The women fellows’ Jubilee

Abstract

We celebrate 50 years of women Fellows of the Royal Society of London in 1995, at a time when the position and progress of women in science are under active discussion. Last year the Office of Science and Technology published the report ‘The Rising Tide’ which discusses the low survival rate of women in science and engineering into positions of seniority and influence. A Hansard Society Commission report, ‘Women at the Top’, has catalogued the dearth of women in the upper reaches of public life: in Parliament, government and the judiciary, in corporate management, and in the universities, the media and the trade unions. There was no formal exclusion nor indeed any mention of women in the original charters and statutes of the Royal Society. One woman appears in the early histories of the Society, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, who paid a visit to the Society in 1667 at her own request. Thomas Birch describes the experiments that Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke performed for her, and Samuel Pepys records that she was ‘full of admiration’ ( Diary , 30 May 1667). She was a prodigious writer, the first Englishwoman to encompass natural philosophy as well as drama, stories, biography, essays, orations and poetry. She was greatly interested in science, which she picked up from her husband William Cavendish, whose tutor was Thomas Hobbes, from her brother-in-law, Charles Cavendish, and from her brother John Lucas, who was an original Fellow of the Society. She was indignant that her own education was so poor.