Defining Women's Scientific Enterprise: Mount Holyoke Faculty and the Rise of American Science (review)

"Why did women enter science in the first place, when it seems to have been so hostile an environment for them?" And "how did the division of scientific work take the sex-based forms it has?" These are the questions that inform Miriam Levin's study of science at Mount Holyoke, and the answers she provides are not surprising. Women, she says, "were welcome within science education almost from the moment higher education began to expand" in the United States. And Mount Holyoke women, seeking opportunities for themselves and their students, "helped define women's work in science." Moreover, while most scholars interested in the professionalization of science have shown little interest in colleges, Levin finds that "colleges as well as universities were sites of great activity and continuous engagement with the forces placing science at the forefront of American society between the 1830s and 1940" (pp. 10–11).

Mount Holyoke began in 1837 as a seminary for young, white, Protestant women who would work as teachers in the grammar schools and high schools that were springing up around the country and as missionaries abroad. The focus on science is directly attributable to Mary Lyon, the woman who established Mount Holyoke and ran it for a dozen years. Like many other Americans, especially those living in New England, Lyon recognized that science provided practical benefits as well as a way to appreciate the order of God's universe. And, like educators in colleges for men, she saw science education as a form of moral instruction, improving students' habits of observation and thought.

While Mount Holyoke was progressive in many ways, gender conventions remained strong. Male professors from neighboring colleges, who were generally better educated than women and who had better access to the latest information, presented the science lectures, while female teachers led the recitations. Thus, along with the basic information, Levin argues, the young women were taught to focus on details and discouraged from speculation. After Mount Holyoke achieved collegiate status in 1888, however, some faculty members engaged in advanced research, obtained academic credentials, and learned to handle the courses on their own. And, as the job market widened, some alumnae went on to medical or graduate school. Science lost its dominant position at Mount Holyoke in the 1930s—when it was widely believed that women should not take jobs that men might hold, and when many more Mount Holyoke women than before looked forward to marriage—and so Levin ends her account with the appointment of the first male president in 1937. Nonetheless, science education remains a defining characteristic of Mount Holyoke to this day.

Historians of technology might wish that Levin had paid more attention to material culture, and historians of education might wish for more attention to pedagogical matters. What textbooks did they use? Did Mount Holyoke women join the American Association of Physics Teachers or counterpart organizations in other disciplines? How did the scientific facilities at Mount Holyoke compare with those at other schools of comparable size and wealth? Of Williston Hall, for instance, we learn only that it was completed in 1876 and contained "a wealth of new apparatus" for teaching the various sciences. Did this new apparatus include the sort of sophisticated instruments that students elsewhere were using to make precise measurements, primarily in order to distinguish what was true from what was not? The linear dividing engine that the Mount Holyoke class of 1883 gave its alma mater at the turn of century (and that is now in the collections of the National Museum of American History) suggests that this is so.