Moving Through Barriers in Science and Life.

This first serious attempt at an autobiographical accounting has forced me to sit still long enough to compile my thoughts about a long personal and scientific journey. I especially hope that my trajectory will be of interest and perhaps beneficial to much younger women who are just getting started in their careers. To paraphrase from Virginia Woolf's writings in A Room of One's Own at the beginning of the 20th century, "for most of history Anonymous was a Woman." However, Ms. Woolf is also quoted as saying "nothing has really happened until it has been described," a harbinger of the enormous historical changes that were about to be enacted and recorded by women in the sciences and other disciplines. The progress in my chosen field of study-the chemical basis of enzyme action-has also been remarkable, from the first description of an enzyme's 3D structure to a growing and deep understanding of the origins of enzyme catalysis.

Discipline building in Germany: women and genetics at the Berlin Institute for Heredity Research.

The origin and the development of scientific disciplines has been a topic of reflection for several decades. The few extensive case studies support the thesis that scientific disciplines are not monolithic structures but can be characterized by distinct social, organizational and scientific-technical practices. Nonetheless, most disciplinary histories of genetics confine themselves largely to an uncontested account of the content of the discipline or occasionally institutional factors. Little attention is paid to the large number of researchers who, by their joint efforts, ultimately shaped the discipline. We contribute to this aspect of disciplinary historiography by discussing the role of women researchers at the Institute for Heredity Research, founded in 1914 in Berlin under the directorship of Erwin Baur, and the sister of the John Innes Institute at Cambridge. This paper investigates how and why Baur built a highly successful research programme that relied on the efforts of his female staff, whose careers, notably Elisabeth Schiemann's, are also assessed in toto. These women undertook the necessary 'technoscience' and in some cases innovative work and helped increase the prestige of the institute and its director. Together they played a pivotal role in the establishment of genetics in Germany. Without them the discipline would have developed much more slowly and along a divergent path.

Balancing life and work by unbending gender: Early American women psychologists' struggles and contributions.

Women's participation in the work force shifted markedly throughout the twentieth century, from a low of 21 percent in 1900 to 59 percent in 1998. The influx of women into market work, particularly married women with children, put pressure on the ideology of domesticity: an ideal male worker in the outside market married to a woman taking care of children and home (Williams, 2000). Here, we examine some moments in the early-to-mid-twentieth century when female psychologists contested established norms of life-work balance premised on domesticity. In the 1920s, Ethel Puffer Howes, one of the first generation of American women psychologists studied by Scarborough and Furumoto (1987), challenged the waste of women's higher education represented by the denial of their interests outside of the confines of domesticity with pioneering applied research on communitarian solutions to life-work balance. Prominent second-generation psychologists, such as Leta Hollingworth, Lillian Gilbreth, and Florence Goodenough, sounded notes of dissent in a variety of forums in the interwar period. At mid-century, the exclusion of women psychologists from war work galvanized more organized efforts to address their status and life-work balance. Examination of the ensuing uneasy collaboration between psychologist and library scholar Alice Bryan and the influential male gatekeeper E. G. Boring documents gendered disparities in life-work balance and illuminates how the entrenched ideology of domesticity was sustained. We conclude with Jane Loevinger's mid-century challenge to domesticity and mother-blaming through her questioning of Boring's persistent focus on the need for job concentration in professional psychologists and development of a novel research focus on mothering.

Maria Sklodowska-Curie, her life and work - the 150 anniversary of her birthday

Maria Sklodowska was born on November 7, 1867 in Warsaw (Poland). Her parents were teachers. Maria's mother has died in 1878 of tuberculosis. In 1893 and 1894, respectively, Maria was awarded master's degrees in physics and in mathematics from the Sorbonne University. In 1895 Maria married Pierre Curie. In 1897 their daughter Irene was born. Maria investigated rays emitted by uranium salts. She hypothesized that the radiation come from atom and called this phenomenon "radioactivity". In 1898, Maria and Pierre discovered new radioactive elements polonium and radium. In 1902 she isolated pure radium chloride and defined radium atomic mass. In June 1903, Maria supervised by Professor Lippmann was awarded her doctorate in physics from the Sorbonne University of Paris after presentation of the thesis "Investigation of radioactive bodies". In December 1903, Maria was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, along with her husband Pierre and Henri Becquerel, for their work on radioactivity. In 1904, the daughter Eve was born. On 19 April 1906, Pierre was killed in a road accident in Paris. In 1910 Maria isolated radium as a pure metal. She also defined an international standard for radioactive emissions (curie), published her fundamental results on radioactivity and textbook of radiology. She also defined the international pattern of radium. In 1911, she won her second Nobel Prize, this time in Chemistry, for her discovery of radium and polonium. In 1914 she was appointed director in the Radium Institute in Paris. During World War I, Maria became the director of the Red Cross Radiology Service and set up France's first military radiology centre. In May 1932 she has attended the official opening ceremony of the Radium Institute in Warsaw. On 4 July 1934, Maria Sklodowska-Curie has died aged 66 years in Sancellemoz sanatorium (France) of aplastic anemia.

Opting Out and Leaning In: The Life Course Employment Profiles of Early Baby Boom Women in the United States.

Most literature on female employment focuses on the intersection between women's labor supply and family events such as marriage, divorce, or childbearing. Even when using longitudinal data and methods, most studies estimate average net effects over time and assume homogeneity among women. Less is known about diversity in women's cumulative work patterns over the long run. Using group-based trajectory analysis, I model the employment trajectories of early Baby Boom women in the United States from ages 20 to 54. I find that women in this cohort can be classified in four ideal-type groups: those who were consistently detached from the labor force (21 %), those who gradually increased their market attachment (27 %), those who worked intensely in young adulthood but dropped out of the workforce after midlife (13 %), and those who were steadily employed across midlife (40 %). I then explore a variety of traits associated with membership in each of these groups. I find that (1) the timing of family events (marriage, fertility) helps to distinguish between groups with weak or strong attachment to the labor force in early adulthood; (2) external constraints (workplace discrimination, husband's opposition to wife's work, ill health) explain membership in groups that experienced work trajectory reversals; and (3) individual preferences influence labor supply across women's life course. This analysis reveals a high degree of complexity in women's lifetime working patterns, highlighting the need to understand women's labor supply as a fluid process.

Gentlemen, husbandmen, and industrious wives: The role of gender in imagining Indian agriculture.

The Agricultural and Horticultural Society of India (AHSI), founded in 1820, remains the most important producer of English-language knowledge regarding the cultivation of plants in colonial India. Members included missionaries, colonial officials, tea and indigo planters, merchants and bankers, as well as the Bengali bhadralok elites of Calcutta and some Indian princes. The writings it produced were highly gendered. Often they focus on how "improving" the political economy and agricultural productivity would create masculine identities, such as gentlemen landowners and industrious peasant husbandman. Yet I also argue that women's agricultural work was fundamental in imagining this path towards "improvement." Using descriptions of Indian farming and labor practices from the Society's meeting minutes and published transactions, as well as additional writings by its members and missionary founders, I show how many European members of the Society viewed women working outside of domestic pursuits as a sign of Indian inferiority. At the same time, many argued for the benefits of women's work, which they viewed as fundamental in making Indian households more productive. Women and their labor were a lynchpin in creating the idea of the effeminate Indian man as well as the solution for improving him. It was this intersection of race with gender which helped to define agriculture as a discipline much closer to practical knowledge than abstract science. While some European women were able to participate in the Society's production of scientific knowledge because of agriculture's practical nature, Indian knowledge (whether from men or women) tended to be openly dismissed as tradition or habit rather than truly practical. The overlap of gender with race consequently helped to create a hierarchy between practical knowledge and tradition.

Opportunities for women in early genetics.

Although women have long been engaged in science, their participation in large numbers was limited until they gained access to higher education in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The rediscovery of Mendel's work in 1900 coincided with the availability of a well trained female scientific workforce, and women entered the new field in significant numbers. Exploring their activities reveals much about the early development of the field that soon revolutionized biology, and about the role of gender in the social organization of science.

Nursing the tropics: nurses as agents of imperial hygiene.

BACKGROUND: Mrs Francis Piggott proposed the Colonial Nursing Association in 1895 as a means of supplying Britain's colonies and dominions with trained professional nurses, who would support the health of white colonists abroad. Over 8400 nurses were placed between 1896 and the Association's end in 1966. Despite the burgeoning of scholarship on gender and empire over the last few decades, there is still more research to be done examining nurses as professional, working women, who present a fascinating variation on the figure of the woman traveler. METHODS: This essay focuses on 1896-1927, exploring how nurses were prepared for their labor abroad and how these skills were challenged and adapted within a foreign environment. We contextualize this discussion with examples from literary tales of exploration and adventure and discourses of empire. RESULTS/CONCLUSIONS: Though the sources of disease against which nurses fought changed during this period, we assert that the underlying role of the nurse continued the same: she was meant to use the tools of personal as well as public 'hygiene' to create both physical and cultural boundaries around her white patients and herself, setting colonists apart from their colonial setting.

[Charlotte Yhlén--the first Swedish woman becoming a medical doctor. She had to move from Sweden to work as a physician]. / Charlotte Yhlén--första svenskan att ta läkarexamen. Hon måste flytta från Sverige för att få arbeta som doktor.

Charlotte Yhlén (1839-1919) was the first Swedish woman with medical education. New research has shed light on this forgotten pioneer. Charlotte was born in a Southern Sweden in a family without academical tradition. In her youth she got inspired by the woman emancipation movement. At an age of 28 she emigrated to the USA and studied at the Woman's Medical College of Pennsylvania. Her student thesis dealt with glaucoma. After graduation, Charlotte applied for work in Sweden but got rejected. Therefore, she moved back to the USA to work at Woman's Hospital of Philadelphia and later with a private practice as a general practitioner. In 1874, she married a Norwegian engineer and the couple got two children. Her husband's successful company Tinius Olsen Company was probably the reason why she gave up her medical career in her 50s. The article describes the conditions for love and work for the first Swedish women with academical education.

"Hollywood nurses" in West Germany: biographies, self-images, and experiences of academically trained nurses after 1945.

The School of Nursing at Heidelberg University was founded in 1953 on the initiative of the Rockefeller Foundation to generate new, scientifically trained nursing elite to advance the professionalization of nursing in West Germany. The "American" concept met massive resistance. Its "superior nursing training" was seen as creating "Hollywood nurses"-a threat to the traditional Christian understanding of good, caring nursing. Intense social conflicts also caused problems with other groups of nurses. The school nevertheless played a very important role as a "cadre academy" in the history of professionalization. Many of the first German professors in the nursing sciences trained or underwent further training in Heidelberg.

Expanding women's rural medical work in early modern Brittany: the Daughters of the Holy Spirit.

During the eighteenth century, orders of nursing sisters took on an expanded role in the rural areas of Brittany. This article explores the impact of religious change on the medical activities of these women. While limits were placed on the medical practice of unlicensed individuals, areas of new opportunity for nuns as charitable practitioners were created by devout nobles throughout the eighteenth century. These nuns provided comprehensive care for the sick poor on their patrons' estates, acting not only as nurses, but also in lieu of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries. This article argues that the medical knowledge and expertise of these sisters from the nursing orders were highly valued by the elites of early modern Brittany.

"To help a million sick, you must kill a few nurses": nurses' occupational health, 1890-1914.

Although nursing is recognized today as a serious occupational health risk, nursing historians have neglected the theme of occupational health and individual nurses' experience of illness. This article uses the local history of three case study institutions to set nurses' health in a national context of political, social, and cultural issues, and suggests a relationship between nurses' health and the professionalization of nursing. The institutions approached the problem differently for good reasons, but the failure to adopt a coherent and consistent policy worked to the detriment of nurses' health. However, the conclusion that occupational health was somehow neglected by contemporary actors was, nevertheless, erroneous and facilitated omission of the subject from historical studies concentrating on professional projects and the wider politics of nursing. This article shows that occupational health issues were inexorably connected to these nursing debates and cannot be understood without reference to professional projects.

"Who would know better than the girls in white?" Nurses as experts in postwar magazine advertising, 1945-1950.

American advertising in the period immediately following the Second World War portrayed nurses as trusted advisers and capable professionals and frequently pictured them performing skilled work, including dispensing medicine and assisting in surgery. Advertisements published in a range of magazines whose target audiences varied by gender, race, age, and class show that nurses in postwar advertisements embodied two broad categories of representation: (a) medical authority, scientific progress, and hospital cleanliness; and (b) feminine expertise, especially in female and family health. Typically portrayed as young white women--although older nurses were occasionally depicted and black nurses appeared in advertisements intended for black audiences-nurses were especially prominent in advertisements for menstrual and beauty products, as well as products related to children's health. Although previous scholarly examinations of nurses in postwar mass media have emphasized their portrayal as hypersexual and incompetent, this investigation posits postwar advertising as a forum that emphasized nurses' professionalism, as well as complex expectations surrounding women's professional and domestic roles.

The evolution of radiobiology through the work of women scientists: the work of Christiane Ferradini.

PURPOSE: Pay tribute to Christiane Ferradini and highlight the importance of her work as a scientist. CONCLUSIONS: Christiane Ferradini was born in 1924 in the south of France. She graduated from the Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France. In 1947, she joined the Curie Laboratory of the Radium Institute (which was then under the leadership of Madame Irène Joliot-Curie) to pursue her doctoral research. After her defence in 1955, she commenced her journey dedicated to the advancement of science. She became an exceptional teacher. She led a research group that contributed, through many fruitful collaborations, to the opening of a new chapter in radiation biology and medicine. Together they shed light on free radical formation and their reactions with biomolecules. Christiane published a total of 190 scientific articles and 9 books. She died in 2002.

The making and transnationalization of an ethnic niche: Vietnamese manicurists.

The article addresses how Vietnamese immigrant women developed an urban employment niche in the beauty industry, in manicuring. They are shown to have done so by creating a market for professional nail care, through the transformation of nailwork into what might be called McNails, entailing inexpensive, walk-in, impersonal service, in stand-alone salons, nationwide, and by making manicures and pedicures de riguer across class and racial strata. Vietnamese are shown to have simultaneously gained access to institutional means to surmount professional manicure credentializing barriers, and to have developed formal and informal ethnic networks that fueled their growing monopolization of jobs in the sector, to the exclusion of non-Vietnamese. The article also elucidates conditions contributing to the Vietnamese build-up and transformation of the niche, to the nation-wide formation of the niche and, most recently, to the transnationalization of the niche. It also extrapolates from the Vietnamese manicure experience propositions concerning the development, expansion, maintenance, and transnationalization of immigrant-formed labor market niches.

[The women's contribution to occupational health at the end of the nineteenth century]. / Il contributo femminile alla medicina del lavoro di fine ottocento.

In the late nineteenth century Italian working class was mainly represented by women. An extraordinary women movement (Laura Solera Mantegazza, Gualberta Adelaide Beccari, Anna Maria Mozzoni, Ersilia Majno Bronzini, Nina Rignano Sullam, Giuseppina Poggiolini among others) including the first Italian women physicians (Anna Kuliscioff, Maria Montessori, Gina Lombroso, Linita Beretta and the very close to become physician Anna Fraentzel Celli) build up associations, journals, books, schools, researches, and petitions. The first law on women and child labour (1902), the First Congress on Occupational illnesses (1906), the birth of the Clinica del Lavoro (1910) represent only part of this contribution which has been almost forgotten and should be enlightened.