{"id":6933,"date":"2025-11-23T11:19:50","date_gmt":"2025-11-23T11:19:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=6933"},"modified":"2025-11-23T11:19:50","modified_gmt":"2025-11-23T11:19:50","slug":"where-were-the-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2025\/11\/23\/where-were-the-women\/","title":{"rendered":"Where Were the Women?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I know that many people feel the Royal Society is a stuffy, white male institution, unwelcoming to women and other minorities, but I cannot agree. It may have had a long history of excluding women, but no more and, in my own personal experience, not over the past couple of decades at least. This year they are celebrating 80 years since the first women \u2013 Katherine Lonsdale<\/a> and Marjory Stevenson<\/a> \u2013 were elected with a series of events. Much more about these women and related events can be found out here<\/a>. As part of that celebration, I attended a one-day meeting regarding historical perspectives. There will be further events in the coming months, including the unveiling of further portraits of women. For the current celebrations, they have acquired, on loan, the well-known painting of Caroline Herschel. There is no doubt the images around the building favour the male, but less so than when I was elected. Portraits take time to produce (not to mention are expensive), but in the short term there is also an excellent exhibition of photos of current women scientists that has been created for this year\u2019s celebrations.<\/p>\n

The meeting celebrated women active in science-related areas over the centuries, starting with Emilie du Ch\u00e2tele<\/a>t, in a series of vignettes. In my own book Not Just for the Boys<\/a><\/em> (now available in paperback too!), I included some brief accounts of some women from the past, including du Ch\u00e2telet and Herschel, but I learned about a number of others whose names I\u2019d not come across before this week. I\u2019ve written in the past<\/a> that, unlike female composers, where more and more from the past are receiving current attention<\/a>, I didn\u2019t expect many female scientists to emerge from history to claim a place in the scientific record, but perhaps I need to change my views, certainly as regards from the nineteenth century on. I believe in due course the recording of the meeting will be put online, so others can check who these women are.<\/p>\n

\"Mary<\/a>My illustration is of Lady Mary Montagu Wortley, with her splendid turban\/hat. She spent a decade in (what is now) Turkey when her husband was Ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, and there came across the local habit of inoculation against smallpox. In the harems and Turkish baths frequented only by women, she could see that, unlike herself and so many of her British compatriots, the skins of Turkish women were not scarred from the effects of smallpox. She became convinced of the power of the practice in providing good protection against the disease that killed so many back home (including her brother and nearly herself), and disfigured many more. When she returned to England, she was vocal in support of the practice, and had her own daughter inoculated (her son had been inoculated back in Turkey). For these actions she was much reviled, including by the medical profession.<\/p>\n

Although not a scientist in the modern meaning of the word, she had studied <\/a>how the practice had been carried out in Turkey, not by medics but by more lowly folk. She noted they were careful to introduce only tiny amounts into the patient and then isolate them from others as a mild form of the disease took hold. In contrast, the medical profession in England, even when carrying out an inoculation, believed purging and bleeding were what needed to accompany the incision, not isolation, with predictable results. However, the royal family in due course inoculated their own children, which conferred a degree of respectability on the practice.\u00a0 By introducing the practice into Western Europe, \u00a0she undoubtedly will have saved many lives. It was another 75 years before Edward Jenner came up with the idea of vaccination using cowpox rather than smallpox itself.<\/p>\n

Let me single out one other woman from the many discussed:\u00a0 Eleanor Ormerod<\/a> (1828-1901). She was a so-called \u2018economic entomologist\u2019, in other words someone who studied pests which attacked crops to economic disadvantage. She built up an enormous circle of correspondents, creating what we might these days call a group of citizen scientists. She was much more formally a scientist than Montagu, including being appointed consulting entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society and lecturer at the Royal Agricultural College in Cirencester. She also had something of a global reputation, winning awards from, for instance, both Russia and France. She became the first woman to be elected to Fellowship of the Meteorological Society in 1878 and the first woman to be awarded an Honorary Degree from the University of Edinburgh<\/a> (1900), shortly before her death.\u00a0 Nevertheless, she was very conscious of being largely excluded from the male scientific establishment and hers is not a well-known name. Apparently, Edinburgh\u2019s cloud computing network is known as Eleanor, and I\u2019m wondering how many of their undergraduates \u2013 or staff \u2013 have any idea why.<\/p>\n

The day ended with Stella Butler<\/a> and myself talking about what has changed since the first women FRS\u2019s were elected in 1945 (three years, as I have to remind myself ruefully, before my own university even got to the point of awarding full degrees to women). Stella has just published a book Breaking the Glass Ceiling of Science<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>which tells the story of the first eleven women elected. Again, many of their names will not be well known. Most people will have heard of Dorothy Hodgkin, and possibly Kathleen Lonsdale (both, incidentally, very committed to promoting world peace), but are less likely to have come across the names of some of the others (in order of election after the first two in 1945: Agnes Arber<\/a> [1946]; Mary Cartwright<\/a> [1947]; Dorothy Hodgkin<\/a> {1947]; Muriel Robertson<\/a> [1947]; Sidnie Manton<\/a> [1948]; Dorothy Needham<\/a> [1948]; Honor Fell<\/a> [1952]; Marthe Vogt<\/a> [1952]; and Rosalind Pitt-Rivers<\/a> [1954]). A group of women, none of whom were professors at the time of election, and many of whom survived for at least substantial parts of their careers on short-term and precarious contracts.<\/p>\n

It is interesting to note that, despite the early nomination in 1902 of Hertha Ayrton<\/a> to be a fellow, a nomination that was rejected on the grounds of her being married (you can find out more about her in the film <\/a>that Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and I were involved with as part of the Royal Society\u2019s 350th<\/sup> celebrations), there was a long period after the time the Royal Society had had to accept the legal argument that women were eligible to be elected, when strangely not one was nominated (from 1922 to 1943). You can read the details of how the first women came to be nominated, and how the politics of making sure the existing (male) fellows would accept the election of women came to pass in Stella\u2019s book.<\/p>\n

Once women were elected, it wasn\u2019t long before they were serving on the Royal Society\u2019s Council, so it would seem after the momentous step had been taken, they were fully included in the fellowship. As I say, I always found the organisation welcoming. I was struck that after I had remarked on this at the meeting, and how it was noticeably different from my experiences in Cambridge at around the same time, another Fellow came up to me to say how that chimed with her own experience, albeit in another university and more recently. Interestingly, I\u2019ve just been going through a transcript of an oral history I recorded for the AIP (the interview was actually conducted about 18 months ago) in which I talk about this experience. There I stated about this time and how I had found the Royal Society more welcoming and inclusive than Cambridge:<\/p>\n

\u2018I think just because they always treated me as a person, not as a woman. I\u2019m just one of them, as it were, instead of being othered.\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Probably quite a succinct way of expressing the feelings of the years around my election in 1999.<\/p>\n

There is much more about the historical aspect of women in science, those connected with the Royal Society and more broadly, as well as the current situation and the work that is now being done by the Society on their website. They may still be way off parity in the fellowship (I think they\u2019ve reached around a third of the fellowship being women), but the numbers have been rising steadily. That\u2019s not to say there isn\u2019t still some negativity towards women lurking in some corners \u2013 but that\u2019s true everywhere in our world, and probably getting worse. It\u2019s not time to give up the good work and the fights where needed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I know that many people feel the Royal Society is a stuffy, white male institution, unwelcoming to women and other minorities, but I cannot agree. It may have had a long history of excluding women, but no more and, in … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[1728,1727,188,1726],"class_list":["post-6933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women-in-science","tag-eleanor-ormerod","tag-lady-mary-wortley-montagu","tag-royal-society","tag-stella-butler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6933"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6940,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6933\/revisions\/6940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}