Marelene Rayner-Canham and Geoff Rayner-Canham, Chemistry was their life: Pioneering British women chemists, 1880–1949

Abstract

The incentive for writing this book was another book published by the Chemical Society about 60 years ago, titled British Chemists [1] that completely ignored women—as if there had not been any women among the chemists of earlier generations. The authors felt that the early women chemists in Britain, quite a few of them working already as early as the late 19th century, deserve credit. The book wholly justifies this. As the Introduction tells us, these women chemists rarely received recognition; most of them were unmarried and could never play a leading role in the profession. But they were most enthusiastic about and dedicated to chemistry—this is what must have given them the strength to fight all barriers. The first of these barriers was getting a secondary education (Chapter 1, ‘‘Setting the Scene’’) and then being accepted to a university. In secondary schools— as the Rayner-Canhams argue—throughout the early 20th century, there was ambivalence about why girls need an academic education at all. It was assumed that most girls would become wives and mothers and only a small minority would be interested in pursuing a career. Who would then be the curriculum aimed at? This reminds us of the American movie, Mona Lisa Smile, set in the 1950s in a rich private New England liberal arts college for women, where even some of the most intelligent and interested girls thought that their role in life was to be a good housewife and mother—and only that. If this was still the attitude in the United States in the 1950s, certainly it was even more so in the late 19th and early 20th century probably everywhere. It is quite astounding to read how relatively early, already in the late 19th century, the demand for university education appeared among women. The authors ascribe this to several factors. In the second half of the 19th century, several women’s organizations were established that stood up for higher education for middle-class women. In fact, middle-class women started to look much farther than ever before when planning their future. Several magazines supported this attitude. One example from an article in 1914 [2]: ‘‘Woman is taking to herself a new significance. She is discovering that she, as well as man, has another M. Hargittai (&) Materials Structure and Modeling Research Group of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Department of Inorganic and Analytical Chemistry, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, P.O. Box 91, 1521 Budapest, Hungary e-mail: hargittaim@mail.bme.hu