Lost Women of Science
In December 1788, the astronomer royal, Dr Nevil Maskelyne, Fellow of the Royal Society, wrote to 38-year-old Caroline Herschel congratulating her on being “the first woman in the history of the world” to discover not one, but two new comets. Her celebrity would, as the director of the Paris Observatory noted, “shine down through the ages”.
Dr Maskelyne hoped Caroline Herschel did not feel isolated among the male community of astronomers in Britain and “for the benefit of terrestrial astronomy, will not think of taking a flight”, at least not until her achievements were recognised by his colleagues in the Royal Society. Curiously, no such recognition was forthcoming.
Although it was founded in 1660, women were not permitted by statute to become fellows of the Royal Society until 285 years later, in 1945. The re-examination of the Royal Society archives during its 350th birthday has thrown new and unexpected light on the lost women of science. It emerges that women had a far more fruitful, if sometimes conflicted, relationship with the Royal Society than has previously been supposed.
Indeed, the Royal Society archives suggest something so fundamental that it may require a subtle revision of the standard history of science in Britain. This is the previously unsuspected degree to which women were a catalyst in the early discussion of the social role of science. More even than their male colleagues, they had a gift for imagining the human impact of scientific discovery. Precisely by being excluded from the fellowship of the society, they saw the life of science in a wider world. They raised questions about its duties and its moral responsibilities, its promise and its menace, in ways we can appreciate far more fully today.
The first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society was Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, in May 1667. There were protests from the all-male fellows – the scandal was reported – and the dangerous experiment was not repeated for another couple of centuries.
Margaret Cavendish later raised issues that have become perennial. She mocked the dry, empirical approach of the fellows, violently attacked the practice of vivisection and wondered what rational explanation could be given for women’s exclusion from learned bodies. She questioned the Baconian notion of relentless mechanical progress in her polemic Observations on Experimental Philosophy (1668). She also produced arguably the first-ever sciencefiction story, The Blazing World (1666), which considered the alternative futures of science. All this earned her the sobriquet “Mad Madge”.
The first original paper that might be considered as part of a scientific research programme conducted by a woman and published in the Royal Society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions, concerned extra-terrestrial phenomena. It was by Caroline Herschel (sister to William Herschel, the great Romantic astronomer) in August 1786. Caroline Herschel’s speciality was discovering comets, of which she found eight at a time when fewer than 30 were known. Her brother was immensely proud of her, built her special telescopes and helped her to obtain the first state salary for a female astronomer in Britain. Caroline Herschel also kept an observational journal for more than 30 years. It is one of the earliest records of how science actually gets done, its secret tribulations as well as its public triumphs.
By the turn of the century, major science was indeed done by women. Heartha Ayrton was producing highly original work on the electric arc. Although rejected as a fellow in 1902, she was the first woman to read her own paper at a Royal Society meeting two years later and was awarded the Royal Society’s Hughes medal in 1906. Slowly the tide was turning.
These remarkable women had already added a third dimension to the whole scientific enterprise as originally conceived by Lord Bacon, and by the founding fathers of the Royal Society. The two primary aims of science had long been established as the discovery of the nature of physical reality “by experiment and proof”, and the applications of such discoveries “for the relief of man’s estate”. The third, fundamental imperative is that science should disperse the seeds of knowledge to all and as imaginatively as possible. Until science knowledge was explained, explored and widely understood, the work of scientists would always be incomplete.
Richard Holmes, The Guardian Weekly