that is amazing, and right now i just started quote koza help" which is different, it's fiction. i don't normally read fiction but it's a good read. >> the author is pamela newkirk, the author of quote collectors from black america." thank you. >> thank you. ..

you might ask, or you might not, you might know the answer, why do we need a women writing science series? the answer is of course that women still are not encouraged by their teachers to enter the scientific field and to stay there, which is really important , retention. that they are not promoted as much. they don't get the best jobs, they don't get the best grades. this is still, by many years of activism on women's part, something that is consistent throughout the scientific field. so, the feminist press, we put together a project and that to project directors are here, florence howe who is the founder of the press, and surely it was

the program director of the whole science project, which also has a web site called under the microscope.com. and how lean who is a board member, who has in fact done a lot of work on the science project. this was put together because it seems to us that it was really important to look at women and science in a different way, instead of sort of theoretical and looking you know what things through a microscope. we said let's do something that is lively and interesting and engaging and tells a story about women and science, because we know that everyone likes a good story. not just those of us who are publishers for instance. so, julie's book came along and it is one way or just delighted to have because it is all those things.

it is lively and it is accessible, but it tells an incredibly important story about the role of women in science and the heart of it is something that we rarely think about or acknowledge, but it is that women's way of doing things is often different than men's. it is is not necessarily biological. i don't think it is at all, but our experience of the world and the way we inhabit the world and the things we see and to do as women make a very big difference for how women do science. and that means that when women are looted, their way of doing things and their experiences and their understanding of how to conduct an experiment is lost. what is so fabulous about julie's work is that she really explores what women contributed to the scientific field by

bringing back very unique perspective to it. so, before we start, i do also just want to make a few announcements. first of all i want to thank very much adrian cline and ryan schwartz who was also on the board of the feminist press, for for the science and arts programs which is sponsoring this tonight and i want to thank the graduate center. i want to thank martin siegel auditorium for being open to night. it is not easy to find that here at the graduate center. i also want to invite all of you upstairs afterwards to the feminist press offices. we are going to have a little reception in honor of julie. she will be signing books there as well, so that is room 5046. go to the fifth floor and then just follow the signs and you will find your way there. now let me do a varied brief introduction of julie which is to say she is a professor of history at baruch college.

i think the fact that she is a historian is very important to this book because as i said she knows how to tell a good story. and this is her second book or go she is also the author of women and the historical enterprise in america. [applause] >> thank yous gloria. thank you. thank you. it is a lot of people and i am thrilled. a lot of people like no. i have a couple of students here who are already raising signs. farouk students have to entreat jobs at one time. the fact that you guys are here i am thrilled. it is wonderful. a lot of people from the feminist press and of course i have to thank the people from science and the arts, the graduate center, the feminist press and of course i want to thank c-span and everybody else who put this all together today. thank you so much. it is a very rare opportunity that we get to talk about the stuff that we write about are going teach all of these classes

and talk about american history but i never get to talk about the stuff that i am actually writing, so this is great. it is a very solitary business when you are writing a book and you sort of hunker down. i never get to talk about it, so this is the perfect opportunity. i was hoping if it is okay with you guys to actually talk a little bit about my personal experiences that brought me to writing the book or go yes we will talk about the book and get into the skinny of the book, but it make a lot of sense i think if i talk to you a little bit about my personal experiences in my professional experiences that brought me to write this book. to be totally honest with you when i look at this i would have never written this even six years ago. all of this stuff happen to me about five years ago, 2005 and when i think of all these things coming together at may the book even greater. but before that i wasn't even interested in looking at women in science. i looked at professional historians but i thought this is

stuff that people who do history and science do. i don't do the history of science. their whole departments of history and science and i don't do that so i thought this wouldn't be something i could actually do. let me tell you a little bit about what happened. 2005, very interesting year for me personally because this was the year that my dad died. he is not a scientist so don't think this is some weird a march to my dad. is nothing like that but my dad was absolutely enamored with scientists, absolutely enamored and the worship the manhattan project or go literally i think i must have been i don't no, maybe seven or eight years old when he started telling me stories about the nuclear chain reaction at the university of chicago in 1942. these were the sorts of stories that i grew up with. he just thought these figures were larger than life. and a very strange story but true story. when i was in high school, we

had to do these projects in humanities class. we had to do skits in roman history. i have an identical twin sister, and she was in the class. we had to do these skits. my sister had to go back to my house and work on this gets. i wasn't there. i was at somebody else's house doing a different skip. my dad came in the room, and i'm getting this from my sister. she is introducing my dad to all of the friends of ours in the realm, and she says to dad, dad, this is alex teller. now i did not know that my friend alex was actually the grandson of edgar teller. my dad knew for sure that this was the grandson of edward teller. my sister said that my dad was giddy when he met this kid. sort of like girls at a jonas brothers concert or something. my dad was absolutely beside

himself. by sister said to him, how did she know that he was the grandson? and he said the strangest thing. he said it was so obvious. it was all in the eyebrows. [laughter] and it was the funniest thing because it was so strange. i used to wear makeup it from and my dad didn't notice but he noticed the eyebrows. my dad has these world book encyclopedias in the home office and he had them from 1958. these are ones that he had read when he was a child. sure enough if you would go to the t. talk's you would find this picture of edward teller and other than the fact that the eyebrows are a little bit more wiry and a little bit more disheveled, they are alex teller's eyebrows. the funny thing about this is it was such an odd observation for him to make that now in the back of matt and i sort of think, now being a historian i give it a different context. it occurs to me that my dad was

one of these boys that came to age in the 1940s and 1950s and that is the period of this book, the age of heroic science. via cult of the atomic physicist. this is right about the time my dad for seize all of these ideas. he had studied this encyclopedic entry for years and years and i realized this is when people are starting to imagine scientist being this hypermasculine figure and i will talk about how this happens but what also happens is that literally women in science at the exact same time get rendered literally culturally invisible. this is a dynamic that i explore in this book. it was very hard to write about the women of the manhattan project because they don't write about themselves. they see themselves at these big players. but anyway, these figures were larger than life growing up to my dad at least. and my dad was smarter than life

to me and he passed away in 2005. this was a very strange moment for me. i was in a lot of transition. i was actually teaching at cuny but i was living in boston so i was doing doing this back-and-forth. my cousin, he knows because i was sleeping on his couch the whole time because i was was going back and forth, i was between book projects. i was telling the dean of the college that i was writing about women intellectuals so she didn't think i was just sitting around. i can say that now because i have something to say for myself. the other thing was the day that my dad died i was about five months pregnant. which is totally an integral part of this whole thing. because i was already a little bit uncomfortable traveling around a lot with my roller boarding going from boston and new york. i was pregnant. but that was going to pale compared to the discomfort of being a pregnant woman who was teaching at the city university

of new york in 2005. sadly. i would like to say that unpaid maternity leave was the least of my problems as a pregnant woman at the city university of new york. lots of things happened because i had the baby not in june, july or august as an extracurricular activity when i'm not teaching. i had the baby in april and this threw everything off. it wreaked havoc on my 10:00, on my psyche, my general finances. i won't go into the whole sob story. my friends were here know the sob story so i'm not going to do that but needless to say, i do have to say this, i have a wonderful colleague who as we speak is on a paid maternity leave at the city university of new york. things have changed. i would like to think my misery had something to do with it because i wasn't so quiet about it. as you guys can tell i am not

really over what happened to me as a pregnant person. and i'm not sure i'm ever really going to totally get over it but i do think you get to a point, when you are tired of feeling bad, tired of feeling like a victim and you want to do something productive for other people. it was right about at that stage that i decided whatever i was going to do, whatever this next project was going to be it was going to be something that looked at women in a professional culture, not v-victor balaji. after a while you were done with that. i wanted to do something that might have been prescriptive about how we can change the culture of this professional, the engendering of this professional culture, whatever the field was going to be. the problem with this, for historians in particular is that we are very good at talking about why things were the way they were. we are not so confident about talking about why the way they are and what they should be.

i do think it is dangerous to be overly prescriptive in a history book but i was really hell-bent at this point to do something that was going to matter for women in the 21st century. that said i had no idea what professional culture i was going to talk about. but remember, this was 2005. who gives me the answer to this? larry summers. [laughter] it sounds like a few of you know what happened with larry summers in 2005. i have to sort of tell the back story but i will do it very quickly because it has everything to do with where i am inserting myself in this conversation on women in science. so, larry summers was the president of harvard university in 2005. he was at this, just sort of an academic conference and there were economists in the room and scientists in the room and he is basically talking about or positing reasons for the dearth of women in institutional science.

and he proceeds to suggest that women's biological proclivities may have something to do with it. now, people of course seized on this which was amazing because if any of you have been to these academic conferences, people talk and it goes in one ear and out the other ear. no one is paying attention but everybody pays attention to what he says when he drops the b bomb, the biology. i at least come i waited for the transcript come out so i look at the transcripts to see what he said and i have to say he doesn't just say biology. he talks about insufficient childcare as being an issue. he talks about just general discrimination being issues but to be totally honest with you know when seized on that part. no one talked about it, no one cared. everybody talked about the biology part. this was the part that i thought was kind of strange because i have got to tell you when i heard the biology part my first inclination was to be totally dismissive.

of course it isn't women's biology. clearly that wasn't the reaction of other people. that was the thing i wanted to sort of wrap my brain around, what was going on that everybody , particularly the most defense of the woods and sciences were up like this. that is when i decided i really wanted to know what was going on there and if they cultural historian what frequently happens, we are interested in what these people say. i wanted to know what larry summers really said that i was much more interested in this interesting popular reaction. i don't know that i have it all figured out, but let me tell you what i think might be going on here. i think to some extent if you were to go to somebody on the street and you would say to them, do you think women are capable of science? i think the vast majority of people would say, absolutely. women are capable of science. but i think that is only the part they tell you. i think there is a part two in the next part of the reaction as

women are competent at science and so far as they are emulating men when they are doing the science. and i think even the people's art of most stalwart defenders of women in science ultimately think of that concept as masculine to the core. no matter how defending you are of women scientists come ultimately i think that is something we haven't really gotten rid of. so at that point, i thought what i want to do is i want to write a book that talks about this gender ring of scientific culture. doubt this was a novel idea to me that this was not a new idea of. lots of people have written really good compelling stuff about science as this gender culture and they have been doing it since the late 1970s, the early 1980s. if any of you have read anything by sandra harding, evelyn fox keller, there is so much out there, released hard stuff and in terms of the feminist

practice there is a little bit of a problem. it is so highly theoretical that what often happens is it feels very disembodied when you are reading it and you forget literally they are talking about real women doing science in the every day. absolutely smart, important stuff and it was totally foundational for the writing of this book. so you have that on the one end of the spectrum and then you have on the other end of the spectrum the stuff that is much more accessible, very readable. human interest stories, very compelling, often written in the biographical mode. these are the things particularly now when the month of march, you see these things, women's history month, library displays. if there is something about a women scientists nine times out of 10 it is madam curie. nice biographies and very compelling to read, fascinating women and in terms of this process a lot of the stuff is a lot more promising because it is so much more accessible.

if you are a young girl or young woman you are very inspired by it. this is fantastic. at the problem with a lot of this stuff, not all of it but a lot of it is that it does nothing to-- as this gender culture. all of the assumptions of masculinity stay in that culture and you just insert women into the mix so it reads in the sort of contents a tory taunt. it is almost over celebratory sometimes. not very help but you are trying to problem it ties science as culture. i think in the book i call it something like, these books that are women who perform outside the female to do no belt prize-winning science anyway sort of thing. great as far as they go. what i decided i wanted to do was they wanted to borrow from both. i wanted to take a look at those things that problem it ties as gender culture but then i wanted to write the biographical mode and i wanted to find women who were identifiable, fascinating

women. this is as far as i am at this point. i decided to talk to a good friend of mine who is not here but her name is carol berg and. she a fantastic historian. i started talking to her about this. the great thing about carol birkin is the is an amazing mentor and she hooked me up. she talked to her cage and. her book agent is a very bright guy. he thought this is fantastic so he starts pitching this and he comes back with this interesting feedback. what it basically was was a great idea, particularly in the wake of the whole summers thing. hill is the one person that you are going to write about? because of course that singular biography is what sells. for me i have got to say this was a total dealbreaker. that is exactly what i did not

want to do. the reason why i necessarily had to write about lots of different women is because the subject of the vote is not actually the women. the subject of the book is this gender ring of science and the women are the lenses. what they do a assorted riffraff light on this problem and all of these different ways. if i had one woman she would refract this way on this gender ring of science but i wanted it this way in all these different perspectives because there were so many different ways that scientific culture is. i wanted to look at married women and single women and women in the lab and women in the field and women who were doing science at the turn-of-the-century and women after feminism. this subdiscipline in that discipline. i needed all sorts of different lenses on this problem. the other thing of course i am an historian so i want to show change over time in this

gendering of science so what i wanted to do was i wanted to talk about women in the turn-of-the-century, women at the end of the century. there might be some woman out there who was 108 that i wanted someone who could tell my story through to the 20 century and that can't be done with one person. so i explain this today and. he completely understood me. he talked to the people at the feminist press than they understood what i was talking about. this is why this was a feminist but as they always had to necessarily be about lots of different women so it could shed light on this problem in all these different ways. so, to show the story to gendering of science over time, i had this notion about science engendering. so what i did was i divide this book into seven different chapters. each chapter looks at a woman or unity of women. it is loosely chronological so it starts the beginning of the 20th century and goes to the end of the 20th century. i have this larger note of about

science so i have these historical overviews and i talk about the science in three different distinct historical moments. the first moment is what i guess you could describe, late stage scientific rationalization i guess because really professionalization of science had been going on since the 1860s or 70s so by the time it gets to the turn-of-the-century does been going on for a while. the three women and communities of women that i talk about, those first three chapters, these are women who are trying to do science during this moment of professionalization, which is a very interesting thing to try to do. is the thing about professionalization is that it is always necessarily a masculine icing process. that may sound very strange, but what i mean about this, you get a group of people who decide they want to professionalize a field and what that means is

they want to infuse it with legitimacy and infuse it with prestige. the ways you go about infusing something with prestige is to give it a lot of masculine connotation. this is what they do of course with professional science. so you have got this group of insiders and they want to be seen as this exclusive group. you define everybody else, the outsiders, as amateur and of course everything associated with scientific amateurism is feminine. that is the way you create the hierarchy. professional science up here, amateur science down here. everything associated with domesticity, i.e., women, are added by default. this is how things happened at the turn-of-the-century. so what i do as i show you three roots of women who are trying to do science anyway and it is a very interesting paradox because what happens is if you are one of these women who wants to do science, you want to enter one

of these masculine bastions of science whether it is the lab or the university university or whatever it is, you enter it but to do that and still appear to be this appropriate woman, you have to do it in sort of look like the domestic help me. so you have to play that domestic world but if you actually pull it off, you look like an incompetent scientist because of course, domesticity, scientists who they are apparently antithetical. this is the paradox that the women in the first three chapters in the book have to deal with in the very first chapter of this book is about madame curie. madame curie, most of you probably know was not american. this is an american science, why are we talking about madame curie? madame curie comes to the united states in the 1920s and the reason why she comes is remember she had discovered radium, radioactivity but the problem was she didn't patent it so there is all of these american chemical producers making all of this money and she can't even

afford this much of it so she could do her own research. so she talks of his publicist in the united states, this woman named missy maloney and she hooks her up. she starts this campaign and all of these american women are going to raise money so madame curie can have a radium. i tell the story about this campaign. what is so funny about this, this tiny campaign says everything about notches how american women were being defined in this. but also how american science is getting defined because she comes to the united states and of course all of her american handlers have to try to deal with the contradiction that is madame curie. here is this woman who is really good at science, the only person in the world who has two nobel prizes in science mind you at the time but the problem is she is a woman and women are not supposed to be naturally good at science. how do you talk about her in the american public? the way american handlers deal with this is they suggest to

americans, you see it in the the newspapers and you see it in all of this discourse that the reason why she is so good at science is not because she does science for science sake like men do. it is her maternity that makes her so good at science. the reason why she discovered radium was because she wanted to cure cancer or humanity. she is basic way like, mother theresa with a beaker basically. lascaux and this is the way she gets described. the real tension in the chapter is that this is not madame curie in the least. she is now mother of the year. she has two daughters and she is pretty neglectful of them during certain junctures of her career and she wanted nothing to do with medical radium. she wanted kids to do science for science sake. this is exactly the way she would talk about it. this was the way she had to get marketed to the american public. that is chapter 1.

chapter 2 is about a woman who pulls off this persona a little bit at her and her name is lily and gilbert. lillian dilbert was a woman who was an issue. literally she had 12 children. she also happened to be in the most virile scientific field he could be in and that was industrial engineering. even today, in the 21st century there are still pockets of engineering and physics that are not just their e-mail but they are masculine in their culture. this is exactly the case of industrial engineering at the turn-of-the-century. the reason why i write about her, she is fascinating. a fascinating woman. but the thing about her, as marvelous as she appears she is one of the most subversive women in this book because those really strange dichotomies between scientists at the end domesticity, she completely turns them on their head. i don't know if she does this knowingly, but she does.

what she does is she defines science as something that can be done in domestic space and defines domesticity is something that can be scientific. she turns all of these things on their head so i had to write about her and she does doesn't 55 different ways. that is chapter 2. chapter 3 is looking at a group of women who we call computers at the harvard astronomical-- these women have to deal with this paradox that comes with her pressure elevation and a slightly different way. they are going to feel like the choice to be married with children and a choice to do science are completely mutually exclusive. you do one or you do the other. this was the case for a lot of professions but you really see it but these women because all of these women choose to basically be married to that observatory. they don't have children, they don't get married but the problem is now that they have made that choice and they are

and that observatory, the way that they get talked about in the observatory is as the sort of domestic housekeepers. the way that their science gets described as always in the sort of domestic metaphors. these women are doing busy work. they liken it to sort of needlepoint or doing the dishes or something like this. i have to say this is a very important point to make. i've been talking in the sort of extractions, talking about domesticity and doing this and that india might not really understand how the meaning and metaphor and language actually gets mapped out onto the real-life experiences of these women. but i am telling you the meaning that comes out of these metaphors has everything to do with the way we come to value women's scientific work and these women are spoken about as domestics. it is funny because i value domestic work in you guys might value to massacre but culturally it always brings women down it take to talk about that in domestic terms.

always, always, always. just to give you a sense of this, let me ask you this anybody know who marie gave bored maher is? who is she? she is a physicist. do you know why she won the nobel prize? the shell orbit theory of the nucleus. my husband who is a physicist, he knows now but he didn't know then, did you? she wins in 1963. she wins the nobel prize in physics. the way that we metaphorically speak of science, there is hard sciences like theoretical physics, infused with masculinity and then we have the soft sciences. this is the stuff that is squishy that women deal with. those are always sort of lower on the hierarchy. she was in one of those fields of hierarchy because she is in theoretical physics but the interesting thing about it is that is not the way the american press talks about it.

and i actually, when i was going back and looking at the clippings when she won the prize in 1963 shackley won the nobel prize in physics with two other men. one guy is at princeton and then there is another guy named jensen who actually also one at the same time, but the thing was he sort of figured out independently. frankly, he figured it out after she did that the two of them get the nobel prize for this at the same time. it is amazing because when the press talks about the shell orbit theory in jensen's hands it looks appropriately masculine. this is something to do with atomic science. then you see it in her hands. totally different. so if you guys don't mind let me just read something. it is funny because normally when i'm reading about people in science to go to the one chapter on curie but this whole chapter

is about women so i have to look around to find her. just listen. this is what i read about her when she wins the nobel prize. upon those discoveries we hear of pat summitt backs or facts or shouts of eureka. the end results of masculine contest. to terms with which the press conveyed female-- bury kerry stood entranced over her radium as a mother would stand over a sleeping child. in 1963 journalists seized on language that land she used to describe herself vary to a teenage daughter. i've yet to prove the senate that is actually true, but the press seized on a. think of couples waltzing around the room room she allegedly told her. they spin as individual couples as they orbit the ballroom. some couples spend in one direction and some in the other just like the electrons orbiting we assume everybody who has ever been against a this vast walden knows it is easier to dance in

one direction than in another. that is the way they describe the theory in her hands. it is funny because the other way, it looks very masculine. this way it looks dainty and in fact i would argue it doesn't even really look like science. i think that as a cultural intention because what is going on here is for her to look like an appropriate woman and to still be this competent scientists, she always has to be painted in the sort of glowing domestic shades. you cannot talk about her is competent and not as domestic at the same time because then she doesn't look appropriate. it is funny because i was actually looking at though press coverage when i was doing research, and when she wins that prize in 1963, every single clipping said, dr. wigner, dr. jensen. mrs. joseph maher. she of course had it ph.d., please note that this is how she gets talked about. when she won the nobel prize, it

is funny because the journalist felt compelled to to everybody that when all of the other physicists were in the room talking about science she took herself off to downtown stockholm and would do a little christmas shopping because that of course is what an appropriate woman would do. this is what the journalist is about her big night as she won the nobel prize. and professor mayor a tiny, shy devoted wife and mother who speaks so softly she can barely be heard, science and femininity have achieved an astonishingly graceful union. last winter at 57 she received the highest honor that the man's world of atomic age science can bestow. i would argue that is getting paid for the first time but that is not what we are talking about. but on her spectacular night of professional triumph in stockholm and the glittering nobel medal became hers maria saw everything through the starry eyes of her romantic woman. it was a fairytale she says. the king of sweden gave me his arm after the ceremony and my

husband looked enchanting in his white tie and tails. he had are of the trousers from our son. now months later the magic of it still brings a special light to maria's bright blue eyes. it is funny because the year before this, james watson winces nobel prize in biology. no one talked about the lent in his beautiful blue eyes. it is amazing how you can talk about them the same way. and then this is not the turn-of-the-century. this is 1963 and the reason why i am making a point of this is because this association with domesticity still stigmatizes women in science in the 21st century. this is why i had to make a point throughout the entire book. this doesn't make a lot of sense to people because we know women who are domestic. people say they keep house and they do this and do that and it doesn't matter. any woman, single, married, dead, a slob, it doesn't matter. every woman falls under this rubric of domesticity.

so i just wanted to make that clear why this was such a big deal. every time women scientists, nobel winner signs give talks about in this domestic terms of the most these women and yet this is how it gets talked about in american culture. anyway, sort of getting back to this historical scheme i had in mind. that was the her section of the book. the second section of the book is what i describe as they age of the heroic scientists. this is the-- when science gets infused with its greatest prestige and american culture. this is of course because of world war ii. you get the rise of the atomic science and you get the atom bomb. all of a sudden all of the men working on the atom bomb and "newsweek" and time in every newspaper has tons of cultural authority in this.. chapter 4 of this book is women of the manhattan project. project. i cannot tell you this problem

of cultural invisibility did when i came to write this chapter. you cannot find these women. i was with them for all of this great juicy evidence. they are there and i don't mean they are not just big players. there are women who literally were setting off the triggers that the trinity test ride in new mexico. they are next to tell her, they are next to-- all of these guys my dad venerated new women and operated with women on a daily basis. i couldn't find evidence about these women because the weird thing about it is these women themselves have started to internalize this invisibility. they wouldn't talk about themselves in these terms. i had a very hard time finding them so i spent a lot of this chapter, chapter 4, trying to diagnose this dearth of evidence and trying to diagnose this feasibility. the very last moment, historical moment in this book is really looking at women scientists with the rise of the second wave of

feminism. i don't think it is a quince events that at the very same time women are starting to question-- we also start to see some pretty interesting epistemological ruptures going on in science itself. at the very same time you have people like betty for dan, literally within that same year you have people like thomas q. and who are starting to talk about science in terms of revolution. he is starting to question the admissions of that very masculine scientist and all of these things are happening at the very same time. this is when rachel carson is writing silent spring. this is not science as usual, because first of all it is not an ethical posture and she doesn't apologize for it. she answer from our prices what she is writing about in the period of masculine science but she is starting to do this. all of a sudden people are starting to question not the issues of that scientist who is

always presumably male but now they are saying you know this guy probably has a subjectivity is ringing to his science. is probably asking certain questions because he has got that subjectivity. so people are starting to question this. it is funny i have to say, back in the 1950s there was a fascinating study done by margaret mead. sheehan as other woman when a grant to all of these high school students and asked them, draw a scientists. in 1956 the vast majority of people that drew the scientists, some with a lab coat, the spectacles, bearded. this is how the scientist was being imagined in american culture. not so much so in the 60s. we start to see people, particularly with the rise of the sociology of science as a field. the sociologists are saying all those things in the 40s and 50s, this idea of the lone

male maverick that sits by himself without anybody bothering him and he is hunker down and comes up with these nobel theories, all of a sudden people are poking holes through that. sciences collaborative. all of those nobel prizes were done in a collaborative way and you know those culturally feminine traits? playing well with others. it may be a good thing and good science. all of a sudden what we start to see is that science itself, epistemological he is being culturally feminized. i don't want to overstate back. what we see in chapter 6 is that the women, i actually show a generational perspective. i look at women who come to professional age right before, so it is right on the eve of the second wave of feminism and then i talk about women who start to get a feminist consciousness with the rise of radical feminism. i talk about rosalyn yalow. she comes right before the feminist german than i talk about people like evelyn fox keller who gets completely politicized and she is really

radicalize. she starts to have a whole different idea about what are identity is as a scientist. then i talk about after the feminist term. what we find is these women are not only starting to see themselves differently but they are starting to accept that maybe they are bringing different methodologies, different perspectives, bringing different questions to science. as this is all happening in the 1960s going into them 1970s, you see this with the women i talk about articulately barbara mcclintock. the one thing that barbara mcclintock science was that was the big no no was intuitive. what we start to see years that maybe some people are looking at this saying you know, maybe that is not a bad thing to bring to science. so that is chapter 6. chapter 7. this is the last chapter. my husband tells me this is the most interesting chapter. i don't know. these are women-- there are

three women in this chapter and this is the chapter basically, there is a paleontologist and i'm sure you guys know who he is. he has these protéges. they are women climatologists and when they started in the field of climatology in the 1960s it was largely male. but then in the 1960s, 70s, 80s and '90s it becomes completely feminized. by 2000 there are 78% of climatology going to women. so i talk about these women who are fascinating, fascinating people in their own right at what is so interesting about this chapter is it is the last chapter in the book and i write it first. completely the first thing that came to my mind and the reason why is because the one question that was in my mind first, when i first decided i was going to write this book, these women are very thoughtful about responses to this question. i don't think they knew they were thoughtful but you can't

look at their science in the way they lived their lives and think that they weren't. this is the question. is there such a thing as a feminine or feminist science? and if there is, do we want to package it this way for women in the 21st century? this was the question that was always in my mind when i was writing this book. and i have got to tell you you cannot look at these women and not start to think about responses to these questions. so i write about them last. this sort of makes the whole thing backwards but i have to tell you the whole process was. i was having a glass of wine with carol bergen and carol bergen was also writing this whole awesome book about women in-- lives. there are three different autobiographies. he would talk about our process. she was telling me that she came across these women because she found this little nugget of something in each of these women

that was absolutely fascinating. didn't know what she wanted to do with it yet but she knew these were the women she was going to write about. as she got to know these women that are in or intimately, suddenly she starting to see this larger metanarrative. she wasn't sure at first, do i want to tell a story of tragedy? she didn't even know yet whether she got to know these women, the packaging of the life stories started to come into view. and she was telling me this. and you know i have got to say that that sounded reasonable to me. i think that is probably how most biographers operate but yet for me the process was exact levy opposite. i completely knew the metanarrative. from day one i knew the larger overarching story. i was going to look at women at this moment of professionalization and this moment when science gets very masculine and mid century and all these epistemological changes in the second wave of feminism and see where women

fell in that. eichmann had this idea in my mind if all the different gender dynamics i wanted to show. i knew i wanted to talk about nepotism policies and what this they stood for married women to try to do science in the 20th century. i knew i wanted to talk about the phenomenon of biological clocks in science. very very different than say a field like mind. in history, the whole idea is to get better and better and wiser with age. you are supposed to get better and better and better like a fine wine, presumably. but of course presumably in physics, very different. there is this whole idea you, page when you are in your 20s and 30s. that is when you do your best work. everything is done by the-- time you are 40. this is where you get your egg brain child of an idea. what happens in the 20s and 30s and then you win the nobel third-- 20 years later. of course is completely happens

to coincide with women's biological clocks. this is where the sabotage begins for women in physics. so i wanted to talk about that dynamic. i think the most important dynamic i wanted to talk about was the fact that science is so totally social. all these people break down, the 1940s and 50s they talk about science as a solitary thing. you do not get what is going on with women if you do not see science as social. i wanted to find people that would but literally tell the story of not just the sociology of science but you get to see literally the geography of the lab, the social politics of the web. this is why he wrote the story about roslyn franklin. you get to see science as social this is why people are usurping her data. so that is the story i have to tell. i knew the dynamics i wanted to talk about, and knew the metanarrative. didn't know the people. so i have to go back and find

the women that helped me tell the story in the most compelling way. totally backwards. and i don't say this because i am not recommending it. i am just telling you this is exactly what happened. that is pretty much the process. i guess if i could just tell you what i want you to leave with, i want you to understand that this book is about the gendering of science but it is told through women who were fascinating in their own rights. hopefully not to tell a sob story. i think a lot of people say, there are so many ways you can describe how to screw a woman. yes you have to tell that part of the story but ultimately i want people to be mindful about the way that culture is gendered and how we can reconceptualize this for the 21st century. anyone have any questions? [applause] thank you.

>> we want to tell you the thank you for your fantastic presentation and i know you would like to answer questions that we would appreciate if questioners could come to the microphone for better audio quality. i will start by asking if you send a copy of the book to lawrence summers? [laughter] >> i have not personally, no. i don't know about the press. >> hi, how are you? >> i am great. i am very happy to be here. i am actually one of those theoretical nuclear physicists in a very masculine aided world. >> well. >> i've been working in many groups where i was really the only one. >> you know the plight. >> and when you mentioned the drawing of the figures, i think that is still valid. i get that a lot. you don't look like a theoretical nuclear physicists. i am asking like, how does a theoretical nuclear woman

physicists expect to be look like? >> those presumptions are benign. >> they do impact your real-life >> they do and i'm trying actually to make a point in my life of not falling into that trap and get out of it and just be myself and brace myself the way i am, and just try to be a role model, because unfortunately i don't have many role models. >> this is the hard thing. >> there a physicists who are higher in positions. >> mentoring, mentoring mentoring and if you don't have the mentors, this is the problem in the radical physicists. we should everyone no, this is what a physicists looks like. [laughter] i am so glad that you came up to say that. >> i do have a question but i do want to say i am very much looking forward to reading your book because i think it is going to bring a totally fresh air,

because you are not a scientist, and you are not inside of the same problems that we can talk about and and we can feel victimized and feel that it is unfair, but i think i am really looking forward to it so i think it is going to be fresh air and inspiring for me. might westin is, that you mentioned it several times that you are focusing on americans ways, and do you find that elsewhere let's say in european countries this issue would be different, like if polish news would write about madame curie differently or all the issues would be different? >> it is a good question i have got to say it is a little bit out of my relevant-- that i can tell you there are different cultures particularly in italy. a very different scientific

culture for women. i think i was telling you laureate that this wonderful prizewinner, she actually wins the nobel prize for the work she did with the united states at washington university but even after she won the nobel she went back to italy because it is just a little bit or amenable. it is different but that said, many of the women in this book, sort of speaking historically, actually they come to the united states because they are having such a hard time in europe. [inaudible] speier now. maria kephart mayor could not find a job to save her life, came here and didn't get paid for the first 25 years she worked as a physicists. she followed her husband here from prague. a lot of people come from europe but that's said there is little pockets of very very amenable spaces and there are certainly institutes in europe that are very amenable to women. sure, yeah.

>> i just want to say thank you for a wonderful presentation. i am the science director at the manhattan local high school here in new york city and they also teach a research program. so for the high school students i like to inform you that more than half of my class is actually comprised of female students of all races, but the question i have for you is, for the students i work with oftentimes i find that when you work with younger students, they don't usually have the concept that science is only meant for one gender or the other, however what i find myself combating are the parents because i have a number of cases where the female students and often time it is-- i have never in countered male students having this kind of issue. when the female students parents are demanding and questioning why is my daughter spending so much time in your class and in your laboratory, whereas the male students i have never encountered this kind of question.

instead, they ask a different question. that is i don't want my son to study psychology because it is not hard science. i was wondering if you could provide any type of insight or it dies when i try to handle some of these cases to try to convince them that is absolutely crucial to help your child realized their potential no matter what gender they are or no matter what subject they are pursuing? >> the reason you see it in the parent is because they have had it already in these kids when they are younger-- it is funny because we see this. test scores in math for girls and boys fourth grade, fifth grade, girls are actually doing a bit better at that stage and then by middle school it goes like this in high school and college-- the pipeline starts to drift madly after that. i don't know if i have great advice but one of the things i can tell you with some of the women in this book, they did things that little boys are supposed to do. they played with gadgets. they did all these things.

they want the ones that were doing the tea party. they were putting things together and taking them apart, that sort of thing. the ones whose parents let them do its-- i will give you an example. barbara mcclintock wants one of those. there is no doubt be fallen to these expectations of what we think girls and boys are supposed to do and it is funny because i have a daughter who i think is very science minded. i have teachers that call me and think that some of the stuff she does is a little inappropriate. so i know this still. i still get this. she does the stuff that the boys in the quest do and they are not getting phonecalls. so there is no doubt that you are sort of fighting a battle here but remind them that so many of these women who did do very well in science were the ones that did this antisocial behavior and they were sort of to themselves. all of these things that girls are not supposed to want to do, these are also very successful scientist. it takes all types to make the world go around and it they just

need to be a little more accepting of it. absolutely, yeah. >> hi, i am a physicist here. >> another one. they come out of the woodwork. >> it was because of my mother's pressure actually. this is a perfect day. i accidentally happened to be here and i don't come here that much. i work in my office. >> you are hunkered down like you are supposed to be. >> my question is-- i have millions of questions of course there were all the years as an almost single woman in night classes in everything, that i just wanted to see if you could see any differences in the different science branches like solution science and natural science. it seems to me very different but it is much more normal if you are a social scientist if you are a woman and much more

abnormal if you were a woman in natural science, especially physics. >> there is no doubt that one of the reasons i talk about so many women is because i want you to see the variation in different disciplines. not just in numbers but in the culture as well. are you talking about differences in numbers or are you talk about some cultures being more amenable? absolutely. there has been a ton of research done about climatology and what it is that makes more women come to climatology. a lot of it has to do with the fact that you can use climatological arguments to make feminist arguments. a lot of women are drawn into the study of aids so they can say things about human nature. so this is actually drawing a lot of women in but the other thing to his there was already this strong tradition of women working in the field so women felt very comfortable entering that space because they had seen it done before. physics, very different story. very different story. one of the women i write about, evelyn fox keller is a grad

student at harvard in the 1950s. she leaves physics and goes into biologically-- biology for that reason. >> i did not stop but i continued in physics. i was thinking of changing. >> i can understand it. it is still their. >> i like physics, but i was feeling i am so at normal. i want to be a normal person. i don't want to get these weird questions like, why are you in physics? i don't want to see that change of pace when i say i am a physicist. everybody looks at me like i am not a normal person or something. >> do you guys see what i'm saying? the problem is alive and well. it is funny if you look at the statistics the numbers look great. there are tons of women entering science. there is always been biology but the numbers look great even in physics. mit there are lots of women but

the numbers don't tell the cultural story and that is why you feel the way you feel. this is a cultural problem. >> i don't think any man our question in a quantum physics club, like why are you here? i mean, amen, they never hear such a question. i was like, i might marry in the future. i'm just here to be a physicist's. >> you have to question her normality. this is still a problem and i'm glad you spoke up because i think some people think this is some old historical problem because this is the history book and i feel like this is a resident issue. it is hard because i am trying to commentary this issue to history but it is alive and well so i'm very glad that you are living, i am sorry you were weren't living embodiment. [laughter] >> actually, my friend, lots of examples you can find like i