Negotiating in/visibility : women, science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century / [edited by] Amelia Bonea and Irina Nastasa-Matei.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Bonea, Amelia, author.
• Nastasă-Matei, Irina, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Women in science--History--20th century.
• Women in engineering--History--20th century.
• Women in medicine--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource : digital file(s)

Other Title:

Negotiating invisibility

Place of Publication:

Manchester, UK : Manchester University Press, 2025.

Language Note:

In English.

System Details:

data file

Biography/History:

• Amelia Bonea is Lecturer in Global History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester.
• Irina Nastasa-Matei is Lecturer in the Department of Political Science, University of Bucharest.

Summary:

This volume explores, from global, multilingual and intersectional perspectives, the experiences of women in science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century. Some, like the American evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, were fairly visible actors in the academic and public arenas of professional science. Others, like the doctors working in secondary schools in interwar Romania or those who struggled to alleviate 'women's illnesses' in famine-stricken rural areas during China's Great Leap Forward, have been largely invisible - as medical practitioners, creators of knowledge, educators and subjects of historical inquiry. The volume investigates the nature and extent of women's in/visibility in science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century, seeking to document the factors that underpinned it and understand how women navigated their circumstances. When and why did women become invisible? When and how did they seek visibility? Was invisibility always a form of discrimination, exclusion and misrecognition or could it also become a strategy of resistance and survival? Drawing on hitherto-little-explored archives in Asia, Europe and North America, the contributors examine the in/visibility of women across multiple sites of medical practice, science-making, pedagogy and communication, such as the laboratory, the university, the clinic, the hospital, the home, the school and the media. They show that invisibility was the outcome of power asymmetries based on intersecting factors like gender, race, ethnicity, class, caste and age, and that women were not only present in science, engineering and medicine, but also exercised considerable agency in trying to negotiate institutional and intellectual hierarchies.

Contents:

• Foreword / Mariko Ogawa
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction : in/visible women, science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century / Amelia Bonea and Irina Nastasa-Matei
• I. Laboratory cultures : visible scientific rebels, invisible innovators
• 1. Breaking down the barriers at Cambridge in the 1930s : Reinet Maasdorp's experience at Rutherford's Cavendish Laboratory / Kathryn Keeble
• 2. 'Your research is crap, do not bother to apply again' : female evolutionary biology theorists as scientific rebels and oppositional scientists / Nuala Caomhánach
• 3. Women's invisibility in public memory of the discovery of RNA splicing : converging biases of gender, race and mentorship / Pnina Geraldine Abir-Am
• II. In/visibilities across borders : scientific collaborations and contestations
• 4. Inventing a career across borders in the early 1930s : the case of cytogeneticists Eileen W. Erlanson and E. K. Janaki Ammal / Savithri Preetha Nair
• 5. Vlasta Kálalová Di-Lotti in Iraq : medical practice and scientific research / Adéla Junová Macková
• 6. Early years of the International Conference of Women Engineers and Scientists : shaping transnational collaboration in the Cold War era, 1964-1975 / Emily Rees Koerner and Graeme Gooday
• III. In/visibilities in medicine and care : treating, teaching, reforming
• 7. 'A model of devotion to the school' : female doctors in secondary schools in interwar Romania / Camelia Zavarache
• 8. Women and the practice of Western medicine in late Republican China : evidence from Sichuan / Jean Corbi
• 9. Agency and coercion : fighting 'women's illnesses' with grassroots science and medicine during the Great Famine in China, 1958-1962 / Kathryn Edgerton-Tarpley
• IV. Intimate knowledge and in/visible domesticities : science, medicine and the home
• 10. The curious case of Yashoda Devi, a woman Ayurvedic practitioner in colonial India / Saurav Kumar Rai
• 11. Lady Irwin College : domestic science post-secondary education for three women graduates in India / Anne Hardgrove
• 12. Clara Park : a mother's intimate knowledge and child science / Marga Vicedo
• V. Towards visible change? : publics, pedagogies and politics of science
• 13. The valuable 's' : publics and counterpublics of abortion and contraception in late twentieth-century Greece / Evangelia Chordaki
• 14. The power of autobiography : documenting women scientists through a lecture series at the University of Illinois / Bethany G. Anderson and Kristen Allen Wilson
• 15. How to do science as a woman and laugh? : insights and lessons from Hungary / Andrea Peto.

Notes:

• This work is licensed under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND) license.
• Description based on publisher-supplied metadata; resource not viewed.

ISBN:

• 1-5261-7839-7
• 1-5261-7837-0

Access Restriction:

Open Access Unrestricted online access