MURIEL LEDERMAN AND BARBARA WHITTEN
Authors’ note: This article owes much of its substance to Margaret Rossiter’s monumental two-volume work Women Scientists in America. Her unique approach is to document the accomplishments and struggles of an entire community rather than to focus on just a few great women. Those interested in a more complete understanding of women scientists in the United States are urged to consult her work.
Scientists organize themselves into institutions that foster the practice of science, provide them with resources, and nurture their professional culture. For women to be able to practice science, they must have access to these same resources—the current state of knowledge, necessary materials, and inter actions with other scientists. The participation of women in scientific institutions has varied with time and place, but it is rare for women to participate as fully as men.
In classical Greece, some women are believed to have participated in the two most important scientific institutions, the Pythagorean societies and the Academy of Plato. However, the science practiced was androcentric. For example, in Pythagorean number theory, numbers were associated with gender, and the number one was male, heavenly, and immaterial, while the number two was female, earthy, and material, a dichotomy that resonates to this day. In Roman times, Alexandria became a center of learning, and Hypatia was the leader of the Neoplatonist school of philosophy and an important mathematician. She ran afoul of a power struggle between Christians and pagans and was murdered by a fanatical Christian mob.
In medieval Europe, science was kept alive in monasteries, where women could become educated and escape the burdens of household management and childbearing. Many of these were headed solely by abbesses or jointly by
-235-
