The Women in Modern Men of Science
This post originally appeared at Double X Science.
While working on the Notable Women in Science series, I was referred at one point back to the McGraw-Hill Modern Men of Science collection from the 1960s. Of the 426 scientists highlighted in 1966 among the “modern men,” seven were women. By then, 11 women had earned the Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy (and even with an award named after her, she isn’t in the collection), 23 women had achieved the Garvan Medal in Chemistry, and 10 had won a Nobel Prize (one of them twice – she also doesn’t appear in this collection.) Some of these awards overlap. However, by 1966, there were clearly more women than seven deserving of this catalogue, and the seven women in the group weren’t … men of science, modern or otherwise. Who are the women who were selected to be among the ‘Modern Men of Science’?
Katherine Esau (1898 – 1997) had a botany award named for her. Born in Russia, she was educated through her first year of college there. In 1919, her parents took her to Germany, where she completed her collegiate work in 1922. That same year, her family migrated to the USA and she took work as a housekeeper, cook, and at a seed company to employ her agricultural skills. They lived in a town with a high Mennonite population because the family identified as part of the sect. They moved to California after a few years. In 1928, Katherine Esau entered graduate school at the University of California, Davis, and earned her Ph.D. in 1931. She continued there as an Instructor of Botany and a Botanist, moving up through academic positions as a professor until 1963, when she transferred to the Santa Barbara campus, becoming a professor emeritus in 1965. More than 20 years into her career, an administrator noted her salary was low and increased her salary to the appropriate amount for her position.
Dr. Esau’s research focused on the effects of viruses on plants. She became the leading expert on the structure and development of the food-conducting tissue called the phloem. Her work all began at the Spreckels Sugar Company in the Salinas Valley of California where she worked towards developing sugar-beet strains resistant to the virus disease called “curly top.” Her work earned her an election the the National Academy of Sciences (1957).
Dame Honor (Bridget) Fell (1900 – 1986) was a biologist and Director of Strangeways Research Laboratory. Born in England, she attended Madras College, St. Andrews, and worked on her B.Sc. (1922) from Edinburgh University, where she also earned her Ph.D. (1923) and D.Sc. (1930). She began her career as the assistant to Dr. Strangeways at what was called the Cambridge Research Hospital but was renamed the Strangeways Research Laboratory. The research was focused on arthritis. Strangeway died in 1927 and Dame Honor Fell was put in charge of the lab a year later, then appointed director in 1929.
She was known to rate a successful experiment as more important than her many honors, which included being elected a fellow of the Royal Society (1952) and made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (1963).
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin was highlighted in our Crystallographers of Merit.
By Smithsonian Institution from United States, via Wikimedia Commons
Dame Kathleen Lonsdale (1903 – 1971; right) was another woman of substance. Born in Ireland as Kathleen Yardley, she was the youngest child of ten. Despite familial issues, she was bright and won several scholarships to attend school and entered Bedford College for Women, University of London, and earned high honors in physics in 1922. She joined the research team of Sir William Bragg (of crystallography fame) at University College and moved to the Royal Institution. In 1927, she married a fellow physicist, Thomas Lonsdale, and for two years she worked at the University of Leeds. She received her D.Sc. in 1929. In 1932, she returned to the Royal Institution. She earned a number of honorary degrees. She was appointed a Dame of the British Empire in 1956.
Dame Lonsdale is known for proving that the carbon atoms in the benzene nucleus are coplanar and arranged in a hexagon, thanks to her work on the crystal-structure of hexamethylbenzene and hexachlorobenzene. For this work, she was awarded the Davy Medal of the Royal Society of London in 1957. Her studies required a large amount of calculation of alternate possibilities to be as complete as possible. She also developed another method of x-ray crystallography to obtain very accurate measurements of the carbon – carbon distance in individual diamonds.
Maria Goeppert Mayer was highlighted in our Historical Physicists post.
Image reprinted in Lise Meitner and the Dawn of the Nuclear Age ISBN 978-0817637323 with the caption “Shy Lise the doctoral candidate, 1906, Vienna. (Courtesy Master and Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge, England)”
Lise Meitner was considered for but never won a Nobel Prize (1878-1968). Born in Vienna, Austria, Dr. Meitner, whom we’ve written about before at Double X Science, received her doctorate in physics at the University of Vienna in 1906. She began work at the University of Berlin, studying with Max Planck and beginning a 30-year collaboration with Otto Hahn. Dr. Meitner is known at “the mother of the atomic bomb,” although her true discovery is the physical theory of nuclear fission, built upon many experiments and published in 1939. Unfortunately, the political atmosphere of Europe required her exile and she was no longer able to work openly with Hahn. Because of her physical and scientific exile, the Nobel Prize awarded in 1945 for nuclear fission to Hahn left Meitner off the prize list. The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission’s Fermi Award, awarded to Meitner, Hahn, and collaborator Fritz Strassmann in 1966, was to acknowledge Meitner’s contribution to the work. However, Meitner also worked extensively in interpreting the physical properties of radioactive substances, including identifying a new element, among many other discoveries. She is best known for something she was not a part of and overlooked for her many important scientific contributions in physics. In addition to the Fermi Award, she was also elected a foreign member of the Royal Society of London (1955) and a foreign member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1960.) Lise Meitner had a very interesting life navigating the politics of her time and working in physics.
Mildred Trotter (1899 – 1991) was a physical anthropologist with an award of the American Association of American Anthropologists named after her. Born in the USA, she received her A.B. in zoology at Mount Holyoke College (1920). She started her career as a research assistant at Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, earning her Sc.M (1921) and Ph.D. (1924). She continued on the academic research career path, attaining the appointment of professor in 1946 and retiring in 1967 as professor emerita. Some of her honors include the St. Louis Globe-Democrat as a Woman of Achievement in Science (1955) and Viking Fun Medal and Award in Physical Anthropology (1956). Her work focused on determining the effects of race, sex, and age on skeletal weight and combining them to allow an estimate of the weight of the total skeletal mass of an individual.
