Margaret W. Rossiter

Women's Work in Science, 1880-1910

T HE PRACTICE OF SCIENCE, it has often been asserted, was always open to both sexes-or, to use sociological terms, was universalistic or sex-blindbut in fact separate labor markets have long existed for men and women in the sciences. Such markets seem to have emerged in the United States in the 1880s and 1890s, when women first began to seek scientific employment in significant numbers, and they were firmly established in several fields by 1910.2 Although the practice of sex segregation was usually justified with the essentially conservative rhetoric that women had special skills or unique talents for certain fields or kinds of work, the phenomenon seems to have been basically an economic one, originating in and sustained by three forces: the rise of a supply of women seeking employment in science, including the first female college graduates; strong resistance to their entering traditional kinds of scientific employment, for example, university teaching or government employment; and the changing structure of scientific work in the 1880s and after, which provided new roles and fields for these entering women. As a result, women were incorporated into the world of scientific employment but segregated within it, as the prevailing stereotypes of appropriate sexual roles interacted with expanding scientific research work and changing research strategies between 1880 and 1910. When the movement to give women a higher education had begun to take hold in the United States in the 1870s and 1880s, little thought had been given to the eventual careers that such graduates might take up. Because of the prevailing notion of separate spheres for the two sexes, most women were assumed to be seeking personal fulfillment and to be planning to become better wives and mothers. Advocates of their studying science saw it as offering a rigorous and satisfying intellectual experience to women who led essentially aimless lives. Even such accomplished scientists as entomologist Mary Murtfeldt of St. Louis, Missouri, astronomer Maria Mitchell of Vassar College, ornithologist Graceanna Lewis of Philadelphia, and physicist Edward C. Pickering of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology expected that the women would participate in science only as amateurs. There were still so few women scientists