A Deep History of Women in Science

In June of 1833, at the third annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Cambridge, a problem came to a head that had been building since the Association’s founding two years earlier. The problem was not scientific. It was terminological.

The Association had gathered practitioners of what was increasingly called “science” — natural history, chemistry, geology, physics, mathematics, the practical arts of measuring and naming the world — and the question of what to call such practitioners had grown uncomfortable. The obvious candidate, “natural philosopher,” carried aristocratic and metaphysical connotations that Coleridge, the poet, considered excessive. Men who dug in fossil pits, who ran electrical currents through frogs’ legs, who ground lenses and made celestial observations: these men had been borrowing a term that implied a wisdom they had not demonstrated. Something more accurate, more modest, was needed.

William Whewell, then a professor at Trinity College Cambridge and one of the Association’s most prominent figures, had a proposal. He offered “scientist,” formed on the model of “artist”: as an artist is one who makes art, a scientist is one who does science. The coinage was made verbally, in the course of a discussion, not in a formal paper. Whewell himself was ambivalent about it; he would write later that the word carried associations he found uncomfortably mechanical and utilitarian. But the word existed now, spoken in the rooms of the Association, in the company of the men it named.(1)

Eight months later, in March of 1834, Whewell reviewed a book in the Quarterly Review, the most widely read British intellectual journal of the period. The book was On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, by Mary Somerville — Scottish mathematician, translator, polymath, and the most celebrated woman of science in Britain, possibly in Europe. Her book had synthesized the recent discoveries of astronomy, physics, and natural philosophy into a single coherent account of how the physical sciences bore on one another: an achievement of synthesis rather than primary discovery, but one that required thorough mastery of the underlying fields and produced a work that was both technically respectable and widely read.

In this review appeared the first published use of the word “scientist” in print.(2)

Whewell did not apply it to Somerville. He used the term to describe practitioners of science in the aggregate; for Somerville herself he reserved a different category. She was not, in his formulation, a scientist. She was a philosopher, elevated by her achievement above the term he was in the same breath bringing into existence. The new word appeared in print for the first time in a review of a woman’s work, and the woman’s work was what made the word seem too narrow to apply to her.

The popular account of this episode tends to compress these events and conclude that Whewell coined the word because of women like Somerville, that her visibility and accomplishment made the question of what to call such people suddenly urgent. Some historians draw a fairly direct causal line.(3) Others are more cautious, reading the 1834 review as a passing deployment of a term already in the air from the 1833 meeting rather than a coinage inspired by Somerville’s book specifically.(4) The What Actually Happened position does not require resolving this dispute. Whether Somerville’s prominence was the direct occasion of the coinage or merely its backdrop, the structural observation holds in either case: the definitional work that produced the credential was conducted in plain sight of the woman who most pressured it into existence. She was placed above the new category rather than admitted to it.

The gate was being built. The first published use of the word “scientist” appeared in a review of a woman’s work. The woman was not called a scientist.

This book is about the gate. Not the women who approached it, and not the men who built it. The structural mechanism that determined, at each moment in the long history of organized inquiry into the natural world, which channels were open, which were closed, and where women went when the main door would not open.

The received account of women in the history of science is a narrative of exceptional individuals overcoming cultural prejudice one by one. The names are familiar: Somerville, Herschel, Curie, Meitner, Franklin. Their stories are real. Their achievements were real. What the received account systematically misses is the structural condition that determined which channels were available at each historical moment, which made some individuals’ persistence possible and others’ impossible, and which continued operating whether the individuals were persistent or not.

What follows is the structural record.