 |
Hardcover, 264 pages Borrowed from the libraryPublished 2009 Read November 2018 |
by Claire G. Jones
Claire Jones's monograph looks at the opportunities and cultural transformations that affected women in science and mathematics around the end of the nineteenth century. This was the era of professionalization and institutionalization, processes which made it harder for women to practice science and mathematics: for example, there were (proportionally) more women researched in mathematics in the late nineteenth century than in the 1960s. Jones explores these questions primarily by following the trajectory of two different female researchers: the electrical engineer Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923, stepmother of the author of The Call, which follows a fictional female chemist before and during the Great War) and the mathematician Grace Chisholm Young (1868-1914). Jones places Ayrton's and Young's work at opposite ends of a spectrum from one another, with Young performing the purely intellectual work of mathematics, and Ayrton in the hands-on world of engineering.
Jones is good at exploring the complexities of these issue and not oversimplifying. At the same time mathematics was seen as more feminine because of its passivity and disconnection from the world (4-5, 18), it was also seen as being too intellectually rigorous for the female capacity (9-10, 18). You might not encounter anything inappropriate as a woman studying mathematics (unlike in history!) but studying it might also sap your vital energy (18).
Grace Young refused to get married because she thought celibacy was needed to make it as a career woman (43), but two decades later, she argued that women needed the superior minds of men (36). She wrote a book called Mother Nature's Girl about how women served the nation by being mothers...* but she left the raising of her own children to her sister-in-law (52)! This is because she was serving her husband; he was trying to make it as a "genius" essentially, and he would could up with the big ideas, and she would do the mathematical gruntwork require to prove them (44, 106). Most of his publications were their joint work, but because he was the one with more professional opportunities thanks to his sex, her name was often omitted (96, 109-10).
Men ought to have practical goals in science, but Hertha Ayrton was criticized as being too practical; women were supposed to love science for its own sake (89). Much of the issue was that science was professionalizing, which meant demonstrating a certain level of seriousness: but the inclusion of middle-class women connoted amateurism (83) and domesticity (112). Women were able to participate in the laboratory when it was in the home, but as science moved out of the home and into the professional apace, "women were marooned in the domestic sphere" (118), left behind in a location where either their science would not be taken seriously, or where it could not be done at all. Ayrton lost access to professional laboratories when her husband (a professor) died; she had just been using the laboratories at Central Technical College, where he worked (130).
This just scratches the surface of what Jones uses the experience of Ayrton and Young to reveal. There are times the book feels like it leans too heavily into minutiae, but overall, it provides a complicated, fascinating, interesting, and useful portrait of important aspects of a key transitional moment in the history of science. I look forward to using it as a lens to supplement my interpretation of the small range of novels from this period that feature women of science; I can definitely see its applications to both Wells's Ann Veronica (which Jones mentions) and Collins's Heart and Science (which she does not).
* She was, in fact, an admirer of Sarah Grand, and a proponent of eugenic feminism.
No comments:
Post a Comment