Quirks and Quarks - Introducing IDEAS | How a historian found the lost women of science

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

IDEAS, hosted by Nahlah Ayed is a weekday podcast that explores how ideas shape our world.“One of your tribe is enough.” That’s what Margaret Rossiter was told when she said she wanted to study female scientists in the ‘70s. Nevertheless, Rossiter persisted. She found and documented hundreds of women whose contributions to science had been overlooked, under-credited and misappropriated. Then she made history herself by coining the term “The Matilda Effect” to describe why those women failed to get the credit they deserved. Who is Matilda? Matilda Joslyn Gage was a suffragist erased from history. She was known as being too radical for Susan B. Anthony. This episode of IDEAS shares her story.You can find more episodes of IDEAS wherever you get your podcasts, and here: https://link.mgln.ai/IDEASxQQ

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This is a CBC podcast. Hi, I'm Bob McDonald, host of Quarks and Quarks. We have a special episode for you today from Ideas, hosted by Nala Ayad, a weekday podcast that explores how ideas shape our world. This episode tells the story of the groundbreaking science historian Margaret Rossiter. In the 1970s, her male supervisors at Yale University told her there was no point in studying women in science. They said that other than Marie Curie, there were. no women scientists. Rossiter proved them wrong. She persisted with her research and wrote three books

about overlooked female scientists in America. Then she coined a phrase to describe why the women failed to get the credit they deserved. The Matilda Effect, inspired by a 19th century suffragist who championed women inventors and ended up being written out of history by her peers. Have a listen to this episode from Ideas. And you have boxes in front of boxes, so you can't really get at. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Historian Margaret Rossiter had boxes, filing cabinets, and yes, binders full of women in her tiny office at Cornell University in upstate New York. Well, this is fabulous. So here's a whole thing on. Botany for ladies.

Oh, that's amazing. Ladies who studied botany were just the beginning. This looks like might be geologists. Well, I had stuff related to each chapter, and then I had like biology, botany physics. I had way too much material. There were also astronomers, chemists, psychologists, hundreds of women in dozens of fields.

women who Margaret had been told did not exist. I mean, the skepticism I remember I said, well, Margaret's writing a book on women's scientist, ha, ha, ha, it'll be a very short book. There were two or three of us that cared about it, but the men in the field were totally scornful. Nothing ever happened. Why wouldn't waste your time on this?

She would spend decades uncovering the lost stories of women's achievements in science, and in doing so, almost single-handedly created an entire field of study. So it got to be too big, right? I mean, instead of being this tiny, trivial project that the world didn't really care about, I kept finding more and more and more. And the more you look, the more you find. Margaret found enough women to write three books about women scientists in America.

They were there, and they were just quietly ignored. They're just a little below the surface. They're not in the textbook. But they're out there. And perhaps just as importantly, Margaret Roseter, who died in 2025, gave name to what those women had experienced. I thought maybe there's a phenomenon here. Basically the Matilda effect, some people are over-recognized and other people aren't.

And people tell me they talk about it in a class, and the women's students look at each other and wink and they understand totally. More than 30 years later, the phrase she coined the Matilda effect resonated with working women in fields beyond science and academia. It attracted a lot of attention. But in the last like decade, it's gotten cited every. It's moved into the world of management. The provost of the University of Salisbury was in England, and they were talking about the Matilda Effect. And I'm like, God, they didn't know how fired his bread.

Today on Ideas, how a historian found the lost women of science, and in doing so, made history herself. Here is Ideas producer Donna Dingwall, with the story behind the Matilda effect. When journalist Katie Hafner got historian Markner, got historian Margaret Rossiter on the phone. She didn't get the friendliest response. Hi, Dr. Rossiter. I'm Katie Hafner and I, and she was so grumpy and so sort of who are you? But I was not daunted. And I said, well, we would really like to come visit you.

Not long after Katie and a colleague made the trip to Cornell. Because while Margaret Rossiter might not have been enthusiastic, Katie knew that they had a lot in common. Can we explain what we're up to? Yes. Okay, so we take one woman and we devote an entire season to one woman. My name's Katie Hafner. I'm a long-time journalist. Was with the New York Times for a very long time.

I'm co-executive producer and host of the Lost Women of Science podcast. It's a little bit self-explanatory, I think, but I know one of your sort of mantras or taglines is we're not mad. We're curious. Okay, we're a little mad. Can you kind of explain what? that captures what you're doing. Yeah, it's so funny because my husband still can't get it right. It's like, wait, we're not angry, we're mad?

No, no, honey, it's we're not mad. We're curious. Okay, we're a little mad. And what I mean by that is that if you had, you know, more than 400 women who'd been basically shortchanged by history, wouldn't you be a little mad? Who you were, whose stories you were trying to tell. But also we're really curious because it's opened up this huge, wonderful universe to us of scientific inquiry done by these women who, you know, really had the odds stacked against them. I mean, we go back. We've gone back. Margaret Rossiter was well known in academic circles for her groundbreaking work on the history of women in science. But Katie was astonished at just how much work there was.

So we finally get Margaret and her books and her bag up to this little tiny office. And the first thing she said was they keep putting me in smaller and smaller offices, and they're moving me again. Out in the corridor, because this place isn't big enough. There were boxes absolutely everywhere, just filled, filled, overflowing with papers. What do we do? Well, I kept everything, though. And there's more outside, too.

There's like a hole. And she gets settled behind her desk and we turn on the mic and we start talking. So this is really a scene setter for you. The conversation that afternoon was, as I've come to learn, characteristically Margaret. She tossed off names, dates, details, rapid fire. She was often blunt. She didn't hold back when it came to her detractors. And it's thanks to the Lost Women of Science podcast and Katie that were able to hear Margaret in her own

words in one of the last interviews she did, most of which has never been broadcast before. Well, when I was in high school, I started reading biographies of scientists. And there was it, this was probably in 1960 or so. They were, it was a series. And every time the family went to the shopping mall, I would go to the bookstore and maybe buy one or two new of these. And they pulled it all together. And I took high school science classes and in the textbook that'd be the biographical note to the side about their life story of sorts. I would hit by an apple. Now was always more interesting than the physics, because we couldn't get the experiments to work. You know, it was also hypothetical.

So then when I got to Radcliffe, they had a department history of science. I took a course, and I remember running into a friend from calculus class and jumping up and down saying, I found what I want to do. It's a subject and there's a lot of it. And, you know, of course, it got to the seven years. Margaret initially studied the history of agriculture and her thesis got published. I knew when that was done, I didn't want to do any more than. And I was going off to Harvard. I had a postdoc to do 20th century American science.

But I had gotten on to these women scientists. Ironically, Margaret had found these women in the biographical directory, American men of science. So I started flipping through it, and there were these women. And, you know, A to Z, they were there. She compiled the names of 500 women and began piecing their stories together. But her work scouring the archives didn't meet with much appreciation from her peers or her supervisors. And they said, well, you're the one female in the group. you should give it the first talk.

So I thought, well, I'll talk on my women scientists. So I did it, a total silence. And then they all raced for the bar. But then I thought, well, this is my one article. I'll send it to a magazine. Well, I got rejected by five or six magazines, no interest. And then I got accepted by the American scientist. And then I got like 250 reprint requests.

So then the question was, should I do more? And some of my Yale professor said, no way, one article about your tribe is enough. Your tribe? This is early 70s, 74 maybe. Yeah. What did that mean? A female kind is related, I guess. Nevertheless, Margaret Rossiter persisted.

When you were doing the work, did you think, if I don't do this, nobody will? More or less. But it's like pulling a string or you keep finding, the more you look, the more you find. So eventually I found, you know. The stories she found were at once predictable and unbelievable. There was Mary Engel Pennington who designed the refrigeration, after she became interested in preventing food spoilage while working for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Maria Mitchell, who in 1847, discovered the first comet.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered how X and Y chromosomes relate to sex determination, and initially got no credit because she had two X chromosomes. There were groups of women who banded together to form professional associations when men barred them. They raised money for grants and awards for other women. And in the case of the American Association of University Women, to buy a gram of radium for Marie Curie so she could continue her research. Margaret's own research could have used a boost, too. I'm unemployed. The job market has totally ended. Even postdocs aren't possible anymore. The work she was doing was complex. Often she had just a name and a few sentences to go on.

And she wasn't really sure where it was all heading until a friend made a radical suggestion. Well, as you know, Margaret and I were very good friends. I miss her very much. I am Sally Gregory Colstead, and I am Professor Emerita at the University of Minnesota, where I taught in the history of science, technology, and medicine. And so my research is really in that area. As a feminist growing up in the 1970s, as an academic, I got very interested in women in science. And she said, turn this into a book. Is that the story? People, other people were writing anthologies, and they'd want me to contribute a chapter. And she said, you know, you should write your own book.

She had a wry sense of humor. I mean, she was fun to be around if you knew her well. And she was genuinely brilliant. Their shared interest in women in science brought Sally and Margaret a somewhat unlikely duo together. Margaret and I met serendipitously when we were graduate students. We were both at a conference at Northwestern University. But of course, we were the two women, so we had the room together.

And we sort of walked into this room, met each other, had to kind of take the measure because she was a Yaleie. She was a substantial woman, kind of a Julia Child's body type. And I was five foot three and not particularly substantial. And I was a Midwesterner. She was an East Coast person. And we kind of looked at each other and said, oh, okay. But we found that we had a lot of things in common in terms of the things we cared about academically and school. And we really grew to respect and like each other during those three days. And as a result, we stayed in contact really over the years since then. And to some extent, I think we were close to being best friends in the field all those years and worked together, collaborated. And as I got my first job at Simmons College, which is a woman's college in Boston, I was to teach six courses. And I said, can I teach a course on women? And my colleagues who are all male said, is there enough to teach? And I said, I'll find it.

But Margaret happened to be in Boston at the same time. And so we started having lunch together or afternoons together. She'd come over to Simmons College and we'd sit in the cafeteria and talk about the things we were working on. So she and I brainstormed about what I would teach and what might be available. And in that context, too, we started realizing that the work that we had done on our dissertations had very little about women. And we really wanted to explore that. So it was kind of a mutual coming of age as historians getting an interest in women in science. Sally's suggestion that Margaret should turn her research into a book

did take some time to sink in. It never occurred to me. I mean, a whole book on women's, I mean, that was an imaginable. And then finally, I mean, sort of the lack of discussion was important. And in fact, and then later on just had, there's all these miscellaneous jobs they had that were called Women's Work, like Eureka moment. And then, ah, I know what I'm doing. The next chapter will be on. But you didn't have a publisher?

No, no. Oh, and Sally used to go to a lot of the meetings, and she checked in with, go to the book exhibit, and nobody had any interest. In fact, some were quite hostile and something. When the first volume of women scientists in America was published in 1982, it got some welcome attention. So then when the Times review came out, were you surprised that it got this much attention?

Yes. Yeah. Well, my mother thought it should be reviewed by the New York Times, and it was silence. My mother called up the New York Times, I guess. And they said, yes. And she got some snotty person that said, well, you know, not every book. It's renewed by the New York Times, and then like the next week it was.

Amazing. The reviewer, a former dean at Radcliffe College, where Margaret had gotten her master's, called it a splendid book. The publishing world had a lot of old girls from the women's colleges that sent the book favorably to suitable reviewers. They couldn't find much of any, but sometimes they'd be a prominent alumna. So how we get good reviews? The book won the Berkshire Prize for Best First Book from the Conference of Women Historians. So Margaret had awards and acclaim, but she still didn't have a permanent job, Sally Colstead.

There were certainly times that she encountered men and employers who simply didn't understand why this work was important. She had a very hard time getting a long-term permanent job. On the other hand, she was really recognized as exceptional. So she did have intermittent short-term appointments. She had a number of fellowships. She taught for two years at Berkeley. But she never was sort of kept on because the topic was not a mainstream topic. And often in departments, they want someone who seems mainstream.

And I would apply for jobs as they described. And the word was, I never fit. But I didn't want to fit. And I remember the interview at the University of Texas, they said, well, of course, we're not going to hire you because you're overqualified. There's jobs that nobody cares about women in some. at all. They just keep blaming me that I don't do history of physics or I don't do history of chemistry or whatever. But I'm here a great library, so I can get a lot done in a year. So it was a matter sort of motive, just keeping going. She was very clever. When she got that job at Berkeley and then

didn't get renewed, she decided that she could apply for unemployment. And someone said, well, can you get it if you just had a temporary job? Well, it turns out you could. And she began to see it, I think, as kind of a fellowship. And so rather than taking a position at some school where she was going to be having to teach a lot, she opted to say, I'm going to kind of take that money, and that will allow me to continue to do my research. I mean, she was very dedicated, very dedicated to the work that she was doing.

And so she wasn't embarrassed by the fact that she was unemployed. I lived in Berkeley, California, and I kept renewing my lease, and I wanted to keep staying there, but I didn't have a job. But I got an NSF grant. They gave me a title that they got overhead and I got checks, It lasted like six months, and then they run out, and then I get out to the unemployment office every other Thursday morning at 840, and I'd get my 200 bucks or whatever it was, and go to the Danish pastry flights and celebrate and keep on, because it's sort of a one-person job in a library.

I think she was hurt in a way. She would have loved to have had a permanent job, but she also wanted to get on with her work. Like, for instance, on a certain day I say, well, I've never heard of any women geologists. Okay, so tomorrow I will go to the Earth Sciences Library, which I don't go to very often. And I hope for a helpful librarian. A lot of Margaret's work did depend on the kindness of librarians and archivists, given that her subjects weren't listed on studies in academic literature or faculty directories. She had to come up with her own research methods.

And I will find out where geologists put their obituaries. You will either be under N for necrology, O for obituaries, and maybe B for biography, and maybe there'll be 50 or more years of obituaries. and I can find that five women that were worth writing up. So, so on behold, I could, and Xerox the obituaries, and the women wrote about each other.

They were classmates at Bryn Mahr or something. All these patterns just pop off the page. And they worked at the geological survey together, you know, and they knew each other. Now, sometimes a man wrote an obituary, and he said, like, nothing is known about her personal life. But then the other women said, oh, she was so thrilled that she had a government job

because the husband was handicapped, and they didn't have enough money, and she was so pleased to be able to put the two or three kids through college. There's a whole lot going on here. There's all this office. We talked a little bit about the scale and the scope of Margaret's work to try to find these people who may not be cited in papers necessarily. Like, where do you look and what kind of lengths did she go to? Margaret was a traveler. She liked to travel in general.

She and her mother went around the world at one point. But Margaret, even though she didn't have a car for some of her life, she would rent cars and go to do archival work. And she literally went across the country. She never missed a chance. If she was going to a professional meeting in Cleveland, she would go to Cleveland's Historical Society and look around to see whether there were any papers there or at Case Western Reserve. So she plumbed the archives across this country. But she was the kind of person who, when she found someone who looked really like she was interesting and important to be talked about, She'd kind of pull on that thread.

If there was an obituary, then she'd do a little bit of work sometimes on the demographics of where did this person live. Who was she at that point in time? Why was her work accepted or not accepted? To what extent did she have a career? So Margaret was really a detective. Eventually, Margaret ended up at Cornell University on a program that placed female scholars at schools, which lacked them. It wasn't permanent, at least not until the school was almost shamed into. to hiring her.

Of course, once she really hit strong with that first book and the second book on the way, that began to change. And eventually she did get that job at Cornell. And that's because Word had gotten out. Margaret Rossiter was a genius. Slightly moved, I think, at Cornell by the fact that she had gotten the MacArthur Genius Award, which no one can gain say is less than really exceptional. It was in 1989 that Margaret was awarded a prestigious MacArthur fellow.

fellowship. You may have heard it referred to as a genius grant. It allows recipients to pursue their research with a no-strings-attached stipend now worth about $800,000 U.S. At a place like Cornell, which is not Stanford or Princeton, MacArthur was a big deal. And there was all this publicity. And there'd be little stories about me. And it would end up saying, but she, you know, doesn't have any permanent job. I would say, that's the way it is or something. when you work on innovative topics. It took a job offer from another university and pressure from a high-profile alumna, a woman,

to convince Cornell to create a chair for Margaret. Sally believes that that position gave Margaret what she needed to write a paper that crystallized the importance of her work. Margaret herself in this article, I think, was more outspoken and a little more contrary than she had been in her books. And I think she had the position at Cornell.

She now had a very confident kind of footing. And she wanted this article. She wanted this point to really be visible and to make something in the field. And I think that was quite self-conscious on her part to figure it out. And I think having the Matthew effect and the Matilda effect, it's alliteration. It kind of makes things fit together. And sometimes they are. And sometimes they are talked about in the same way.

Margaret named the systematic erasure of women's work, the Matilda. effect as an answer of sorts to the Matthew effect, which was a term coined by a sociologist Robert Merton in the late 60s. She crossed out the name Matthew, which seemed very deliberate. Absolutely. Merton was looking at the dissertation of a graduate student at Columbia, Harriet Zuckerman, and she had done interviews with Nobel laureates. And so he was fascinated by what she did in those interviews because these laureates, among other things commented that once they got the Nobel Prize, they suddenly got other awards, opportunities to speak,

certain kind of public recognition. And he thought, that's very interesting. And so he said, I wonder why this kind of accumulation of credit goes on and how does that go on. And so he looked at Zuckerman's research and did some additional work himself and produced an article which he called the Matthew effect. And he called it the Matthew effect because he looked at the Bible and said in the Bible, Matthew was a person who said, for those to whom much has been given, more will be given. I'm not quite, I'm paraphrasing. But for those who have not, it will be taken away. And it was an observation of a sociologist. And it was without any kind of evaluation. Margaret was rankled that Merton didn't address the issue of what the Matthew effect meant for those. have knots. What is the opposite of the Matthew effect? What happens to the people who are at the

bottom? What happens to those people from whom some of the things are taken away? That is, some of the credit is taken away. Margaret also knew it was important to give her idea a name. I know enough about sociology or science to know if it has a name, it's got more mileage than if it just, it's an oddity. I couldn't figure out a name, and I didn't want it like Jane or Anne or something. But it wasn't until a label was put to. Yeah. And it was sort of caught. That's what I was catching on to. That's how the system works. That's what Robert K. Merton is famous for the Matthew effect. Well, I can name an effect too. Why not? She talked about whether it could be the Martha effect, because Mary and Martha in the Bible,

Martha did the kind of scut work while Mary got to sit at Jesus feet was the story. but that didn't quite resonate. What did resonate was an article she'd come across about a 19th century suffragist who championed overlooked female inventors. I was reading something totally unrelated by Dale Spender, who was an Australian feminist. If you actually look at a definition of slavery.

Somewhere in the end, she mentioned the Tilda Gage. The Tilda Gage said, if someone owns your labor and owns your resources, the harder you work, the richer they get. And the harder women work, the rich of men get. And the more we put into keeping them rich and important, the less are going to have left. Gage had written in the 1870s, some pamphlet on male inventors.

The one Eli Whitney, the cotton gin guy, took full credit for that. His female owner, I guess, was the one. The figure of Matilda Gage spoke to Margaret in, other ways. The suffragist had been written out of the women's movement for being too progressive. She never became as famous as her peers, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton, who took credit for the work that they'd done together. She also liked that Matilda Gage called for the separation of church and state, believing religious doctrine was at the heart of women's oppression. That was a stark contrast to Robert Merton's reliance on the Bible in naming the Matthew effect.

I whipped off this article, and it was sort of a spoof. Here I am taking on the powers that be Robert K. Merton and people, laughing at them a bit, which delighted the editor because he was sort of countercultural in a certain way. They dumped a previous article that was accepted and put mine in like the very next issue. They thought it was a hot potato. And it came out and went worldwide. To hear more about Matilda Gage, the namesake behind the worldwide phenomenon that is the Matilda Effect, we'll leave a link to the first part of this series in the podcast notes.

This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad. If you sold somebody a loaded gun who you knew was in a vulnerable state and they shot themselves. I think it is murder. Just because you're using the internet doesn't mean you get away with murder. I'm Damon Fairless, host of Hunting Warhead. This season, I take you inside the business of suicide. And the places desperate people go when they can't find what they need in the real world.

Hunting the Suicide Salesman. Available now wherever you get your podcasts. While Margaret Rositer's paper received a lot of attention in the academic world, you can be forgiven if you've never heard of the Matilda effect. But the phenomenon it describes women's work being overlooked, minimized, and even misappropriated is all too common. It's been the subject of movies and songs. Tumble out of bed and I stumble to the kitchen

Pour myself a cup of ambition And yon and stretch and try to come to life And in some measure, we have Margaret Roseter and Matilda Gage To thank for providing the awareness and the language To describe the experiences many women have Regardless of where they work. For all, who are we to argue with universal truths expressed by Dolly Parton?

Here's Ideas producer and Dolly fan, Donna Dingw. I do like to think that Dolly, Matilda, and Margaret would get on like the proverbial house on fire. After all, Matilda Gage was a prolific writer, cranking out speeches, newspaper, and journal articles and books throughout her career. Margaret Rossiter was equally prolific as a writer. And Dolly Parton has 3,000 song credits to her name. So far. With me. Matilda and Margaret called out the ways in which women's work has historically been diminished and stolen.

And Dolly fought her own battle on that front. She famously refused to give up publishing rights to her biggest hit to Elvis Presley's manager, Colonel Tom Parker. I am digressing a bit, but only a bit. It's fair to say that all three women were ahead of their time. Matilda's ideas were more liberal than her peers. She called out the church for priests' abuse of women and children in the 1800s. She fought not just for voting rights, but for labor rights, racial equality, indigenous sovereignty, reproductive rights. That led Gloria Steinem to call her the woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time.

Sally Kohlstead says it's no wonder Margaret was inspired by Matilda. She thought, this is a really interesting woman, a little bit underrepresented, a little bit unknown. We all know Elizabeth Cady Stanton. We all know Susan B. Anthony. I mean, Gage was fascinating. Her treatise on women inventors included this line, and I'm quoting, women's scientific education has been grossly neglected, yet some of the most important inventions of the world are due to her.

She was looking for the places where women had apparently been innovative, had not gotten patents or had gotten patents through their husband, and therefore been made invisible. And not until it would have jostom, Cage, was feisty, somewhat controversial, she wrote against Christianity or wrote about Christianity having put women down. And I think Margaret liked the fact that she was a contrarian. But she had also encountered because she lived in upstate New York. She had actually been to Seneca Falls several times, not too far away from Cornell once she got there. And she had also been to Fayetteville and she had visited the House of Matilda Gage, which today is a much more interesting historical site. Margaret, who was an underdog herself, related to Matilda's overlooked legacy, which has been resurrected by activists over the past few decades. Margaret kind of was intrigued, I think, by Matilda Jocelyn Gage, and she decided to call it the Matilda effect, which meant that she was now going to look at and talk about that this is a

big phenomenon. It's not just a single thing like harassment. It's the phenomenon of women getting erased, even though they have done the work. In her papers and books, Margaret talked about practices and systemic biases that led to erasure. With meticulous research, she dispelled the prevailing thinking about women in science, that they didn't exist. History of science is right about great men. So here I was finding this other universe. These women were there.

They were women's colleges. They were struggling. They're not household names. Not only were they there in the early 1900s. They outpaced men in earning advanced degrees. In her 1974 paper, Margaret Rossiter found that 63.3% of the women in her source material had PhDs compared to 46.6% of men. Yet many of those women couldn't find employment to match their expertise. And Margaret saw patterns, women working in museums as lab assistants, teaching at women's colleges with no options to advance, leaving this impression that there weren't many women.

women's scientists, which is why no one seemed to be able to point to a female scientist when Margaret asked about them. And it was this idea that really maybe there was Marie Curie, but that was kind of it. Here's Sally Colstead, Margaret's friend and fellow science historian. Exactly. In fact, that became kind of an interesting mantra as Margaret was doing her research, and she found that a professor at Caltech in writing to one of his colleagues and saying, no, I'm not going to take the student you recommend it. She looks very good. But we're not going to hire a woman unless she's as good as Marie Curie. And, of course, when Margaret reported that in her book,

she had kind of a side comment about, really, there was no one among men at Caltech, who were the equivalent of Marie Curie as well. Margaret also turned her eye to other barriers that kept women out of jobs where they could do research and make a living, namely being married to another scientist. They meet in graduate school. There's room and space for everybody, I guess. He gets a job. She gets pregnant.

They moved to suburbia. Maybe she works in his lab. The university won't let her be a professor. He may not give her credit in his work. He doesn't complain. She's stoic. But maybe in private she does. He gets a great obituary, maybe the Nobel Prize.

Maybe the daughter writes something to the New York Times that mother deserved a share of the Nobel Prize. That may sound like an abstract generalization, but it's a true story. American chemist Isabella Carl taught herself x-ray crystallography. Her work was essential. yet the Nobel Prize went to her husband. To be fair, he did lobby for her inclusion, and her daughter did write that letter,

saying, my father never actually did a crystal structure in his life. Margaret also exposed how rules against nepotism in academia worked against women, something Sally Colstead experienced firsthand. At one point, my husband, who's also an academic, was being interviewed for a job, and we were kind of looking to see if there's anything else for me, And it looked like there might have been something for me. And then suddenly he ran into a dean who said, well, I'm sorry. You know, we can't have two people.

And he said, she's not even in my field. But they had this sense that having two people in an institution of were married would somehow lead to some conflict of interest or conformity of interest maybe. Right. And clearly that would work against women more than men. No, that went without saying in my mind. Yeah, you're right. There was also the siloing of disciplines, what Margaret called segregational hierarchy,

how certain fields were more suitable for women and others effectively off limits. Margaret took that on in her second book, which covered the period from 1940 to 1972. Now, home economics, I don't know if you took it in high school, whatever it was, but home economics got a name by the 50s, which was kind of like, what was it called, the wedding ring class. You learn to cook, you learn to clean, and now you could become a good wife. And her point was, in part, that Ellen Swallow Richards, who had founded that field in the 1880s at MIT as a kind of chemistry class for women. Richards called home economics because she wanted people to see that it was really a scientific field.

It was economics. It was how do you master various kinds of phenomenon and pull it together so that you have a place, for example, of nutrition. And so the women who graduated or who took those degrees were women who went on to run hospitals, were women who went on to teach that in essentially all of the women's colleges. And they were learning science that they could then use and have careers because they weren't allowed in some of the mainstream fields. Believe it or not, Home Act was kind of badass. So Home Economics early on was an activist place for women.

In the 1950s, across the country, because Home Economics was. basically in every university, there was a change in that post-war period. And we know something about what went on in the 1950s for women in general. As the baby boom happened, those women and in those departments were put a set aside, and almost all the departments across the country were headed by men. And they were the ones who said, home economics, that's a good place for us to teach women how to be better wives. Sally Colstead says, well, Margaret was putting name to all of this. She was also doing quieter work that was just as revolutionary. The truth is they both were. Well, we were coming of age in the late 60s, early 70s. And so we're reading things like

Germain Greer, the female eunuch. We were reading things like Robin Morgan's sister, who it is powerful. Sally and Margaret were teaching courses on the history of women in science despite a lack of support from higher ups. And within the profession, they were staking new ground, setting up the Women's Caucus of the History of Science Society in 1972 and the International Commission on Women in the History of Science, Tech, and Medicine a decade later. Margaret also had a 10-year run as the editor of ISIS, the official journal of the History of Science Society. There, she mentored women and others whose work might have otherwise been overlooked. Margaret saw that position as editor, as one that made her position.

positioned to be influential in the field broadly, but also to pay attention to individuals. And so I know that she very often stood up for people whose articles were not yet polished. And she'd say, I think that's worth something. I want to see if we can get that article to something else because this is a person whose English is not very good because they're coming from maybe a smaller country that didn't really have the kind of staff or the kind of libraries that other people had. And she'd work with individuals to try and get their art. articles in print.

She helped found the Women's Caucus of the History of Science Society that I was really fortunate to be a leader of in the last couple years. And so I think we talked a lot about what does it mean to do history now and to be a historian and a woman historian maybe or someone interested in women in history. And how do we kind of, you know, continue the tradition of women and scholars like Margaret and also, you know, update our advocacy and make sure that we're still working on behalf of people in the profession or working to be advocates. My name is Ellen Abrams. I am an assistant professor at the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto.

I came across Professor Ellen Abrams' name when I read an obituary for Margaret in a journal. In the comments section, Ellen and dozens of others shared memories of Margaret and her impact, It was my luck that Ellen had recently taken a new position at the University of Toronto. I know that you wrote that Margaret was one of two women who have been central to your work. Can you just tell me a little bit about Margaret's influence on you? Yeah. So Margaret was, like I was saying, a professor nearing retirement when I joined the Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell as a graduate student, one of the most, well, known faculty in the history of science. And so I knew of her, but I really, I got to know her in the offices. She and I were often two people who were working sort of odd hours, so late nights

and weekends. And so I got to have a lot of kind of informal chats with her. I mean, speaking with Margaret, she had sort of an encyclopedic knowledge of the history of science and the profession of the history of science. And so talking to her sometimes felt like drinking from a fire hose. Like she just had so much to say about so many things. And I would kind of frantically afterwards go look things up, you know, always kind of had her door open when she was in the office, would ask what I was working on. And then if she knew of any sort of small grants, she helped me learn about a travel grant to go to some of my, you know, earlier conferences. She always was kind of trying to make connections to my work or what I was doing.

which I appreciated. And there are direct connections, bridges really, between Margaret's work and Ellen's. You've described a moment when you encountered a woman who you saw as an sort of overqualified researcher, you know, when you were a graduate student in the same department that Professor Rossiter was in at Cornell. I was interested in how the American Mathematical Society was growing and developing and what it meant to be a researcher in the U.S. at that time. And there were just these really kind of cynical and funny letters that I was encountering in the records of the one of the leaders of the American Mathematical Society. And they were written by a woman, Carolyn used to Seeley.

But they were, of course, being held in the Roland George Dwight Richardson papers. I realized that this really snarky and funny woman had a PhD in mathematics. but had been hired as sort of a clerical assistant for the American Mathematical Society. And so I started kind of trying to find out as much as I could. I mean, she also continued to do mathematical research while she was working full-time doing this kind of clerical work. You know, Margaret's work really helped me understand. This woman is hired, you know, has a PhD in mathematics, but rarely at that time did a PhD in one of the sciences lead to full-time research work. So a lot of women ended up with full-time teaching loads or as calculators or as assistants.

And so once I kind of encountered this woman, I already had sort of a baseline way to understand her career in a way that I probably wouldn't have if I wasn't already familiar with all of these trends that Margaret had pulled out. What mostly kind of drew me in to Margaret's work was sort of how analytically fascinating it is, right? Like I think it's really politically important. I think it's really important for how we think about both science and history. But I also think it's just really interesting the way she draws out and kind of is able to articulate these kind of broader systemic things that are happening. The broad approach might explain how the material. The Matilda effect has moved beyond scientific circles and is applied to business, art, literature, and all of academia. And if you need further proof, it can be found, of course, on TikTok on this very droll, anonymous account.

The Matilda effect is when women do the work, but men take the credit. For example, Dr. Rosalind Franklin, she took the first image of DNA. Two dudes stole it, got famous and received the Nobel Prize. She got cancer and died. Gabrielle Colette, best-selling French novelists. Her husband locked her in a room and forced her to write while he took credit. Ada Lovelace invented coding for a machine that didn't even exist yet. She was dismissed as a glorified secretary.

Margaret Keane painted the creepy big-eye portraits. Her husband claimed them for years until she proved they were hers by painting live in court. Lisa Maitner figured out nuclear fission. Her male colleague got the Nobel Prize. Then the men used her discovery to create the atomic bomb. a happy women's history month. Please like and subscribe before a man does it first. Beyond understanding what the Matilda effect is, the work that Margaret did beginning in the 1970s and which Matilda Gage did in the 1870s was about writing erased women back into history.

And in that sense, they started a tradition that has a very long tale. My name is Elsa Holland. I'm a poet and historian and a co-author. with Jo Bell and Tanya Hirschman of On This Day She, putting women back into history one day at a time. Okay. And that book, as I understand it, actually started with a calendar. Is that right? Yes. I was given a calendar for a Christmas present, and it was one where you tore off a sheet for each day. And on each day, there was a historical fact linked to that date. I noticed that there weren't very many women

mentioned. In fact, that the first woman was mentioned sometime towards, the end of February. And then I noticed that by the end of July, there'd only been 20 women mentioned. And, yeah, this provoked a rage in me, which I then shared with two writer friends, Joe and Tanya, and we agreed that we should do something about this.

And one of the things that was in our power and within our time to do something about was to set up a Twitter account. And so we did that, and we ran that for over six years, posting every day about a woman, or group of women from around the world, from all different time periods, from all different disciplines, from, you know, arts to mathematics to swimming. We tried to find a date that

was important to them in terms of achievement, so not a birth or death date, but a date that they got a patent on an invention or a date that they published something or a date that they'd been voted into power. Matilda Jocelyn Gage was one of the women featured on their account, and the hope was that her story and others like it would become less a novel factoid and more common knowledge. Our aim was to get this knowledge that was there and make it common knowledge rather than specialized knowledge so that everybody could know about a mathematician from the 6th century

or, you know, an explorer from the 19th century who'd gone to South America and collected flowers or drawn butterflies or whatever it was. So we wanted women who had, we kind of developed this phrase, engaged with the world in such a way as to change it. Just to go back to this idea of something being common knowledge versus specialized knowledge,

what does that mean, especially as it applies to the historical record? Well, I guess part of law what it means is that once something becomes common knowledge, it's more difficult to forget. It's more difficult to be suppressed as knowledge because everybody holds that knowledge. I did want to talk a little bit about Joanna Russ,

who was a celebrated American science fiction writer, feminist, activist, and the book that you mentioned, it's How to Suppress Women's Writing. I think it came out in the 80s, As well as Margaret, did you pay homage to that in the introduction to your book? So can you just sort of characterize what that book was? I bought that book as a first year undergraduate, a women's press publication, which was obviously a big thing in the sort of 80s.

And it was absolutely inspiring and mind-blowing for me, this naming of the way that women's writing had been put down, the sort of literature equivalent. to the Matilda effect, if you like. And Matilda Jocelyn Gage is the one who really arrested my attention because she says, men have stolen everything from women.

They steal our time, our energy, our concern, our self-esteem, our self-respect, our achievements, our ideas. They steal what we do and what we work at for themselves. And Joanna Ross says it all so clearly that the bit that we pay homage to is actually the cover of the book, book. I've actually got it here because I thought I might need it. So she put, she didn't write it,

but if it's clear she did the deed, she wrote it but she shouldn't have. She wrote it, but look what she wrote about. She wrote it, but she wrote only one of it, et cetera, et cetera. And it just came to me and I thought that it's exactly the same as the sort of stuff that we've been talking about, but in terms of women in history and not she wrote it, but she did it. She did it, but. Margaret referenced Joanna Russ in her paper on the Matilda Effect in 1993. She noted that the cover of Russ's book, which Elsa was just reading from, presented a systematic summary and critique of the many ways women's contributions to literature

have been consciously or not undervalued over the centuries. She thus provides a good summary of the many ways in which accomplishments can be and have been assessed, but then diminished and dismissed. Once you've read that and once you've seen it, you can't stop seeing it. And so when you see it or when you notice it, you don't feel that you're somehow kind of making it up. So I think it's absolutely key that analysis of how women's history has, been, you know, either not recorded or then recorded and torn up or recorded and remembered for a little bit and then suppressed again, because otherwise, it's a kind of gaslighting going on. Elsa Holland is now a bit embarrassed to admit that when they took on the book project,

which features 365 women for each day of the year, she was afraid they might not find enough material. You didn't have trouble finding enough Margaret Rossiter. You know, she wrote three volumes of women in science. And she just said, the more I look, the more I found. Yes. And I think that's the point that if we think, oh, it's only going to be one woman, we've been lucky to find that woman. And then we stop looking. Well, yeah, then we're only going to find one. But if you keep looking, there are more and more and more. And what's so lovely I found about it as well, that so often, you know, you find these networks, you know, each one of them is helping a group of them to survive in that field. So yes, so it becomes,

what's the word, exponential. So yes, oh my goodness, no, we didn't have any difficulty finding enough at all. And we could have gone on for ages if we hadn't run out of time and energy. Journalist Katie Hafner has run into the same problem, if you can call it that, in her work with the podcast, Lost Women of Science. We have a database of 4005. women. Wow. We would never get through the ball. You do outreach in the podcast and you ask people to write in and look in their own basements. And has that merited stories for you? Have things come out of that? Oh my gosh. So many stories. People write to us about their great aunt and their grandmother and new ones come to us every day for our database. We used to get little cards from people.

And some of them would say grandma had a PhD from Heidelberg and Germany and psychology. And, you know, back in the 1890s, you know, keep on with this. You know, a lot of what we've been talking about is kind of the legacy of these women. And I wonder about how should we remember Margaret Rossiter? Well, I mean, Trailblazer is sort of a cliche, but absolutely and so dogged and so just be persistent. like Margaret, you know, be Margaret. Get in the car, get on a plane. Like, if you can, I go to the Library of Congress, look in boxes.

Okay, open it up and see what the file say. Yeah, so, oh, my gosh. Wow. What is it? And that's what she did. So do the Margaret thing, short of being a hoarder. But in a way, thank goodness she was a hoarder, right? I collected everything and I kept everything. You really did.

Let me tell me there was nothing there, so I'd go find all these interesting things. She did, and that's the reason that there is a prize called the Rossiter Prize in the History of Science Society, because it became very obvious when we were giving out a prize for the best article or the best book, that Margaret's name on it would carry a certain kind of resonance and also recognize what she had done. So there are prizes in her name. write the kind of traditional ways that we remember someone. I think, you know, there's other great ways I would like to continue things like assigning her texts and courses, using her work or continuing to remember her work, and sort of what

does that teach us about how to do history. So beyond the topic of women in science, which I think and I hope and I'm guessing will continue to generate more, more research. research and more work, and therefore honor and remember Margaret. She, in a sense, forced the bigger field to look for where are the women? What are they contributing? How are they contributing? And moreover, she was recognized by women who are today in the sciences who said, huh, I didn't know that about my past.

I didn't know other women had experienced what I'm now experiencing. She was really kind of, maybe for lack of a better term, kind of a missionary as she sort of distributed what she had learned. It's an archive, yeah. It's an archive. You're sitting on an archive. It's been 30, 40 years of material. She had a vision of the kind of history we should know about women, and she put that

in place. But I couldn't resist. Okay, sorry, this is a confidential letter. There was this whole story there. Serious consideration should be given to the advisability of giving a place to a girl's student who may during her after her college career, married and be taken out of circulation

so far as her technical value society is concerned. The business of raising a family takes from five to fourteen years out of minimum. Oh, my gosh. And I just think the more you look, the more you find. Can I look at this box behind you? Oh, my gosh.

18th century. That's what we started my class. 18th century. And that was the conclusion to our episode titled The Matilda Effect. If you'd like to know more about Matilda Gage, you can find the story of the forgotten suffragist on our website or in your podcast feed.

Both programs were produced by Donna Dingwall with technical production by Sam McNulty. Special thanks to Katie Hafner, the producer and host of the Lost Women of Science podcast for use of their interview with Margaret Rosader. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Nicola Luxchic is the senior producer. Greg Kelly is the executive producer. producer of ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad. You've been listening to The Matilda Effect. If you like what you heard, find more episodes of ideas wherever you get your podcasts

and follow their feeds so you don't miss an episode. And for anyone interested, we will include a podcast link to the story of suffragist Matilda Gage in today's episode description. Thanks for listening. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.