2. Women, science and professional identity, c.1860–1914

Claire G. Jones

Personally I do not agree with sex being brought into science at all. The idea of ‘woman and science’ is entirely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not; in any case she should be given opportunities, and her work should be studied from the scientific, not the sex, point of view.¹

This heartfelt plea for equality in science was made by the electrical engineer and physicist Hertha Ayrton in an interview with the Daily News in 1919. At this time, Ayrton was a public figure for her scientific work – including the design of anti-gas fans used on the front in the First World War – and for her support for the campaign for women’s suffrage. In 1906 she had been awarded the prestigious Royal Society Hughes Medal for original research. Despite these eminent credentials, throughout her life Ayrton constantly felt the need to argue against any sex differentiation in intellectual work and to call for men and women to be treated equally whatever the career or profession they chose. This appeal was also a strategy to guard her scientific reputation from the charge that her achievements had been made in collaboration with her husband, rather than in her own right. The electrical engineer William Ayrton died in 1908, when his wife was barely halfway through her scientific career, yet even an obituary of Ayrton published on her death in 1923 asserted that she was ‘far more subject to her husband’s lead than either he or she imagined’.² Collaboration for any woman seeking to forge a professional identity in science was a complicated issue as, in Ayrton’s words, ‘no one will believe that if a man and a woman do a bit of work together the woman really does anything’.³ This systematic gender bias in the allocation of credit in science has been called the ‘Matthew Matilda Effect’ and its impact identified across various scientific disciplines and professions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.⁴ Despite this unequal recognition, there were many scientific women who played an active role in the predominantly masculine scientific networks which operated around institutional and domestic settings at this time.⁵

The politics of collaboration is just one of the historical complexities to be addressed in order to understand how scientific women created their personal identities and navigated the landscape of science in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. This was a time when science was emerging as a profession and moving from a largely domestic setting to an institutional one; it was also when the growth of new industries such as electricity and other technologies was beginning to shape what a male, let alone a female, scientific professional looked like.⁶ Despite this, there was much variance between disciplines with, for example, sciences such as astronomy and botany remaining largely in the field and so relatively accessible to women, while others such as electrical experimentation transferred to the laboratory, leaving scientific women mostly behind in the domestic sphere.⁷ Professionalization was not manifested simply by a change in place of knowledge production from the home to an institution, however; it also intersected with gendered understandings of who was eligible to be, and capable of being, a scientific practitioner. This latter battle was played out especially in the context of increasing numbers of scientific societies and the competition between them for influence and standing. By excluding ‘amateurs’ and women from the fellowship in order to preserve status, elite scientific societies were complicit in the evolution of a process of demarcation which situated women as non-professionals, whatever their scientific eminence. In 1911, even Nobel Prize-winning physicist and chemist Marie Curie was refused a fellowship of the French Academy of Science, which elected its first female fellow in 1979.⁸ Meanwhile, in Britain, Thomas Huxley, ‘Darwin’s bulldog’, prevented women’s admission to the Geological Society and engineered their exclusion from the Ethnological Society with the express intention of upgrading its professional status in relation to the breakaway anthropologists.⁹ Although some new societies, for example the British Astronomical Association (founded in 1886), emerged to cater for women, schoolteachers and other amateur enthusiasts, a hierarchy persisted and provided a barrier to women engaging on an equal level. As well as implying second-class amateur status, the exclusion of women from elite societies impacted on their ability to pursue scientific work, as access to the latest papers, specialist libraries and scientific meetings was a privilege often tightly confined to fellows.

Some of the harshest opponents of women’s admission to learned societies and professional networks based their beliefs on a science of sex that was sceptical of women’s intellectual capacity for such work. Since its inception, modern science had sought to establish biological differences between the sexes and this project acquired a new dynamic with the evolutionary understandings of intellectual difference which emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin had argued that the chief distinction in mental powers between the two sexes was men’s ‘higher eminence’ in any activity, including science, which required ‘deep thought, reason or imagination’ – all qualities that evolution had not developed to the same extent in women.¹⁰ These ideas, which were taken up by doctors and leading men of science, naturalized contemporary prejudices with regard to women and turned tradition and habit into immutable scientific facts which limited women’s opportunities.¹¹ At the very time when the identity of a scientific professional was being negotiated, women were confronted with a scientifically validated theory that asserted their ineligibility for inclusion and reinforced prejudice against them.

If women’s intellectual capacity for science was questioned in the decades around 1900, what other factors influenced women’s access to, and negotiation within, a professional role? The shifting, developing idea of a professional scientist at this time created several possible identities for a professional man of science, including one that gave space for science alongside other pursuits befitting a gentleman of the liberal, educated elite.¹² However, despite the tradition of the ‘gentleman amateur’ in science – an individual who practised science at home and for altruistic rather than monetary reasons – persisting well into the twentieth century, women practising their science in a similarly focused context invited contrasting interpretations.¹³ Lord Rayleigh, FRS, winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904, completed most of his life’s work at his home laboratory at Terling Place, yet his scientific pre-eminence was unquestioned. However, women were defined by the home in a way that men were not; for men, the absence of an institutional affiliation did not threaten acceptance of their expertise – something vital for professional practice in the public sphere – in the same way that it did for women. The persistence of this amateur tradition in science warns against using remuneration as a defining factor in seeking to understand the professional role in science. This ‘modern’ understanding of a paid professional is not completely valid until after the First World War, although men did increasingly assume salaried roles in science from c.1870 onwards, often with women working alongside them for nothing.¹⁴ This was in keeping with prescribed ideals which assumed that middle-class women would not receive payment for their work but rather pursued their science in the spirit of feminine service and philanthropy. As paid roles in science expanded from the beginning of the twentieth century, partly in response to opportunities created by the new technological industries, women did gain a foothold, but mainly in the low-status jobs and routine roles believed to be more fitting to their feminine abilities. For example, women (often graduates or equivalent) were employed as research assistants and calculators in the mathematics and engineering departments at Imperial College from its establishment in 1907;¹⁵ during the First World War women scientists took the place of male researchers away at the front;¹⁶ and in the interwar period women were employed as laboratory assistants and ‘women chemists’ in industrial manufacture.¹⁷

Possession of qualifications and training is inextricably linked to the idea of the professional as a practitioner whose expertise is recognized and credible. More women were accessing a formal university training in science as the new colleges for women were established from the late nineteenth century onwards. Colleges of the universities of London and Cambridge were especially significant for science, having purpose-built laboratories and strong science interests by the mid-1880s.¹⁸ Formal academic study also opened the door to research collaborations in a professional setting and opportunities for scientific publication – both important for establishing professional status.¹⁹ However, as demonstrated below, women found that the possession of qualifications and a publication record were not enough to secure the same professional opportunities as men.

This chapter explores the changing landscape of science from c.1860 up to 1914 – and the gendered roles within it – through case studies of three women of successive generations, each of whom established a strong scientific identity as an expert in both public and specialist arenas. Despite their standing in their respective worlds, all these women faced challenges in shaping and preserving a professional identity due to tensions surrounding femininity and science. These scientific practitioners operated as peers within male scientific networks and were not shy in asserting their equality and rights. That they had to reassert their professional identity constantly is indicative not only of the structure of science, but also of the difficulties facing women in embodying and maintaining scientific authority. Economic entomologist Eleanor Ormerod (1828–1901); physicist and electrical engineer Hertha Ayrton (1854–1923); and geologist and palaeobotanist Marie Stopes (1880–1958) can all be understood as precarious professionals.

Eleanor Ormerod (1828–1901): economic entomologist

In the twilight of her scientific career, Eleanor Ormerod, economic entomologist, was admitted to the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws by the University of Edinburgh, the first woman to be so honoured by the university. Eleanor’s obituary, just one year later, repeated the gendered praise spoken by the Dean of Faculty at the degree ceremony:

The pre-eminent position which Miss Ormerod holds in the world of science is the reward of patient study and unwearying observation … Her labours have been crowned with such success that she is entitled to be hailed as the protectress of agriculture and the fruits of the earth – a beneficent Demeter of the nineteenth century.²⁰

Of the three women whose lives are explored here, in many ways Ormerod can be seen as the one whose activities and role mostly closely resemble what we would recognize as those of a professional in science today. Ormerod is widely understood as a pioneering technological scientist and economic entomologist whose science and science communication activities made her instrumental in establishing and defining her discipline.²¹ As Britain’s first practising economic entomologist, Ormerod shaped an identity as an expert in both public and specialist spheres, participated in international collaborative research, acted as an expert witness in legal cases and was commissioned as a consultant by government agencies and agricultural and educational institutions. In this way she had a major impact on England’s agricultural productivity at a time when this was under threat by the farming depression of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. In particular, Ormerod’s annual reports, published from 1877 through to 1901, provided practical scientific guidance and choreographed the observations of farmers, gardeners, livestock producers and others to create a dynamic body of entomological knowledge. Combating pests and the economic damage they caused was central to this and Ormerod was well versed in and advocated the use of insecticide and other chemical interventions when appropriate. In 1897 she attracted public hostility from more sentimental quarters when she declared ‘war against the sparrows’ and called for the mass extermination of the house sparrow as a pest which threatened agricultural production.²² In addition to her reports, Ormerod distributed, at her own cost, thousands of leaflets on how to identify and counteract pests and found time to write various practical works such as Manual of Injurious Insects with Methods of Prevention and Remedy (1890) and A Textbook on Agricultural Entomology (1892).

Figure 2.1. Eleanor Ann Ormerod, LL.D., frontispiece to Eleanor Ormerod, LL.D., Economic Entomologist: Autobiography and Correspondence, ed. Robert Wallace (New York, 1904). Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

In her memoir, Ormerod dates her entomological studies as beginning in earnest in 1852, when she became fascinated with beetles and began dissecting them in order to match the insects to descriptions in her textbook, which lacked any illustrations. This was a lesson the young Eleanor learned well; she realized the importance of illustrations in identifying and combating insects, infestations and agricultural diseases.²³ The habits of a scientist were acquired by Eleanor much earlier, however. Growing up in privilege at Sedbury Park, her father’s estate on the Monmouthshire and Gloucestershire borders, made her ideally placed to pursue her naturalist interests. She describes an idyllic childhood with opportunity to wander the estate and recruit the labourers who worked on it to aid her in her observations of bird, plant and insect life. Any snake found was brought to Eleanor and, if it was a remarkable one, she took a cast of it or ‘had it buried in an ant-hill in order to set up its skeleton when the ants had cleaned the bones’.²⁴ As her father aged, Ormerod assumed increasing responsibility for the management of the estate and this gave her a practical appreciation of the challenges facing agriculture and farming. Indeed, it was the immense losses caused by a serious outbreak of turnip-fly and its ravages which led to the publication of her first special report in 1881.²⁵

Ormerod’s acknowledged expertise and activities as an economic entomologist would seem to place her easily within the framework of science professionalism as it was emerging in the mid-century. She was self-taught and possessed no qualifications herself but, given the persistence of the amateur tradition in science, this was not particularly unusual for women or men. However, the importance of training became increasingly recognized in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Ormerod herself was instrumental in the development of training in the new field of economic entomology; she advised and lectured on this subject at the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester for several years, and at the South Kensington Institute she delivered a series of lectures to trainee schoolteachers. From 1896 to 1898, she also acted as an examiner in economic entomology at the University of Edinburgh. Despite this, Suzanne Le-May Sheffield recounts that in 1889, when the university set up a paid lectureship in agricultural entomology, its administrators consulted Ormerod about who should be appointed but assumed she would not be considered – because she was a woman.²⁶ Similarly, in 1882, when she became honorary consulting entomologist to the Royal Agricultural Society, she took up a post that gave this august organization free access to her expertise for the next ten years. This ineligibility for paid employment was the prescription for women of the upper classes until the practice slowly eroded towards the end of the century in response to the growing movement for women’s emancipation. Ormerod self-financed all her entomological activities and publications – something which, as an elite, unmarried woman with a hefty inheritance, she was able to do – and called her appointments her ‘honorary official work’ and her private work her reports.²⁷ Expenses were sometimes paid and Ormerod would usually accept this; for example, she received ‘some small amount of money’ when subpoenaed to give evidence as an expert witness in a dispute between a purchaser and producer about the origin and nature of an infestation within a shipment of flour being transported from New York to Durban.²⁸ Neither was she slow to exert her rights in this matter. When the £10 expenses she received for a series of lectures did not cover her outlay she did not try to hide her annoyance.²⁹

Ormerod’s exasperation over insufficient expenses is representative of her underlying strong sense of self-worth as a scientific specialist. She assumed the identity of an expert professional in multiple additional ways, including in letters to The Times and other journals, and in her exhibitions on pests and diseases at local agricultural shows. Her letters were invariably signed with her full credentials, including ‘Consulting Entomologist of the Royal Agricultural Society’ and ‘F. R. Met’, to illustrate her expertise.³⁰ At the Bath and West of England Show in 1896, Ormerod contributed an authoritative account of over seventy kinds of insect injury to farm, fruit and livestock, explained in detail across seventeen display cases. After the show, this exhibition was donated to Edinburgh University for display as ‘The Ormerod Collection of Agricultural Entomology’.³¹ Ormerod also validated her expertise by holding fellowships of the Royal Meteorological Society and the Entomological Society and honorary membership of many other agricultural and entomological bodies worldwide.³² These activities situated her in a professional context that was becoming characterized by collaborative networks, validated credentials and institutionalization. It is significant to note that Ormerod worked with her sister Georgiana, who produced most of the illustrations that were crucial to her publications. Georgiana, who had similar interests and expertise as her sister, is referred to by Ormerod as her ‘assistant’ or ‘collaborator’.³³ It is usual in male–female collaboration in science for the female to be cast as assistant, although this has also applied to less privileged male scientific workers whose contributions are now being recovered.³⁴ That this single-sex collaboration has been interpreted as wholly the work of Eleanor is testimony to the persistent tendency to look for one single ‘hero’ or ‘heroine’ of science and to ignore collaboration and teamwork, both of which are characteristics of professional science.

The work that arguably had the biggest impact on economic entomology in Britain – and one which was produced collaboratively via correspondence – was Ormerod’s series of annual reports. These were produced from the testimony of other experts and the farm workers and labourers who had first-hand knowledge of pests and the problems they caused. Working from home, Ormerod collected the testimonies and evidence together, made sense of them and added her own interpretation and guidance. In this way, she fashioned a professional identity and practice through correspondence. This places her within a contemporary zeitgeist of new popular science, which was part of the process of professionalization. This is represented by the emergence of accessible publications such as Popular Science Review (established 1862) and Quarterly Journal of Science (established 1864), which conceived of readers as ‘co-participants in the creation of knowledge’.³⁵ Ormerod’s publications also situate her in the tradition of women as science writers and popularizers, one of the few acceptable routes for women attempting to negotiate a way into science.³⁶ Writing or interpreting science for a popular or young audience was understood as belonging to the woman’s sphere, as it implied feminine deference to specialist male authority. Ormerod, however, clearly positioned herself as an expert despite, at times, putting a spin on her communications to align herself with traditional feminine ideals.

Ormerod has been understood as nurturing a public career as a technological scientist under the guise of accepted feminine philanthropy.³⁷ This is certainly the message conveyed by the Edinburgh address which praised her as ‘the protectress of agriculture and the fruits of the earth – a beneficent Demeter of the nineteenth century’. This is also suggested by some of her letters, in which she speaks politely of communicating with ‘leading men of the world’ and being ‘personally honoured by being allowed to ask aid from [them] and in my humble way sometimes I can reciprocate’.³⁸ But there is evidence to suggest that this was a veneer in order to comply with the gendered prescriptions of the age and to reconcile her femininity with her role as a professional. Ormerod’s relations with the institutions she worked with in honorary roles were sometimes tense. She resigned from her role with the Royal Agricultural Society because she perceived that her work was being used without credit and she demanded a written promise that her help would be acknowledged. What is more, this disagreement was not kept private but was the topic of a letter she had published in The Times.³⁹ Here it is clear that she did not readily accept any gendered hierarchy of knowledge in economic entomology. Ormerod played with the feminine conventions of her time, but behind this was a steely confidence in her own ability and status. This may have been supported by the knowledge that she was practising a science which, in its association with botany and natural history, had a tradition of women’s participation. Ormerod was not the only woman whose work had a major impact on entomology. Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), of German descent, was a world-travelling scientist, illustrator and writer and one of the first to document metamorphosis and the life cycle of insects. Merian’s life serves to illuminate science before the professionalizing process, when a lack of structure meant that individualism had freer rein.⁴⁰ Representing a generation after Ormerod, Margaret Fountaine (1862–1940) was an entomologist and traveller whose life questions any easy boundary between professional and amateur in natural history. As a result, she has been classified by history as a diarist and traveller rather than being given credit as the influential scientist and illustrator she was.⁴¹

It is significant that Ormerod operated during the mid to late nineteenth century. Her life suggests that, for (privileged) women, a professional role in science was more achievable at that time than later, when demarcation lines had been established and hardened, and gendered hierarchies of authority fully emerged. These were the challenges that faced physicist and electrical engineer Hertha Ayrton.

Hertha Ayrton (1854–1923): physicist and electrical engineer

In June 1899, Hertha Ayrton was the only woman among an elite group of scientists demonstrating at the annual Royal Society conversazione. The Daily News, reporting on the event the following day, remarked

What astonished the lady visitors, more perhaps than anything else, was to find one of their own sex in charge of the most dangerous-looking of all the exhibits – a fierce arc light enclosed in glass. Mrs Ayrton was not a bit afraid of it.⁴²

Despite practising her science in the generation that succeeded Ormerod’s, in her work as a physicist and electrical engineer Hertha Ayrton arguably faced more scepticism due to her sex, even though she had some advantages and professional credentials that her predecessor lacked. Ayrton had studied mathematics as a university student and, following that, had embarked on more practical subjects at the new City and Guilds Technical Institute at Finsbury, London. However, her attempt to use this training to access a professional role equivalent to that a man might expect was largely unsuccessful, and she faced constant challenges in seeking access to laboratory space and elite scientific societies and networks. Indeed, the Daily News report above testifies to the perceived oddness of a woman engaged in electrical science. Ayrton was at a disadvantage in practising an active, experimental science that did not have a tradition of female participation, as did botany and natural history. It also required the use of a laboratory, a space that had become strongly masculine-gendered.⁴³ In addition, at the end of the century, Darwinist ideas of women’s intellectual incapacity for science had hardened into scientific ‘fact’, creating an extra obstacle for scientific women to overcome, both in their own internal struggle for self-identity and in proving their abilities in the public sphere. Despite this, Ayrton published ground-breaking research, took out patents for various technological devices, gained considerable recognition (alongside some scepticism) and – for a part of her life, at least – managed a precarious professional career as a ‘lady’ among the engineers.

Although she came from unprivileged beginnings – an impoverished but respectable Jewish immigrant family – in 1876, Hertha Ayrton (then Sarah Phoebe Marks) became one of the few women to access a university education when she enrolled as a student at Girton College, Cambridge. She was able to take up her place thanks only to the help of feminist campaigner Barbara Bodichon (1827–1891) and her network of rich philanthropic friends, including the novelist George Eliot, who funded her studies. The character Mirah in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda is said to be modelled on Hertha.⁴⁴ Ayrton took mathematics and ‘graduated’ in 1880 with a disappointing third. Like many of the early students, she was ill prepared for university as she had not benefitted from the preparatory education, similar to that available in boys’ public schools, which was beginning to be offered to girls from around the mid-1870s due to the growth of new girls’ high schools. As a woman, she was ineligible to be awarded a degree; this was a right that was granted to women at Cambridge only in 1948. The absence of a degree or credit-endorsing letters after your name was a limitation to any woman seeking to support herself in a professional capacity. This is evidenced by the approximately 720 women who travelled to Trinity College Dublin between 1901 and 1907, a period during which the college offered to confer a degree on any woman who could demonstrate a university training.⁴⁵ After Girton, Ayrton sought professional training in the new electrical industries by enrolling at Finsbury Park Technical College, where women could ‘study electrical science without risk of alarming anybody or of doing any harm to themselves’.⁴⁶ These evening classes in electrical and applied physics attracted just three female students alongside 118 men. In 1885, Hertha married her tutor at Finsbury, the electrical engineer William Ayrton. This partnership facilitated Hertha Ayrton’s access to professional networks and, although both spouses worked largely independently, it also provided a springboard to her career. However, unlike her husband, as a woman, Hertha never had access to a salaried career or enjoyed a paid position or renumeration for her scientific work. Hertha recognized this fully when she accepted Ayrton’s proposal: she wrote in a letter announcing her marriage to her mother, ‘He is also going to let me go on with my electrical work, and of course he can help me with it in every way.’⁴⁷

Figure 2.2. ‘Mrs Ayrton in her Laboratory’, frontispiece to Evelyn Sharp, Hertha Ayrton: a Memoir (London, 1926).

Ayrton’s marriage gave her access to her husband’s laboratories and student assistants, thus enabling her to undertake research at the industrially focused Central Institution, Kensington, which later became a part of Imperial College. This pattern conforms to the picture in an emerging body of scholarship which demonstrates that women needed male mentors or intermediaries in order to infiltrate the male networks and spaces of science.⁴⁸ In 1908, when her husband died, however, Ayrton was excluded from these facilities, despite her strong scientific reputation. For the remainder of her fifteen years as a scientific practitioner, she had no option but to carry out her research in a laboratory located in her London home. This domestic setting limited the work she was able to do and cast a shadow over her science as peers began to question the accuracy of her experimental methods and the adequacy of her equipment.⁴⁹ The ambivalence surrounding the idea of women in a laboratory is neatly revealed by an analysis of a photograph of ‘Mrs Ayrton in her Laboratory’ dating from 1906, the year she received a Royal Society medal.⁵⁰ Here, Ayrton is positioned in front of a bookcase; a potted plant and vase can be seen above each shoulder and paintings hang on the wall above her head. These include the famous image by Joseph Wright of Derby, A Philosopher Giving a Lecture on the Orrery (1766), which may indicate that Ayrton located herself within the tradition of modern, empirical science that emerged with the scientific revolution in the late seventeenth century. She stands in front of a table upon which is a barely visible glass tank; the edge of another glass tank can just be seen, resting on top of a table covered in a velvet cloth. These are the two tanks she used for her later research into the formation of sand ripples and water vortices. Ayrton herself is dressed as if to receive visitors; she wears jewellery and avoids our eyes by gazing out towards the right of the photograph in a classic, passive, ‘feminine’ pose. In this apparently domestic setting, there is no signifier of Ayrton’s profession in the portrait. As a result, the effect is ambiguous: is this a scientist in the laboratory? Or a hostess in her drawing room? The visual subtext revealed by Hertha’s portrait is that a woman’s space is the home, not the laboratory. Historians have written extensively about the ways in which space has been divided according to gender and function, making it difficult for women to cross social and physical boundaries in the same way as men.⁵¹ Although many male scientists had home laboratories – in keeping with the ‘aristocratic house’ tradition in science – by the late nineteenth century rarely were these their only experimental space. The existence of men’s additional home laboratories seldom impacted on the reception of their science or threatened masculine professional credibility.

Ayrton’s science was carried out at the margins in other ways too. Although she demonstrated her research at Royal Society conversaziones – one of a small handful of women scientists to be honoured with an invitation at the time – and received the Royal Society Hughes Medal for original research in 1906, her relations with this august institution were largely fraught. She was nominated for a fellowship twice, in 1902 and 1904, but the Royal Society refused to consider her due to her sex.⁵² In the years around 1900, there was coordinated lobbying by scientific women to gain admission to learned societies, often prompting acrimonious debate among male fellows, who feared that their society would be tainted with amateurism and triviality. When the Royal Geographical Society considered the issue, from 1892 onwards, the ensuing angry controversy broke out on to the letters page of The Times. Women were finally admitted as fellows of the Royal Geographical Society in 1913.⁵³ After similar debate, the Linnaean Society (established in 1788) admitted its first female fellows in 1904, and the Royal Astronomical Society (established in 1820) in 1916. The first two women fellows of the Royal Society were elected in 1945. Less prestigious societies were not so fussy, and Ayrton became the first female fellow of the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) in 1899. The IEE had been established in 1871 as the London-based Society of Telegraph Engineers; its members worked at the intersection of commerce and science and were in the vanguard of developing technical applications for public and private use. Ayrton’s admission papers show that she had been admitted under an exceptional clause and had not followed the same election process as the average male. This special clause did not require any electrical education or employment qualification, merely that the candidate ‘shall be so prominently associated with the objects of the Institution that the Council considers his [sic] admission to Membership would conduce to its interests’.⁵⁴ It was not until 1919 that the next woman was elected, in the same year as the enactment of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act. Exclusion from the Royal Society isolated Ayrton to an extent from developments in her field and was more than just a slight to her scientific vanity. In 1910 she was moved to write to the then president, Sir Archibald Geikie, to ask if she could have the privileges of a fellow in the one respect of receiving unpublished papers, as not having access had put her at ‘great disadvantage’.⁵⁵

Ayrton’s difficulties with the Royal Society were connected to the strong antipathy to women’s participation in science from some fellows and members of the council based on the perceived intellectual disabilities of the female sex. In his obituary of Ayrton, chemist Henry Armstrong wrote that she had ‘neither the extent nor depth of knowledge, the penetrative faculty, to give her entire grasp of her subject’ and suggested that William Ayrton should have had a ‘humdrum wife’ who ‘put him into carpet-slippers when he came home’ and ‘fed him well’, as then he would have been able to do more effective work.⁵⁶ These views, although not by any means universal (for example, Norman Lockyer, the founding editor of Nature, was strongly supportive of women), presented challenges to any woman seeking to be recognized as a professional scientific practitioner. Turning his aim to female science teachers, Armstrong used his report for the 1904 Mosely Education Commission to emphasize the ‘mental disabilities that evolution had bestowed on women’ and the consequent ‘ruinous effect’ of women entering the science teaching profession.⁵⁷ Three years after Ayrton’s death, Maurice Solomon wrote that Ayrton had been an ‘inspiration’ but her sex had been ‘a continual hindrance to her work’ as she faced ‘a constant struggle against prejudice and old-standing prohibitions … which even in success had led too many to judge her achievements by the sex of the doer’.⁵⁸ This is a reflection that can also be applied, to an extent, to Marie Stopes.

Marie Stopes (1880–1958): geologist and palaeobotanist

On 16 June 1914, a day coinciding with the Royal Society annual conversazione, an anonymous correspondent to The Times gave a description of the handicaps facing her as a woman attempting to pursue a role in science. This ‘Complaint against the Royal Society’ listed the practical difficulties and moral injustices of excluding women scientists from the professional exchange and research networks which were becoming so essential to success in science:

Women high up in scientific positions, women with international reputations, women who would themselves bear the magic title F. R. S. if they could disguise from the world the fact of their sex – such women are shut out from the concourse of their intellectual fellows, shut out from the opportunities of meeting and talking with their scientific colleagues, unless they know by chance some bachelor Fellow.⁵⁹

This forthright letter was written by Marie Stopes. In it she criticized the practices of the Royal Society, among them the need of even the most distinguished woman of science to have a male fellow to ‘communicate’ her paper (this was also a requirement for male non-fellows) and women’s exclusion from most meetings and the library. It was clear that when it came to pursuing a professional role in science, Stopes believed there was not a level playing field for both sexes. Despite this blistering complaint, Stopes had already received a major research grant from the Royal Society, had published in their prestigious publications, and had exhibited her fossil finds at the society’s annual conversazione in 1909. Although she is remembered primarily for her work on birth control, for approximately sixteen years prior to this Stopes forged a significant and visible career in geology and palaeobotany. This saw her travel widely for research, accept government commissions, publish nearly forty academic papers and write books for non-specialist readerships. Stopes’s first book was a study of plant life, published in 1906, which she hoped would encourage young people to become interested in the subject.⁶⁰ This places her as having started her scientific working life in the comfortable niche for women of constructing a professional, public identity in science through writing for children and young adults. However, Stopes established a prestigious reputation that reached well beyond a lay audience and became highly influential in her discipline. According to Helen Fraser and Christopher Cleal, her research produced novel and important insights, in particular into coal-forest ecology. Stopes was ‘arguably the first to view the coal forests as a living ecosystem rather than a series of dead fossils – an approach that was not really emulated again for nearly half a century’.⁶¹

Stopes’s interest in science was stimulated at a young age, when she accompanied her father on archaeological field trips and helped him prepare items and catalogue his collections. Her talents in this area were further nurtured at North London Collegiate School for Girls, which boasted an outstanding science department. Unlike Ormerod and Ayrton, Stopes was of a generation that was able to benefit from the growth in serious, academic schools for girls, which, as well as giving their pupils an education equivalent to that provided in a boys’ public school, also provided acceptable jobs as teachers for the increasing number of female ‘graduates’ from the new colleges for women. Stopes initially applied to major in chemistry at University College London (UCL); however, the department did not accept her. As with Ayrton, there was some resistance to women participating in laboratory-based science. At UCL in the late 1880s, one female student was discouraged from seeking admission to chemistry classes as it was believed that women would be ‘scarred for life and have their clothes burnt off them as the men threw chemicals around’.⁶² Stopes compromised and studied feminine-friendly botany as a major with chemistry and zoology as minor subjects. At the same time – and against UCL regulations – she enrolled as an external student at Birkbeck College and took on a double study load, going on to graduate with a BSc Honours in botany and geology in 1902 after only two years.⁶³ This success led to a temporary research assistant post and a scholarship to fund a year abroad to complete a doctorate in palaeobotany at the Botanical Institute at the University of Munich. Stopes was the first woman to work at the institute and her supervisor, Professor K. Goebel, had to have the rules of admission changed to enable her to graduate in 1904.⁶⁴ Her research dealt with cycad seed structure and function (cycads are woody plants that produce seeds; they are of especial interest due to their connection and similarity to ancient plants). On her return to England, Stopes took up a post as assistant lecturer in botany at Owens College, Manchester (later the University of Manchester), becoming the first woman to lecture there in science. While at Manchester – and still aged only twenty-four – Stopes was awarded a doctorate from the University of London. According to her biographer, the University of Manchester had severe misgivings about her appointment as the ‘council were nervous of a woman and only ratified her after lengthy debate’. Stopes was warned that university authorities would be watching her progress carefully.⁶⁵ A precarious professional indeed.

Figure 2.3. Marie Stopes in her laboratory, Manchester, c.1904–6. Unknown photographer; image restored by Adam Cuerden. Source: Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain).

Unlike Ayrton and Ormerod, Stopes took on paid commissions and earned (some) money from her science, something which both aligns her with twentieth-century ideas of professional practice and testifies to her public identity as an expert in her field. In 1910 the Canadian Geological Survey asked her to act as adjudicator in a scientific controversy surrounding the Fern Ledges of Saint John, New Brunswick. Stopes investigated for eighteen months and produced an extensive report of the flora, later developing her findings into a book which became one of her most significant contributions to science.⁶⁶ Following this, the Natural History Museum in London engaged her to write a catalogue of the cretaceous plants in their collections.⁶⁷ From 1916, when coal as a source of power became an urgent issue, Stopes supported the war effort by collaborating in research on the constituents of coal for the government’s Industrial Research Department. However, it is Stopes’s eighteen-month research trip to Japan that reveals the most significant clues as to how she negotiated her personal and public identity as a professional scientist.

Stopes’s sojourn in Japan was made possible by the award of a substantial Royal Society grant which enabled her to work at the Botanical Institute of the Imperial University in Tokyo. From August 1907 to January 1909, Stopes combined working at the institute with field trips to find carboniferous fossils, including angiosperms, in the hope of locating a petrified ancestor of the modern plant. A glimpse of her life here is revealed by her Journal from Japan, an account of her experiences published on her return.⁶⁸ Stopes spent some quiet days in the laboratory cutting and preparing fossils, usually working independently but at times collaborating with others or teaching male students at the university how to perform this intricate task.⁶⁹ However, the journal also describes her many adventurous expeditions in search of fossils. These were often to remote areas and involved arduous journeys and camping out in very difficult, uncomfortable terrain. One of her first treks was to the ‘northern wilds’ of Hokkaido, an expedition that required her to take an overnight train on her own, the only female passenger, followed by a steamer on which she shared a berth with two men, and finally to go on foot and by cart to a remote coal mine. Once she had arrived, in order to hunt for the fossils, she had to navigate and camp out alongside rivers and dense forest with a group of local male helpers and escorts, one of whom ‘carries me on his back on the frequent occasions when it is necessary to cross the river’.⁷⁰ Back at the institute, conditions were, of course, far less gruelling. Stopes enjoyed being the centre of attention at the many formal functions and dinners scheduled, often in her honour, and basked in being the only woman present.⁷¹ Journal from Japan is a travelogue and an autobiographical account more than anything else, but Stopes’s personal understanding of her core identity as a professional scientist is strong throughout. Indeed, the subtitle is ‘A daily record of life as seen by a scientist’ and the special status this implies – that a scientifically trained professional can provide a more authoritative understanding of life – is something Stopes retained when she became involved in birth control from 1916 onwards.

Stopes asserted a strong, individual professional identity in other ways too. She kept her own name on marriage, sending a circular letter to family and friends to advise them of this fact in response to some criticism: ‘I have taken the necessary steps to retain my own name as my legal one … and it is also the name I use in all my scientific work. It is, in short, my real name.’⁷² The horror with which she viewed ‘compelling professional women to give up their professions on marriage’ was made clear in a letter to The Times in 1914.⁷³ Stopes also inhabited a professional role via her membership of learned societies. For the most part, she benefitted from the campaigns around 1900 to open scientific institutions to women. After a long and bad-tempered campaign, the prestigious Linnean Society had admitted its first women as fellows in 1904; Stopes was elected in 1909.⁷⁴ However, she had to wait until 1922 to be admitted to the Geological Society, which changed its charter to enable the election of women only in 1919. A fellowship of the Royal Society, a body which had a reputation of elitism and exclusivity to maintain, eluded her, however.

An analysis of the experiences of these three women across successive generations indicates the fluidity of the notion of a professional in science in the years 1860–1914. Even when Stopes was practising in the first decades of the twentieth century, the identity of a professional scientist had not been fully demarcated – however, it was clear that the developing stereotype was gendered radically male. This may explain why Ormerod, working in economic entomology from the 1870s onwards, enjoyed more flexibility as the characteristics of a legitimate professional scientist were then only just beginning to emerge and take shape. Yet Ormerod was a wealthy, privileged woman; the lack of these advantages would have precluded other women, and indeed most men, from a similar career in science. Ayrton and Stopes had access to higher education and professional training, but as these opportunities developed so did ideas of the appropriateness of certain disciplines for men or women. Ayrton, as physicist and engineer, was disadvantaged in practising in a branch of practical science that was gendered radically masculine. Ormerod and Stopes worked largely in the feminine-friendly traditions of natural history and there are many women that can be identified as participating in similar fields from the mid nineteenth century onwards. Although Stopes was one of the few to develop a significant career, over a third of British palaeobotanists working on carboniferous plants in the first half of the twentieth century were women.⁷⁵ Despite this, the fact of their sex impacted on all of these women in different but central ways. It coloured the language used to describe and understand their scientific activities; it limited their access to facilities, networks and renumeration; and it created a tension in their self-identity as professionals and women. For example, despite Ayrton’s plea to disregard sex and concentrate on science, on her death The Times headed her obituary ‘A distinguished woman scientist’.⁷⁶ This is still a tension confronting many women pursuing a professional career in science today.