The Society: Race, Gender and Science
by Kenneth R. Manning
© 1995 by the History of Science Society, All rights reserved
I. Thematic Development
The role of race and gender in science is a complex, multi-faceted subject that lends itself to a number of approaches and interpretations. It provides a richly layered context within which to introduce history of science as an academic discipline, a basis for developing a history of science component in the curricula of high schools and colleges, and an opportunity to think through issues and ideas that so far have not been the focus of sufficient attention among educators. Only a few courses on the subject are offered anywhere in the country.
Rather than attempt a brief summary of each possible approach to race-gender studies in science, the focus here will be on a single theme: the emergence and experience of women and African Americans as working scientists and as members of the scientific community. The objective is to develop guidelines that will enable teachers at the high- school and college levels to introduce the subject to their students. These guidelines are appropriate not only for introductory courses in the history of science, but also where such courses are not always an option, as a way to establish a history of science component within courses in general science, history, and social studies. Students would come from a wide range of academic interests within the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and engineering. They would seek to understand the ways that science, over the course of several centuries, has affected our thinking, our social constructs, and our lifestyles. Such a focus is relevant for many fields -- not only engineering or physics, for example, which we associate with "hard science," but also fields like literature and sociology which explore and interpret aspects of the human experience often touched by science or scientific ideas. No rigid criteria or prerequisites are desirable it is important to encourage diversity of enrollment and participation.
The scientific community has tended to be white and male, a relatively homogeneous group. The image conjured up by the label "scientist" remains that of a white male hovering over test tubes in a darkened laboratory. Yet history also provides examples of individuals whose life struggles have helped to broaden the professional ranks of science. Women, African Americans, and other minorities have strived for more than three centuries to become part of the scientific enterprise. Many found sufficient motivation in a deeply-felt personal need to become scientists, few formulated any overt political agenda relating to race or gender issues. Each one's struggle, however, has helped transform science into a more diverse, more multi-complexioned enterprise. The world of science illustrates some of the tensions and dynamics that have pervaded human- and civil-rights struggles in other walks of life.
II. Biographical Information
Maria Gaetana Agnesi, a mathematician, was born on 16 May, 1718, in Milan, Italy, the daughter of Pietro Agnesi, a professor of mathematics, and Anna Fortunate (Brivio) Agnesi. Her father encouraged her interest in science by engaging a series of distinguished academics to tutor her. The Agnesi household became known for its salons, at which young Maria presented Latin theses on various scientific subjects, then defended them in a number of vernacular languages -- French, German, and Spanish in addition to her native Italian -- in debates with visiting scholars. Agnesi eventually tired of being an object of public attention at her father's salons. She considered entering a convent, but instead withdrew from all social interaction and devoted herself to mathematical study. Her famous Istituzioni analitche ad uso della gioventù italiana appeared in 1748. In this two-volume text, Agnesi aimed to provide a thorough survey of algebra and analysis-starting with elementary concepts, proceeding to the classical theory of equations, and culminating with differential and integral calculus, infinite series, and the solution of differential equations. A committee of the French Academy of Sciences issued a statement saying that "no other book, in any language . . . would enable a reader to penetrate as deeply, or as rapidly, into the fundamental concepts of analysis." In 1750, Agnesi was appointed by Pope Benedict XIV to the chair of mathematics and natural philosophy at the University of Bologna. Although she never taught, she held the position until 1752. Later, she devoted herself to religious studies and social work. She served as director of a home for the elderly in Milan for nearly thirty years, until her death on 9 January 1799.
Benjamin Banneker, an astronomer often considered the first African-American man of science, was born on 9 November 1731 in Baltimore County, Maryland, the son of a freed slave named Robert and of Mary Banneker, daughter of a white indentured English servant named Molly Welsh and her husband Bannka, also a freed slave. Banneker received no formal schooling except for a few weeks in a one-room Quaker schoolhouse near his father's farm. Although he read widely his first love was mathematics, which led him to devise and construct a wooden striking clock around 1753. He raised tobacco, grew vegetables, and cultivated orchards and bees until the late 1780s, when he was forced to retire from farming as a result of poor health. In the ensuing years, he developed an ;interest in astronomy. By borrowing instruments and texts, he taught himself enough mathematics and astronomy to make celestial observations and calculations. In 1791, he was employed for three months as a surveyor on the project commissioned by President George Washington to lay out a national capital. A year later, he wrote to then Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, submitting a copy of his tabular calculation (or ephemeris) showing the positions of celestial bodies. This manuscript, he hoped, would serve as an example of intellectual achievement by an African American and might motivate Jefferson and others to work towards ending slavery. Jefferson responded, "No body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing to the degraded condition of their existence." The ephemeris was published in Baltimore under the title, Benjamin Banneker's Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Viginia Almanack and Ephermeris for the Year of Our Lord 1792. Banneker's almanacs appeared annually thereafter until 1797. They were promoted by abolitionist societies and distributed widely in the Uni ted States and England. Banneker died on 9 October 1806.
Franz Boas, an anthropologist, was born on 9 July 1858 in Minden, Germany, the son of Meier Boas, a merchant, and Sophie (Meyer) Boas, a teacher. He earned a doctorate in physics, but his interest in travel -- as well as in other branches of science such as geography, ethnology, and biology -- led him gradually into the field of anthropology. Unhappy with life in Germany, where he had been subjected to discrimination on account of his Jewish background, he moved to New York and accepted a job as assistant editor of Science magazine in 1887. Later, he held appointments at Clark University the Weld Museum, the American Museum of Natural History, and Columbia University. Best known for his studies of American Indian populations, he hoped to transform anthropology into a more rigorous, exact science by challenging subjective racial and ethnic biases about "foreign" or "indigenous" population groups. He also supported the professional struggles of African-American scientists such as Ernest Everett Just, and participated in the work of progressive social and political organizations such as the National Assocation for the Advancement of Colored People. Boas died on 21 December 1942 in New York City.
Edward Alexander Bouchet, a physicist, was born on 15 September 1852 in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of William Francis Bouchet, a domestic worker, and Susan (Cooley) Bouchet. After a distinguished undergraduate career at Yale University, in which he earned honors in Latin composition and oratory and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, Bouchet pursued graduate study at Yale through seminars in experimental physics, chemistry, mineralogy, and calculus. In 1876, he completed his doctoral thesis in physics, "Measuring Refractive Indices," and became the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at an American university. His career was spent mostly in high-school teaching, with brief excursions "to hospital management (Provident Hospital, St. Louis, 1903-04) and the federal customs service (1904-05). He designed and taught laboratory courses in physics and chemistry at the Institute for Colored Youth, Philadelphia (a predecessor of Cheney State College), and subsequently taught physics and mathematics at Sumner High School, St. Louis (1902- 03). In 1906, he was appointed director of academics at St. Paul's School, Lawrenceville, Virginia, a position he held for two years before accepting the post of principal of Lincoln High School in Gallipolis, Ohio. Later, he served three years as professor at Bishop College, Marshall, Texas, retiring in 1916 because of ill health. He died on 28 October 1918 in New Haven, Connecticut.
Marie Curie, a physicist, was born on 7 November 1867 in Warsaw Poland, the daughter of Wladyslaw and Bronislawa (Boguska) Sklodowski, both teachers. After serving several years as a governess, she attended the University of Paris and graduated with honors in physics and mathematics. In 1897, she married Pierre Curie, also a physicist, with whom she collaborated on studies in radiation and radioactivity. Marie Curie isolated a decigram of pure radium in 1902 and was the first to determine the element's atomic weight. Meanwhile, she taught at a girls school to supplement her husband's salary at the Sorbonne. She was denied a paid position there until 1904, when the authorities appointed her as Pierre's assistant, a year after the Curies were jointly awarded (with Henri Becquerel) the Nobel prize for physics in recognition of their discovery of radioactivity. Following Pierre's death in 1906, Marie Curie was offered a pension. She declined, and was appointed instead to the chair in physics that Pierre had held, thus becoming the first woman ever to teach at the Sorbonne. In 1911, when she was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry "for her services to the advancement of chemistry by the discovery of the elements radium and polonium," she became the first scientist to receive the Nobel Prize twice. She served as a medical consultant to the French army during World War I, after which she devoted herself to research at the newly formed Radium Institute and traveled abroad with her two daughters, one of whom (Irene) was the co-discoverer (with her husband, Frédéric Joliot) of artificial radioactivity Marie Curie's health suffered from overwork, and her fingers developed lesions from handling radium. She died on 4 July 1934 in Sancellemoz, France.
Charles Richard Drew, a surgeon and pioneer in blood plasma research, was born on 3 June 1904 in Washington, DC, the son of Richard Thomas Drew, a carpenter, and Nora Rosella (Burrell) Drew. He received his medical training at McGill University and taught at Howard University prior to earning his doctorate in the medical sciences program at Columbia University in 1940. His doctoral research on "banked blood," together with his subsequent experience in supervising blood plasma collection for British troops at the start of World War II, led to his appointment in February 1941 as director of the American Red Cross Blood Bank. He resigned less than a year later in protest over the Red Cross policy that mandated segregation of blood by the race of donors. The policy, an accommodation to racial prejudice of the time, was criticized by Drew as without scientific basis and as "indefensible . . . from any point of view." Returning to Howard University he became professor and head of the surgery department and chief surgeon at Freedmen's Hospital. He died at the peak of his career, in an automobile accident on 1 April 1950, near Burlington, North Carolina, on his way to a conference. The legend that he succumbed to injuries after being denied treatment at a whites-only hospital is unfounded. He was brought promptly to a hospital emergency room, where white surgeons who knew his identity tried without success to save his life.
Sophie Germain, a mathematician, was born on 1 April 1776 in Paris, France, the daughter of Ambroise-François Germain, a merchant and politician, and Marie-Madeleine (Gruguelu) Germain. She was largely self-taught, using the resources of her father's private library. As a teenager, she read an account of the life of Archimedes -- one of the great scientists of Antiquity -- and decided that she would follow in his footsteps. In spite of opposition from her parents who opposed her desire to become a mathematician, she immersed herself in the works of Isaac Newton and Leonhard Euler. At the age of eighteen, she secretly obtained copies of notes taken at Joseph Louis Lagrange's lectures in the L'ecole Polytechnique, Paris. Women were not permitted to enroll, but this did not deter Germain; she sent in a term paper using the pseudonym M. Le Blanc. The paper so impressed Lagrange that he sought out its author and discovered the subterfuge. Germain's number-theoretic proofs were acclaimed by Lagrange, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and other eminent mathematicians. She developed theorems relating to the problem of a general proof for "Fermat's last theorem." She also contributed to the applied mathematics of acoustics and elasticity, and was awarded a prize by the prestigious French Academy of Sciences in 1816. She died in Paris on 27 June 1831. Two philosophical treatises that she had worked on periodically were published posthumously. One entitled Considérations générales sur l'état des sciences et des lettres outlined her vision of the essential unity between the sciences and the humanities.
Caroline Lucretia Herschel, an astronomer, was born on 16 March 1750 in Hannover, Germany, the daughter of Isaac and Anna Ilse Herschel. Following her father's death in 1767, she hired out as a maid. In 1772, her brother William, the noted astronomer, persuaded her to join him in Bath, England. She pursued a career as a singer, but was hindered in this by the demands of her brother, who expected her to attend to the upkeep of the household while he devoted himself to his research. Caroline was known to have spoon-fed him his dinner, while he labored at his telescope. When the Herschels moved to the vicinity of Windsor Castle in 1782, William encouraged Caroline to search for comets on her own. She discovered three new nebulae in 1783. Her primary role, however, was as William's assistant. She ground and polished his mirrors, made extensive mathematical calculations, and provided him with secretarial help while simultaneously overseeing the management of his household. Nevertheless, she discovered eight more nebulae on her own and published several papers in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. Her revised edition of Flamsteed's Catalogue of Stars was published by the Royal Society in 1798. In 1828, she was awarded a gold medal by the Royal Astronomical Society, not for her own work, but for her manuscript arrangement of William's nebulae and star clusters. She died on 9 January 1848 in Hangover, Germany.
Ernest Everett Just, a zoologist, was born on 14 August 1883 in Charleston, South Carolina, the son of Charles Fraser Just, a wharf-builder, and Mary Mathews (Cooper) Just, a teacher. After graduating at Dartmouth College in 1907, he began a lifelong career in teaching and research. He taught at Howard University, and conducted embryological research at major laboratories worldwide, including the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL), Woods Hole, Massachusetts; the Stazione Zoologica, Naples, Italy; the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut, Berlin-Dahlem, Germany; and the Station Biologique, Roscoff, France. He was noted for his research on fertilization in marine annelids, and for a scientific theory-not taken seriously at the time, but later reconsidered in light of evolving knowledge of biological mechanisms -- that the ectoplasm or cell surface has a fundamental role in development. Despite his standing as a leading scientist of the period, he faced professional problems because of hi race. His options for career development and advancement were restricted to a role within a black college or university, where his teaching and administrative duties were heavy and where research took a relatively low priority. Nevertheless, he secured a substantial grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund that allowed him to spend much of the decade of the 1930s away from these problems, pursuing his research in Europe. Ironically, he was more productive and comfortable there -- amid the rise of Nazism and fascism -- than in America. He returned to America following the German invasion of France in 1940. He died on 27 October 1941 in Washington, DC.
Margaret Morgan Lawrence, a psychiatrist, was born on 19 August 1914 in New York City, the daughter of Sandy Alonzo Morgan, a minister, and Mary Elizabeth (Smith) Morgan. Her early childhood was spent in rigidly segregated Vicksburg, Mississippi, after which she attended high school in New York. She was the only black student in her undergraduate class at Cornell University, supporting herself by working as a maid. After graduating in 1936, she entered the College of physicians and Surgeons (Columbia University) and earned the M.D. in 1940. An authority in child psychiatry (especially the problems of black children), Lawrence taught at Meharry Medical College, studied public health at Columbia University under Dr. Benjamin Speck, and trained in psychoanalysis at the all-white, largely male Columbia Psychoanalytic Clinic. At Columbia, she held posts as supervising child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, and as associate clinical professor of psychiatry. Her publications include The Mental Health Team in the Schools (1971) and Young Inner City Families: The Development of Ego Strength Under Stress (1975).
Henry Cecil Ransom McBay , a chemist, was born on 29 May 1914 in Mexia, Texas, the son of William Cecil McBay, a farmer and mortician, and Roberta (Ransom) McBay, a seamstress. After earning his bachelor's degree at Wiley College in 1934, he went on for graduate work at Atlanta University (M.S. 1936) and the University of Chicago (Ph.D. 1945). He supported himself through a series of teaching positions (mostly high- school) and janitorial jobs. At Chicago, McBay was assigned by his thesis supervisor to work on a problem involving applications of acetyl peroxide, a dangerous explosive that could cause grievous bodily harm if handled improperly. He also worked on synthesis of hormones useful in medical treatment. In 1945, he accepted a position in the chemistry department of Morehouse College. A demanding teacher, he influenced many students who came under his tutelage. Over forty Morehouse graduates who began their chemistry studies under McBay later earned Ph.D.'s in chemistry and developed teaching and research careers in academia, government, and industry.
Walter Eugene Massey, a physicist, was born on 5 April 1938 in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the son of Almar Massey and Essie (Nelson) Massey. He entered Morehouse College as a freshman in 1954 without a high-school diploma, without ever having heard of physics, and never having taken a course in chemistry, trigonometry, or advanced algebra. After graduating from Morehouse in 1958, he went on to earn a Ph.D. in physics at Washington University, St. Louis. He has held academic, research, and administrative positions with the Argonne National Laboratory, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Brown University, and the University of Chicago. At Brown in the early 1970s, he devised and directed an innovative program -- Inner City Teachers of Science -- that placed undergraduates in mentorship roles in urban classrooms as part of their introductory physics, chemistry, and biology courses. In 1988, Massey became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; in 1990, he was appointed director of the National Science Foundation (NSF), a position that he held until 1993. He was the first African-American to serve in either capacity. At NSE he initiated a program that linked predominantly black and predominantly white colleges into regional partnerships aimed at improving science education for minority students.
Lise Meitner, a physicist, was born on 7 November 1878 in Vienna, Austria, the daughter of Philipp Meitner, a lawyer, and Hedwig (Skovran) Meitner. Both parents were of Jewish origin, but raised their family in the Protestant faith. Lise Meitner developed an interest in physics at an early age. Science was not considered a suitable career path for women, however, and her parents persuaded her to prepare herself to teach French. She went on to study privately for entrance to the University of Vienna, where she enrolled as a science student in 1901. While most of her teachers were supportive, some fellow students did not approve of sharing their otherwise all-male classroom with a female. Meitner graduated in 1905, the second woman to earn a science doctorate at the University of Vienna. Her early career took her to Berlin, where she worked with Otto Hahn on the chemistry of radioactivity. In 1912, she joined the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut für Chemie, and in 1918 became head of the physics department. Her work focused on clarifying the relationship between beta and gamma rays. She was a regular participant in physics colloquia with Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Erwin Schroedinger. As nuclear physics advanced during the 1930s, she was a part of a core group of scientists moving towards an understanding of nuclear fission -- the splitting of the atomic nucleus. Her work was interrupted when the Nazi; racial laws (requiring the removal of Jews from roles of academic responsibility) threatened her post at the Kaiser-Wilhelm Institut. She left Germany, and continued her research in Denmark and Sweden, where she was appointed to the staff of the Nobel Institute in Stockholm. In 1939, she made her most famous contribution to science: an assessment of the large amount of energy released by bombarding the uranium nucleus with neutrons. She later declined an invitation to join the team working on the nuclear-fission bomb, and hoped (to no avail) that the project would ultimately prove a failure . She died in Cambridge, England, on 27 October 1968.
Maria Mitchell, an astronomer, was born on 1 August 1818 on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, the daughter of William Mitchell and Lydia (Coleman) Mitchell. As a child, she helped her father check whaling- ship chronometers and calculate longitude. In 1836, she became librarian of the Nantucket Atheneum and used her spare time to make astronomical observations. Her reputation as an astronomer spread rapidly following her discovery of a new comet on 1 October 1847. The king of Denmark awarded her a gold medal, and she was appointed by the U.S. Nautical Almanac Office to compute the ephemerides of the planet Venus. In 1865, she joined the faculty of the newly established Vassar College as professor of astronomy and director of the college observatory. Mitchell was the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and sciences, and was a member of the American Philosophical Society. In 1870, she served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Women. She died on 28 June 1889 in Lynn, Massachusetts.
Amalie Emmy Noether (known as Emmy Noether), a mathematician, was born on 23 March 1882 in Erlangen, Germany, the daughter of Max Noether, a mathematician, and Ida Amalia (Kaufmann) Noether. She studied mathematics and foreign languages at the University of Erlangen (1900-02) with the intention of becoming a French and English teacher. In 1907, she earned the Ph.D. at Erlangen, cumma cum laude, with a thesis on algebraic variants. In 1915, she was invited by the mathematician David Hilbert to deliver guest lectures in his courses at Göttingen. She helped solve research problems of interest to Hilbert, and prepared mathematical formulations for several concepts relating to Einstein's relativity theory. Despite this accomplishment and Hilbert's efforts on her behalf, Noether was repeatedly denied a substantive academic position due to the prevailing prejudice against women in the academy. In 1919, she was appointed Privataozent (a junior lecturer). She never achieved professorial rank at Göttingen, although in 1922 she was named to the purely honorary post of nichtbeamteter ausserordentlicher Professor (unofficial associate professor). Her ethnicity counted against her as well. In April 1933, she and other Jewish faculty members at Göttingen were dismissed. She departed Germany for the United States later that year. She lectured and carried on her research there and at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, until her untimely death in Bryn Mawr on 14 April 1935, from complications following surgery.
Norbert Rillieux, an inventor and engineer, was born on 17 March 1806 in New Orleans, Louisiana, the son of Vincent Rillieux, a wealthy white plantation owner, and Constance Vivant, a slave on his plantation. Rillieux was sent to study at L'Ècole Centrale in Paris, since there was no opportunity for blacks (free or slave) to obtain an education in New Orleans. After graduation, he became an instructor in applied mechanics at the L'Ècole Centrale. In 1830, he published a series of papers on steam mechanics that captured the attention of scientists and engineers throughout Europe. He also developed a theory that revolutionized the process of refining sugar. Known as the theory of multiple-effect evaporation, it was developed by Rillieux into a practical device for use in the sugar industry. His vacuum-pan refiner was patented in the United States on 26 August 1843 (Patent No. 3,237) and 10 December 1846 (Patent No. 4,879). Rillieux helped install the device on plantations in Louisiana, but was never happy living in New Orleans because of the racial discrimination that he faced in everyday life. He returned to France in 1854, when the Louisiana legislature passed a law requiring all free blacks to carry special identification papers. He spent several years studying Egyptology and hieroglyphics before resuming his engineering work. In 1881, he patented a process for refining beet sugar. He died on 8 October 1894 in Paris.
Sheila Evans Widnall, an aeronautical engineer and educator, was born on 13 July 1938 in Tacoma, Washington, the daughter of Rolland John Evans and Genevieve Alice (Krause) Evans. She received her undergraduate and graduate education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the early 1969, at a time when women -- in larger numbers -- were just beginning to find opportunities for advanced scientific and technical training at major institutions. Widnall remained at M.I.T. and became professor of aeronautics and astronautics. She also served as chairman of the faculty and as associate provost. Her professional responsibilities have included periods as an editorial adviser for journals in her field, and as a board member of foundations and aerospace corporations. She was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1987-88. In 1993, she was nominated by President Clinton for the post of Secretary of the Air Force. Subsequently confirmed by the Senate, she became the first woman to hold this post.
Roger Arliner Young, a zoologist, was born on 18 April 1899 in Clifton Forge, Viginia. After graduating from Howard University in 1923, she earned graduate degrees in zoology at the University of Chicago (M.S., 1926) and the University of Pennsylvania (Ph.D., 1940). At the University of Chicago, she was elected to Sigma X, the national science honors society. She is said to have been the first African-American woman to earn a Ph.D. in zoology. Her special research interest was the effect of ultraviolet on marine eggs. A student and protégé of Ernest Everett Just, she taught for several years in the zoology department at Howard, and worked both with Just and independently on her own research problems at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, during the 1920s and 30s. Following a rift with Just and with other members of the Howard zoology department (all male), she left the university in 1936 and taught at a number of black colleges, including the North Carolina College for Negroes, Shaw University (North Carolina). Paul Quinn College (Texas), Jackson State College (Mississippi), and Southern University (Louisiana). Throughout her life she was faced with financial difficulties related, in part, to her support for an infirm, dependent mother. The pressures were so great that she suffered a nervous breakdown and spent a period in the Mississippi State Mental Asylum in the early 1960s. She died on 9 November 1964.
III. Discussion of Social and Cultural Context
Since Antiquity, communities or groups, networks, and loose associations have formed around human endeavors. This has been the case with science, as with other activities. The Pythagoreans, a secretive group of mathematicians in ancient Greece, worked on fundamental problems of mathematics and science. They were a closed group, neither diverse nor inclusionary. One of the criteria for admission reportedly involved an examination to determine whether the candidate's head shape and facial expression complied with certain established standards. Although we do not know exactly what these standards were, there can be little doubt that they generated homogeneity in the ranks. Numbering around three hundred, the group worked on a body of philosophical and scientific problems that have come down to us in the clear and precise form that we call Pythagoreanism. More is known about the body of literature itself than about the individuals or the group that created the work. Here stands an example of a tightly conceived body of problems and approaches to their solution -- a methodology and outlook defining a community of scientists. The approaches were sometimes collaborative, sometimes not.
The notion of scientific community broadened as modern science emerged in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. It came to include anyone involved in scientific communication -- the writing of letters or commentary, or the actual performance of scientific research. Yet within this expanded definition, smaller communities developed around the various branches of science. The original organic, if somewhat diffuse, whole became fragmented into a series of separate disciplines. By the sixteenth century, there were at least two strong traditions of scientific endeavor: that in astronomy surrounding the work of Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Galileo Galilei; and that in anatomy and physiology centering on the work of Andreas Vesalius and William Harvey. These areas of scientific activity produced a shared body of scholarship that focused practitioners from different places on the same fundamental problems of nature. The people who participated in formulating theoretical frameworks for each area, who posed research questions, and who probed for solutions constitute what might be called a cohesive scientific community.
Much can be learned about a community simply by perusing a list of names. The names of Copernicus, Galileo, Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Vesalius, René Descartes, Christiaan Huygens, and Isaac Newton suggest that during the Renaissance and afterwards, contributions were made by individuals from various countries, of different nationalities. Traditional boundaries became less important as people crossed national and geographic borders to acquire new knowledge and expose themselves to innovative ways of thinking. The lives and careers of major figures in Western science have been influenced by national, social, political, cultural, racial, ethnic, an religious factors. The Copernican Revolution which caused man to shift from an earth-centered to a sun-centered view of the universe -- with all of the religious, philosophical, and psychological implications that the shift implied --was spearheaded by a Pole. Through travel and study in Italy during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, Copernicus was exposed to intellectual currents that molded his world view. He helped in turn to pave the way for Galileo, an Italian, and for other astronomer of various nationalities.
With the general revival of the arts and letters during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, science moved northward from Renaissance Italy to England and elsewhere, having been centered during the Middle Ages largely in Arabic-speaking regions. No one place served as a focus or center of activity in the emergence of modern science, no one people monopolized the work, no one religion was represented, and man nationalities were included. Science flourished in Italy, France, and England, and the scientific community consisted of Italians, Poles, Germans, French, Dutch, and English. Protestants and Catholics were represented.
Science was an activity carried on by people of many different backgrounds, working through diverse experiences and traditions. While it may have become focused periodically within certain groups, it geographic shifts were marked. Some curious anomalies appeared along the way. Why, for instance, despite their strong intellectual tradition, did Jews not contribute significantly to the Scientific Revolution in early modern Europe? Jewish contributors at the level of a Kepler or a Newton did not appear in the scientific community until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Before 1600, only a few Jewish philosopher took up natural history and some astronomy in connection with the interpretation of holy writ and the reckoning of the calendar. Minimally involved in the main currents of scientific research prior to the Renaissance, Jews were a small presence too in the seminal development that took place in Europe during the Renaissance. The Dictionary of Scientific Biography lists a mere handful of scientists with Jewish names or with Jewish backgrounds from this period.
Like Jews, women were absent from the roster of fifteenth-, sixteenth and seventeenth-century scientists -- although for more obvious reasons. During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and later, however, a few modified their otherwise circumscribed domestic lifestyles by undertaking scientific study and research. Women began to study natural phenomena and to tackle related scientific questions. Some wrote and published works in mathematics, astronomy, and natural history. Among this group were the Marquise du Châtelet, Caroline Herschel, Maria Agnesi, and Sophie Germain. Geographic diversity and cultural cross-fertilization were as evident within the female ranks of science as elsewhere. Du Châtelet (France) translated parts of Newton's work into French under the influence and guidance of Voltaire, who himself could not understand the technical results. Herschel (England) helped her brother in astronomy. Agnesi (Italy) and Germain (France) discussed mathematics and mathematical physics with eminent male scientists of their day. Most often a woman's route into science was through progressive-minded male mentors -- a father, a brother, an uncle, a lover. Sometimes, as in the case of Sophie Germain, it was through impersonating a man. Germain submitted her assignments at the Ècole Polytechnique, Paris, under the pseudonym "Monsieur Le Blanc." The publication of works such as Francesco Algarotti's Newtonianism for the Ladies (1737) and Lalande's Ladies' Astronomy (1785) illustrated that women were beginning to take an interest in the field even when they were not necessarily active participants.
Women remained on the periphery of science during the eighteenth century, excluded as they were from professional academies and institutions of higher learning. In contrast, a few non-white males were permitted to pursue science and other studies at European universities. Francis Williams, a free black born in Jamaica in 1702, studied mathematics and Latin at Cambridge University before embarking on a successful teaching career in Jamaica. He had an ongoing interest in the sciences, as suggested by a period portrait which shows him seated in his personal library surrounded by works of Newton, Boyle, and Bacon, a celestial globe, and compasses. Other well-educated blacks in eighteenth-century Europe included Anthony William Amo, a native of Guinea, West Africa who earned a doctor's degree at the University ofWittenberg around 1730; Job Ben Solomon, a Fula slave and leading Arabic scholar, who worked in London in the early 1730s with the noted English botanist and physician Sir Hans Sloane; and a Monsieur Lislet, who was named a corresponding member of the Academie des Sciences for his skills in meteorological observation.
In America, the trend was somewhat parallel, although the number of blacks and women participating in science during the eighteenth centuIy was smaller. Jane Colden of Newburgh, New York, was well known for her botanical classifications, especially the gardenia. Like some European women before her, she learned science from her father, himself a botanist ofinternational repute. The African-American mathematician and astronomer Benjamin Banneker published almanacs and worked during the early 1790s as a surveyor on the project to lay out the fledgling nation's capital city, Washington, DC. His career provided a counterpoint to prevailing notions of racial inferiority.
Banneker was part of the "free black" population, the only non-white group in America with a chance (albeit a slim one) for exposure to educational opportuhty, to the scientific literature, and to the practice of science itself. Through the efforts of free blacks and others sympathetic to their cause, a number of African-American educational and religious institutions grew and flourished in antebellum America. Among these were the Institute for Colored Youth at Cheney, Pennsylvania (1837), Lincoln University (1854), and Wilberforce University (1856). Free blacks struggled for legal emancipation and were involved in liberation efforts, through the underground railroad, through marriage, and through purchase. In addition, with the enactment offederal Fugitive Slave Laws (1793 and 1850), they needed to worry about their own personal freedom. For many, scientific work was a dream that could only be realized under more favorable social circumstances and in a more congenial racial climate.
Free blacks who pursued higher education did so at New England colleges and tended to study law, theology, and letters -- disciplines that were considered of practical use in their ongoing social and political struggle. Amherst College, Bowdoin College, Dartmouth College, and Oberlin College were among the few institutions of higher learning accessible to people of color between 1820 and the Civil War. A few blacks pursued medical degrees at places such as Rush Medical College and the Harvard Medical School. Almost none took up science. There is no evidence, in fact, that African Americans were involved in scientific work in any significant way from the time of Banneker at the end of the previous century until the start of the Civil War. Some were active in the more practical field of invention, however, as evidenced by the careers of Thomas L. Jennings, Henry Blair, George Peae, James Forten, Norbert Rillieux, and others who developed patentable processes and devices.
Lack of access to higher education also posed problems for women early American science. Nearly a century after Jane Colden's work, the sisters Emma Hart Willard and Almira Hart Lincoln (later Phelps) fought for the inclusion of a formal scientific component in women's education. Both taught at the Troy Female Seminary during the 1820s and 1830s. Lincoln, who subsequently started her own academy in Maryland, wrote botany, chemistry and natural philosophy texts that appealed to women to study science -- in a more impassioned way than had Algarotti's and Lalande's texts.
The Hart sisters opened up possibilities for the scientific education of women through academies, seminaries, and colleges. Observational sciences such as astronomy and biology caught on especially well. Mount Holyoke Seminary (which became Mount Holyoke College in 1888) was founded in the 1830s by Mary Lyon, who actively promoted the cause of science education. Vassar College opened in 1865, Barnard College in 1889, and a number in between. Even though these colleges did not represent the only means of scientific education for women (coeducational institutions such as Cornell University and the University of Michigan accepted women), they were important in giving science prominence in women's education.
By the middle of the nineteenth century, American science had begun to develop in earnest. White scientists, working on a level of achievement and sophistication comparable to that of Benjamin Banneker, established institutional structures on which their sons --and by then some of their daughters -- could build and from which they could benefit. In the 1850s, Harriet Beecher Stowe was writing Uncle Tom's Cabin, hoping to contribute to the emancipation movement; Charles Darwin was publishing his Origin of Species in England; and, in America, Benjamin Franklin's great-grandson Alexander Bache and others of the so-called "Lazzaroni" (schntific beggars) articulated principles that would lead, among other things, to the formation of the National Academy of Sciences. The American Association for the Advancement of Science had been founded in 1847, and, in 1861, William Barton Rogers obtained a charter and a plot of land in Boston's Back Bay to develop "a School of Industrial Science," the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Such institutions remained predominantly white and male -- a factor that added incentive and a sense of urgency to the work of institutions intended especially to educate African Americans and women. Prior to the Civil War, African Americans seeking higher education were often forced to attend institutions overseas because of racial discrimination at American colleges and universites; after the War, they established their own institutions in substantial number. Similarly, women founded and attended "female academies" and women's colleges. A select few went on for graduate study at major universities. Such race- and gender-segregated patterns of mentorship, peer review, and interaction often adversely influenced opportunities for education, as well as levels of fundng and other support. Women and African Americans who chose to pursue careers in science did so at considerable personal, emotional, and financial risk. The effort required was enormous, the gains were uncertain -- a trend that persists down to the present time.
With the appointment of Maria Mitchell as professor of astronomy in 1865, Vassar College became a center for women in science. Mitchell had learned astronomy by helping her father at their home in Nantucket. She had dscovered a new comet in 1847, and was widely known for her research in the field. She lived with her father in the observatory at Vassar and motivated her students to considerable achievement. Among these were Mary Whitney Christine Ladd-Franklin, and Ellen Swallow Richards, who themselves became leaders in the movement to increase women's opportunities in science. By the 1890s, there had emerged a cadre of women involved in both teaching and research in the sciences. The zoologist Cornelia Clapp (Mount Holyoke College) promoted science education for women at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts (MBL). This laboratory had been founded in 1888 with vital support from the Women's Education Association.
Meanwhile, universities such as Howard University (founded in 1867) were taking steps to educate African Americans in the "liberal arts and sciences." For the first several decades, however, the sciences remained a relatively low priority in the curriculum of black colleges and universities. In part this was because the largely white administrations and faculty envisioned blacks primarily as teachers and preachers among their own people; partly because prevailing opinion held that blacks could neither reason rigorously nor exercise adequate conceptual or quantitative skills; and partly because the market for black scientists or black science teachers was almost non-existent. Nevertheless, science was a part of the curriculum almost from the start. Courses in toxicology, chemistry, physiology, hygene, and other fields served as an essential foundation for emerging programs in medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, and other fields.
In 1876, the first black Ph.D. from an American university, Edward Bouchet, received his degree in physics at Yale University. He was one of the first recpients of any color to earn the Ph.D., the first in America having been awarded just ten years earlier. Bouchet's career did not, however include research in the sciences instead, he became a high-school science teacher at the Institute for Colored Youth, near Philadelphia. Professional opportunities in science were not open to him, even though he had worked beside some of America's top physicists, including the eminent Josiah Willard Gibbs at Yale. His was nonetheless an important accomplishment, presenting, like Banneker before him, a counter-example to the widely held view that African Americans were mentally inferior.
Only after the turn of the twentieth century, when the zoologist Ernest Everett Just took his place beside other scientists (male and female) at the MBL, did the possibilities of science as a career for African Americans begin to be taken more seriously at black educational institutions and elsewhere. Other examples roughly contemporary with Just include Charles Henry Turner, George Washington Carver, St. Elmo Brady, Ellmer Imes, Julian H. Lewis, and a little later, Percy L. Julian and Charles R. Drew. This cohort represents the first group of black scientists to receive Ph.D.'s from major white universities, pursue science at the research level, and publish in the leading scientific journals of the day. Prior to the Second World War, their careers were linked almost exclusively to black colleges and universities.
One of the earliest research opportunities available to black scientists arose in connection with seasonal laboratories such as the MBL. Among the African Americans who worked there variously during the summer season were Turner, Just, Samuel Milton Nabrit, W. Montague Cobb, Harold E. Finley, and, a female zoologist, Roger Arliner Young. Sometimes faced with an unfriendly reception, these scientists nevertheless managed to do pioneering work there. Just advanced the frontiers of embryology, despite the subjection of himself and his family to racial slurs both in a scientific and non-scientific context. It is important to note that some white scientists contemporary with Just -- Franz Boas, for example -- were sufficiently progressive in their thinking to support their African-American colleagues and to challenge racial dogma among other scientists and within the society at large.
Women scientists, meanwhile, were making important strides as well. In Europe, Marie Curie isolated radium in 1902 and became the first woman to hold a teaching post at the Sorbonne, as well as the first scientist -- male or female -- to receive the Nobel Prize twice (for physics in 1903, for chemistry in 1911). Emmy Noether prepared mathematical formulations for several concepts relating to Einstein's relativity theory. Despite this accomplishment, she never received a secure academic appointment, serving in a purely honorary capacity at the University of Göttigen beginning in 1922. With a double mark against her (she was both Jewish and female), she left Germany in 1933 for the United States, where she taught briefly at Bryn Mawr College. Lise Metner worked in Berlin on the chemistry of radioactivity, and was a regular participant in physics colloquia with Max Planck, Albert Einstein, and Erwin Schroedinger in the 1920s. As nuclear physics advanced during the 1930s, she contributed to an understanding of nuclear fission. Like Noether, she left Germany because she was a Jew, and subsequently held posts in Denmark and Sweden.
Women scientists in America also found niches in spite of handicaps imposed by gender and ethnicity. Libbie Hyman, a prominent authority in invertebrate zoology who worked at the MBL and other laboratories, held a makeshift position at the American Museum of Natural History beginning in 1937. No university would hire her because she was Jewish, a woman, and reportedly had an "abrasive" personality. The bias against women academics softened gradually in the years following World War II. Yet, curiously, the twelve major scientists selected for inclusion in the centennial calendar of the MBL, issued in 1988, were all male. Among the group were Edmund Beecher Wilson, Jacques Loeb, and Ernest Everett Just. The absence of women seems unfortunate considering that many eminent women biologists -- Rebecca Lancefield, Libbie Hyman, Sally Hughes-Schrader, and others -- worked at Woods Hole, and that the founding of the laboratory in 1888 had owed much to the efforts of the Women's Education Association, which regarded the MBL as an important part of a larger mission to promote the education of women.
The problems of women scientists were in some respects similar to those faced by blacks, whose opportunities were even more constrained in terms of the type of institutions that would employ them. The Second World War brought African-American scientists to public notice for the first time. Before then, they had worked individually and at black institutions, ther number and presence not having been strongly felt or observed within the scientific community. At Los Alamos and in the various branches of the Manhattan Prolect under way at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and other research laboratories, some white scientists witnessed for the first time a sizable portion of black physicists and chemists entering their world -- mobilized as part of the scentific war effort. Blacks who worked on the bomb project included Moddie D. Taylor, Edwin R. Russell, George W. Reed, and the brothers William J. Knox and Lawrence H. Knox. In a talk at the American Physical Society in 1946, Arthur Holly Compton remarked that the bomb project revealed the extent to which "colored and white, Christian and Jew" could work together for a common purpose.
After World War II, a few white universities began to open opportunities for blacks on their faculty as well as for blacks seeking graduate training. Several problems remained for African Americans who wished to pursue careers in science: lack of access to a high-quality elementary and high-school science preparation; weak undergraduate curricula in certain black colleges; exclusion from admission to many white colleges; the high cost of graduate training; and systemic discrimination in the professional world of science. As an example of the last point, professional meetings of national scientific groups such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) were still being held in segregated cities like Atlanta and New Orleans, where, as late as the 1950s, black scientists who wanted to attend were not given living accommodations at the conference hotels. Several faculty at Fisk University signed a letter to Science magazine in 1951, protesting the action of the Mathematical Association of America in its denial of banquet tickets to black participants at a conference held at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Many African-American scientists, including the physicist Herman Russell Branson of Howard University and the biologist Samuel Milton Nabrit of Atlanta University, worked diligently to direct young talented blacks into science, while simultaneously meeting the demands of their own research interests. Noteworthy in this regard is the career of a chemist, Henry C. MeBay, who after doing extraordinarily well in his Ph.D. program at the University of Chicago, began in 1945 to teach at Morehouse College, the historically black college in Atlanta. Over the next thirty years his persistent guidance and mentorship, principally of black men, but of women too, stimulated over forty blacks to obtain Ph.D.'s in chemistry and allied fields.
The 1964 Civil Rights Act provided an incentive to generate new educational opportunities for women, African Americans, and other minorities. Recruitment and admissions programs at both the undergraduate and graduate levels opened up at colleges and universities throughout the country. Careers in science became a firmer reality for African Americans and women, in both academia and industry. The 1970s and 1980s saw efforts by scientific organizations, universities, and learned societies to be more inclusive in their membership. The AAAS established a program, "Opportunities in Science," to address the question of the underrepresentation of minorities in science. The decade of the 1980s saw the leadership of that organization adminstered by a woman, Sheila Widnall, and then, for the first time, by an African American, Walter E. Massey. Still, the representation of blacks and other minorities in scientific careers hovers around two or three percent. Intervention efforts appear to have been more successful so far at bringng women into the ranks of science than at bringing in African Americans. Increasing the pool of African Americans will require time, effort, funding, and a level of commitment that moves beyond political rhetoric.