With this diary I am ending my series of discussions of female scientists and mathematicians. Even though I limited it to those who died before 2000 I believe that I could turn up at least a hundred. If I included more modern researchers who died after 2000 it might easily reach several times that. I have spotlighted fifty over the last several years. In this diary I will mention briefly eight female scientists that I could have written in more depth on, but decided that I had finally reached my limit.
Why spotlight female scientists especially? Because women who made important contributions to science and mathematics were not fully recognized and often discouraged from the pursuit of such knowledge, usually because of the totally ludicrous idea that they somehow were unable to think about such subjects (despite ample evidence to the contrary), or that it would ruin them for their real purpose, becoming mothers. Of course, women were also denigrated in the arts and writing, although some made names for themselves despite the prejudice that prevented them from reaching their full potential. As a male I find such ideas an embarrassment to my sex. I have never believed women to be inferior to men, even before I became the father of two girls and the foster father to another, as well as a mentor to several graduate and undergraduate students who happened to be female (I also had a number of male graduate and undergraduate students). It just never made sense to me. Both our daughters and our foster daughter followed careers in the sciences and all three now hold positions working in applied science in some fashion or other, primarily in medical science or related fields. As I have said in an earlier diary, I have also collaborated with several female scientists over the years and have found them to be excellent colleagues, as good as any of the male colleagues that I have had. It often leaves me with a sense of exasperation over this maltreatment that occurs even today (See: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/25/women-in-stem-stories-whisper_n_5844678.html.) It is often worse in developing countries, in some of which the birth of a daughter is met with lamentations. It takes real bravery, as shown by Malala Yousafzai, to fight this system, but it can be done. I have served as major professor for an Egyptian woman, who was a devout Muslim, and as an external advisor for a Pakistani women who was working for her doctorate in agricultural science. Both were bright students who needed a chance to prove themselves. In the case of the Egyptian women I saw first hand the difficulties placed on her by even her fellow students while she was struggling to finish her master's in entomology despite serious health problems. The male Egyptian students were the worst. But it is not just in Islamic countries that such prejudice occurs and I don't mean to pick on them especially (although tribal traditions in such countries are often oppressive to women and I cannot deny that reality!) I have worked with or had professional contact with female scientists in Argentina, Mexico, New Zealand, and Israel, and to a much lesser extent Poland. Although they never talked to me about this issue, I don't doubt, based on stories I have gotten from other sources, that they have often suffered from such preconceptions.
As I noted above, I will close with capsule biographic vignettes of eight more women of whom I have not published full diaries. However, they all deserve their own and it is with some regret that I do not plan to write them. I urge all my readers, both men and women, to acquaint themselves with all of these and to search out others. I hope to encourage women to take up science and math, with the confidence that they can achieve great things and that they are only limited by their own imaginations. Do not let the sexism that still rears its ugly head completely discourage you! We need all the minds we have to solve the problems that our species faces, especially the great environmental changes that we are foisting upon ourselves. As for myself I can only say, welcome to the great journey that is science! I guess that means that I am a feminist and I would hope that more of my sex will be in the future. We all gain in the end if the sexes are treated with equality of opportunity.
Ruth Benedict 1887-1948. Ruth Benedict was a anthropologist and close associate of Margaret Mead. She was born in New York City in 1887 and, like Mead, studied under Franz Boas. She became a prominent authority both in anthropology and folklore and her major book "Patterns of Culture" is still relevant in this regard She and Mead were considered by many in the field to be the major movers in cultural anthropology after the death of Boas. Among other things, Benedict debunked the idea of human races in a pamphlet she wrote during World War II - "The Races of Mankind." Certainly both she and Margaret Mead came under heavy criticism, but their heritage and points of view are still important to this day.
Sara Plummer Lemmon 1836-1923. Another female botanist, she has the singular distinction of having a mountain peak (Mt. Lemmon above Tucson) named after her. She was the first woman to climb this peak. Lemmon was born in Maine in 1836 and died in California in 1923. Never having an academic career, she attended the Female College of Worcester (later Oread Institute) she served as a nurse in the Civil War. She moved to Santa Barbara, California for her health in 1868. There she met and later (1880) married her husband, a former Union soldier, and like her a self-taught botanist, who had been confined to Andersonville Prison. She is responsible for the California poppy being named the state flower and her work in botany of California and Arizona, along with her husband, was ground breaking. The specimens they collected are now in the herbarium of the University of California at Berkeley.
Mary Somerville 1780-1872. A long-lived astronomer and polymath, Mary Somerville and Caroline Herschel were the first women to be elected as honorary members of the Royal Astronomical Society. The daughter of Sir William George Fairfax, an Irish vice-admiral, and descended from Scottish ancestors through her mother, Mary Somerville was considered by her father to be an undisciplined savage at the age of ten. He arranged for her education, first through a boarding school and later informally. After her sister's death her mother forbade her further study for fear that it would kill her too. She, of course, continued to study in secret. Over time she married two cousins and had six children. Her first husband (died in 1807) discouraged her interests, thinking it too much of a strain on a woman's brain, but her second husband (married in 1812) encouraged her in her work. She translated LaPlace's work on astronomy, retitled as "The Mechanism of the Heavens" and wrote several very popular texts on the physical sciences.
Caroline Herschel 1750-1848. About thirty years older than Mary Somerville, she became a famous female astronomer and was elected as an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical at the same time (1835). Born Caroline Lucretia Herschel in Hanover, Germany, she never married but instead became closely associated with her brother, Sir William Herschel, in astronomy. She was given several honors including medals from the Royal Society and from the King of Prussia, and was the first woman to be paid for her contributions in science. She was also made an honorary member of the Royal Irish Academy. Her discoveries of comets made her famous in a time that had very few women honored for scientific achievements.
Mary Ball 1812-1898. Few women studied entomology in the 1800s, but one of these was an Irish woman who became interested in dragonflies, among other insects. Mary Ball was born in County Cork to a family that encouraged studies in nature. Her brother was especially supportive of her interest in insects and she was mentored by the Irish naturalist William Thompson. Her collection of insects, especially of dragonflies, was well known and admired. However all of her publications, as was the custom of the times, were published by her brother. Her sister became a algologist.
Annie Trumbull Slosson 1838-1926. Born Anna Trumbull in Connecticut, she preferred to be called Annie. Another women who found insects fascinating but who had no formal training, she had over 100 species named after her, usually as the first discoverer. She was one of the founders of the New York Entomological Society. She published numerous articles (under her own name, unlike Mary Ball) in a number of scientific journals and was also a fiction writer. He fiction has fallen into obscurity, but her entomological work has lived after her. She married a Edward Slosson in Hartford, Connecticut in 1867. He died in 1871, leaving her a widow. They had no children. She devoted her life after his death to her entomological and literary interests.
Maria Goeppert-Mayer 1906-1972. A German (her birth place is actually now Poland) born American physicist who worked with nuclear shells and the atomic nucleus, she was the second woman (after Marie Curie) to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics. She studied at the University of Göttingen. Born Maria Goeppert in Katowice, then in Prussia, her family moved to Göttingen, where her father became a professor at the university. Academia was a tradition in the family and her father was a sixth generation professor, in his case, of pediatric medicine. Educated at the Höhere Technische and the Frauenstudium, schools that prepared girls for university study, she entered Göttingen in 1924, after passing the entrance exam at 17 years of age. She received her Ph.D. in 1930. Her examiners included Nobel Laureates Max Born, James Franck, and Adolf Otto Reinhold Windaus. Her dissertation on two photon absorption theory was called "a masterpiece of clarity and concreteness" by another physicist. In January of the same year she married Joseph Edward Mayer, a chemist, and subsequently moved to Johns Hopkins University where he was a professor. They had two children. When her husband moved to Columbia University after being fired, possibly because of the presence of his wife as unpaid female faculty in the physics department (the head of the physics department apparently hated women in academia), she became even more involved in quantum physics. However she still received no salary. She became associated with Enrico Fermi and Harold Urey, but finally got a paid position at Sarah Lawrence College. In 1942 she joined the Manhattan Project and worked for a time at Los Alamos. She got a position at Columbia through the influence of Edward Teller and later (1960) was made full professor of physics at the University of California at San Diego. In 1963 Goeppert- Mayer, Jensen, and Wigner were presented with the Nobel Prize for Physics for their work on electron shells.
Margaret Belle (Oakley) Dayhoff 1925-1983. An American physical chemist, Margaret Dayhoff was called both "mother and father of bioinformatics." She was vitally important in the development of computer technology applications to chemistry. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she moved with her parents to New York City while she was still a child. She was valedictorian of her class at Bayside High School in 1942, won a scholarship to New York University, where she graduated magna cum laude (mathematics) in 1945. Dayhoff got her Ph.D. in quantum chemistry from Columbia under George Kimball and went on to the Rockefeller Institute. She moved on to Maryland in 1952, later gaining a fellowship at the University of Maryland. There she worked on chemical bonding. With others she developed chemical phylogenetic analysis and published, with Richard Eck, the first evolutionary tree, using computer technology and based on molecular sequences. She was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was given several other major honors and assignments. She also started the Atlas of Protein Sequence and Structure. This eventually led to GenBank, the main source for DNA sequences on the Internet. Unfortunately Margaret Dayhoff died of a heart attack at the age of 57.
If I have made any errors or any of the readers know of other important references, please feel free to comment.
Literature Reference: Bonta, Marcia M. 1991. Women in the Field: America's Pioneering Women Naturalists. Texas A & M.
Some Internet References: Ruth Benedict http://www.nndb.com/people/786/000097495/ Ruth Benedict http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruth_Benedict Sara Plummer Lemmon http://ucjeps.berkeley.edu/archon/?p=creators/creator&id=38 Sara Plummer Lemmon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sara_Plummer_Lemmon Mary Fairfax Somerville http://www.agnesscott.edu/lriddle/women/somer.htm Mary Fairfax Greig Somerville http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Somerville.html Mary Somerville http://www.sheisanastronomer.org/index.php/history/mary-somerville Mary Somerville http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Somerville Caroline Herschel http://www.womanastronomer.com/caroline_herschel.htm Caroline Herschel http://www.space.com/17439-caroline-herschel.html Caroline Herschel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel Mary Ball http://insects.about.com/od/thefieldofentomology/p/womenentomolog.htm Mary Ball http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Ball Annie Trumbull Slosson http://insects.about.com/od/thefieldofentomology/p/womenentomolog.htm Annie Trumbull Slosson http://tcn.amnh.org/updates/collectorspotlightannietrumbullslosson Annie Trumbull Slosson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Trumbull_Slosson Maria Goeppert-Mayer http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1963/mayer-bio.html Maria Goeppert-Mayer and the nuclear shell model http://www.aps.org/publications/apsnews/200808/physicshistory.cfm Maria Goeppert-Mayer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Goeppert-Mayer Margaret Belle (Oakley) Dayhoff http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Oakley_Dayhoff