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some fathers tell their kids about mythical home run hitters who won the World Series, or of courageous expeditions to Antarctica or the moon. My father’s story to me was about Enrico Fermi and the scientists who created a nuclear chain reaction beneath the stands of the football stadium at the University of Chicago during World War II. As a lifelong Chicagoan, Dad preferred this story to those about heroic men at Los Alamos. It was at this moment under Stagg Field, he believed, that brilliant men had convened for some greater scientific purpose. The only story as awe inspiring was the one he told of the Founding Fathers, who converged on Philadelphia in 1776 to establish , as Dad put it, the most enlightened democracy in the world. Both stories were so often told in our house that I could even remember the pauses built into their telling for dramatic effect. Whether he knew it or not, the message Dad conveyed was not only that science, like statescraft , bred greatness, but also that those talented enough to change the course of history were inevitably male. My father was in awe of the great men of politics and science, and I wanted to awe my father. I never aspired to run for office, but I did have fleeting thoughts about becoming a scientist. I started out on the right path, and early on I proved to be a whiz at math. In elementary school I performed arithmetic leaps and bounds better than my peers. I remember my fourth-grade teacher walking me over to the accelerated fifth-grade class while the other kids grappled with concepts I had already mastered. My excellence in math was short-lived, however. In sixth grade I was ahead by two grade levels, and by seventh and eighth grades ahead by only one. In high school I hit my wall, turning in a mediocre performance in advanced algebra and then doing miserably in trigonometry. Invariably, boys were involved, for the ones on which I had designs didn’t turn up in my history classes, but in math classes, where I deferred to their seeming expertise. In my senior year I opted Introduction: Through the Lives of Women Scientists 1 2 out of calculus altogether. It infuriates me that I had succumbed to math anxiety at precisely the predictable moment for adolescent girls. Then, although I performed brilliantly in advanced biology, I had so little confidence in math that I avoided other science classes. In the one chemistry course I was forced to take, the teacher seemed openly hostile to girls, so I didn’t approach him for help. Although I could have pursued biology in college, I decided that I didn’t have a mind capable of serious science. My dad once confided to me that he thought things would have been different had I been a boy; he sensed that I had fallen prey to the prevailing tides. In his honor, here are the stories of scientists, ones that I hope will also inspire awe. Of course, they are necessarily different from his, since I am asking new questions about heroism. I am asking about the girls who did what I didn’t, who felt social pressures not to pursue science but did anyway. I am asking about the lives they led once they became women and certifiable scientists, and I am asking about how it was that many of the best female scientific minds were ignored largely because they never were certified as “scientists.” These stories describe scientists my father never heard of, though some of them might have been under Stagg Field had the culture of science been different. This book is not overly laudatory of female accomplishment in science , but it isn’t a victimology either. To pity women of the sexist past or to celebrate women’s progress in the enlightened present is to write without context. To find compelling stories in the twentieth century, I had to leave Stagg Field and sometimes professional labs and institutional science altogether. I had to write outside the narrative conventions of “great” history, too, for when you boil them down, they are masculine to the hilt and perpetuate the invisibility of women I aim to remedy. Women can never be the true heroines of “great science,” just wannabes and impostors, since the cast of such science is male by default. Twentieth-century science has been buoyed by myths that create prestige in masculine...

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