Woman in Science / With an Introductory Chapter on Woman's Long Struggle for Things of the Mind

by J. A. Zahm

SUMMARY AND EPILOGUE

Saint-Evremond, the first great master of the genteel style in French literature, who was equally noted as a brilliant courtier, a graceful wit, a professed Epicurean, and who exerted so marked an influence on the writings of Voltaire and the essayists of Queen Anne's time, gives us in one of his desultory productions an entertaining disquisition on La femme qui ne se trouve point et ne se trouvera jamais—the woman who is not and never will be found. The caption of this singular essay admirably expresses the idea that the majority of mankind has, even until the present day, held respecting woman in science. For them she was non-existent. Nature, in their view, had disqualified her for serious and, above all, for abstract science. Never, therefore, in the opinion of these solemn wiseacres, had been found or could be found a woman who had achieved distinction in science.

The foregoing chapters show how ill-founded is such a view regarding woman in times past. For that half of humanity which has produced such scientific luminaries as Aspasia, Laura Bassi, Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Sophie Germain, Mary Somerville, Caroline Herschel, Sónya Kovalévsky, Agnes S. Lewis, Margaret Dunlop Gibson, Eleanor Ormerod and Mme. Curie—to mention no others—is far from exhibiting any evidence of intellectual disqualification and still farther from warranting any one from declaring that the successful pursuit of science is entirely beyond the mental powers of womankind.

The preceding pages, likewise, afford an answer to those who insist on woman's incapacity for scientific pursuits, and point to the small number of those that have attained eminence in any of the branches of science; who continue to assert that the women named are but exceptions to the rule of the hopeless inferiority of their sex, and that no conclusions can be deduced from the paucity of women who have risen above the intellectual level of their less fortunate or less highly dowered sisters. They further show that, until the last few decades, woman's environment was rarely if ever favorable to her pursuit of science. From the days of Aspasia until the latter half of the nineteenth century she was discriminated against by law, custom and public opinion. Save only in Italy, she was excluded from the universities and from learned societies in which she might have had an opportunity of developing her intellect. In other countries her social ostracism in all that pertained to mental development was so complete and universal that she rarely had an opportunity of making a trial of her powers or exhibiting her innate capacity. The consequence was that her mind remained in a condition of comparative atrophy—a condition that gave rise to that long prevalent belief in woman's intellectual inferiority to man and her natural incapacity for everything that is not light or frivolous.

Practically all that women have achieved in science, until very recent years, has been accomplished in defiance of that conventional code which compelled them to confine their activities to the ordinary duties of the household. The lives and achievements of the eminent mathematicians, Sophie Germain and Mary Somerville, are good illustrations of the truth of this assertion. It was only their persistence in the study of their favorite branch of science, in spite of the opposition of their family and friends, and in spite of what was considered taboo for their sex by the usages and ordinances of society, that they were able to attain that eminence in the most abstruse of the sciences which won for them the plaudits of the world. Both were virtually self-made women. Deprived of the advantages of a college or university education, and denied the stimulus afforded by membership in learned scientific associations, they nevertheless succeeded by their own unaided efforts in winning a place of highest honor in the Walhalla of men of science.

M. Alphonse de Candolle, in his great work, Histoire des Sciences et des Savants depuis Deux Siècles, devotes only two pages to the consideration of woman in science. She is, to him, a negligible quantity. And, although a professed man of science, he repeats, without any scientific warrant whatever, all the gratuitous statements of his predecessors regarding the superficial character of the female mind, "a mind," he will have it, which "takes pleasure in ideas that are readily seized by a kind of intuition;" a mind "to which the slow methods of observation and calculation by which truth is surely arrived at are not pleasing. Truths themselves," the Swiss savant continues, "independent of their nature and possible consequences—especially general truths which have no relation to a particular person—are of small moment to most women. Add to this a feeble independence of opinion, a reasoning faculty less intense than in man, and, finally, the horror of doubt, that is, a state of mind in which all research in the sciences of observation must begin and often end. These reasons are," according to de Candolle, "more than sufficient to explain the position of women in scientific pursuits."[256]

They certainly are more than sufficient to explain their position if we choose to accept the author's method of determining one's attainments in the realm of science. His chief test of one's eminence in science is the number of learned societies to which one belongs. For De Candolle, membership in one or more such bodies is prima facie evidence of special distinction in some branch of science. But "We," he declares, "do not see the name of any woman on the lists of learned men connected with the principal academies. This is not due entirely to the fact that the customs and regulations have made no provision for their admission, for it is easy to assure one's self that no person of the feminine sex has ever produced an original scientific work which has made its mark in any science and commanded the attention of specialists in science. I do not think it has ever been considered desirable to elect a woman a member of any of the great scientific academies with restricted membership."[257]

When De Candolle insisted on membership in learned societies as a necessary indication of scientific eminence, he must have known, what everybody knew, that such exclusive societies as the French Academy of Sciences and the Royal Society of Great Britain have always been dead set against the admission of women members. It is difficult to imagine that the learned author of the History of Science and Scientists was entirely ignorant of the exclusion from the French Academy of Maria Gaetana Agnesi solely because she was a woman. And he must have been aware that, had it not been for her sex, Sophie Germain would have been accorded a fauteuil in the same society for her remarkable investigations in one of the difficult departments of mathematical physics. He must likewise have been cognizant of the attitude of such organizations as the Royal Society toward women, no matter how meritorious their achievements in science.

According to De Candolle's criterion, such women as Mme. Curie, Sónya Kovalévsky, Eleanor Ormerod, Agnes S. Lewis, Margaret Dunlop Gibson have accomplished nothing worthy of note because, forsooth, their names are not found on the rolls of membership of the Royal Society or the French Academy of Sciences—associations whose constitutions have been purposely so framed as to exclude women from membership. It would, indeed, be difficult to instance a more unfair or a more unscientific test of woman's eminence in science, and that, too, proposed by one who is supposed to be actuated in his judgments by rigorously scientific methods. Had any of the women named belonged to the male sex, there never would have been any question of their fitness to become members of the societies in question. This is particularly true of Mme. Curie, who, in the estimation of the world, has done more to enhance the prestige of French science than any man of the present generation—a statement that is sufficiently justified by the fact that she is the only one so far who has twice, in competition with the greatest of the world's men of science, succeeded in carrying away the great Nobel prize.[258]