Vol. 42, No. 2, April 2013
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Lessons from a February 2013 AAAS Session on the 25th Anniversary of Uneasy Careers…
by Pnina G. Abir-Am, WSRC, Brandeis University
AAAS session speakers. (Counterclockwise from right: Nancy Slack, Joy Harvey, Pnina Abir-Am, Betty Smocovitis,
(a stand in for Sue who had to catch her plane) Margaret Rossiter, and Anne McLachlan (member of the audience)
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The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) recently held, as part of its Annual Meeting in February 2013 in Boston, a large format session1 marking the 25th anniversary of Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives, Women in Science, 1789–1979, (1987) (hereafter "Uneasy Careers…") the first collective volume in the history of women and gender in science, (hereafter WGS).2 The logic of anniversaries limits such occasions, by a long tradition, to fractions of Centennials such as the 25th, 50th, and so on, thus providing rare but culturally endorsed occasions to reflect on the nexus of past and present.3 Our session set to contrast the mid-1980s, as the "past" or the specific historical period which shaped this volume with the present. The present has been indelibly marked by a long public debate on the under-representation of women in science, during and since 2005.4
A paradox posed by the nexus of past and present is why and how after two to three decades of WGS scholarship, (of which Uneasy Careers… is a great example of the sheer range of women's contributions and experiences in various scientific disciplines and countries) influential segments of society which dominated the 2005 debate, most notably several university presidents who were also scientists, as well as media figures, proved unable to seize on the resources provided by WGS scholars, eventually burning out the issue of "women in science" for the time being due to unproductive over-exposure.5 This "present" was addressed by the 2nd speaker who is a woman scientist and a policy maker, though the historian of science speakers did not avoid it either.
At AAAS in Boston we were fortunate to receive a 3-hour or so-called "large" format session, which enabled the four speakers, Margaret Walsh Rossiter, Sue V. Rosser, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am, as well as moderator and co-organizer Joy Harvey to cover a wide territory, as well as entertain questions from an engaged audience. All speakers had solid AAAS credentials: Margaret Rossiter was inducted as a AAAS Fellow just a few hours before our session began; Sue Rosser is one of three women on AAAS's 12 member Executive Council; Nancy Slack has been a practicing scientist and AAAS member since the 1950s; Pnina G. Abir-Am served as speaker at several AAAS Annual Meetings, most recently in 2011 at a session on the Centennial of Mme Curie's 2nd Nobel Prize, superbly co-organized by Penny Gilmer, Chair of Section C (Chemistry) and a biochemist at Florida State University who also attended our session in Boston; and Alan Rocke, outgoing Chair of Section L (HPS) and Chair of History at CWRU. That session was reported in the April 2012 issue of this Newsletter.
The first two talks, "Thirty Women who Changed American Science, 1970–2010" by Margaret Walsh Rossiter, a former Editor of ISIS and Osiris, currently the Marie Noll Underhill Chair at Cornell University where she has been since 1986; and "Policy Making for Women in Science: Breaking into the Lab," by Sue V. Rosser, Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at San Francisco State University, focused on organizational interventions to increase the numbers of women in science. The talks complemented each other neatly since Sue Rosser, a scientist turned feminist activist and policy maker, took a top-down approach focusing on the impact of NSF Programs in the 1990s; while Margaret Rossiter, the foremost historian of women in American science, focused on a bottom-up approach or on archivally documenting the women scientists' own organizational strategies in resourcefully surviving the world of institutionalized science and their own status in it as a powerless minority. Both speakers presented topics addressed in greater details in books each published in 2012: Rossiter's Women Scientists in America, volume 3, Forging a New World since 1972; (Johns Hopkins University Press, reviewed in the 16 November 2012 issue of Science) and Rosser's Breaking into the Lab: Engineering Progress for Women in Science. (New York University Press, 2012).
As Rossiter argued, laws do not create change by themselves but require a generation of dedicated "implementers" who graft social change onto an often impervious status quo. Some of the 30 names highlighted by Rossiter, such as Jewell Plummer Cobb, the first African-American scientist on the National Science Board or Vera Kistiakowsky, founder of the Women's Section in the American Physical Society, (whose last name evokes her dad, the first Presidential Science Adviser in the late 1950s, George Kistiakowsky) are known mainly in policy circles. Others, such as Louise Lamphere and Shyamala Rajender, both of whom led successful class law suits against universities (URI & UMN, respectively) which led to judicial interventions that reverberated well beyond their "home" institutions, are known mainly among WGS scholars and feminist activists. Still others, such as Anita Borg, a computer scientist enshrined in the title of a newsletter on women in science based at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; or Nancy Hopkins who exposed the lesser wages of women scientists at MIT in the late 1990s and was also instrumental in precipitating the year long debate on the under-representation of women in science in 2005, are known to the public at large. Hopefully, a new generation of scholars will soon build upon Rossiter's 3rd volume of her amazing trilogy6 and uncover the "second" and "third" women who made a difference beyond the 1970s.
The 2nd speaker, Sue Rosser, a zoologist trained at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been a WGS scholar, activist, and academic administrator since the 1970s,7 when she came under the influence of pioneering neuroscientist and feminist activist Ruth Bleier.8 Rosser is perhaps best known for Female Friendly Science (New York: Pergamon, 1990) and The Science Glass Ceiling: Academic Women Scientists and the Struggle to Succeed. (New York: Routledge, 2004). The latter examined the persisting obstacles to women's advancement in science (besides the "glass ceiling" other well known such metaphors include the "sticky floor" and the "leaking pipeline").
Sue Rosser's talk focused on her findings from interviews with over 400 NSF-POWRE awardees from the 1990s. POWRE was an NSF Program which succeeded its VPW Program in the 1980s and preceded ADVANCE which began in 2001. ADVANCE currently awards around 10 institutional awards every other year, of $3-5 million, mostly to state universities, for 5 years, so as to transform institutional structures in academia to improve the retention of women scientists. Still, NSF-ADVANCE's own PI meeting in May 2005 made us all aware9, via the creative device of a theatrical troupe from its sponsored project in Michigan which impersonated hiring and tenuring committees, that their chairmen became very adept at derailing the careers of women without appearing to do so. Having held NSF visiting professorships under both VPW and POWRE Programs, I suggest that such interviews include not only the women awardees but also those adept chairmen who continue to specialize in derailing not only individual women scientists but also national policies and programs designed to address the under-representation of women in science. Not too long ago, a Nobel Laureate at MIT, S. Tonegawa, derailed the appointment of a woman scientist who was offered a position as assistant professor there on the ground that she will compete with him; he made news simply because he did not even bother to worry about appearances.10
Illustrated with poignant quotations from her interviewees, which repeatedly illustrated the challenge of balancing scientific careers and personal lives, Sue Rosser's talk captured both the increasing opportunities for women created by affirmative action but also the persistence of obstacles. This is precisely the problem Uneasy Careers… set out to document in the mid-1980s with over a dozen case studies, from two centuries and various disciplines, countries, and familial conditions. Sue Rosser's talk and extensive studies of policy impact on women in science not only validates Uneasy Careers'… foresight 25 years ago but also testifies to its enduring relevance in the present.
The third speaker, Nancy G. Slack, Professor Emerita at the Sage Colleges, a botanist, ecologist, historian of American science, and by her own account, a life-long member of a collaborative couple with retired RPI physicist Glenn Slack, showed up bravely in a cast having broken her ankle on one of her many alpine expeditions. Nancy Slack is the author of G. Evelyn Hutchinson and the Invention of Modern Ecology (Yale UP, 2010) and co-editor of Creative Couples in the Sciences.11 In her talk, she combined a discussion of collaborative couples in 19th and 20th Century America, (that she first explored in chapter 5 of Uneasy Careers…) illustrated with superb slides, with her own experience as a woman scientist whose career was initially derailed by institutional bias against married women scientists with children. Nancy was able to regain her career once such attitudes began to change.12 Her own existential experience as member of a dual career couple left Nancy Slack with a lasting interest in other such couples."13
She provided vivid contrasting examples of collaborative couples ranging from those in which the female spouse emerged as the more important scientist (e.g. the Brittons and the Brandagees) to those in which she resigned herself to a secondary role as career impresario for an authoritarian male spouse (the Clements). Nancy concluded by attempting a general typology of collaborative couples, redefined so as to include partners from different scientific fields.
The last speaker, Pnina G. Abir-Am, (who also organized the session with Joy Harvey) is a Resident Scholar at WSRC, Brandeis University, since 2007, where she is conducting several projects on women in science, as well as completing a new history of the discovery of DNA's structure. Her most recent item in the July 2012 HSS Newsletter discussed history of science inspired plays, especially those on Rosalind Franklin's long misunderstood role in the discovery of DNA's structure. In her AAAS talk, Abir-Am focused on the dual role of the collective genre as both a carrier of intellectual innovation and a tool of community building. Abir-Am further inquired as to why Uneasy Careers… set to problematize the balancing of scientists' lives and careers, (an issue at the heart of current debates on the under-representation of women in science) as a persisting historical challenge? She also asked which impact did Uneasy Careers… have at the time, (1980s) and why did it all but disappear from the public radar when it was most needed, in 2005?
Abir-Am defined the 1980s as a historical period marked by the defeat of the ERA as a constitutional amendment in 1983. At the same time, the rise of the "me generation" throughout the 1980s strengthened the tendency to focus on individual careers rather than collective social change. This meant an increasing focus on career advancing publications such as monographs, rather than edited collective volumes, except perhaps for those who never left the 1970s. The precedent of Sexual Politics, (1970) whose author Kate Millet was greeted by the media as the Mao-Tse-Tung of women's liberation was scary. Yet, the same media praised Woman in Sexist Society, A Study in Power and Powerlessness, (1971) edited by Vivian Gornick and Barbara Moran, with 35 authors, all preaching the same message as Millet, because ganging up on 35 is not the same as ganging up on one. The lesson was clear enough: a collective volume can signal both new ideas and a new community; it can even evoke, if not prolong, the 1970s!
Abir-Am emphasized that Uneasy Careers… was unique at the time (and unsurpassed since) in its very unusual range: it covered a wider historical, disciplinary, national-cultural, and social-theoretical range than most volumes in the history of science.14 It was informed not only by the need to balance the duality of history of science as both social and intellectual analysis, (discussed in Part I & II, respectively) but also by then recent advances in both American and European social theory,15 and women's studies,16 both topics remaining unwelcome among historians of science at the time.17 By historicizing and comparing over a dozen well researched and well written case-studies, this volume put an end to then lingering doubts as to whether women scientists did significantly contribute to science.18 This could not have been accomplished by either biographies or monographs of women in scientific organizations, which accounted for the most prevalent genres at the time. Furthermore, at a time the history of science was divided into unfriendly factions of internalists and externalists, Uneasy Careers…was subversive enough to pave the way toward conciliation and rapprochement.
Uneasy Careers… was a global phenomenon. Its subject matter included women scientists and their better known male mentors in both European and North American countries. Its case studies included scientific disciplines ranging from observational sciences such as astronomy and botany which accommodated relatively large numbers of women; experimental sciences such as chemical physics and molecular biology; as well as theoretical sciences such as mathematics and evolutionary theory; which had relatively few women but those few were of "star" quality. Its lives included all familial conditions ranging from single to married, widowed, separated, "union libre" and so on, all conditions shown to be compatible with scientific pursuits. Uneasy Careers… further encompassed an extended historicity ranging over two centuries, again a rarity at a time historians of science specialized by century. This range was made possible by collaboration between the two co-editors, one a 19th-century specialist19 and the other a 20th-century specialist.20 Last but not least, by including contributors from several countries, Uneasy Careers… transcended national scholarly communities. 21
Questions from the audience by Anne McLachlan of the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley; Jeannette Brown, author of African American Women Chemists (Oxford University Press, 2012) and a CHF Fellow; Penny Gilmer, a coordinator of the NSF-ADVANCE Program at five Florida Universities and co-editor of The Centennial of Mme Curie's 2nd Nobel Prize, (2011) and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, a former HSS President, currently a Dean in the School of Engineering at UMN, among others, focused on whether Uneasy Careers… succeeded to reform both the history of science's conception of how to study the intertwined lives and careers of its scientist subjects; and the scientific community's own consciousness of its diverse past. These fascinating issues deserve a separate discussion.
The session was moderated by Joy Harvey of the Independent Scholars Alliance in Greater Boston, who made a heroic effort to formally introduce her long-time friends qua speakers, and gracefully navigated the lively interaction between speakers and audience. Best known as the author of Almost a Man of Genius, Clemence Royer and the Evolutionary Debates in 19th Century French Feminism, (Rutgers University Press, 1997) and a co-editor (with Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie) of Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science; (1999), Joy Harvey recently published "The vanishing wives of Nobel Laureates,"22 an intriguing study of several scientific collaborations which raised major questions as to how scientific credit was distributed in science.
A quarter of a century had passed since Uneasy Careers… was published, having been acclaimed in the language of its HSS prize, as "outstanding research." Both HSS and AAAS were gracious to it in the 1980s,23 as well as in the present. Though the legacy of Uneasy Careers… remains uncertain at a time gender equality seems to stall, its spirit survives in both expected and unexpected places.24 So what are the lessons from this session for history of science as a field, for newcomer WGS scholars, for the best and for the rest who rarely if ever go to WGS sessions at HSS, AAAS or elsewhere? It's better late than never! If you somehow failed to notice the subversive streak of Uneasy Careers…or missed why it is such a rare gem, then Amazon can help you: the paperback edition sells for one cent. Even more so, don't miss another quarter of a century of pure joy and adventure by deluding yourself that the history of women and gender in science is not for you!
Footnotes
1 A HSS also held such a session at its 2012 Annual Meeting. In addition to presentations by authors of chapters in Uneasy Careers… on their evolving scholarly trajectories, among them Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, Anne Hibner Koblitz, Joy Harvey, Nancy Slack and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt. The dozen participants in these two sessions are grateful to AAAS & HSS Program Committees for providing space and good time slots. Recent HSS Annual Meetings which marked the 25th anniversaries of WGS books include 2007 for Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (1982) by Margaret Walsh Rossiter; and 2005 for The Death of Nature, Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (1980) by Carolyn Merchant. return»
2 By Rutgers University Press; Editors: Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram; Foreword: Margaret Walsh Rossiter; hardcover and paperback; 2nd printing in 1989. See Table of Contents at http://pgabiram.scientificlegacies.org/books/ uneasy-careers The volume was commissioned in the mid-1980s by Karen M. Reeds in her then capacity of Science Acquisition Editor. return»
3 For further details on the logic of anniversaries with special emphasis on science-related ones see my Introductions to Commemorative Practices in Science: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory, (University of Chicago Press, 2000; known as Osiris, vol. 14, an official HSS publication) edited by Pnina G. Abir-Am & Clark A. Elliott; and to La Mise en Memoire de la Science (Paris: EAC, 1998) sous la direction de Pnina G. Abir-Am. return»
4 For details of this public debate, see http://people.brandeis.edu/~pninaga/ sger; ironically, the first and third hypotheses (i.e. on the issues of "dedication" or willingness to work long hours, and "socialization" as social customs incorporating gender bias) which are amenable to policy and educational interventions, did not stir much discussion. By contrast, the 2nd hypothesis on the issue of "innate" lesser aptitude consumed the debate and wasted it unproductively on irrelevant issues of biological determinism. return»
5 Another paradox, also made clear by that debate, was the contrast between the progress of tokenism, i.e. small numbers of women reaching high visibility in top government, industry, and academic positions, at a time the "glass ceiling" continues to lead to "leaking pipelines" or under-representation for most other women. One of the insights surfacing as a result of the public debate is the growing realization that overt discrimination, by now illegal, did not disappear but was replaced by covert and more subtle forms. return»
6 At the Three Societies Meeting in Philadelphia in July 2012, in a session devoted to this 3rd volume, Ruth Schwartz Cowan, a former President of SHOT and renowned author of More Work for Mother (1983) and Ruby Heap, a historian at the University of Ottawa, Canada, Chair of Women's Studies there, and adviser to its President, elaborated on the enormous impact Rossiter's first two volumes (1982, 1995) had on themselves and many other scholars. return»
7 Her essay "Feminist scholarship in the sciences: Where are we now and when can we expect a theoretical breakthrough? Hypathia, 2, 3, (1987) 5-19, mapped six strands of WGS scholarship at the time, helping women scientists, students, and scholars better orient themselves. This essay, much as others on related topics which also appeared in 1987, share in the 25th anniversary of Uneasy Careers… especially since its purpose is to mark a collective identity as WGS scholars. return»
8 See Bleier's Science and Gender (1984) and Bleier (ed.) Feminist Approaches to Science. (1986) Together with Ruth Hubbard et al (eds.) Women Look and Biology Looking at Women (1979) and Biological Woman: The Convenient Myth (1982) and Evelyn Fox Keller's A Feeling for the Organism, The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1983) and Reflections on Gender and Science, (1985). Bleier's volumes were among the earliest and most influential works on women in science produced by women scientists turned feminist activists and scholars. Vivian Gornick's Women in Science, Portraits from a World in Transition (1983) based on interviews with over 100 women scientists, also proved influential at the time. return»
9 I attended as PI of a SGER project, see details in http://people.brandeis.edu/ ~pninaga/sger. I thank NSF-STS Program Director in 2005, Ronald Rainger, for suggesting that I attend that meeting. return»
10 Tonegawa had to resign as director of a research center, but the junior woman scientist in question had to leave for a much less prestigious institution. Ironically, this conduct took place during the MIT presidency of a woman scientist, Susan Hockfield. One can only wonder how prevalent such a conduct may have been all along since it explains the paradox of attrition of the more gifted: while mediocrities are allowed in because they do not threaten others, the most promising ones invariably run against "their own Tonegawas." It will be useful to hear from those who know of Tonegawa-like cases outside science. return»
11 With Helena M. Pycior and Pnina G. Abir-Am (Rutgers University Press, 1996) This volume was part of the Series "Lives of Women in Science," mentioned in note 1. See also its review in American History Review, February 1998, by Margaret Walsh Rossiter. return»
12 For the experience of another resourceful dual career couple, in the late 1970s, again from the perspective of the female spouse, see Shulamit Reinharz, Observing the Observer; (Oxford University Press, 2009). Though written for methodological purposes, this book includes many insights into the challenge of balancing the careers of collaborative couples in the extended sense of spouses in different fields. The Reinharzs, (Jehuda served as President of Brandeis University for 17 years and Shulamit has been the founding director of its Women's Studies Research Center for more than 10 years) much as the Slacks, had their careers in different fields but also managed to collaborate occasionally. In Creative Couples in the Sciences, (note 10) we coined this term to mean collaboration on joint outcomes in science but Nancy emphasized that a collaborative spirit can also prevail among partners who specialize in different fields. return»
13 Most recently, she published "Epilogue: Collaborative Couples, Past, Present, Future" in For Better or for Worse (Birkhauser, 2012) edited by Brigitte van Tigellen, Anette Lykness, and Don Opitz; based on a double session at the International Congress for History of Science in Budapest, 2009. return»
14 Predecessor works in the history of WGS were often limited to science in the U.S. There were no works combining American and European science over two centuries and many disciplines. return»
15 As in my "The Biotheoretical Gathering…"(History of Science, March 1987, 1-70) which compared models of scientific change advanced by J. Ben David, P. Bourdieu, M. Foucault, E. Gellner, A. Giddens, T. Kuhn, R. Merton. return»
16 E.g. Gloria Bowles & Renate Duelli-Klein (eds.) Theories of Women's Studies. (1983) return»
17 The bias of historians of science against social theory made it impossible for me to publish my Ph.D. thesis as I was unwilling to give up on the two such chapters. (They were eventually published in History of Science, March 1985 and 1987.) Ironically, this impasse made me available to respond to the invitation to edit Uneasy Careers… return»
18 When I asked a leading historian of science why he was not studying women scientists, he replied that he was interested in ideas. A few years later, when we sat next to each other on the podium for HSS awardees, he may have noticed that I was there because I wrote on a woman who not only had an interesting love life but also an interesting theory. return»
19 Co-editor Dorinda Outram, a Cambridge University Ph.D. in history, specialized at the time in the history of 19th Century French biology and held a lectureship at the University of Cork, Ireland. She and co-editor Pnina G. Abir-Am were introduced to each other in Cambridge, UK where Outram was affiliated with Girton College and Abir-Am was affiliated with Robinson College. return»
20 Co-editor Pnina G. Abir-Am had a Ph.D. from Universite de Montreal and a MSc. from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; she did post-graduate research in U.K. at the Wellcome Institute/ University of London) and in the U.S. return»
21 Though most of the authors were trained in the U.S., about half of them worked on European topics and were familiar with European communities of historians of science. return»
22 In For Better or For Worse, (Birkhauser, 2012) See note 13. return»
23 Uneasy Careers… was introduced to HSS members as a double session at its 1986 Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, just at the time it went to press. AAAS organized a session on women in science in 1989 which was covered by famous science journalist William Broad in Science magazine, right across from the AAAS Presidential Address. It also quoted three times from my talk. return»
24 Gender and Genre, 1700-2000, edited by Paola Govoni & Alice Z. Franceschi. (London: Ashgate, 2013) For the "state of the art" in WGS in the international arena one can examine the most recent program of the International Commission for Women in the History of Science, Technology and Medicine, held at ENS in Paris in September 2011 at (see http://www.womenscommission-dhst.net/). return»