A Less Than Golden Age for Women in Chemistry

It is a pleasure to be here with you today, especially since historians rarely get to address chemists, even young ones. By way of introduction I should say that I was briefly (until midway through my sophomore year) a chemistry major, thanks to a very enjoyable course and textbook by Professor Harry Sisler, who made chemistry seem beautiful. But then in sophomore year Professor Louis Fieser made organic chemistry seem monotonous—I could not stay interested in all those ways you can turn an aldehyde into a ketone. The history of science was for me a much better subject, and I have been at it ever since. 

While in graduate school at Yale University in the early 1970s, when the women s liberation movement was all around us, I asked the professors in my department (History of Science and Medicine, since discontinued) at one of our Friday afternoon beer parties if there had ever been any women scientists. Certainly none had ever been mentioned in any of our courses. The answer was no, there had never been any. Not even Madame Curie who had won two Nobel Prizes No, she had been a mere drudge who stirred the pitchblende for her husband s experiments. Such was the state of knowledge (or ignorance or even prejudice) and authority then. Later, after I had completed my degree, I determined to see for myself if there had ever been any women scientists of any sort—and, as they say, the rest is history.1 

Nowadays you do not have to look far to discover that there have been a lot of women chemists in the past.2 For our purposes today we can start with Anna Jane Harrison (1912 to 1998) of Mount 

Margaret W. Rossiter, Writing the History of Science, in Jonathan Monroe, ed., Writing Across the Curriculum (Ithaca, NY Cornell University Press, forthcoming). 

By 1978 Harrison was finishing her term on the National Science Board, to which she had been appointed by Richard Nixon in 1972. In the 1980s, she was the fourth woman president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the first woman chemist). Thus she was one of the very few women scientists of the 1970s and 1980s to play much of a role in the whole enterprise that is called science policy. She even ran a meeting on international science at Mount Holyoke (a women s college) in the mid-1980s.4 

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The presentation by Margaret W. Rossiter, of Cornell University, was titled 1970-2000 A Less Than Golden Age for Women in Chemistry The last 25 years have been a kind of golden age for women in science and engineering in the United States, compared with previous times. Laws were passed in 1972 that, pushed by well-publicized lawsuits, government investigations, voluntary pressure, and individual initiative, made substantial quantitative differences in the training and job opportunities... 

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