From: johnston@fys.ruu.nl (Helen Johnston)
Subject: Re: Plato's Views on Women
Keywords: Plato, politics, women, feminism
Organization: Physics Department, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 19:59:31 GMT

In article <1992Nov11.091333.5728@cbnewsk.cb.att.com> noraa@cbnewsk.cb.att.com (aaron.l.hoffmeyer) writes:
>
>So, which women should we have heard of, but didn't get to?  Why are
>science and math sexist?
>
and in article <1992Nov11.110753.4523@genie.slhs.udel.edu> 
starr@genie.slhs.udel.edu (Tim Starr) also writes:

> And I had a chemistry teacher whose high school professor told her that she
> didn't belong in the class because she was a girl.  So what?  Citing cases
> of sexist prejudice in the past hardly bolsters the case that there's been
> some widespread practice of neglecting to give due credit to the achievements
> of women.  What are these achievements?  Who are these women?  How were they
> covered up?

This is the problem, of course. Your teachers were never taught about
these women, so they didn't teach their students. And now you, thinking
they don't exist, won't teach your students. But luckily there have been
poeple starting to go back to primary sources and uncover the
accomplishments of history's great women. I encourage everyone who has
the opportunity to teach, whether it be in university courses, or in
school lessons, or in discussions with your own children, to point out
the accomplishments of these women. 

Teach them about the women who were philosophers along with men in
ancient Greece. Tell them about Theano, the female cosmologist who
married Pythagoras when he was an old man, and wrote treatises on
mathematics, physics and medicine as part of the Pythagorean School.
Teach them about Maria the Jewess, who lived in Alexandria in the first
century A.D. Writing under the pseudonym of "Miriam the Prophetess",
she wrote many works of alchemy. She invented the water bath, used for
maintaining constant temperature or heating substances slowly; in
French a double-boiler is still called a "bain-marie". Teach them about
Hypatia, the famous Librarian of Alexandria, for fifteen centuries
considered the only female scientist in history.

Tell them about Mary Montagu, who introduced smallpox innoculation to
Europe. Tell them about Marie Lavoisier, wife and co-worker of the
"Father of Modern Chemistry", Antoine Lavoisier. She continued
publishing work under Antoine's name ten years after her husband was
guillotined during the French Revolution. Tell them about the geologist
Mary Anning, who discovered the first complete skeletons of the
ichthyosaurus and the plesiosaurus. Tell them about Charles Lyell's
wife Mary Elizabeth Horner, herself a geologist, about whom the author
of Lyell's obituary wrote "Had she not been part of him she would
herself have been better known to fame."

Tell them about Caroline Herschel, sister to the discoverer of the
planet Neptune. Together with him, she discovered the binary motion of
stars, founded sidereal astronomy, and discovered 2500 new nebulae and
star clusters.

Tell them about Emilie de Breteuil, Marquise du Chatelet, translator
and interpreter of the works of Newton, and largely responsible for
introducing his philosophies into France.  Teach them that there had
been many dozens of women publishing novels a full century and more
before Defoe, Richardson and Fielding "invented" the form in the 18th
century.

Teach them about Ada Lovelace, inventor of computer programming for
Charles Babbage's "difference engine". Tell them of Sophie Germain, who,
completely self-taught in mathematics as she was not allowed to attend
the Ecole Polytechnique, won a prix extraordinaire from the Institut de
France for her solution to the problem of vibrating plates. Tell them of
Sophia (Sonya) Kovalevsky, author of the Cauchy-Kovalevsky theorem on
the existence and uniqueness of solutions to partial differential
equations. Her work on the rotation of a rigid body, a problem which
Euler, Lagrange and Poisson had all failed to solve, not only won the
Prix Bordin from the French Academy of Sciences, but has not been
surpassed since. 

Teach them about the heroic work of the women "computers" employed at
the Harvard Observatory at the end of last century. Employed to do
boring, tedious work which, as women, they were considered "ideally
suited" for (and at much less cost than hiring men!), they also did
important science, including the discovery of the Cepheid
period-luminosity relation (Henrietta Leavitt) and the establishment of
stellar spectral classification (Annie Jump Cannon, who classified
250,000 stars by eye). They were the immediate predecessors of the
first woman to receive a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard, Cecilia
Payne Gaposchkin, the guru of variable stars. Her doctoral thesis, in
which she virtually invented the field of stellar atmospheres, has been
described as one of the greatest astronomical theses ever written.

And then teach them WHY so many people can still think that there were
no important women in history, apart from the occasional monarch whose
presence cannot be overlooked. Tell them about the social pressures that
prevented women from getting an education in the first place; and that
the lucky few who did often published under male pseudonyms. Others, who
were in the fortunate position of being encouraged in their work by
fathers, brothers or husbands, often found their work being attributed
to their male colleagues. Margaret Alic writes: "Many of these men were
careful to give the women proper credit. It was usually other scientists
and later historians who robbed them of their due, since every major
accomplishment by a woman scientist spoke out strongly for the equality
of women... Women scientists often chose to publish under a male
pseudonym to ensure that their work would be taken seriously. Problems
of identifying authorship were further compounded by a woman's loss of
her name upon marriage."

This is only a small example of women's accomplishments through the
ages. I recommend the following books to anyone who has an interest in
pursuing the lives of these and other women further:

	Margaret Alic, "Hypatia's Heritage: A history of women in
science from antiquity to the late nineteenth century." (The Women's
Press, 1986)

	Lynn Osen, "Women in Mathematics" (MIT Press, 1974)

	Dale Spender, "Mothers of the novel" (1986)

The following quote from Emilie du Chatelet "could have been speaking
for 2000 years of women scientists".

	Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look
	upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that
	renowned scholar... I am in my own right a whole person,
	responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say,
	all that I do. It may be that there are metaphysicians and
	philosophers whose learning is greater than mine, although
	I have not met them. Yet, they are but frail humans too,
	and have their faults; so, when I add the sum total of my
	graces, I confess that I am inferior to no one.
			(Emilie du Chatelet, 1706-49)


	She was a great man whose only fault was in being a woman. 
	A woman who translated and explained Newton... in one
	word, a very great man. (Voltaire, writing of du Chatelet).

	And I make no question but great Improvements might be
	made in the Sciences, were not Women Enviously excluded
	from this their proper Business. (Mary Astell, b. 1666)

	One would naturally expect that, in the pruning of our
	historical traditions which is proceeding so briskly, the
	fame of the great women of the past is peculiarly doomed to
	suffer curtailment. (Joseph McCabe, 1903)


-- 
Helen Johnston       | Astronomye is an harde thynge and yvel forto knowe.
johnston@fys.ruu.nl  |      -- William Langland, Piers the Plowman
Newsgroups: soc.women,alt.feminism,soc.men