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Women in the Historiography of Biology

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Handbook of the Historiography of Biology

Part of the book series: Historiographies of Science ((HISTSC,volume 1))

Abstract

Women no less than men have been drawn to the study of nature, but only after they were given access to higher education were they able to participate in science in greater numbers. The historian’s gaze has accordingly been transfixed on the accomplishments of men and a few extraordinarily talented women. This began to change in the 1970s when a new wave of women scholars and feminists turned to recovering the accomplishments of individuals, exploring opportunities and hindrances to women’s participation in science, and identifying sexist ideologies and gendered assumptions within biology that influence not only women’s ability to do science, but also broader social, economic, and political rights of women. The result is a rich body of literature on women’s contributions to, and a feminist critique of, biology.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Harvard University remained the leading program for training historians of science, but new departments were created at the University of Wisconsin (1940s), the University of Oklahoma (1950s), and Indiana University (1960), and a program in the history of science formed at Cornell University in the mid-1960s.

  2. 2.

    (In establishing a women’s committee, HSS was following the lead of the American Historical Association, which established a Coordinating Committee on Women in the History Profession in December 1969 (Smith 1994)).

  3. 3.

    (On feminist methodology for narrative research, see Bloom (1998)).

  4. 4.

    (For Britain, see Richmond (Richmond 2001, 2006, 2007b) and Love 1979. For the Netherlands, Norway, and Germany, see Stamhuis (1995), Stamhuis and Monsen (2007), and Stamhuis and Richmond (2014). For the USA, see Ogilvie (2007), Richmond (2012), and Dietrich and Tambasco (2007). On cytogenetics, see Brush (1978), Ogilvie and Choquette (1981), Cross and Steward (1993), and Echeverría (2000) (all of which focus on the work of Nettie Marie Stevens); see also Richmond (2010), and Williams (2016). For Germany, see Satzinger (Satzinger 2004, 2008, 2009a, b) and Deichmann (Deichmann 1997, 2014))

  5. 5.

    (For biochemistry, see Richmond (2007a), Needham (1982), and Ŝtrbáňová (2004). For ecology, see Norwood (1993), Marcil (2015), and Slack (1996)).

  6. 6.

    (Marine biology, Sloan (1978) and Zottoli and Seyfarth (2015); protozoology, Warner and Ewing (2002); developmental biology, Keller (1996) and Gilbert and Rader (2001); molecular biology, Spanier (1995); primatology, Fedigan (1994, 2001); anthropology, Wylie (1997, 2001)).

  7. 7.

    (Hypatia, “Feminism and Science,” 2, 3 (Autumn 1987) and 3, 1 (Spring 1988), including 17 articles and a bibliography of women in science).

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  1. Wayne State University, Detroit, USA

    Marsha L. Richmond

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  1. Marsha L. Richmond
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  1. HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh HPS Dept, 1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

    Michael Dietrich

  2. University of Minnesota, Saint Paul, MN, USA

    Mark Borrello

  3. Tel Aviv, Israel

    Oren Harman

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Richmond, M.L. (2018). Women in the Historiography of Biology. In: Dietrich, M., Borrello, M., Harman, O. (eds) Handbook of the Historiography of Biology. Historiographies of Science, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74456-8_17-1

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