Women chemists in the

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... 

We give an overview of the different employment avenues for women chemists in the interwar period and choose exemplars for each. The chapter concludes with examples of women chemists who used the opportunities of the Second World War to develop career directions, though the effect of that war on women chemists seems to have been less momentous than that of the 1914-1918 conflict. The late 1940s seem to be an appropriate place to end the book, for as Evelyn Fox Keller has observed, the mid-20th century represented the nadir of the history of women in science. 11... 

Each chapter ends with a commentary addressing some specific aspect of that particular chapter. In this commentary, we would like to consider that this book will finally bring awareness of the forgotten role of British women chemists in the late 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. At last, in addition to the History of British chemists, we now have HERstory. 

As part of the final chapter, we will revisit the issue of the employment of women chemists in the post-First World War era. 

For the women chemists for whom we have biographical information, what comes through most strongly is their enthusiasm and dedication. It is for this reason we have titled the book Chemistry Was Their Life. The women chemists of the 1880s to 1920s saw themselves as the pioneers they had to succeed for the sake of the young women who followed them. At the same time, they truly found chemistry enthralling — it was indeed the centre of their lives and, for those in academia, they were determined to convey this belief to their students. 

One of our previous studies indicated that women scientists tended to cluster in certain areas.9 There were two areas in which women chemists flourished biochemistry (see Chap. 8) and crystallography (see Chap. 9). In those chapters, we focus not only on the women and their work, but also the environment in which they worked and the mentors who contributed to their advancement. These were the only two fields in which pioneering women chemists received the accolade of election to Fellowship of the Royal Society (see Table 0.1). 

Up to this point, we have used institutional and subject narratives in which to embed the biographical accounts. These encompass a relatively small number of women chemists of the period. In the last three chapters, we look at the roles of women chemists from other perspectives. 

For Scotland (see Chap. 7), Glasgow was the overwhelming choice of women chemists. In part, this was probably due to the existence of a separate women s college, Queen Margaret College, in the early years while the total for Edinburgh includes Heriot-Watt College (later Heriot-Watt University). 

Emboldened by Curie s success, a memorial (petition) was presented to the Council in October 1904 by Ida Smedley and Martha Whiteley requesting admission of women to Fellowship.39 Nineteen women chemists signed the petition (see Table 2.1), which stated We, the undersigned, representing women engaged in chemical work in this country desire to lay... 

Hartle, who had been taught by Freund at Newnham, had spent 2 years at Birmingham as a researcher with Percy Frankland, spouse of Toynbee. Frankland was another champion of women chemists. In fact, it will always be an unanswered question whether it was the men, such as Ramsay and Frankland, who provided many of the links between women at different universities, as they would have had the professional and social network to do so. 

The letter was followed by a statement from the same group of women concerning a meeting of representative women chemists. In this declaration, the 312 Fellows were thanked for their support in addition, women were urged not to become Subscribers on the grounds that it would prejudice their case for Fellowship of the Chemical Society (Table 2.2). 

It is with much interest that we learned a few weeks ago that women chemists in London had formed a Club. Most men are clubbable, one way or another, but we did not know this was true of women. We wonder if this formation of a Club for women chemists is another sign of female emancipation. We should be glad to think that they mellow over a bottle or two of fine wine. We commend claret — the Queen of wines. Presumably claret attained this title because of its beauty, its grace and its subtlety — admirable qualities which men have always associated with women.89... 

Analytical chemistry was an area favoured by some women chemists during the interwar period. In fact, a remarkable number of women chemists who graduated from UL chose this direction. We have chosen three individuals to exemplify this Dorothy Baylis, Muriel Roberts, and Gertrude Andrew. 

In Chap. 12, we will see that the First World War resulted in a demand for women chemists — in particular, for the small-scale production of fine chemicals. Nowhere was this more evident than the chemistry department at the University of Sheffield under William Palmer Wynne.73... 

No rebuttal could be found in later issues from women chemists, and it is curious that the author claims women students were at the bottom of the exam lists when the usual complaint was that women chemists dominated the upper ranks. 

Perhaps answering the wartime need for women chemists in industry (see Chap. 12), Smith left the Training College in 1917 to become a research chemist at Messrs Cooper s Laboratory. With the War ended and the male chemists returning to resume their posts, she returned to teaching in 1920, becoming Principal at a private school in Ilkley, Yorkshire — a position she held until her death in 1924. 

One of the women chemists with the widest government employment was Lovelyn Elaine Eustice.50 Eustice was born on 6 August 1894 in Southampton, daughter of John Eustice,... 

Harriet Louise Frush was one of the pioneering women scientists who entered the field of carbohydrate chemistry in the 1920s and with perseverance and hard work was able to succeed. At that time there were few women chemists in U.S. Government agencies, and hardly any on the faculty of most universities. Her career was not easy to be accepted by her peers she had to prove herself in research, yet when she had done so, her position was terminated. Although later reinstated, she was overshadowed by her co-workers and never quite received the recognition she deserved. This memoir draws attention to her many accomplishments in the carbohydrate field. 

In this analysis, weight coefficients for rows and for columns have been defined as constants. They could have been made proportional to the marginal sums of Table 32.10, but this would weight down the influence of the earlier years, which we wished to avoid in this application. As with CFA, this analysis yields three latent vectors which contribute respectively 89, 10 and 1% to the interaction in the data. The numerical results of this analysis are very similar to those in Table 32.11 and, therefore, are not reproduced here. The only notable discrepancies are in the precision of the representation of the early years up to 1972, which is less than in the previous application, and in the precision of the representation of the category of women chemists which is better than in the previous analysis by CFA (0.960 vs 0.770). 

Fortunately for a poor, would-be chemist like Leblanc, France s aristocratic passion for the physical sciences crossed economic, social, and political borders. Intellectuals such as Rousseau and Diderot cultivated the sciences with enthusiasm and compiled encyclopedias and dictionaries of natural substances. Local academies and institutes in the far-flung provinces sponsored chemical studies. Crowds flocked to hear chemists lecture and to watch their flashy laboratory demonstrations. Even the future revolutionary, Jean-Paul Marat, experimented with fire, electricity, and light and tried—in vain—to become a member of the Royal Academy of Sciences. In America, Benjamin Franklin abandoned his printing and publishing business for physics, and in England his friend Jane Marcet wrote Mrs Marcet s Conversations in Chemistry for women and working-class men. 

Michael, A. J. Prakt. Chem. 1887, 35, 349. Arthur Michael (1853-1942) was horn in Buffalo, New York. He studied under Robert Bunsen, August Hofmann, Adolphe Wurtz, and Dimitri Mendeleev, but never bothered to take a degree. Back to the United States, Michael became a Professor of Chemistry at Tufts University, where he married one of his most brilliant students, Helen Abbott, one of the few women organic chemists in this period. Since he failed miserably as an administrator, Michael and his wife set up their own private laboratory at Newton Center, Massachusetts, where the Michael addition was discovered. 

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