The Royal Society's lost women scientists

Richard Holmes - ... All this year, and all round the globe, the Royal Society of London has been celebrating its 350th birthday. In a sense, it has been a celebration of science itself and the social importance of its history. The senior scientific establishment in Britain, and arguably in the world, the Royal Society dates to the time of Charles II. Its early members included Isaac Newton, Edmond Halley, Robert Hooke, Thomas Hobbes, Christopher Wren and even – rather intriguingly – Samuel Pepys. But amid this year's seminars, exhibitions and publications, there has been one ghost at the feast: the historic absence of women scientists from its ranks.

Although it was founded in 1660, women were not permitted by statute to become fellows of the Royal Society until 285 years later, in 1945. (An exception was made for Queen Victoria, who was made a royal fellow.) It will be recalled that women over the age of 30 had won the vote nearly 30 years earlier, in 1918. Very similar exclusions operated elsewhere: in the American National Academy of Sciences until 1925; in the Russian National Academy until 1939; and even in that home of Enlightenment science, the Académie des Sciences in France, until 1962. Marie Curie was rejected for membership of the Académie in 1911, the very year she won her second Nobel prize. ...

Yet my re-examination of the Royal Society archives during this 350th birthday year has thrown new and unexpected light on the lost women of science. I have tracked down a series of letters, documents and rare publications that begin to fit together to suggest a very different network of support and understanding between the sexes. It emerges that women had a far more fruitful, if sometimes conflicted, relationship with the Royal Society than has previously been supposed....

The first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society was Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle, in May 1667. There were protests from the all-male fellows – Pepys recorded the scandal – and the dangerous experiment was not repeated for another couple of centuries. But Margaret could take advantage of her position, being the second wife of William Cavendish FRS, a member of one of the great aristocratic dynasties of British science. She knew many of the leading fellows, such as Robert Boyle and Thomas Hobbes. On this occasion, she witnessed several experiments of "colours, loadstones, microscopes" and was "full of admiration", although according to Pepys, her dress was "so antic and her deportment so unordinary" that the fellows were made strangely uneasy. But this may have been for other reasons.Margaret later raised issues that have become perennial. She mocked the dry, empirical approach of the fellows, violently attacked the practice of vivisection and wondered what rational explanation could be given for women's exclusion from learned bodies. ...

via The Royal Society's lost women scientists | Science | The Observer.