Anna Reser - Forces of Nature: The Women who Changed Science
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From the ancient world to the present women have been critical to the progress of science, yet their importance is overlooked, their stories lost, distorted, or actively suppressed. Forces of Nature sets the record straight and charts the fascinating history of womens discoveries in science. In the ancient and medieval world, women served as royal physicians and nurses, taught mathematics, studied the stars, and practiced midwifery. As natural philosophers, physicists, anatomists, and botanists, they were central to the great intellectual flourishing of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment. More recently women have been crucially involved in the Manhattan Project, pioneering space missions and much more. Despite their record of illustrious achievements, even today very few women win Nobel Prizes in science. In this thoroughly researched, authoritative work, you will discover how women have navigated a male-dominated scientific culture showing themselves to be pioneers and trailblazers, often without any recognition at all. Included in the book are the stories of: Hypatia of Alexandria, one of the earliest recorded female mathematicians Maria Cunitz who corrected errors in Keplers work Emmy Noether who discovered fundamental laws of physics Vera Rubin one of the most influential astronomers of the twentieth century Jocelyn Bell Burnell who helped discover pulsars
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Forces of Nature
The Women Who
Changed Science
Changed Science
Anna Reser & Leila McNeill
Contents
Introduction
Reading Womens Silence in the History of Science
WOMEN IN THE HISTORY OF SCIENCE: REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING
Writing the history of women is often an encounter with absence and silence. In the history of science in particular, the written record simply does not reflect the number of women who have always participated in science and medicine, nor does it reflect the complexity of their stories. In many times and places, it was seen as inappropriate for women to participate in public life, particularly in the Western world, so there are simply fewer records of women in general. Access to public life confers value and status and makes a persons accomplishments, and even the basic facts of their life, worth recording. Historically, women have been denied this access, and along with it a more complete record of their lives.
In the sciences, this lack of a record is compounded by the insular nature of scientific communities. Women were often not allowed into the institutional spaces that create and keep written records, such as professional societies and scientific journals. The challenge and reward of writing womens history is reading these gaps in the record for clues to the ways that women have been erased from history, which is sometimes all we can definitively say about their lives.
The farther back in time one searches, the more difficult it becomes to locate written accounts of the lives of women in science. Very few written records of any kind exist from ancient times, and the relatively low status of women in different societies has impacted the likelihood that they will be mentioned in such records. There are, however, records about a few women whose lives and work included intentional and careful study of the natural world.
THE PURSUIT OF NATURAL KNOWLEDGE IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
The earliest textual records of any culture come from the ancient city-states of Mesopotamia in the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Enheduanna (circa 22852250 BCE), the very first author whose name was recorded, was a poet and priestess who lived in the ancient city of Ur. She was the daughter of the king Sargon, who likely made her a high priestess to solidify his political power. As high priestess, Enheduannas writings, preserved on clay tablets, lent her great authority. As part of her management of the temple in Ur, she oversaw the agricultural activity on the temple lands. Because Enheduanna was also responsible for organizing religious rituals throughout the year, she must have managed a complex liturgical calendar based on the phases of the moon.
Archaeologists first discovered evidence of Enheduanna in the 1920s when excavating the site of Ur. There they uncovered a stone disk carved on one side with a relief of a temple scene depicting a woman in elaborate clothing, flanked by what are probably male attendants, performing a ritual on an altar set before a ziggurat (a rectangular stepped tower.) An inscription on the other side of the disk identifies the central figure as the priestess of the moon god Nanna:
Ancient astronomers studied the motions of the planets, named the stars and constellations, and predicted lunar and solar eclipses eclipses.
Enheduanna, true lady of Nanna, wife of Nanna,
Daughter of Sargon, King of all, in the temple of
Inanna [of Ur, a dais you built (and) Dais,
Table of heaven (an)] you called it.
Daughter of Sargon, King of all, in the temple of
Inanna [of Ur, a dais you built (and) Dais,
Table of heaven (an)] you called it.
Later discoveries of Enheduannas writings, which include long poems to Nanna, and to her personal goddess Inanna, and more than forty Temple hymns, have made her an important figure in the study of ancient Sumerian literature and culture. To historians of science, the record of Enheduannas life offers evidence of womens participation in the observation of nature even in the earliest written record of human society. Women have always known nature.
Enheduannas life was revealed through great effort by archaeologists and linguists, working with very little material. The task of recovering womens histories becomes easier in periods when writing was more commonplace and where more of these records have survived the centuries. Perhaps the most famous scientific woman of the ancient world was Hypatia of Alexandria (circa 335405 CE), a fourth-century Greek mathematician and philosopher who lived in the city of Alexandria nearly 3,000 years after Enheduanna. Unlike those of the famous men of Greek philosophy and science, no known copies of Hypatias own scientific writings exist. Instead, historians have pieced together her biography from what others have written about her and contextual information about the larger world of Greek institutions of learning. Hypatia was the daughter of Theon of Alexandria, a mathematician and astronomer, and she probably received her training in those disciplines at the Museum of Alexandria, of which Theon was the head. She later became the director of the Neoplatonic school at Alexandria when she was in her thirties.
Hypatias story consists of series of textual records that extend from around the time she lived and into the nineteenth century, all of which are scattered across different types of texts, in different languages and from different cultures. It is remarkable that record of her existence survived so much translation and transference across the centuries, but it presents a challenge for historians. What conclusions can be drawn from this textual record, if not about Hypatias own life, then about the role of women in Greek society and learned culture? Only recently have scholars looked to Hypatias story to uncover information about her scientific and mathematical activities. Her prominence in the written historical record was at first due to the violent circumstances of her death, which were likely entangled with Alexandrian politics.6 Part of the problem lies in the assumptions that scholars have made about who participated in public life in the ancient world, and who was able or willing to engage in scientific inquiry.
Instead of simply accepting that there are spaces where women will not be found, we should be asking why a woman might not appear in a particular sphere and who prevented her from being there.
Stories like that of Hypatia, whose life and work were preserved for reasons beyond her scientific endeavors, point to a much richer world of knowledge making and learning for women in the ancient period than is often assumed. It is likely that there were many women practicing astronomy, learning and teaching mathematics, and deeply engaged with philosophy, but records of their lives have simply not survived. What of the women who searched the skies and wrote about the natural world who did not suffer the same fate as Hypatia? We may never know their names, but the project of recovering the place of women in science benefits from our informed assumption that they existed and that their scientific practices, like Hypatias, were held in the same high regard as those of their male contemporaries.
ABSENT FROM HISTORY
In the cases of Enheduanna and Hypatia, historians are fortunate to have a record of their lives and work, however fragmentary or limited they may be. But how should we go about recovering the stories of women who left no written record and whose existence may not even be known? Historians have developed methods for researching historical actors who left few written records. Sometimes, as in the case of Hypatia, a biography can be pieced together from the writings of others. This is especially true of the medieval and early modern periods where there are simply more written records of all kinds. In the case of early modern Europe, for example, scholars have found evidence of women whose lives and work intersect with the sciences by studying images and examining the catalogs of private libraries that belonged to wealthy women to see if they owned scientific books. Women were frequently in correspondence with more well-known scientists, and sometimes women are listed in the dedications of scientific texts written by men. These records are important sources of information about women who may not have had the opportunity to author their own scientific works but were still very much involved in scientific life.
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