Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972, and: A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist, and: Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics (review)

Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972 by Margaret W. Rossiter. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, 624 pp., $35.95 hardcover, $17.95 paper.

A Matter of Choices: Memoirs of a Female Physicist by Fay Ajzenberg-Selove. East Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994, 238 pp., $40.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper.

Lise Meitner: A Life in Physics by Ruth Lewin Sime. Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1999, 540 pp., $40.00 hardcover, $18.95 paper.

In 1986, in The Science Question in Feminism, Sandra Harding suggested that discovering the significant work of women has been a useful step along the path to a feminist critique in several fields such as literature, history, and anthropology. She expressed doubt that this would be helpful in developing a feminist critique of science, since so few women have made notable contributions to science. Recent work has shown that Harding was unnecessarily pessimistic. It may be true that women have been more rigorously excluded from science than from any human activity except active warfare. But no matter how high the barriers, determined and talented women have always found ways to do science. In recent years we have seen biographies of important women scientists such as Marie Curie, Lise Meitner, and Rachel Carson. We also have seen memoirs such as Fay Ajzenberg-Selove's A Matter of Choices and Edward Hill's My Daughter Beatrice, as well as more general works like Susan Bertsch McGrayne's Nobel Prize Women in Science, and Margaret Rossiter's monumental study, Women Scientists in America.

The subjects of this review are contributions to that effort in each of these three categories. Ruth Lewin Sime describes the life of Lise Meitner, a luminary in physics from the first half of this century. Fay Ajzenberg-Selove describes her own recent career in physics, and comments on the changes she has seen in the physics community. Margaret Rossiter gives a more global account of American women scientists from World War II until the passage of affirmative action legislation in the 1970s.

Sime is a chemist who is well qualified to describe Lise Meitner's work and its significance. Meitner was born to a comfortable, cultured, secular Jewish family at the end of the nineteenth century. At a time when women were routinely denied higher education, she became one of the most well-known physicists in Europe, and the director of the physics division at the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. She worked for years in a very fruitful collaboration with the German chemist Otto Hahn; together they discovered the element protactinium and were the first to identify nuclear fission.

Meitner was 60 when Hitler came to power, and understandably reluctant to leave her life and work in Germany. She waited until 1938, when the German annexation of Austria made her Austrian passport invalid, and she barely got out of Germany. Sime tells this dramatic story well.

She also tells well the story of the discovery of nuclear fission, Meitner's most important work. Before she left Germany, Meitner and Hahn had begun working on the neutron-induced decay of uranium, a project perfectly suited to their collaboration between physics and chemistry. They were trying to fit this process into the pattern of previous work on radioactive elements, looking for decay products with only slightly smaller atomic weights and numbers. Their results refused to follow the pattern, becoming more and more complex and confusing. Sime describes this period of confusion almost too well; it is difficult to follow. Just after she left Germany, Meitner realized that the uranium nucleus was not pinching off a small part of itself, as most radioactive nuclei did, but rather splitting almost in two, becoming two much lighter...