Overview

This volume brings together scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds to discuss how women contributed to the making, pedagogy, institutionalisation and communication of scientific knowledge in the twentieth century, and to reflect on the theoretical and methodological challenges of documenting such hidden contributions. Featuring examples from China, former Czechoslovakia, Greece, Hungary, India, Japan, Romania, the United Kingdom and the United States, the contributors discuss women's engagement with science across different institutional and non-institutional sites, ranging from the laboratory and the school to the clinic, the home and the media. The volume moves beyond the professional scientist model to enlarge our understanding of women's participation in twentieth-century science and document the complex combination of factors that rendered such contributions (in)visible to contemporaries and future generations.

Full Product Details

Author:   Amelia Bonea ,  Irina Nastasa-Matei
Publisher:   Manchester University Press
Imprint:   Manchester University Press
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 2.20cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.728kg
ISBN:  

9781526178381

ISBN 10:   1526178389
Pages:   400
Publication Date:   05 August 2025
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Professional and scholarly ,  General/trade ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly ,  Professional & Vocational
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Foreword - Mariko Ogawa Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: In/visible women, science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century - Amelia Bonea and Irina Nastasa-Matei I Laboratory cultures: Visible scientific rebels, invisible innovators 1 Breaking down the barriers at Cambridge in the 1930s: Reinet Maasdorp’s experience at Rutherford’s Cavendish Laboratory - Kathryn Keeble 2 ‘Your research is crap, do not bother to apply again’: Female evolutionary biology theorists as scientific rebels and oppositional scientists - Nuala Caomhánach 3 Women’s invisibility in public memory of the discovery of RNA splicing: Converging biases of gender, race and mentorship - Pnina Geraldine Abir-Am II In/visibilities across borders: Scientific collaborations and contestations 4 Inventing a career across borders in the early 1930s: The case of cytogeneticists Eileen W. Erlanson and E. K. Janaki Ammal - Savithri Preetha Nair 5 Vlasta Kálalová Di-Lotti in Iraq: Medical practice and scientific research - Adéla Junová Macková 6 Early years of the International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists: Shaping transnational collaboration in the Cold War era, 1964-1975 - Emily Rees Koerner and Graeme Gooday III In/visibilities in medicine and care: Treating, teaching, reforming 7 ‘A model of devotion to the school’: Female doctors in secondary schools in interwar Romania - Camelia Zavarache 8 Women and the practice of Western medicine in late Republican China: Evidence from Sichuan - Jean Corbi 9 Agency and coercion: Fighting ‘women’s illnesses’ with grassroots science and medicine during the Great Famine in China, 1958-1962 - Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley IV Intimate knowledge and in/visible domesticities: Science, medicine and the home 10 The curious case of Yashoda Devi, a woman Ayurvedic practitioner in colonial India - Saurav Kumar Rai 11 Lady Irwin College: Domestic science post-secondary education for three women graduates in India - Anne Hardgrove 12 Clara Park: A mother’s intimate knowledge and child science - Marga Vicedo V Towards visible change? Publics, pedagogies and politics of science 13 The valuable ‘s’: Publics and counterpublics of abortion and contraception in late twentieth-century Greece - Evangelia Chordaki 14 The power of autobiography: Documenting women scientists through a lecture series at the University of Illinois - Bethany G. Anderson and Kristen Allen Wilson 15 How to do science as a woman and laugh? Insights and lessons from Hungary - Andrea Peto -- .

Reviews

'Negotiating in/visibility” advances the history of women in science in two ways. It multiplies the sites at which we look for scientific work, foregrounding schools, homes and voluntary associations alongside laboratories and clinics. It also shows that the politics of visibility must be studied within networks of travel, translation and pedagogy, not only within the walls of institutions. For historians of science, technology and medicine, as well as for gender historians and STS scholars, this is a collection to assign and to argue with. It is a model of how edited volumes can extend a field’s archive while sharpening its conceptual tools.' Masha Bratishcheva, Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa, H-Soz-Kult -- .

Author Information

Amelia Bonea is Lecturer in Global History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. Irina Nastasa-Matei is Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest

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