Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, and: Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972 (review)

Margaret W. Rossiter. Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Reprint. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. xviii + 439 pp. Ill. $17.95 (paperbound).

Margaret W. Rossiter. Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. xviii + 584 pp. Ill. $42.50; $17.95 (paperbound).

I vividly recall when, as a postdoctoral research associate, I first heard Margaret Rossiter lecture on her then-new book, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (1982). Sharply indignant and ardent, she retold the story of her own struggles and strategies to find the support--financial and intellectual--to complete this monumental and pathbreaking volume, an outgrowth of her dissertation. The heart of her argument is contained in chapter 3, titled "'Women's Work' in Science," where she sets out a typology of occupational segregation by sex--or, in other words, the emergence of "women's work" in the sciences (p. 60). To summarize, Rossiter found that women seeking scientific employment at the end of the nineteenth century confronted a professional workplace segregated either "hierarchically" (where women occupied only the lowest rungs on the ladder) or "territorially" (where women could move up the career ladder only because the entire field was defined as feminine)--conditions that persisted until at least World War II. Thus, although women graduates began to seek salaried professional work in all scientific fields within a decade or two of their admission to graduate-degree programs in the sciences, both access and advancement were more likely in fields like botany, home economics, or public health that, for complex reasons, were constructed as female-friendly enclaves.

Ironically, women's entry into scientific careers was facilitated by just those forces that would combine to inhibit their advancement: the reconfiguring of collegiate education into the research university model, and the ambition of many white-collar workers to professionalize their careers. In a splendid chapter titled "A Manly Profession," Rossiter documents the strong resistance to allowing women into newly created professional bastions of scientific work such as university appointments. As she writes, "the concepts of prestige, status, and professionalism were at the time closely intertwined with that of masculinity" (p. 73). The admission of women to professional societies and academic departments (excepting those at all-women's colleges) seemed to threaten their "precarious 'prestige'" (p. 73). Rossiter is frequently quite amusing, and never more so than when she describes the development of professional rites, such as the "smoker," deliberately designed to perpetuate an all-male, quasi-social sanctuary against the threatened encroachment of women. When women did find employment in mixed-sex academic departments, Rossiter shows with fine-toothed archival research, they functioned as underpaid assistants, technicians--or, in other words, as "post docs" in perpetuity.

At the time of the book's original publication, except among those of us working in the area of women and the professions, Rossiter's findings of systematic conscious and unconscious bias against women in the sciences were greeted with either puzzlement or skepticism. On the antifeminist right, some scholars insisted that her prosopographical evidence for discrimination against women scientists was entirely circumstantial and thus unconvincing. More favorable reviews, such as one by Angela Nugent that appeared in these pages, ¹ pressed for a more direct discussion of the style and content of women's scientific work. Although this was driven in part by the early wave of feminist writing on gender and epistemology in the sciences (i.e., "Is there a feminine science?"), it also reflected some resistance to the idea that science could have been so riddled with irrational prejudice as Rossiter's tales of the late nineteenth century strongly suggested.

Close to twenty years later, our doubts about the accuracy of Rossiter's picture of the world...