Michelle Thaller
A Rich Legacy: Women in Science from 2500 BC - 1700 AD
I was asked to give a talk about the history of women in science a few months ago, and to be honest, I didn't really know what to say. I wanted to put on my best Scottish accent and say "Damn it, Jim, I'm a scientist, not a historian!" But I agreed to do the lecture and set off on the internet to learn what I could about historical scientific females.
Of course I knew some of the more famous figures like Marie Curie, but that didn't seem satisfying — they always mention Marie Curie. Being a minority in any field gets like that; one or two examples of "people like you" are held up, and that's supposed to make you feel better. An African American friend of mine who was discussing this with me felt the same way.
"No offense to a brilliant scientist who succeeded despite overwhelming odds," he said, "but if I hear about George Washington Carver and his 400 uses for the peanut one more time, I'm going to scream."
The good news is that the Internet is changing all that. In just an hour or so I found some wonderful sites about women (and African Americans too, by the way) whose contributions to science are so often overlooked.
So where does women's history in science begin? Amazingly, with our first records of scientists of any kind. The very first technical person (scientist or engineer) whose name we know is Imhotep, the architect of the first pyramid, who was male. The second technical name we know is female.
En Heddu'Anna lived around 2354 B.C., and was the high priestess of Ishtar in Babylon. That might not sound very scientific to you, but modern-day preconceptions can be deceiving. The high priestess was an immensely prestigious position in ancient Babylon, comparable in power to the king.
En Heddu'Anna supervised celestial observations taken by a network of temples across the Fertile Crescent. Extremely accurate measurements of the positions of the Sun, Moon, and stars were used to calculate the seasons and regulate the calendar. No doubt she interpreted her observations through religion and mysticism, making her more like the astrologers of today than an actual physical scientist. But back then there were no such delineations, and she is, nonetheless, the first observational astronomer we know of.
The fact that the two most ancient scientists we know of are a man and a woman is very symbolic to me. Although we might not be able to prove it, it seems to me that our idea that half the population of the world (the female half) largely sat out history must not be true. Women and men were always working together to solve the technical problems of the day and push knowledge forward.
Stepping up a few thousand years, the most famous female scientist of the Greco-Roman world was undoubtedly Hypatia, who lived around 400 AD. Hypatia was one of the head teachers at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt, an institution that was, at that time, the pre-eminent center of scholarship in the world. Hypatia taught natural philosophy (which is what they called science back then), and wrote several major treatises on mathematics and astronomy. She was also an inventor, credited with a water distiller, an instrument to measure the specific gravity of water, an astrolabe and a planisphere.
But Hypatia also had major political problems, most of them having to do with an emerging 'cult' religion called Christianity. She was a committed academic, and an agnostic at a time when the atmosphere of the Roman world was becoming increasingly charged by the followers of this new sect. Hypatia seems to have gotten involved in an argument between the pagan civil authorities of Alexandria and the leader of the Christians, Saint Cyril. She eventually became too much of a liability for the Christians, who stormed the library, dragged her out of her classroom, and lynched her in the streets.
I find Hypatia interesting for a simple reason. Despite the absence of women from the history of this time, one of the most powerful and (to her detriment) politically influential people in Alexandria was a woman. Interesting.
In the middle ages, monasteries took over the role as centers of teaching and learning. This is another area of history where we have to overcome our preconceptions about the lives of the men and women who lived back then. Monasteries varied widely in their practices; some were extremely strict and ascetic, others were lively communities of craftspeople, artists and teachers, many of whom possessed surprising wealth and influence.
People of noble birth, especially women, often chose monastic life to obtain an education, pursue the arts, or even escape from an unwanted arranged marriage. Some monasteries kept men and women separate, some didn't (some didn't even require celibacy). It's no surprise, then, that the majority of women scientists we know of from this era are nuns.
One of the major figures from the early middle ages is Hildegard Von Bingen, whose life helps to disprove the image we have of medieval women. Born in 1098 to a noble family, Hildegard was tithed to the church (that's right her parents donated her!) at birth. Hildegard was sent to study with an anchoress, a woman who had chosen an extreme form of monastic life (she was literally walled into the side of the church, in a cramped cell with only a small window as her link with humanity). Hildegard rejected such harsh monasticism, and went to a co-ed monastery in Disibodenberg to continue her studies.
Round about this time, Hildegard began to experience a series of ecstatic visions, in which she believed she was experiencing the direct presence of God. She wrote extensively about the visions, which energized her to communicate the divine truth that had been revealed to her. Interestingly, she wrote such detailed descriptions of her ecstasies that modern-day physicians have diagnosed her as having extreme migraine headaches. Her perceptions of spinning lights and a profound sense of truth match the experiences of current migraine sufferers. In any case, Hildegard's visions inspired her to travel and study the natural world as a way of better knowing the glory of God. Eventually, she founded several thriving communities of monks and nuns dedicated to the arts and sciences, as well as religious studies.
Hildegard was a religious visionary, and much like the ancient priestesses of Babylon, it's hard for us to separate her works into purely "scientific" texts as opposed to works of theology and philosophy. Still, it's evident that Hildegard found observing the natural world to be an integral part of understanding the glory of God, and she wrote prolifically about physiology, biology, and astronomy.
Her works also delved into large-scale interpretations of her observations, in which she advocated a Sun-centered model for the Solar System and a universal law of gravitation, hundreds of years before Copernicus and Newton. Her greatest contributions were arguably in the field of music, where she wrote some of the most elegant and evocative plainchants in existence, many of which formed the foundation of the more sophisticated Gregorian chant.
Nuns continued the tradition of Hildegard into the ensuing centuries. We know of several other examples, such as Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz, who lived in Mexico City at the end of the 1600's. Again, Sor Juana seems to have come from a wealthy, perhaps noble, background. She was born in Spain, but sent to the Mexican Court when she was a young girl. Again, convent life was not what you might think despite an official vow of poverty, Sor Juana's "cell" was two-story house with servants and pupils in residence.
At the end of her life the church catalogued her possessions, including an extensive collection of jewelry and a personal library of several thousand volumes. She also had sophisticated scientific apparatus, including a telescope. Like Hildegard, she believed that studying the natural sciences brought humanity closer to God. In one of her books on the topic, she wrote: ""It seems to me debilitating for a Catholic not to know everything in this life of the Divine Mysteries that can be learned through natural means."
There are so many other women, real women, who we know the names of now. The Internet has opened up a huge new horizon of information, and now we have better access to a legacy that never seemed to make it into the history books. One of the best sites I found is called "4000 Years of Women in Science ." Women may have had more limited roles in the past, but after perusing this site, its hard not to believe that we were really involved in history (and science) all along.