Instant Genius - International Women’s Day: The forgotten female scientists of history

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

Today is International Women’s Day, and in this episode of the Science Focus Podcast, online assistant Sara Rigby talks to science historians Anna Reser and Leila McNeill, authors of Forces of Nature: The Women who Changed Science (£20, Frances Lincoln). They tell us about the women who engaged in science throughout history but don’t always get remembered – the midwives, the astronomers, and the wives and sisters. Read an edited excerpt from the interview Let us know what you think of the episode with a review or a comment wherever you listen to your podcasts. Subscribe to the Science Focus Podcast on these services: Acast, iTunes, Stitcher, RSS, Overcast Read the full transcription of this episode [this will open in a new window] Listen to more episodes of the Science Focus Podcast: Why aren't there more women in science? Angela Saini: Inequality in science Caroline Criado Perez: Does data discriminate against women? Kathryn D. Sullivan: What is it really like to walk in space? Subhadra Das: What part has science played in racism? Kevin Fong: What happened to Apollo 13? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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to learn more. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team, with the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Sarah Rigby, online assistant at BBC Science Focus magazine. Today is International Women's Day and in this episode, I'm talking to science science historians Anna Reza and Leila McNeil, authors of Forces of Nature, the women who changed science. They tell me about the women who engaged in science throughout history but don't always get remembered. the midwives, the astronomers, and the wives and sisters.

When I've read about women in science history before, I often get the impression that it was exclusively men doing science for centuries until there were a few sort of superstars that the people like Mary Cury or Rosalind Franklin who sort of started getting women into science. But having read your book, it sounds like that's not the case at all, is it? It certainly isn't. And we can find women participating in science going all the way back to antiquity all around the world.

And one of the problems with looking at figures like Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin is that they were anomalous in the sense that when they were making their discoveries and doing what they were doing, it was still very rare for women. women to be in higher institutions of learning and scientific institutions in particular. And so when you're just trying to look for women in those spaces, those are the figures that pop up. And they're easy to find records of because institutions keep records and things like that. So one of the things that we were interested in doing with this book was kind of looking beyond those institutions where formal records are. are kept to see the different ways that women could have been participating in science on their

own terms and in their own way outside of these spaces. And so we find women doing this in all kinds of ways going all the way back to antiquity. And one of the most common ways that we see is women participating in medicine as healers and midwives in various forms. And we find that in antiquity all the way through the Middle Ages, all the way up until the 19th century when medicine was professionalized. And it was kind of taken out of the hands of women and out of the domestic sphere where women were practicing these things in their homes and their communities and taking it into that institutionalized setting. Where, again, that's where you'll start getting those unsung women in science, you know, the ones that broke into that institutional barrier. But yeah, we were much more interested in looking outside of that.

Right. Thank you, Leila. So was there ever a time or place when women didn't engage in science in some form that you know of? I don't think so. I think one of the things that we had to do for this book and that I think we need to do more broadly looking at the history of women in science is rethinking what counts as. science. And we use the term like pursuing knowledge of nature because, you know, institutionalized, like formalized science doesn't exist until like the early modern period in a way that people recognize and it becomes like a standardized practice and there are methods that are shared across borders.

So before that, you're not really looking for science per se in those terms, but there are people pursuing knowledge about nature, and women were doing that basically in every period that men were as well. It's just that women, typically, especially in Western cultures, are you, women, have different expectations about what their social life should look like and about what kind of access they should have to the public sphere. And so if we only think about science as something that happens in this like broadly public collaborative way across, you know, the community of letters or whatever, then you're not really going to find women doing that in a lot of spaces.

But if you kind of zoom in a little and look inside the home and inside communities, women are pursuing this knowledge in these spaces instead because this is sort of where they're at. So instead of looking for women where men are, we look for them where they are. And in those spaces, you do find, particularly like Layla said, medicine, women practicing medicine to care for their own families and their communities, but also sometimes. to make a profession out of it, making and selling medicines, traveling around as a healer, things like that, particularly like midwifery

and the care of pregnant women and babies is obviously going to be something that women are doing more often than men in a lot of spaces, at least in the ancient world, for sure. So yeah, what we found in researching this book is that basically everywhere we looked, we found women who were pursuing and creating knowledge about nature in various ways. Okay, thank you, Anna. So as you both just

mentioned, women were often midwives in antiquity. So why, maybe this is a very obvious question, but why specifically midwives as opposed to doctors? Why was there the gender divide between sort of what sort of medicine people practiced? It's a little bit complex just because doctor in the sense that we think of it now is in like a physician. It was not really a profession until the modern period, at least in the sense of it being like, you know, you have a special formalized education and you have all these sort of institutional bodies to which you can belong as a physician. But the divide, I guess, between midwifery and being a doctor in the ancient world is much fuzzier than that.

Part of the issue is that when we kind of look back, really far back, maybe like to ancient Egypt or to ancient Greece, we are always confronting the challenge of like putting our own categories from now back into the past doctor, midwife, nurse, whatever, and that those things are sort of useful for us to just kind of name something in a way that we kind of understand, but it can kind of recategorize things. Yeah, I think one way to think of it is that women cared for, women. And that's more of the divide rather than midwife versus physician in the way we understand physician or doctor. And that women caring for women was something that was understood to happen and be expected to happen all the way through like the turn of the 20th century, but when,

before medicine became professionalized and institutionalized. So I think maybe that's more of an appropriate way to think of the distinction rather than midwife versus doctor. Right, I see. So it's been said that witches were often just midwives or medicine women or women with some level of competence and knowledge. Would you say that was accurate? So that was something very surprising for me in this research, that there actually isn't a whole lot of historical evidence to show that midwives were singled out as witches. There's very little to know historical evidence to support that. But what was interesting to find is that in antiquity, you didn't have the same

associations with witches and witchcraft in women who had certain kinds of knowledge that you did coming into the Middle Ages. In antiquity, it could be seen as like maybe something not that great to promote yourself as or to practice, but it didn't have that association yet with Satan or the devil. You don't really get that until the Middle Ages when that connection between magic and witchcraft became associated with Satan. But what that has to do with midwives specifically can't really find a whole lot of historical evidence to support that connection.

So were midwives respected in the same way that maybe physicians were? Yeah, I think particularly in ancient Rome, we have a lot of material from ancient Rome about the profession of midwives. dweffery. And one of the things that we have a ton of are, like, relief carvings of midwives at work, which are really cool. They use sort of specialized tools. They had a particular kind of, like, birthing chair that they was in their possession that they would sort of take from job to job, helping women to give birth. And even in the Hippocratic corpus, there are writing,

by men about midwives that place them in this context of like a professional medical practice so that like um for instance like sarinus writes about the the characteristics of like a good or ideal midwife so there's some like sort of idea of like a standard for the profession Obviously, like, his ideals were like she should be literate and versed in medical theory, but also like she should keep her fingernails short so she doesn't scratch the mother or baby. So, you know, particularly with like the Hippocratic corpus, there's a lot of digging through what men are writing about women, about their bodies, but also about things like this about their profession. But yes, midwives, particularly in ancient Rome, were respected and were thought of as women. professionals who did a specific job and had specific skills related to that. And we have lots of evidence of these midwives from that period.

What other scientific fields were there in antiquity where you often found women? One of the problems with looking at participation of kind of anybody in antiquity is a lack of records in general for both women and men. and to the extent that records were kept, that they were largely written by men. So we have a bunch of layers to get through in order to kind of uncover what women and even men were exactly doing

in the big umbrella term of what we would call science. But we do have evidence of like, say, mentioned in the book and that a lot of people know about hypatia, who was involved in mathematics and natural philosophy, which is what the closest thing to what we understand is science in the ancient period. And we also have evidence that there were women who were at least skilled in identifying astronomical phenomena as far as keeping track of eclipses and things like that.

but as far as what they were actually practicing, that could mirror something that we call astronomy today, it's really hard to find that evidence. But we do have evidence that women were doing these things in some capacity. So there were people like Hildegard of Bingen who, well, we wouldn't think of it as science now. she was a religious figure but you still mention her

as someone who studied science in some sense so could you talk a bit about about Hildegarde of Vingen please and what she studied and what she did? Hildegarde is an incredibly interesting figure she claimed that her understanding of the cosmos she laid out her own cosmological system in Skivias that was written in three parts.

And it was also illuminated. So it had the really lovely images that we associate with medieval manuscripts. And she claimed that she received her image of the cosmos through union with God, that these came to her through visions that she started having when she started having. she was a child. She didn't start recording or directing her visions until she was much older. But this was something that not only gave her the ability to write this wonderful manuscript, but it was also something that gave her cultural capital in the church. It allowed her to rise through the ranks of the church.

and to make demands of the Pope and have those demands met because she was seen as such a divine figure. And her cosmological system in a sense differs from other cosmological systems of this time because she did conceive of it in a very specific feminine way. The image of it looks like an egg on fire of our universe, of an egg on fire. of our universe, of an egg on fire. And it is a very, it looks very much like a vulva. And so there's been a lot of kind of feminist historical analysis of this that says, you know, this is a specifically feminine envisioning of the cosmos. And that makes this different than other cosmological systems at the time.

And in addition to that, which we don't go a whole lot into in the book because that chapter was focused on like the cosmos and astronomy. But she also wrote a medical text as well. She was very much a polymath. She also created music of her own and composed. So she was very much into understanding nature, understanding the cosmos through. her cosmological system but also music and then understanding nature through her medical texts. So she was an incredibly interesting figure for sure. I thought it was really interesting in your book that you referred to her as a cosmologist. Because as I've studied cosmology before, I would think of it as the whole field as having been invented very, very recently. But I suppose anyone who had a conception of what the universe as a whole is, and what it was like you could call a cosmologist. Yeah, I think our understanding of the cosmos

has just gotten so much bigger that we just understand how much of a larger place the cosmos is now makes it seem like there's so much more to explore and think about. But even back then, even if their physical understanding of the cosmos was a lot smaller, they were still thinking about where did it come from, how did it come to be,

what does it look like? What is our place in it? What else is out there? Where do the angels sit out there? Those are all cosmological questions, even if they're not the same cosmological questions that we've evolved with today. Astronomy in general seems to be an area where a lot of women in the history of science have done a lot of work. and it often seems to be women who were the wives or the sisters of prominent astronomers, and that's how they sort of got into the field and ended up doing their own work. Why is that? Well, for, I would say, most of recorded history, that's the only way that women had into those fields.

So if we're talking about someone like Caroline Herschel, whose brother William was an astronomer. He needed a housekeeper, and he also wanted to get Caroline out of a kind of bad situation in Germany. So he brought her to England to work in his house. And he just sort of enlisted her to be his assistant, kind of without her, you know, permission, really. But part of the reason that this is Caroline's entry into astronomy is because in this period, people, it's not like you go to work at, you know, one big observatory with all your colleagues. William had his own observatory at their house and bath. And all of that is very expensive to buy telescopes and to maintain them.

obviously the Herschels are like an upper middle class family, upper class family. They have plenty of family wealth and all that stuff. But that's not something that the women in the family have like independent access to. So in order for her to have an observatory to work in, she worked in Williams Observatory. And then also what we talked about sort of at the beginning about these institutional spaces where women are not allowed. So you're a royal society, your royal astronomical society. These bodies don't permit women until later. Caroline was actually inducted as an honorary member, right, Leila, into the Royal Astronomical Society.

But it wasn't like she was allowed to go there and participate in the same way that men were. You know, she wasn't really allowed to go give a lecture or anything like that. So in order for women to participate or at least get close to these formalized, institutionalized spaces for science, usually you do it through a man who is connected to that. So oftentimes that's your husband or in Caroline's case, it's your brother. Another very famous historical, well, I don't know if they're very famous. The Havaleas says were a husband and wife team of astronomers and kind of a similar situation. They had their really well-outfitted home observatory.

But the reason for that is just that women are not permitted in the formal spaces of science. And so in order to get anywhere near them, you have to go through a man, basically. And I think it's important to point out with Havallius that to, You'd have to be kind of well off class-wise to enter into a marriage with a man who could afford to build an observatory on top of his house. So even, you know, this is very much a gendered field. It's also a very classed one as well because, you know, you're not going to find a poor working class woman marrying into this type of marriage. that has the money to outfit their home like that. So how common do you think it was that prominent men in science,

particularly astronomers, had a sort of a female counterpart who helped them out and did their own contributions to the work? I think it's a lot more than we have record of. the reason that we know about Caroline and Catherine or Elizabetha Havilius

you know her husband gave her credit a little bit in the work so we actually have a written record of that same thing with Marianne LaVoisier that they left their kind of footprint in history a little bit but you know

they weren't really publishing on their own. So we're able to know about them because of what men said about them for the most part. So that I think brings into question how many women were doing this work where their husbands didn't credit them. Because that also wasn't very usual for men to do that. It was expected that women would be doing the help and that the men would be the ones publishing. And so whatever work women were doing behind the scenes often has been subsumed by their husband's work and they have become kind of invisible in the historical record. So we do have plenty of evidence that wives and sisters were doing this work, but I do think that it was a lot more than we actually have record of just because it was expected. We've talked for the most part about Europe, European history.

Is there any notable period of time, a period or place outside of Europe where women had a particularly respected role in some sort of scientific field? So, you know, just with the caveat that none of us are, Neither of us are specialists in ancient China or China in general. But yeah, there are a lot of records of women participating in medical practice in ancient China. And like we've said with some of these other examples, a lot of what we know about this comes from things that men wrote about women. And so again, you do have to kind of filter through these sources and kind of read between the lines. But yeah, we have really, we have good records of medical practice in China.

Like Layla said, women cared for women. And so there is like in Chinese medicine, there is a particular branch of medicine. that is dedicated to women. And so there are women practitioners who take care of these complaints of women, in particular, you know, complaints with childbirth and sex and things like that because it's not appropriate for male doctors to take care of that. So, you know, one of the fascinating things that I find. found in reading about this is that there there are these kind of mythologized figures of grannies

that are these women medical practitioners like herb sellers and there are a few different types but they've been kind of like in these writings by men about them they're like cautionary writings about the kinds of like wily women medical practitioners that you should avoid because they're like tricksters and they will do scams on you and sell you things that don't work. But in reading more about this history, one of the things that historians are trying to do is read through these kind of caricatures and stereotypes and read these as there's still evidence of women medical practitioners. If men were worried enough about them to write them down, they existed. people knew about them.

They were figures in public life that you would encounter. And so reading through the record that way is a really important way to kind of recapture this stuff. And so, you know, you take the stories about these medical grannies with a grain of salt, and you can kind of start to unfold this picture of like an economy of when, and medical practitioners who are going around making, making medicines. You know, there were stories about grannies who were called to the imperial court to take care of, like, the concubines. So there's, this is kind of like, the further back you go in time, the more of this kind of work you have to do to kind of unpick this history from, you know, these myths and these stories and these kind of cultural practices. And this idea of women taking care of women is something that even if it does seem kind of, you know, sexist in the sense that women can only take care of women and that it's less than for men to stoop to the level of taking care of women.

It was kind of that tradition that allowed women an entry into the modern institutionalized practice of becoming physicians. And so one of the things that Anna had mentioned was the Women's Medical College in Pennsylvania. They accepted students from Japan, from India, from Native American communities, and they all went and studied, not all, but a lot of them went and studied women's medicine, gynecology, and obstetrics, because there was a need for that in the communities that they were coming from in their own countries. because men weren't doing a great job taking care of women. And so you have these, quote-unquote, lady physicians or lady doctors, as they called themselves during that time, stepping up to say,

you're not going to take care of women. We will continue to take care of women. And we're going to become professionals in that sense. And we have this long tradition of women taking care of women. And that became like an actual argument to become, licensed physicians. So I think it's important to just underline that while that kind of seems like a way to subjugate women, it became a way for women to get their professional license in the 19th and

20th century to become actual professional physicians as well. Okay. Thank you, Leila. So I'd just like to wrap up now by talking about your favorite lesser-known women in science history that you either wrote about in this book or that you discovered in your research of this book. So mine, I think, is Nicole Renle-Lopout, who she was an astronomer, and she was sort of drafted in to help to calculate when Halley's comet would return, which is a very difficult thing to do because it depended on a lot of very new mathematics.

and you had to work out how the gravitational pull of both Jupiter and Saturn would affect it. And that's not an easy thing to do. That's still a difficult thing, would still be a difficult thing to do today. So while Halley's, Edmund Halley's own calculations were out by about a year, Leport managed to get it to within about two days, who's only about two days out, which is absolutely amazing. So I'm now a big fun of her. So Leila, who is your favorite woman in science history?

She was definitely one of my favorites of that time period to write about. I think one of my favorites is Zizelia Nuttall. She was an archaeologist and anthropologist. She was Mexican-American. and she ended up, she was born in San Francisco and she traveled through Europe and she took like one trip to Mexico and was like, nope, this is, this is what I want to do and this is what I want to learn about. And she was having roots in Mexico.

She felt it was very important to produce archaeology and anthropology. not just about Mexicans, but for Mexicans, which was a very different way that Americans and Europeans were studying ancient Mexico, where you had a bunch of salacious narratives about, you know, savages and human sacrifice and things like that. And while Nuttall recognized that those things did happen in certain parts of ancient Mexico, she does blame kind of the colonizers of Europe and of kind of conflating those stories to justify the colonization of ancient Mexican peoples. And so what she tries to do is kind of rehabilitate ancient Mexican traditions and rituals that modern day Mexicans can continue to celebrate.

And she actually succeeds in a lot of ways. And I just, I found that her, her story was a really important one because it's not like she made, you know, she didn't like discover a pyramid or excavate, you know, mummy sites or whatever. What she did was more of a cultural shift in the way that we look at the history of archaeology and the way that we look at Mexico and the history of Mexico in particular. Okay, thank you, Leland. So Anna, who is your favorite less than known woman in science history? Okay, well, I'm going to give you the annoying answer, which is it's not one woman, but I think the thing that's been really formative for me in thinking about this book is how we categorize different types of scientific labor and what kind of labor counts as scientific labor. And so I will say that my favorite women in science are all of the secretaries and clerical workers. of the space program in the 1960s, which is what I study on my own time.

But so most of the clerical work of the space program was done by women. And we don't know very much about these women. It just in terms of like names and stuff, even though this happened in the mid-20th century. But we do have like a lot of representations of the clerical workers at NASA. that are very similar to what you would see at any kind of mid-century sort of madmen-esque feel to the way that women in clerical positions are represented as like kind of like sometimes sex symbols and like a nice thing to have in the office to look at. And there's a lot of that stuff with NASA and sort of getting into looking at those images and thinking about the role of these women in the space program. You know, I found a really great source from a local newspaper close to Kennedy Space Center, which is in Florida, that interviewed a bunch of women who worked at NASA, who had full-time jobs at NASA and asked them how they thought women could contribute to the space program. So, yeah, so one of the things that I think is really important to me in looking at this history and what we're going.

we sort of talked about at the very beginning about not looking where men are, but looking where women are, is to not only look for labor that we see as inherently technical or inherently scientific. So we know much more about the women at NASA who were engineers or who had scientific backgrounds, but in what way are the women who are doing clerical work for the space program not do doing, not participating in like the technical labor of the space program. And so that's one of those things that I, I want us to think about more is how we can kind of switch our thinking around about that because it really changed the way that I saw that history. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Science Focus podcast. That was Anna Reza and Leila McNeil talking

about the ordinary women in science history. Their book, Forces of Nature, is out on the 20th of April. If you liked this episode, head over to the History Extra podcast to hear a panel of experts discussing the biggest questions in women's history. Find it in the History Extra podcast feed, wherever you get your podcasts. The February issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. In this issue, we explore how your brain creates reality, we look into the baffling science of dark boson stars, and, as always, our panel of experts answer your questions. Of course, there's much more inside and on sciencefocus.com. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Science Focus magazine team.

With the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor, not. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship, so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com.