The history of women in science a seminar at the University of Regensburg,FRG

We provide here an outline of a course on the role of women in the history of the natural sciences. All students and members of faculty were free to attend. We report our experiences in teaching the courses and some of the literature used. The conclusions we came to on researching this topic are summarised. A combined historical and biographical approach was the most useful. We divided history into epochs in which we examined the cultural political and religious roles of women in society. Then we reported on important women scientists in each period, looking at their autobiographies and summarising, where possible, their scientific contributions. We discussed how the contributions of women scientists are forgotten or suppressed and ways in which the course participants themselves had internalised the ‘androcentric’ view of science. The most important finding for us was that throughout history women scientists were numerous, gifted—and forgotten.     

The History of Gendered Social Science: a personal narrative and some reflections on method

The history of the relationships between social work, social reform, social policy and social science contains an important story about the contributions of men and women, and about the ways in which masculinist social science and policy came to dominate the activities of women reformers and social scientists. This article focuses on a moment in this history, a conflict at the London School of Economics (LSE) in the 1950s about the future of social work education. A key figure in this was the author's father, Richard Titmuss. The article draws on biography, autobiography and intellectual/institutional history, raising some methodological issues about this approach to uncovering hidden stories; it also argues that the conflict at LSE, a painfully remembered episode in the history of social work, cannot be understood except in the context of the gendered story of ‘the socials’.     

Australian women in science : Two unorthodox careers

Today it is most unlikely that anyone without the appropriate qualifications could become a scientist. But Helen Newton Turner, an animal geneticist, and Isobel Bennett, a marine biologist, starting to work in science quite by accident, have become nationally and internationally accepted by their peers. The paper compares and contrasts the careers of these two eminent Australian women scientists, from childhood to retirement and even later, and discusses the factors responsible for their success. The main ingredients were of course their own intelligence, interest, determination, and capacity for hard work. Notwithstanding these personal qualities, however, their careers would not have been possible without the influence and support of two eminent scientific mentors. With the guidance, encouragement, and help of these enlightened men, both women went on to achieve outstanding success in traditionally male-dominated fields.     

The Newsletter of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History: presentation to its conference in Sofia, 8 August 2007

Presented as part of the twentieth anniversary celebration of the International Federation for Research in Women’s History in Sofia in August 2007, this paper examines the association’s newsletter to see what it reveals about the expansion of the academic infrastructure for women’s history from 1987 through to 2007. It looks at the rapid advancement of the subject in the 1980s and early 1990s and its slower growth in the following decade. It also explores briefly the problems that the establishment of Women’s Studies Centres presented for women’s history.     

‘I was completely oblivious to gender’: an exploration of how women in STEMM navigate leadership in a neoliberal,post-feminist context

Women are under-represented in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine (STEMM) fields worldwide, particularly in leadership positions. We explore this phenomenon by examining the leadership experiences of 25 women who were actively seeking to enhance their leadership capacities in STEMM fields from five countries in the Global North. We argue that women in this study seemed to be caught in an ‘ideological dilemma’ between recognizing sexism and gender bias in their organizational contexts and seeing their organizations as gender neutral. We argue that a post-feminist climate and a neoliberal ethic of meritocracy in science render inequality difficult to articulate and address. Considering this dilemma through the lens of ‘cruel optimism’, we suggest that women are problematically bound to a fantasy of success in STEMM in which leadership is attainable through arduous effort.

Abbreviation: STEMM; Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, and Medicine     

Histories of now: listening to women in British film

ABSTRACT

The research project ‘Calling the Shots: Women and contemporary film culture in the UK, 2000–2015’ investigates contemporary women's film history through two primary routes: the statistical analyses of the numbers of women in six key above-the-line professions (director, writer, producer, executive producer, cinematographer and editor), and interviews with 50 women in those same roles (by August 2018 we had interviewed 58). This paper focuses specifically on the permutations of the interview process for constructing women's film history in the contemporary period. Taking into consideration the theoretical, methodological and political issues at stake in recording oral histories of working women filmmakers, we contemplate the consequences of collecting and writing history that is still in medias res.     

Waves of Publications on Chinese Women and Gender Studies

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the evolution of Chinese women and gender studies in academia since the 1970s through a discussion of a number of prominent Western-language book publications that reveal changing scholarly approaches and attitudes toward this subject. It makes evident that within several generations the field has developed from a study favoured by left-leaning academics to a subject fed by multi-disciplinary approaches and integral to China scholarship. The review demonstrates how researchers sought sources and means to expose the once-buried literary and artistic achievements of imperial era women while modern history and literary experts as well as anthropologists and other social scientists countered long-standing narratives of women’s oppression, and pursued alternative scenarios to show how Chinese men and women have transformed their culture and society. There is also attention given to publications about masculinity, same-sex cultures, and the one-child policy. The review concludes that more contact between Western and Chinese scholars on women and gender studies will enrich and expand the dimensions of this field.     

The Warnock report: The politics of reproductive technology

The Warnock Report (the report of the Committee of Inquiry into Human Fertilisation and Embryology, requested by the government of Great Britain) is a crucial text in the discourse on reproductive technologies. This paper is an investigation of the Report to find out exactly what is being said about women's bodies. I explore the relationship between the state and science, between ideology and technology, and the attempt of the Warnock Inquiry to construct a meaning of technology practice.After a brief introduction, the scope of the report is considred in part I. Part II discusses the Inquiry's treatment of infertility and the family. It includes sections on artificial insemination, invitro fertilisation, egg donation and surrogacy. The analysis reveals the Inquiry's preoccupation with the meaning of motherhood and social control of breeding. Women as women are not a presence in the discourse. Part III covers the Report's consideration of scientific research. I show that genetics is an inextricable part of research associated with artificial reproduction and that there exists an undercurrent eugenic meaning of genetics in the discourse on reproductive technology. An epilogue ties together the main points of my analysis.In short, what the text of the Report revealed was that the state and science require that women's bodies be available to serve the patriarchal nuclear family and the needs of scientists. The state empowers science because politicized technologies can be utilized by the state to intervene in population control. This is the logic behind eugenics and the policing of women's sexuality via reproductive technologies.     

‘HOTTEST 100 WOMEN’

Social movement theorists have developed several concepts to explain the role of social networking in maintaining social movements. This is particularly relevant for periods when levels of public activism are low due to backlash, hostile social contexts and structural uncertainties. As part of my study of the women's movement online and feminist blog networks in Australia, I provide a review of several of these concepts, interrogating their applicability to the study of online communities. This paper explores the relevance of the social movement theory concepts of submerged networks, abeyance structures and the related idea of counterpublics for the study of feminist blog networks. In 2009, the radio station Triple J's ‘Hottest 100 of All Time’ poll featured no solo women artists, and women played on few tracks. In response to this, several strands of discourse developed in the Australian feminist blogosphere identifying ways that the history of rock music excludes or erases women. Activists developed a cross-platform poll on Twitter, Facebook and email, and promoted it through blogs and Twitter, to counter the ‘Hottest 100 Men’ with a ‘Hottest 100 Women’. This paper shows the ways these women have used blogging networks to challenge mainstream discourses and generate new ones.     

Warmth and Unity with All Women? Historicizing Racism in the Australian Women's Movement

In this paper I discuss the four Women and Labour conferences which were held in Australian capital cities over the seven years between 1978 and 1984. I explore the ways in which the history of Australian feminist activism during this period could be written, questioning in particular the claim that the Women and Labour conferences have been central to the history of Australian feminism. I discuss the ways in which a historical sense could be established, using writings about the conferences as historical ‘evidence’, that race and ethnic divisions between women had not been important to the ‘women's movement’ until 1984. In other words, I challenge the construction of this conference as a turning point - not only in the feminist politicization of immigrant and Aboriginal women, but also in the politicization of all feminists about race and ethnic divisions. More broadly, I am interested in how a history would be written if it aimed to get to the ‘truth’ about racism and about the feminist activism of immigrant women. How would the apparent lack of written ‘evidence’ - at least until 1984 - of immigrant women's feminist activism, and of the awareness of Australian feminists about issues of racism, be written into this history? In addition, I suggest that it is important to the writing of feminist history in Australia that published documentation has been mostly produced by anglo women, and is thus partial and mediated by the lived, embodied experiences of anglo women. Finally, my intention is to interrogate commonly understood narratives about Australian feminist history, to challenge their seamlessness, and to suggest the importance of recognizing the tension within feminist discourses between difference as benign diversity and difference as disruption.     

The International Federation for Research in Women’s History: some introductory comments

These introductory remarks about the International Federation for Research in Women’s History, founded in 1987, look at its aim and mention the range and diversity of countries which are affiliated to it. Reference is also made to the current global financial crisis and to the impact this may have on women’s history.     

Women’s international Democratic Federation,the ‘Third World’ and the Global Cold War from the late-1950s to the mid-1960s

ABSTRACT

This article examines the work of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) with women from Africa, Asia and Latin America. It analyzes their role in the WIDF’s decision-making process and activities during a period marked by decolonization and the intensification of women’s rights activism outside Europe. This analysis contributes to a better understanding of the extent to which the WIDF’s official position on support for the rights of women in the Global South was translated into the practical work of organization. The article is based on materials from Moscow archives that have hitherto not been explored in research on the WIDF. It shows that, in spite of the WIDF’s formal anti-colonial stance, women from the Global South were not always given a voice or able to insert their demands into WIDF policy.     

Prenatal diagnosis and eugenic ideology

The new techniques of prenatal diagnosis confront women with choices that are constrained by the social and economic realities of the societies in which we live. These societies take little, if any, responsibility for meeting the special needs of people with disabilities and, in fact, discriminate against them. Prejudices against people with disabilities, poor people, and immigrants during the nineteenth century generated a science of ‘race improvement’, called eugenics. In the United States, a number of eugenic measures were enacted early in this century, but it was in Nazi Germany that eugenics or ‘racial hygiene’ flourished. In the guise of furthering the health of the German people (the Volk), German scientists and physicians designed programs of ‘selection and eradication’ (Auslese und Ausmerze) that were initially implemented by sterilizing people who were judged unfit to have children. Next came euthanasia and finally mass extermination of ‘lives not worth living’ (lebensunwerte Leben). Present-day German women, looking at this history, are opposing the ideology that underlies the new technical developments in prenatal diagnosis and some feminists outside Germany share their misgivings. This paper tries to place the new technologies in the context of eugenics and to point out some of the ways in which the new,supposedly liberating, choices in fact limit women's control over our lives.     

The British federation of university women and the status of women in universities, 1907-1939

Abstract

The early 1990s have marked a turning point in the history of the British Federation of University Women (BFUW), which has recently renamed itself the British Federation of Women Graduates, and has had to leave its historic premises in Crosby Hall, Chelsea. This article looks at the origin of the BFUW in the context of feminist concern with women's position in the universities in the first decade of this century. It sketches some of the difficulties faced by the Federation in defining, promoting and defending ‘women's interests’ in the universities and highlights its role in providing a supportive network for women in academic posts.     

One hundred years of women in universities — A confidence trick?

Gabrielle Baldwin, Women at Monash (Monash University) Clayton, Victoria, 1985; Bettina Cass, Madge Dawson, Diana Temple, Sue Willis, Anne Winkler, Why So Few? Women Academics in Australian Universities (Sydney University Press) Sydney, 1983; Madge Dawson and Heather Radi (eds), Against the Odds. Fifteen professional women reflect on their lives and careers (Hale & Iremonger) Sydney, 1984; Patricia Grimshaw and Lynne Strahan (eds), The Half Open Door. Sixteen modern Australian women look at professional life and achievements (Hale & Iremonger) Sydney, 1982; Farley Kelly, Degrees of Liberation. A short history of women in the University of Melbourne, Women Graduates’ Centenary Committee of the University of Melbourne, 1985; Alison Mackinnon, The New Women. Adelaide's early women graduates, Wakefield Press in association with the University of Adelaide Foundation, 1986.     

Structures of feeling: contemporary research in women’s film and broadcasting history

ABSTRACT

This special issue is the second volume originating from the ‘Doing Women’s Film and Television Histories III’ international conference held at the Phoenix Cinema, Leicester, England, in May 2016. It connects with concerns and questions of women’s production histories related to the constructed nature of history and how we write a ‘history from below’ to foreground the hidden, marginalised or forgotten histories of our women ancestors. This collection captures something of the dominant ‘structures of feeling’ of women’s film and broadcasting history scholarship in the contemporary period ranging from considerations of women working in both above and below-the-line roles in film, television and radio, to those whose labour fell outside of mainstream cinema production, as in the instance of the amateur film in the UK between the 1930s and 1980. Together, these case studies span from 1926 to the contemporary period, providing particular flashpoints of women’s history across the UK, North America, Italy and Australia.     

Chilean women and the UN decade for women

This article analyses two aspects of the reality of Chilean women during the United Nations Decade of Women: political participation and labour force participation. This analysis takes into account some of the proposals of the Regional Plan of Action for the Integration of Women into Latin American Economic and Social Development as well as the consequences of the political, cultural and economic model established by the Chilean military government. The effects of the Decade of Women on Chilean women is not analysed primarily because the specific proposals contained in the Plan of Action are based on the prerequisites of development and participation—which are not applicable to the Chilean case during this period.Notwithstanding the fact that all forms of popular participation have been effectively eliminated, there have emerged women's organizations whose concerns include calling into question the oppression of women on the basis of sex. With respect to labour, women's participation in the labour force has increased. However, this increase is not a response to improved opportunities or a more equalitarian treatment of women workers, but rather as the consequence of elevated unemployment rates especially in lower class families where women have greater access to certain kinds of marginal employment.On a final note, the article also includes a discussion of recent trends in research on women, trends which provide a challenge to the more traditional forms of research.