A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War

"We’ve just seen the centenary of Armistice—the finale to a terrifying war—come and go. I think it’s key to remember, too, that 2018 is Britain’s ‘suffragist centenary’, marking the moment when more than eight million women over the age of 30 gained the vote. (The United States followed suit in 1920.) Science historian Patricia Fara’s powerful book looks at this socio-political ferment through a scientific lens. We walk the walk with scores of women in science from the nineteenth century, through the war years and into the early twentieth century, when sexism was pervasive and blatant. That prejudice has cast a long shadow. As Fara reminds, glass ceilings, leaky pipelines and unconscious bias are still very much out there for today’s women scientists. And those constraints can, in part, be traced back to failures in the battle for equality following the First World War. “Fara tells the stories of many women researchers who, after years of collaborating with their husbands, were publicly ignored or demoted” Fara describes intense discrimination. Between 1881 and 1916, just over 400 women studied science at Cambridge, although women could not graduate until half a century after University College London allowed it in 1880. Mockery and exclusion were a norm for female science students—and really, they were almost to be expected in an era when science itself strained to justify misogyny. Egregious treatment persisted through graduation and beyond. Physiologist Mabel Purefoy Fitzgerald was awarded an honorary Oxford MA at the age of 100 in 1972—a full three-quarters of a century late. Dorothea Pertz, who worked with the botanist Francis Darwin (Charles’s son), published papers and lectured at Newnham, but was never formally recognised. Fara tells the stories of many women researchers who, after years of collaborating with their husbands, were publicly ignored or demoted. Other stories were happier. Plant hybridization researcher Edith Saunders became president of the Genetics Society. Crystallographer Kathleen Lonsdale was one of the first women elected to the Royal Society. And Newnham became a centre of scientific inquiry for women—a ‘lab of their own’. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Fara gives us more names to conjure with: Scots geologist Maria Gordon, the chemists Ida Smedley and Mara Whiteley, wartime surgeon Louisa Garrett Anderson, suffragist and historian Ray Costelloe. Largely forgotten now, they are given fresh life on these pages. But Fara is a realist. While suffrage and war work changed many women’s lives, shut doors and stalled research careers blighted the following decades. And while prejudice in science may be partially concealed now, its roots are deep. Too many women in science still have distressing stories to tell."

"Fara’s book couldn’t have been published at a better time, around the centenary of women getting the vote. She looks at the sometimes forgotten history of women who took up ‘men’s’ work in science and industry during the First World War. What she shows is that they did just as well as men did in these jobs—sometimes very dangerous and dirty jobs. “Reading the research changed my life and gave a fresh dimension to my feminism” The tragedy is that despite proving themselves perfectly capable, once the war was over, they were expected to leave work and go back and be housewives. And this was a position supported by the trade unions. It’s a book that I think fills an important gap in our understanding of the history of suffrage. It wasn’t the first time, because some women had worked alongside their husbands, fathers and brothers in labs for a very long time. A few had even worked independently, if they had the means. What was special about this time was not that a few women were excelling as much as thousands of women proving that working in these fields as a matter of routine posed no threat, that they could function just as well as anyone else, and get the job done. It was the ordinariness of women in munition factories, in chemistry labs, just doing everyday work—that was the big revolution. They helped to redefine femininity."