Many women I know get their dress commented on, or their general appearance, rather than the excellence – or otherwise – of their science. I’ve yet to hear someone comment on a man’s choice, or absence, of tie, or the state of his hair. It’s a trivial example but, alongside other subtle forms of denigration, such as not using a woman’s title in an introduction while according that privilege to a man, it is intensely frustrating. It is also nothing new.
The very fact that Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (shown here), was known as Mad Madge back in her lifetime in the seventeenth century, immediately conveys a sense of how people reacted to her. She dared to stand out – both in dress and activities. She wrote. Copiously and under her own name. These were not suitable female tracts about domesticity or religion, but about much larger issues including those relating to science (or natural philosophy as it was known back then). She was an atomist; she experimented with lenses and microscopes during her exile in France and formed her own opinion about their utility; she worried about animal experimentation and vivisection (notably by William Harvey) when this was a barely considered issue. She wrote about all these things and set out a vision of an alternative world in what might be said to be the first book of science fiction, The Blazing World (1666). In this book she had critical comments about the rather newly formed Royal Society and its Fellows, whom she satirised as ‘bird men’, ‘fox men’ and ‘spider men’. It is perhaps not surprising that when, a year later, she visited the Royal Society (the visit was only approved with great reluctance), the general view of her was damning.
Samuel Pepys, who would soon assume the role of the young Society’s President, referred to her as a ‘mad, conceited ridiculous woman’ and commented that her dress was ‘so antick…I do not like her at all’. There is no doubt she chose to dress very eccentrically, including sometimes in male attire. But, then as now, it ought to be possible to go beyond superficial matters such as clothing and focus on the content of what is being said or written. Cavendish wrote a lot. She wanted to be remembered by posterity (as she now is), explicitly writing early on ‘all I desire is fame’, and continuing to hope, mainly unsuccessfully, for her ideas to be given serious thought. She simply went against all society’s rules for how a woman, even a duchess, should comport herself.
Being eccentric was one way of attracting attention, but also not one that was likely to ensure that that attention was serious. I’ve learned a lot about Margaret Cavendish over the years, having partaken in two panel discussions about her life and impact. Firstly on Free Thinking (although on that recording, most of my remarks were excised, presumably in order to reduce the length of the programme); secondly in a panel discussion last autumn about the marginalisation of women in Philosophy and Science, with The Philosopher (video here). In both cases Francesca Peacock was also on the panel and, if you want to know more about Cavendish, Peacock’s book Pure Wit, describes her life in lively detail. Or, if short of time, a chapter about her is included in Richard Holmes’ book, The Long Pursuit.
Why have I chosen now to bring all this up? Partly because I’ve been asked to write something for the Royal Society’s celebrations of 80 years since the first women were elected to the Fellowship and I wanted to include a few words about Cavendish’s ill-fated visit to the Society as the first woman to be allowed in (but then had to trim it in the interests of length). But also because of something said to me recently by a visitor to Cambridge about her daughter. This young woman had just embarked on a university course related to Physics and was finding her environment far from congenial. It seemed that the men she was paired with simply took over, elbowed her out of the way, when it came to practical work. ‘But’, the mother said, ‘she’s a feisty little thing.’ I felt indignant on the daughter’s behalf that this was what it took to survive, in 2026, on a Physics-related course. Whereas, around the time Yale first admitted women and Eileen Pollack found the Physics course unwelcoming, as described in her 2015 book, The Only Woman in the Room, about her time at Yale in the mid 1970’s, that could be forgiven, perhaps, as consistent with the fact Yale hadn’t really adjusted to women on campus. But now? Really?
Women wanting to pursue a Physics-related career should not need to be feisty to survive – or eccentric, or have their dress referred to or any of the other indignities both Cavendish and Pollack, some centuries later, had to endure. We need women of all dispositions in our workplace, not just the ones who dare to stand up for their corner. It is depressing to feel that our university labs are still so often hostile, and whoever is in charge of them, be they professors or PhD students, don’t think it is important enough to intervene when a woman is being patronised or bullied (on the limited information I have about this particular case, I don’t know which, but neither is acceptable).
What will it take for women to feel at home in a Physics Lab? We don’t only want the ‘feisty’ to be the ones who survive. I recall something Curt Rice said to me twelve years ago ‘Put a single woman in a group of men’, he said, ‘and she will feel uncomfortable and awkward. Put a single man in a group of women and he will feel in charge.’ (The full blogpost in which I refer to this is here; the word feisty appears there too.) Clearly, we need men to feel less at home, less entitled, less ‘in charge’. And if the men in the room aren’t able to act appropriately, it also needs a watchful supervisory eye and determined intervention.
