{"id":6992,"date":"2026-03-08T09:33:24","date_gmt":"2026-03-08T09:33:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=6992"},"modified":"2026-03-08T09:33:24","modified_gmt":"2026-03-08T09:33:24","slug":"theres-always-another-forgotten-woman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2026\/03\/08\/theres-always-another-forgotten-woman\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s Always Another Forgotten Woman"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s International Women\u2019s Day and across the internet many stories will be spreading of amazing women \u2013 in science and in many other arenas \u2013 who either don\u2019t, or haven\u2019t, got the attention they deserve. The Royal Society is continuing its celebration of 80 years since the first women were elected FRS, as my previous blog <\/a>alludes to, with a two-day conference this coming week. Additionally, a map <\/a>is being constructed by them to identify locations associated with women in the history of STEM, to which anyone can add. There are the obvious names \u2013 Dorothy Hodgkin, Florence Nightingale, Ada Lovelace, all associated with London \u2013 appearing on this map, but it is time some of the less familiar ones got attention, and with a far wider geographic distribution. Many more names are appearing in stories and anecdotes on the web, of women whose contributions have been overlooked or claimed under the name of some man (the so-called Matilda Effect<\/a>).<\/p>\n

This year on IWD, I want to write about Ida Freund. In one sense I have known about her all my adult life, since I was awarded an Ida Freund Prize from Girton College as an undergraduate. Did I think about who she was? Not at all, women from the past held no interest for me at 20, I had my own life to worry about then. But, having just re-encountered her name, I realise what an interesting woman she was. Not just a woman in science at a time when that was rare, but also a foreign emigr\u00e9e who had had a leg amputated in childhood, so someone living with a significant disability. Much more of a teacher than a researcher, she made significant impact on chemistry teaching in Cambridge and more widely.<\/p>\n

\"Ida_Freund\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Ida Freund (1863-1914) was born in Austria and came over to England in 1881 after the deaths of both her mother and grandmother, to be with her uncle as guardian. At the time, women\u2019s education was still a contentious issue, but Girton College had been founded as a woman\u2019s college in 1869 (and moved from Hitchin to its current location just outside Cambridge a few years later)\u00a0 and she was enrolled there. Accounts imply she didn\u2019t want to do this, although no explanation of why is given, but she obviously thrived there and went on to the Cambridge Training College for Women (now Hughes Hall) as a lecturer. From there she moved on to Newnham College where she spent the rest of her life, teaching chemistry to generations of students.<\/p>\n

In those days, women were often excluded from the main university lectures (the male lecturers had to agree to their attendance) and the practical work for the women had to be done at Newnham, where a laboratory was created over which she \u2018reigned supreme\u2019. (I believe the Girton students also attended.) Women were allowed to sit the same exams as their male counterparts, but their names and classes were posted on a separate list and they were not allowed formally to proceed to degrees, thereby being denied the right to put BA after their name (no one, still, gets a BSc in Cambridge). This situation, it must shamefully be admitted, continued until 1948.<\/p>\n

\"Ida<\/a>The Newnham Lab in 1912, with Ida Freund sitting<\/em><\/p>\n

Freund seems to have cut a strange figure. A letter from one of her students described her thus:<\/p>\n

\u2018Miss Freund is the presiding genius, a jolly, stout German, whose clothes are falling in rags off her back. We made lots of horrible smells….\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another said of her:<\/p>\n

\u2018Miss Freund was a terror to the first-year student with her sharp rebuke for thoughtless mistake. One grew to love her as time went on, though we laughed at her emphatic and odd uses of English. Yet how brave she was trundling her crippled and, I am sure, often painful body about in her invalid chair smiling, urging, scolding us along….\u2019<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

She never pursued a doctorate, or even very much of her own research, with a total of two papers to her name during her life. Teaching, however, was something she took extremely seriously. Her first textbook (The study of chemical composition: an account of its method and historical development with illustrative quotations<\/em>) was published in 1904; her second (The experimental basis of chemistry: suggestions for a series of experiments illustrative of the fundamental principles of chemistry)<\/em> was published posthumously in 1920. Her teaching seems to have been firmly rooted in experiment, but she also \u2013 as in her 1904 book \u2013 managed to discuss some quite cutting-edge ideas for the time, including sections on the electron (discovered in 1897 in Cambridge by JJ Thomson) and radioactivity (discovered by Henri Becquerel in 1896 in Paris).<\/p>\n

The theme of this year\u2019s IWD is Give to Gain. So, what did Ida Freund give and who gained? Firstly, she gave the proceeds of a University Prize she won (the Gamble Prize in 1903 for an essay on the early history of the atomic theory), in part to Girton to create the fund from which I received my prize some seventy years later. There must have been generations of natural science students at the College who likewise benefitted from her generosity. Newnham also has an Ida Freund Memorial Prize. But perhaps there is another lasting legacy of hers we should celebrate her for, with a higher sugar content: periodic table iced cakes\/cupcakes. This was a tradition she started, with clear pedagogical intent as well as a light-hearted character. One of her students described this:<\/p>\n

‘In my year we were requested to go and make a further study of the \u2018Periodic Table of the Elements’: We found a very large board with the Table set out. The division across and down were made with Edinburgh Rock, numbers were made of chocolate, and the elements were iced cakes each showing its name and atomic weight in icing. The nonvalent atoms were round, univalent had a protruding corner, bivalent two, trivalent triangular, and so on . We divided it up between us!’<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Periodic Table cupcakes are of course still to be found in some locations with a chemical bent on celebratory occasions.<\/p>\n

So, an early teacher of women chemists, who themselves no doubt trained many other women to go on and teach (or research) and who contributed to successive generations through her generosity. Certainly one of the many less well-known women who deserve to be remembered on this day, as on every other. Let us not forget those who forged a path for others of us to follow.<\/p>\n

My sources for this blogpost, beyond Wikipedia, come from Chemistry was their Life, Marylene and Geoff Rayner-Canham, Imperial College Press 2008; and Ida Freund \u2013 Pioneer in Women\u2019s Education in Chemistry, Margaret Hill and Alan Dronsfield, Education in Chemistry 2004 <\/em>https:\/\/edu.rsc.org\/download?ac=133519<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s International Women\u2019s Day and across the internet many stories will be spreading of amazing women \u2013 in science and in many other arenas \u2013 who either don\u2019t, or haven\u2019t, got the attention they deserve. The Royal Society is continuing … 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":[595,1746,1747,1748],"class_list":["post-6992","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-women-in-science","tag-girton-college","tag-ida-freund","tag-newnham-college","tag-periodic-table"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6992","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=6992"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6992\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6996,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6992\/revisions\/6996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}