Historical Perspectives On Contemporary Issues

In 1846, the educator Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps observed, “Females, in particular, are not expected to enter into the recesses of the temple of science.” As Phelps explained, “It is but of late that they have been encouraged to approach even its portals, and to venture a glance upon the mysteries therein.”i Although most education majors in my U.S. history classes are familiar with the early nineteenth-century educational reformer Horace Mann, few have heard of Phelps. Many students would be surprised by Dr. Kim Tolley’s research documenting the rise of “female academies” in the early nineteenth century, which provided girls with access to subjects such as botany, astronomy, physics, and chemistry. In their compelling lectures, Dr. Tolley and Dr. Natalie S. King interrogate a question that educators have been asking since at least the 1960s: “Why are there so few women in science, technology engineering, and mathematics?” Tolley and King highlight factors that hinder girls’ achievement in the sciences, including negative race and gender stereotyping, lack of opportunities for participation and employment, and lack of access to STEM subjects. Factors that facilitate young women’s participation in STEM include positive role modeling, offering specific career paths in the sciences, and providing institutional and community-based support for science education. King emphasizes the importance of helping girls to envision themselves as scientists and to maintain their hopes and dreams despite facing gendered and racialized barriers. Tolley and King’s findings support scholars’ assertions of the importance of historical role models for engaging girls in STEM. However, this begs an additional question for historians of science and medicine: “Why are there so few historical role models of women in STEM fields?”ii

 
As the scholar Patricia Fara contends, “Women have not been written out of the history of science: they have never been written in.” Fortunately, scholarship by Tolley, Jessica Linker, Susan Scott Parrish, Londa Schiebinger, and others have helped to fill the gaps in the historical record.iii Tolley’s research demonstrates that girls’ engagement in scientific education in the United States was an uneven process, beginning with significant access in the period from 1784-1850, followed by a restrictive backlash though the 1950s, and subsequent support of STEM education and careers that flowed from the 1960s Feminist Movement. Tolley’s work in the history of education makes it clear that the marginalization of women in the sciences was not inevitable. Indeed, women’s lack of confidence in the study of STEM subjects was culturally constructed, rather than inherent. Tolley notes that textbooks written by Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps and other early nineteenth-century women educators included images of girls performing hands-on experiments, which allowed young women to imagine themselves as scientists and innovators. However, these science texts privileged white middle class girls and marginalized girls of color. In her research, Tolley discovered that the Cherokee Nation schools and the Hampton Institute, which educated African American youth, included science curricula for girls in the mid-nineteenth century. Women such as the educator Charlotte Forten Grimké and the physician Eliza Ann Grier exemplify nineteenth-century African American women who surmounted barriers to higher education and medical school. Additional research and publications are needed to write women back into the history of STEM so that educators have ample resources for teaching the deep history of women in science, technology, engineering, math, and medicine. 
 
Dr. Natalie King’s presentation also underscores the importance of both historical role models and contemporaneous mentors, particularly for women of color. Her exciting educational strategies engage girls with hands-on learning that facilitates their critical thinking and helps them to pursue community activism. King showcases a flexible science curriculum that can be deployed in formal educational settings, community and faith-based facilities, and home-based learning. I found it inspiring that King highlighted Dasha and Miala, students from Atlanta’s Coretta Scott King Academy, who presented themselves confidently as role models for their peers and for girls in their communities. Several studies have shown that girls whose peer groups promote their interest in science are more likely to pursue STEM classes and careers.iv Dasha and Miala might find additional encouragement from nineteenth-century role models such as Charlotte Forten Grimké and her aunt, Margaretta Forten, who recognized their Philadelphia churches and communities as sites of education, health reform, abolitionist agitation, and civil rights activism. Their friend and colleague, Sarah Mapps Douglass, who founded a school for African American girls, attended Philadelphia’s Women’s Medical College and taught her students anatomy, physiology, and personal health. Both King and Tolley’s work point to the importance of educating our young educators to include the history of women in STEM as part of science and humanities curricula.
 
A research study by Dr. Heidi Reeder and her colleagues at Boise State University confirmed the need to include women’s historical engagement in the sciences at all educational levels. The study provided a questionnaire to undergraduate students at three universities. When male and female students were asked to write down “as many famous or historically important scientists, inventors, or engineers they could think of,” over 95% of names listed were men. When asked to name important women in STEM, respondents named on average less than one woman. In addition, some of the women cited, such as Rosa Parks and Hillary Clinton, were not scientists. The top men’s names were Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Isaac Newton, while the few women’s names included Marie Curie, Amelia Earhart, and Florence Nightingale. Reeder was surprised that after over half a century of historical research in women’s and gender history, college students lacked information on women in the sciences. In another study of one hundred and fifty secondary school physics teachers, the educators could name only one woman in STEM. Academic and public historians have opportunities to reach out to K-12 educators to work together to formulate engaging curricula on the history of women in science. As Reeder notes, “The transformative nature of [historical] narrative may be particularly powerful, not only in relaying women’s technological advancements, but also in helping people remember and relate to individuals’ lives and processes of discovery.”v Telling stories that enliven the struggles and successes of women of the past provide students with opportunities to imagine themselves as scientists and to formulate strategies to navigate contemporary barriers in STEM.
 
My own research pushes the narrative of women’s engagement in medicine and science even further back in time to reveal additional historical role models. Apart from a few foundational studies, women’s contributions to the healthcare labor force in early America are relatively invisible and their roles, practices, and authority remain understudied. In my forthcoming book, I construct case studies from the greater Philadelphia area to demonstrate that Euro-American, Native American, and African American women continued to play a central role in healthcare from the late seventeenth century to well into the nineteenth century. Doctresses, herbalists, and apothecaries participated actively in an unregulated consumer healthcare marketplace and created an arena where women could act with authority while resisting attempts at marginalization. However, recovering the lives and practices of women of this earlier period is challenging, because documentation is scarce. The Philadelphia merchant and healer, Elizabeth Coates Paschall, exemplifies an elite Euro-American woman whose mid-eighteenth-century healthcare practice was well respected by patients and physicians. Although none of her letters or diaries are extant, Paschall’s notations in her medical recipe book demonstrate that she was deeply engaged in Enlightenment experimental science. Paschall participated in transatlantic networks of botanical experts and she recorded chemical remedies from her brothers-in-law who were alchemical doctors. She checked out medical and scientific books from the Library Company of Philadelphia to inform the chemical, physiological, and anatomic basis for her treatments. Within her medical and scientific networks, Paschall shared medicines that were her “own invention,” and she positioned herself as a legitimate producer of medical knowledge. Like many colonists, Paschall also valued the expert knowledge of American Indian and African American healers. 
 
The eighteenth-century history of science often privileges the contributions of elite white males who were members or correspondents of males-only organizations such as London’s Royal Society. However, these scientists or “natural philosophers” eagerly sought information about medicinal herbs and pharmaceuticals from Native American and African American healing experts. Women of color were also respected medical practitioners in their own communities. If we view the production of scientific knowledge from a grassroots perspective rather than from the “top-down,” we widen the number of participants in the enterprise of science. Native American women healers were recognized experts at healing wounds, fractures, and infections. The Lenape healer Hannah Freeman and the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) adept Molly Brant (also called Degonwadonti) both practiced as healers for over a half a century, treating colonists as well as people in their own communities. African American women brought unique medical knowledge with them during the brutal forced migrations of slavery. Sufferers valued their abilities to cure snakebite, poisoning, and smallpox. Anna Dalemoa Bellamy exemplifies a late-eighteenth century Philadelphia healing adept. According to one Philadelphian, Bellamy was known as “a woman of education—and called by some the black doctor.” Bellamy was skilled at bone setting, [therapeutic] bleeding, tooth drawing, and curing wounds.”vi The medical and scientific expertise of women of color have deep cultural roots. Girls pursuing medicine and science can place themselves within this long historical narrative. 
 
The recent movie, Hidden Figures, highlights the critical contributions of the black mathematicians Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, who worked at NASA during the Space Race of the 1960s. The film has generated the “Hidden Figures Effect” by revealing the importance of female role models in inspiring young women to enter STEM fields.vii Educators and historians can capitalize on this momentum to foreground the histories of women in science, technology, engineering, math, and healthcare at all educational levels. 
 

i Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps quoted in Kim Tolley, The Science Education of Girls: A Historical Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2003), 1. 

ii Alice S. Rossi, “Women in Science: Why So Few,” Science 148, no. 3674 (1965): 1196-1202; Catherine Hill, et al, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (Washington, D.C.: AAUW, 2010); Eileen Pollack, “Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?” New York Times, October 3, 2013.

iiiPatricia Fara, Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science, and Power in the Enlightenment (London: Pimlico, 2004), 24; Jessica C. Linker, “The Fruits of Their Labor: Women’s Scientific Practice in Early America, 1750-1860,” (PhD diss., University of Connecticut, 2017); Susan Scott Parrish, American Curiosity: Cultures of Natural History in the Colonial British Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Schiebinger, Secret Cures of Slaves: People, Plants, and Medicine in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). 

iv Catherine Riegle-Crumb, George Farkas, and Chandra Muller, “The Role of Gender and Friendship in Advanced Course Taking,” Sociology of Education 79, no. 3 (2006): 206-228; Jayne Stake and Shannon Nickens, “Adolescent Girls’ and Boys’ Science Peer Relationships and Perceptions of the Possible Self as Scientist,” Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 52, no. 1 (2005): 1-11; James Daniel Lee, “More Than Ability: Gender and Personal Relationships Influence Science and Technology Involvement,” Sociology of Education 75, no. 4 (2002): 349-374.

v Heidi Reeder, Patricia A. Pyke, Lynn Lubamersky, and Seung Youn Chyung, “Perceptions about Women in Science and Engineering History,” Proceedings of the 2012 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference (2012). http://www.asee.org/public/conferences/8/papers/3444/view.

vi Ann Parrish, Visitations of the Sick, 1796, Parrish Collection, box 5, bound volumes, #1653, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 

vii Jacqui Frost, “The Role of Female Role Models,” The Society Pages (February 22, 2017), https://thesocietypages.org/trot/2017/02/22/the-role-of-female-role-models/