Jacobi’s systematic study of menstruation, which helped to set the foundation for modern day quantitative data collection.

Cassia Roth in Feminism, Fascism, and Frogs: The Case of Bertha Lutz at the United Nations looks at the scientific and activist career of Bertha Lutz and the fascistic political regime in 20th century Brazil. Robert Davis looks at another lesser-known figure in Emma Allison, a ‘Lady Engineer, in which he shows how the representation of Allison during her own time, despite her being a pioneering inventor, has contributed to her historical erasure. In What Does a Woman Know?, Kathleen Sheppard looks at archaeologist Caroline Ransom Williams and how her work became buried the archives and left out of the historical narrative dominated by more famous men. Lastly, Afton Woodward explores the trope of the female poisoner in literature and popular culture and argues that such simplistic representation confines women’s contributions to science to the domestic sphere.

Florence Nightingale: Of Myths and Maths

Joy Lisi Rankin

The way we tell stories about women matters. The way we remember women matters. Until recently, if you had asked me what I remembered about Florence Nightingale, I would have told you about her tireless work as a nurse. I would have said nothing about her tireless work as a mathematician, mainly because I had never learned about it. The mythology built around Florence Nightingale, nurse, demonstrates how and why the gendered stories that we tell about the past matter very much in the present.

My Nightingale mythology has centered on her work as a devoted nurse. In this story, she courageously left behind the creature comforts of her elite English home life to tend to British soldiers during the Crimean War. (1) She braved dirt, disease, and death to cure and comfort all of those daring, dashing young British men. In this grand narrative, she remained unmarried throughout her life in order to better serve as the virginal caretaker, a model of chaste womanhood. Her gentle and caring manner and the warmth of her personality—these are the characteristics that earned her the moniker The Lady with the Lamp. I am confident that this is the Nightingale story that you remember, too.

Certainly, the general historical framework for this story is accurate. But the omission and reinterpretation of key details have served to perpetuate the norm of nursing as a pink-collar profession, in which practitioners have had second-class status compared with their doctor colleagues, who have been predominantly men. Indeed, Nightingale did care for ailing and injured soldiers during the Crimean War. In doing so, she challenged the social norms of upper-class Victorian England, which dictated that—as a woman—she should remain a dutiful daughter and then wife with little unsupervised contact with men. In her own time, Nightingale’s parents resisted her efforts to pursue a nursing vocation. Her desire to help others initially made her an iconoclast, not a heroine.

Similarly, Nightingale’s rejection of marriage has been mythologized as the ultimate sign of her devotion to nursing and nation. But really, she was flat-out rejecting marriage as a social institution. Moreover, she had the means to make that choice. Nightingale hailed from a wealthy and distinguished British family. Her grandfather served as a Member of Parliament for several decades. (2) She grew up on two large family estates and frequently visited London. Social and financial affluence afforded her the opportunity to safely reject marriage at a time when most women who did not marry struggled to support themselves for the rest of their lives.

Nightingale received several marriage proposals, all of which she declined. Instead, she chose to live with women companions over the course of her life. Some Nightingale scholars have debated whether or not she was a lesbian, but I think that debate masks a far more significant point. (3) I want to underscore that Nightingale’s choice was queer. (4) She rejected the gendered sexual politics of Victorian marriage, and she chose to live with other women on her own terms. She defied the dominant social and cultural norms of 19th-century English society, and she relentlessly pursued her own passions and interests.

Focusing on Nightingale the nurse has also obscured, indeed, almost completely effaced, Nightingale the statistician. (5) Nightingale’s mathematical and intellectual abilities manifested from an early age. By age ten, she had created tables that displayed data about the fruits and vegetables produced in her family’s gardens. She eagerly studied an album of pressed flowers that she received from Margaret Stovin, an expert botanist and a family friend. Her father, who had earned his education at the universities of Edinburgh and Cambridge, began teaching her formal mathematics when she was eleven. As a young woman, she requested and received private lessons in mathematics from a Cambridge-trained mathematics tutor. (6) And, her family socialized with prominent British intellectuals of their day, which enabled Nightingale to meet the polymath Charles Babbage.

Nightingale was a talented and creative statistician. She returned from the Crimea having collected extensive data on soldier mortality rates. She began a long collaboration with British statistician William Farr with the goal of reforming the British Army Medical Service, including hospitals. One of Nightingale’s analyses revealed that British soldiers aged 25-35 had a mortality rate twice as high in military hospitals compared to civilian life. Another analysis showed that soldiers were far more likely to die at home or abroad during peacetime than they were during wartime because of the wretchedly unhygienic and unsanitary conditions in cities.

Nightingale completed her 850-page book Notes on Matters Affecting Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army in two years, toiling sometimes for twenty-four hours out of twenty-four to complete it. (7) Her statistical analyses, combined with her vocal calls for change, ultimately propelled major health and data collection reforms in both military and civilian hospitals. Crucial to her efforts were her illustrations that made these numbers compelling to the politicians with the power to implement reform.

Nightingale transformed data visualization. She realized that