Encountering the Weirdness of the Past: Writing Women’s History of Science @Green Library

In August, a new exhibit sponsored by Stanford’s Special Collections opened at Green Library’s Munger rotunda, Embodied Knowledge: Women and Science before Silicon Valley. A companion exhibition, Early Stanford Women in STEM, fills a case near the first-floor West entrance through December. From its inception in 1891, Stanford has educated and encouraged women of science, but elsewhere and for much of human history, women were largely denied access to institutions of research and learning, and had to improvise their own opportunities. These new exhibits explore the long history of women pursuing scientific, medical, and technical knowledge, showcasing Stanford Library’s considerable holdings on this subject. Our colleague, PWR lecturer Dr. Meg Formato, played a pivotal role in making these exhibits happen, curating artifacts, arranging exhibit cases, mentoring aspiring historians, and writing catalog chapters.

The exhibit cases give you terrific access to treasures from special collections: intriguing prints, photographs, manuscripts, and books. In addition, biographical and interpretive notes provide pithy introductions to the periods and controversies represented. Quickly I learned about botanists, midwives, and chemists who often published their scientific knowledge under cover of feminine gender-appropriate genres such as the conduct book. Take, for example, Priscilla Wakefield’s Mental Improvement: or the Beauties and Wonders of Nature and Art. In a Series of Instructive Conversations published in London in 1799. There are also examples of women directly engaging their fellow academics, for example, Maria Gaetana Agnesi’s 1748 book-length presentation of the then new techniques of infinitesimal calculus made when she was a member of the Bologna Academy of Sciences. These phenomena were not confined to Europe. In a gorgeous illustrated account of co-educational learning in a 16th-century Indian madrasa, we can see that the women seem much more engaged than their male peers. Medicine in the Arab world advanced dramatically in this period and the exhibit provides indirect evidence of women’s contributions to midwifery specifically. Gynecologic and obstetric knowledge also advanced in East Asia in a number of eras thanks to the work of female practitioners and writers as a case dedicated to Japan makes visible. 

When I asked Meg why this kind of exhibit matters, she observed that generally when people think about women in science, they think of one or two remarkable women such as Marie Curie. But these exhibits bring to life some of the unexpected ways less famous women have cultivated and shared scientific knowledge, “in the home, in the convent, through collecting, through teaching, through administrative work,” as Meg put it. She continues, “I like the way the exhibit challenges the myth of solitary genius and showcases all this remarkably inventive scientific work in unexpected places. … [H]istory is so much stranger and more complicated than we usually encounter it in books, scholarly articles or documentaries. … The weirdness of the past really comes out in artifacts and objects that were made and used by real people.” Meg pointed to several favorite artifacts, including Elizabeth Carter’s 1739 translation from the Italian of Signor Algarotti’s Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explained for the Use of the Ladies, in Six Dialogues. Light and Colours. (Carter was a key figure in my dissertation so I was especially delighted to see her work on display!). Meg’s other favorite artifacts include photographs of a botany club at Stanford in the 1890s and a Stanford transcript on an index card filled out in a student’s own hand. As she points out, the details in these sources raise great questions. Meg asks, “Where are these young botanists? What are they collecting? What was the role of clubs in the scientific life of Stanford students? Why would you need a book of physics just for ladies? How popular were these? Why? Wait… Stanford students recorded their own grades? Why? When did that change? Why was everything credit no credit? Why did this scientist start by taking art? …” The making of knowledge in the past inspires our own inquiries.

Meg’s involvement with the exhibits came about due to a teaching collaboration. Meg and Professor of History Paula Findlen taught together in Education as Self Fashioning. Paula, who works closely with Special Collections for her research and teaching about the pre-modern period, had long envisioned an exhibition in Green Library highlighting the holdings related to women in science in Stanford’s special collections. In the fall of 2021, Paula approached Meg about curating and writing on the modern sources, Meg’s period expertise in the history of science. Meg’s training is in the history of physics, and Stanford’s history in the 1890s and early 20th century is really about the natural sciences, what we’d now call biology, geology, and earth systems. So she says she “was a little out of my element.” But her love for archival work and understanding the institution where she teaches spurred her on. 

Given our teaching loads, it can be hard to find the time to contribute meaningfully to such projects, but as Meg says, she’s “a big believer that being active researchers, writers and learners, makes us more skillful and empathetic teachers in PWR.” Indeed, she finds she can “pull new and active examples from my own work while teaching the research process.” Moreover, students have been interested in researching Stanford’s own history in recent years, especially eugenics at Stanford, and her work on this project improved her ability to mentor those projects.

A central theme in Meg’s research is thinking through how writing and administrative practices–labor usually done by women in the modern period–play a constitutive role in the creation of scientific knowledge. This is an important idea for understanding women’s contributions to science at Stanford. Faculty roles for women were quite unusual at Stanford in the first 50 years, but women curators, collectors, assistants, department administrators and secretaries did an enormous amount of knowledge making and department building in the sciences, work that Meg endeavored to highlight in the chapter she contributed to the exhibit catalog, “Beyond Invisible Technicians: Women and Science at Stanford, 1890-1940.” For example, faculty said of Margaret Storey, a long-time assistant and librarian with the Zoological Collection, that although she published comparatively little, “few people have ever done so much to further ichthyology, herpetology and zoology.” It’s only by looking at the artifacts and correspondence in special collections that we can see how Storey built knowledge in ways that would otherwise remain invisible to us, Meg maintains.

A team of fourteen main contributors worked with nine curators across the libraries to develop the themes, and main essays on the exhibition. Paula and Meg were able to hire a wonderful Notation in Science Communication student, Mia Cano, to do original research on the number of students majoring in what we would now call STEM fields during Stanford’s early years. Mia contributed an appendix to the catalog, which will appear in January. Many other students had roles writing individual object labels for the exhibit. Meg’s favorite collaboration was laying out the exhibit cases with Library Manager Deardra Fuzzel, who designed the exhibitions at Green. Deardra’s job mixes art with science–knowing, for example, how light in different parts of the library affects different rare artifacts–and it was “incredibly fun” to lay out the cases with her to tell the stories Meg and Paula wanted to tell in the exhibit. 

Stanford’s amazing library collections are available to all Stanford affiliates. As Meg lamented, “few people really get into the collections to see for themselves what they notice and what puzzles them. I think the exhibitions are a way of inspiring that work and sharing the collections with a wider group of library patrons.”