The Women In History We Don't Talk About

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

- Leila McNeill and Anna Reser

READING ABOUT SCIENCE HISTORY, YOU OFTEN GET THE IMPRESSION THAT IT WAS EXCLUSIVELY MEN DOING SCIENCE FOR CENTURIES UNTIL THERE WERE A FEW SUPERSTARS, PEOPLE LIKE MARIE CURIE OR ROSALIND FRANKLIN, WHO BROKE THROUGH. WAS THAT REALLY THE CASE?

LEILA MCNEILL: It certainly isn’t, and we can find women participating in science going back to antiquity all around the world. And one of the problems with looking at figures like Marie Curie and Rosalind Franklin is that they were anomalous in the sense that when they were making their discoveries, it was still very rare for women to be in higher institutions of learning and scientific institutions in particular. And so when you’re just trying to look for women in those spaces, those are the figures that tend to pop up. They’re easy to find because institutions keep records and things like that.

One of the things that we were interested in doing was looking beyond those institutions where formal records are kept, to see the different ways that women could have been participating in science on their own terms and in their own way outside of these spaces.

We find women doing this in all kinds of ways, going all the way back to antiquity. And one of the most common ways that we see women participating in medicine is as healers and midwives in various forms. We find that to be the case in antiquity all the way through the Middle Ages, up until the 19th Century when medicine was professionalized. At that point, it was taken out of the hands of women who were practicing these things in their homes and their communities, and taken into that institutionalized setting where, again, that’s where you start getting those unsung women in science, the ones who broke into that institutional barrier.