Cross-post: Beyond Marie Curie: The women in science history we don’t talk about

By Sarah Rigby for BBC Science Focus

Ancient Roman carving of a midwife via Wikimedia Commons

Beyond the exceptional talents of Marie Curie, Rosalind Franklin and Ada Lovelace, it’d be easy to think that women didn’t used to participate in science. But as science historians Leila McNeill and Anna Reser reveal to Sara Rigby, women have contributed to our understanding of the world, stretching all the way back to antiquity.

Many women in science history seem to have done a lot of work in astronomy. Yet it often seems to be women who were the wives or sisters of prominent astronomers. Why is that?

AR: I would say that for most of recorded history, that’s the only way that women had to get into those fields. So if we’re talking about someone like Caroline Herschel, her brother William was an astronomer. He needed a housekeeper, so he brought Caroline to England to work in his house, and he just enlisted her to be his assistant, kind of without her permission.

William had his own observatory at their house in Bath. It is very expensive, to buy telescopes and to maintain them. Obviously, the Herschels were an upper-middle-class or upper-class family. They had plenty of family wealth. But that’s not something that the women in the family would have had independent access to. So in order for her to have a space to work in, she worked in William’s observatory.

In order for women to participate in, or at least get close to these formalised and institutionalised spaces for science, usually they would have to do it through a man who was connected to it. Often that would be the husband, or in Caroline’s case, it’s your brother.

Read more or listen to the interview at

https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/beyond-marie-curie-the-women-in-science-history-we-dont-talk-about/