<
https://www.sciencehistory.org/collections/blog/ladies-who-lab-lesser-known-women-in-science-1920-1970/>
"I recently read—and loved—
Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus. Set in the
1960s, it tells the story of Elizabeth Zott, a brilliant chemist who faces
discrimination in the workplace due to her gender. Zott inadvertently lands a
role as a cooking show host after she is unfairly fired from her research post.
Through her television platform, she inspires women across the country to be
more confident in themselves and dismantles the male-superiority complex. She
sets a precedent that women can achieve anything they set their minds to.
Though
Lessons in Chemistry is a work of fiction, there were many real-life
“Elizabeth Zotts”—women who were successful, if not well-known, scientists
despite cultural circumstances.
While identifying books to digitize for the Science History Institute Digital
Collections, I happened across several women in STEM who I hadn’t previously
known. I was browsing a list of more than 300 books in the Othmer Library
published in the year 1928 (because these books entered the public domain on
January 1, 2024), when I began to pick authors who I suspected were women. I
counted only four.
These four female authors I identified are not well known, despite leaving
legacies and hearty contributions to their scientific fields. It seems the
implicit standard for a female scientist to become a household name is a Nobel
Prize à la Marie Curie, the archetypal woman in science. So below I offer brief
vignettes of the lives of these four Nobel Prize-less, yet impressive and
deserving contributors to science, celebrating the true lives of women
scientists in the 1920s and beyond."
Via Esther Schindler.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
