Negotiating in/visibility: Women, science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century

by Amelia Bonea (Editor), Irina Nastasa-Matei (Editor)

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781526178381
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Publication date:	08/05/2025
Pages:	400
Product dimensions:	6.14(w) x 9.21(h) x 0.87(d)

About the Author

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

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