A Twisted Tale: Women in the Physical Sciences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract

Dismissed as inconsequential before the 1970s, the history of the contributions of women to the physical sciences has become a topic of considerable research in the last two decades. Best known of the women physical scientists are the three “great exceptions” from central Europe – Sonya Kovalevsky, Marie Sklodowska Curie, and Lise Meitner– but in recent years, other women and other countries and areas have been receiving attention, and more is to be expected in the future. The overall pattern for most women in these fields, the nonexceptions, has been one of ghettoization and subsequent attempts to overcome barriers. PRECEDENTS Before 1800 there were several self-taught and privately-tutored “learned ladies” in the physical sciences. Included were the English self-styled “natural philosopher” Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), who wrote books and in the 1660s visited the Royal Society of London, which had not elected her to membership; the German astronomer Maria Winkelmann Kirch (1670– 1720), who worked for the then-new Berlin Academy of Sciences in the early 1700s; the Frenchwoman Emilie du Chatelet (1706–1749), who translated Newton’s Principia into French before her premature death in childbirth in 1749; the Italians Laura Bassi (1711–1778), famed professor of physics at the University of Bologna, and Maria Agnesi (1718–1799), a mathematician in Bologna; Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova (1743–1810), the director of the Imperial Academy of Sciences in Russia; and Marie Anne Lavoisier (1758– 1836), who helped her husband Antoine with his work in the Chemical Revolution.

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