The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science

I. Assistants, Housekeepers, and Interchangeable Parts: Women Scientists and Professionalization,1880–1940

Assistants, Housekeepers, and Interchangeable Parts: Women Scientists and Professionalization, 1880–1940 I the year was 1921. the physicist robert millikan announced that the nation’s expanding technostructure required better “selection and development of men of outstanding ability in science.” His call for “men” was not accidental; he imagined the best candidates to be masculine, rugged types and likened them to “explorers” in search of “nature’s gold.” Thomas Alva Edison, holder of more than one thousand American patents and the most widely recognized scientist in the country, embodied this enterprising pioneer as he attempted to recruit young men in his mold to develop technologies in his research facility in West Orange, New Jersey. Edison wouldn’t settle for small-time thinkers; his team of “A-class men” would be drawn from applicants who passed a rigorous test he had devised. But his recruitment efforts proved disappointing: of the five hundred men who applied for positions , only 6 percent passed his exam. His own son failed to earn a place in his ranks of A-Class men.1 Test takers grew defensive; they were not common street folk, but graduates of science programs in the most prestigious universities in the country. The problem lay not with them, they claimed, but rather with Edison’s arbitrary criteria for gauging scientific competence in the modern age. Some of the questions on his exam were what they were used to: “What pinch pressure at the driving wheels does a 23-ton locomotive require when drawing a load of 100 tons on level track?” Others, however, seemed highly irregular for testing scientific competence : “Who was Leonides?” “What is the name of a famous violin maker?” “What is felt?” One stumped job applicant wondered, “How many $10,000 per annum men . . . could have answered 50 percent of those tomfooleryisms.” Another dismissed the test as “vulgar,” an insult to his educated sensibility. “Who cares who wrote ‘Home Sweet Home,’” a college graduate lashed out. “We are in an age of specialization, and men are being trained to do things in certain lines of work that do not 13 14 allow them to waste time and gray matter on general knowledge that can be had by referring to an encyclopedia.”2 Not all reactions to Edison’s questions were defensive; some thought that the test proved just how “amazingly ignorant” college men had become . “I think that any man who cannot give a prompt answer to 75 percent of the questions at least is lacking in education, and, if a college man, had wasted his time in college,” asserted an anonymous reader of the New York Times. Another reader thought the questions answerable “by any well-read and average intelligent man or woman,” regardless of college credentials. Some thought it refreshing that Edison looked for men who didn’t have “one-track minds,” who sought to expand their mental storerooms rather than let them atrophy. A doctor from New York believed that more test takers would have passed had they devoted time to book reading rather than ball games, moving pictures, the sporting news, and other preoccupations of American males. Readers who followed the story flexed their cerebral muscles by taking the exam themselves. Men congregated in subways, clubrooms, college dorms, and hotel lobbies, jotting down answers to questions they speculated had been on the exam. People were wholly invested in establishing whether or not the exam tested scientific competence, and those with and without college training were curious about how they would perform on it if it did.3 As erudite as Edison appeared through all this, people seemed to forget that he had become who he was without the assistance of professional degrees of any kind. He never went to college; as a boy he was homeschooled and thrown quickly into business ventures to fend for himself. He observed the world around him and learned through reading and hands-on experimentation. As an established inventor he still boasted a subscription list of sixty-two periodicals, most of them scientific but also economic and legal and others oddly eclectic. Science and technology fascinated him, but so did geography, literature, and music—realms of knowledge that academic specialists considered “generalized trivia” in the technological age.4 Edison’s hands-on experience of science reinforced his opinion that academic specialization, the hallmark of the modern university, had stifled human curiosity and compartmentalized men’s thoughts until they...