Wonder women
Female scientists are starting to get the recognition they deserve in cultural spaces, with museums and galleries bringing their stories and achievements to the fore. By Deborah Mulhearn
Colour photography pioneer Sarah Acland; astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne- Gaposchkin; chemist and mineralogist Elizabeth Hippisley; astronomer and astrolabe maker Mariam al-Asturlabi; and maths-expert sisters Flora and Jane Sang.
None of them are household names, as stories of pioneering female scientists have often been left out of the history books. Their lives tend to be only briefly recorded, their achievements obscured by men in the same field, often husbands, fathers and brothers.
But museums are now starting to reveal their stories and rethink how they celebrate both the historic and current roles of women in science. Objects and stories unearthed as part of the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918, more coverage of initiatives such as Women’s History Month, and the wider recognition of female scientists in society have put them centre stage.
But comments such as the one by Cern scientist Alessandro Strumia in 2018 that it was men who were discriminated against in science, not women, show that there is still a long way to go.
Last year saw not one but two women Nobel laureates, the physicist Donna Strickland and the chemist Frances Arnold, while physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell won the £2.3m Breakthrough Prize for her work on pulsars and professor Penny Endersby became the first woman chief executive of the Met Office.
In wider culture, the actress Nicole Kidman won an award for her portrayal of the chemist Rosalind Franklin – the scientist who discovered the double helix in DNA – in the 2015 West End play Photograph 51. The 2016 film Hidden Figures looks at three black women mathematicians working at Nasa in 1962, and Mary Anning and the Dinosaur Hunters, a film in production, tells the story of the early-19th-century palaeontologist.
The new Mary Anning wing at Lyme Regis museum in Dorset celebrates her life and work, and commemorative plaques have been recently installed at Camarthen, the South Wales birthplace of Dorothea Bate, the first women to be employed at London’s Natural History Museum, and the childhood home of the mathematician Ada Lovelace in Leicestershire.
Even female representation in fictional science is catching up with the introduction of the first female Dr Who and no fewer than five women scientists in the recent sci-fi film Annihilation, which is on Netflix.
Until the mid-20th century, women were usually working in the shadow of more recognised male scientists. The death of Rosaline Franklin in 1958 at the age of 37 meant she missed out on the Nobel prize, which was awarded to her male co-workers, James Watson and Francis Crick, for their research into the structure of DNA.
The Scottish Sang sisters objected when their father wanted them to share the credit on his work on logarithms, to which they had heavily contributed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. National Museums Scotland’s website tells their story through their father’s gyroscope, which was bought by the museum.
A 1952 copy of the Wonder Woman comic sparked The Wonder Women of Space exhibition in 2018 at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath, part of the Bath Preservation Trust. The comic was in the museum’s collection because it featured the story of the astronomer Caroline Herschel as part of a series entitled Wonder Women of History.
“The comic gave us a germ of an idea,” says Joe Middleton, the manager at the Herschel. “As a small museum we are restricted, but we are fortunate to have strong contacts with Royal Museums Greenwich and the Science Museum, which can help with loans and advice.”
The scientific siblings Caroline and William Herschel were both self-taught. William is known as the astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus, while Caroline, deemed unmarriageable after a childhood illness stunted her growth, discovered eight comets and three nebulae (clouds of dust and gas in space).
She helped her brother develop a mathematical approach to astronomy and mapped all the stars and discoveries they both made despite having to do all the housework as well. All the while she had to act as an assistant to her brother.
“Women were always a big part of astronomy, but were hidden behind the leader of a project, acting as ‘sky sweepers’,” Middleton says. “Caroline was unusual in that she was recognised and awarded for her work by the Royal Astronomical Society in her lifetime.
“Historians and curators are finding incredible stories that have never been told and are using them to inspire today’s young women and girls to take up science. It was not considered ladylike to be interested in science and it’s interesting to see how individuals and groups circumvented these restrictions. We want to use our collections and expertise to spread the word that it’s possible, no matter what gender, ethnicity or background you have.”
Stem of all things
As well as reflecting the achievements of outstanding women scientists in their displays and collecting policies, smaller museums such as the Herschel can use education programmes and industry partnerships to encourage more women and girls into Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects and scientific careers.
Relationships have been built with working scientists, who were invited to select an object from the museum collections that related to their work, and to give talks about their careers. Luke Lucas, a female spacecraft operations engineer at the European Space Agency, chose a tellurium, a miniature model of the moon and earth.
Carole Mundell, a professor of extragalactic astronomy and the head of astrophysics at Bath University, chose the Index to Flamsteed’s Observations of the Fixed Stars, with Caroline Herschel’s corrections marked on it.
Herschel also appears on the children’s book illustrator Quentin Blake’s new artwork for the Science Museum, along with Lovelace, aviator Amy Johnson, engineer and inventor Hertha Ayrton and chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, as part of a mural featuring 20 historical scientific figures.
The Science Museum’s current exhibition The Sun: Living With Our Star, runs until May and features stories about the early-20th century astronomer Cecilia Payne, who discovered that the sun and stars are made up of hydrogen and helium. It also features Elizabeth Beckley, an astronomer who documented daily solar images that helped our understanding of the solar cycle.
The ongoing work in museums to increase the participation of women in science and girls in Stem subjects is not new. But it has been given new impetus with partnerships and education initiatives that focus on women’s achievements and showcase the range of opportunities. Using the stories of remarkable women (and men) throughout history to inspire engineers is the premise behind the Future Brunels programme at Bristol’s SS Great Britain Trust.
“So a letter from Ada Lovelace, the early computer programmer, can act as a prompt to engage young girls, and a talk from Aardman Animations can show them the varied careers they can have if they keep studying Stem subjects, unlike the barriers that faced women such as Brunel’s sister Sophia.”
Redressing the balance
Leeds Museums and Galleries shows how an exhibition programme can benefit a venue’s collecting. “We have a strong historic toys and games collection, which now has more gender neutral, and less pink, contemporary toys,” says Kitty Ross, a social history curator at the museum service.
“For example, a Lego set of the women of Nasa was originally acquired for the exhibition A Woman’s Place at Abbey House Museum.” Now, the female space engineers figures supplement Leeds museums’ collection nicely.
National Museums Scotland’s (NMS) Stem engagement strategy is funded by the ScottishPower Foundation and has enabled the organisation to forge relationships with industry and access speakers, often women, from the Stem sector.
The partnership has supported science workshops and funded a science-engagement manager and an outreach assistant post at NMS to build partnerships with researchers, scientists, engineers and schools. It aims to boost knowledge, encourage debate and support national Stem strategies to inspire scientists of tomorrow.
These programmes try to normalise gender representation as well as other under- represented groups to provide a range of role models for students. NMS has also worked with the Institute of Physics, in partnership with Education Scotland and Skills Development Scotland, on the Improving Gender Balance project to review Stem programming and marketing to ensure the images and text used are gender neutral and relevant to as wide an audience as possible.
The Museum of the History of Science (MHS) in Oxford celebrates its centenary in 2024 and is using its work on women scientists to inform its future strategy.
“We are looking at the process of how we put together our exhibitions and trails, with the long-term aim of feeding this work into a redisplay for the centenary, making women more prominent in the permanent displays and programming,” says Helen Pooley, its learning and participation manager.
“We’ve been moving thousands of objects, many of them forgotten, and are looking at how we can tag our collections database to find previously hidden stories more easily. We had a pneumatic trough from the chemist and geologist Elizabeth Hippisley’s laboratory, but it lacked context. We have redressed that display using her lab notes and researched more about her life and where she lived.”
Pooley says the museum has the world’s most important collection of astrolabes – early calculating devices – but hadn’t fully realised the long history of women as makers of scientific objects.
“Mariam al-Asturlabi, for example, was a 10th century Syrian astrolabe maker,” Pooley says. “There is only one piece of evidence about her existence from a contemporary biography and none of her objects have survived, but there is a wider story we can tell.”
The learning team’s communication expertise and knowledge is also being used more in gallery interpretation. “For example, we did a tour for adults, which told some of the stories behind the women in the temporary displays, which is not something we’d done before,” Pooley says.
The popularity of the MHS’s Women in Science exhibition last year has seen it extended into 2019. It comprises archive material relating to four pioneering women: Hippisley, the photographers Anna Atkins and Acland, and Lovelace, perhaps the only well-known name of the four.
“We were encouraged by comments from students and academics who were pleased to see women’s lives celebrated,” says Pooley. “One visitor said she had always wanted to see Einstein’s blackboard, but found it was just as exciting to see the work of Lovelace.”
There is also a new leaflet and trail, Shout Out for Women, across Oxford University’s Gardens, Libraries and Museums sites that builds on the exhibition content by highlighting significant objects from the MHS’s broader collections related to eight women scientists.
These include the astronomer Mary Somerville’s microscope, photographs by Atkins, who published the first book with photography, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, in 1843, and Acland, a pioneer in colour photography who was experimenting six or seven years before the Lumière Brothers invented their autochrome technique in 1907.
Deborah Mulhearn is a freelance writer
Women such as Sophia Brunel Hawes, the sister of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, were excluded from the world of science and engineering, but found other ways to contribute to its advancement.
The SS Great Britain Trust has acquired two manuscripts by Hawes for its collection and various objects associated with her are on display in the Being Brunel museum. A memoir of her father, the engineer Marc Brunel, poignantly describes his dying days: “During his illness his mind did not wander but appeared absent to what was passing around, the fingers moving as if he were drawing his ideas in the air.”
“Evidence suggests that she thought of herself as being actively involved in her family’s professional interests,” says Kate Rambridge, the head of interpretation at Being Brunel.
None of them are household names, as stories of pioneering female scientists have often been left out of the history books. Their lives tend to be only briefly recorded, their achievements obscured by men in the same field, often husbands, fathers and brothers.
But museums are now starting to reveal their stories and rethink how they celebrate both the historic and current roles of women in science. Objects and stories unearthed as part of the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918, more coverage of initiatives such as Women’s History Month, and the wider recognition of female scientists in society have put them centre stage.
But comments such as the one by Cern scientist Alessandro Strumia in 2018 that it was men who were discriminated against in science, not women, show that there is still a long way to go.
Last year saw not one but two women Nobel laureates, the physicist Donna Strickland and the chemist Frances Arnold, while physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell won the £2.3m Breakthrough Prize for her work on pulsars and professor Penny Endersby became the first woman chief executive of the Met Office.
In wider culture, the actress Nicole Kidman won an award for her portrayal of the chemist Rosalind Franklin – the scientist who discovered the double helix in DNA – in the 2015 West End play Photograph 51. The 2016 film Hidden Figures looks at three black women mathematicians working at Nasa in 1962, and Mary Anning and the Dinosaur Hunters, a film in production, tells the story of the early-19th-century palaeontologist.
The new Mary Anning wing at Lyme Regis museum in Dorset celebrates her life and work, and commemorative plaques have been recently installed at Camarthen, the South Wales birthplace of Dorothea Bate, the first women to be employed at London’s Natural History Museum, and the childhood home of the mathematician Ada Lovelace in Leicestershire.
Even female representation in fictional science is catching up with the introduction of the first female Dr Who and no fewer than five women scientists in the recent sci-fi film Annihilation, which is on Netflix.
Whether in real life or fiction, their stories are central to the narrative and they are no longer portrayed as just assistants supporting male colleagues. Museums are following suit.
Recognition due
Until the mid-20th century, women were usually working in the shadow of more recognised male scientists. The death of Rosaline Franklin in 1958 at the age of 37 meant she missed out on the Nobel prize, which was awarded to her male co-workers, James Watson and Francis Crick, for their research into the structure of DNA.
The Scottish Sang sisters objected when their father wanted them to share the credit on his work on logarithms, to which they had heavily contributed in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. National Museums Scotland’s website tells their story through their father’s gyroscope, which was bought by the museum.
A 1952 copy of the Wonder Woman comic sparked The Wonder Women of Space exhibition in 2018 at the Herschel Museum of Astronomy in Bath, part of the Bath Preservation Trust. The comic was in the museum’s collection because it featured the story of the astronomer Caroline Herschel as part of a series entitled Wonder Women of History.
“The comic gave us a germ of an idea,” says Joe Middleton, the manager at the Herschel. “As a small museum we are restricted, but we are fortunate to have strong contacts with Royal Museums Greenwich and the Science Museum, which can help with loans and advice.”
The scientific siblings Caroline and William Herschel were both self-taught. William is known as the astronomer who discovered the planet Uranus, while Caroline, deemed unmarriageable after a childhood illness stunted her growth, discovered eight comets and three nebulae (clouds of dust and gas in space).
She helped her brother develop a mathematical approach to astronomy and mapped all the stars and discoveries they both made despite having to do all the housework as well. All the while she had to act as an assistant to her brother.
“Women were always a big part of astronomy, but were hidden behind the leader of a project, acting as ‘sky sweepers’,” Middleton says. “Caroline was unusual in that she was recognised and awarded for her work by the Royal Astronomical Society in her lifetime.
“Historians and curators are finding incredible stories that have never been told and are using them to inspire today’s young women and girls to take up science. It was not considered ladylike to be interested in science and it’s interesting to see how individuals and groups circumvented these restrictions. We want to use our collections and expertise to spread the word that it’s possible, no matter what gender, ethnicity or background you have.”
Stem of all things
As well as reflecting the achievements of outstanding women scientists in their displays and collecting policies, smaller museums such as the Herschel can use education programmes and industry partnerships to encourage more women and girls into Stem (science, technology, engineering and maths) subjects and scientific careers.
Relationships have been built with working scientists, who were invited to select an object from the museum collections that related to their work, and to give talks about their careers. Luke Lucas, a female spacecraft operations engineer at the European Space Agency, chose a tellurium, a miniature model of the moon and earth.
Carole Mundell, a professor of extragalactic astronomy and the head of astrophysics at Bath University, chose the Index to Flamsteed’s Observations of the Fixed Stars, with Caroline Herschel’s corrections marked on it.
Herschel also appears on the children’s book illustrator Quentin Blake’s new artwork for the Science Museum, along with Lovelace, aviator Amy Johnson, engineer and inventor Hertha Ayrton and chemist Dorothy Hodgkin, as part of a mural featuring 20 historical scientific figures.
The Science Museum’s current exhibition The Sun: Living With Our Star, runs until May and features stories about the early-20th century astronomer Cecilia Payne, who discovered that the sun and stars are made up of hydrogen and helium. It also features Elizabeth Beckley, an astronomer who documented daily solar images that helped our understanding of the solar cycle.
The ongoing work in museums to increase the participation of women in science and girls in Stem subjects is not new. But it has been given new impetus with partnerships and education initiatives that focus on women’s achievements and showcase the range of opportunities. Using the stories of remarkable women (and men) throughout history to inspire engineers is the premise behind the Future Brunels programme at Bristol’s SS Great Britain Trust.
“We are challenging the stereotype of engineering as a white, male, middle-class profession,” says Rachel Roberts, the head of education at the SS Great Britain Trust. “Much of our collection revolves around Isambard Kingdom Brunel, but we use his drawings to show that the arts and sciences are intertwined and that there are creative people in both.
“Our research shows that it’s often hard for girls and young women to connect their identities with science subjects and professions, and that seeing behind the scenes and connecting with the collections is a crucial way for them to see the opportunities in modern engineering now,” Roberts says.
Redressing the balance
Leeds Museums and Galleries shows how an exhibition programme can benefit a venue’s collecting. “We have a strong historic toys and games collection, which now has more gender neutral, and less pink, contemporary toys,” says Kitty Ross, a social history curator at the museum service.
“For example, a Lego set of the women of Nasa was originally acquired for the exhibition A Woman’s Place at Abbey House Museum.” Now, the female space engineers figures supplement Leeds museums’ collection nicely.
National Museums Scotland’s (NMS) Stem engagement strategy is funded by the ScottishPower Foundation and has enabled the organisation to forge relationships with industry and access speakers, often women, from the Stem sector.
The partnership has supported science workshops and funded a science-engagement manager and an outreach assistant post at NMS to build partnerships with researchers, scientists, engineers and schools. It aims to boost knowledge, encourage debate and support national Stem strategies to inspire scientists of tomorrow.
These programmes try to normalise gender representation as well as other under- represented groups to provide a range of role models for students. NMS has also worked with the Institute of Physics, in partnership with Education Scotland and Skills Development Scotland, on the Improving Gender Balance project to review Stem programming and marketing to ensure the images and text used are gender neutral and relevant to as wide an audience as possible.
The Museum of the History of Science (MHS) in Oxford celebrates its centenary in 2024 and is using its work on women scientists to inform its future strategy.
“We are looking at the process of how we put together our exhibitions and trails, with the long-term aim of feeding this work into a redisplay for the centenary, making women more prominent in the permanent displays and programming,” says Helen Pooley, its learning and participation manager.
“We’ve been moving thousands of objects, many of them forgotten, and are looking at how we can tag our collections database to find previously hidden stories more easily. We had a pneumatic trough from the chemist and geologist Elizabeth Hippisley’s laboratory, but it lacked context. We have redressed that display using her lab notes and researched more about her life and where she lived.”
Pooley says the museum has the world’s most important collection of astrolabes – early calculating devices – but hadn’t fully realised the long history of women as makers of scientific objects.
“Mariam al-Asturlabi, for example, was a 10th century Syrian astrolabe maker,” Pooley says. “There is only one piece of evidence about her existence from a contemporary biography and none of her objects have survived, but there is a wider story we can tell.”
The learning team’s communication expertise and knowledge is also being used more in gallery interpretation. “For example, we did a tour for adults, which told some of the stories behind the women in the temporary displays, which is not something we’d done before,” Pooley says.
The popularity of the MHS’s Women in Science exhibition last year has seen it extended into 2019. It comprises archive material relating to four pioneering women: Hippisley, the photographers Anna Atkins and Acland, and Lovelace, perhaps the only well-known name of the four.
“We were encouraged by comments from students and academics who were pleased to see women’s lives celebrated,” says Pooley. “One visitor said she had always wanted to see Einstein’s blackboard, but found it was just as exciting to see the work of Lovelace.”
There is also a new leaflet and trail, Shout Out for Women, across Oxford University’s Gardens, Libraries and Museums sites that builds on the exhibition content by highlighting significant objects from the MHS’s broader collections related to eight women scientists.
These include the astronomer Mary Somerville’s microscope, photographs by Atkins, who published the first book with photography, Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions, in 1843, and Acland, a pioneer in colour photography who was experimenting six or seven years before the Lumière Brothers invented their autochrome technique in 1907.
Despite unfortunate attitudes like those of the Cern scientist, it’s an exciting time for women in science, and museums and galleries can be at the forefront of unearthing the stories behind their objects. Biographical information and evidence about women may be scant, but it is vital to tip the balance and share stories through exhibitions and education programmes.
Sophia Brunel Hawes: taking notes
Women such as Sophia Brunel Hawes, the sister of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, were excluded from the world of science and engineering, but found other ways to contribute to its advancement.
The SS Great Britain Trust has acquired two manuscripts by Hawes for its collection and various objects associated with her are on display in the Being Brunel museum. A memoir of her father, the engineer Marc Brunel, poignantly describes his dying days: “During his illness his mind did not wander but appeared absent to what was passing around, the fingers moving as if he were drawing his ideas in the air.”
A travel journal made on a journey in the 1840s with her politician husband through the manufacturing districts of north-west England describes the Liverpool to Manchester railway, details of the manufacturing process and techniques in the cotton and silk mills she visited in Manchester, and the glassworks at St Helens in Merseyside.
“Evidence suggests that she thought of herself as being actively involved in her family’s professional interests,” says Kate Rambridge, the head of interpretation at Being Brunel.
“Her manuscripts show the significant contribution she made in supporting the family’s considerable achievements. She established the Brunel family tradition of biography and memoir, and without these thoughtful notes and memoirs, we would not have been able to expand our knowledge of the Brunel family further still.”