Maria Rentetzi

Gender, politics, and radioactivity research in interwar Vienna: the case of the Institute for Radium Research

This essay explores the significance of political and ideological context as well as experimental culture for the participation of women in radioactivity research. It argues that the politics of Red Vienna and the culture of radioactivity research specific to the Viennese setting encouraged exceptional gender politics within the Institute for Radium Research in the interwar years. The essay further attempts to provide an alternative approach to narratives that concentrate on personal dispositions and stereotypical images of women in science to explain the disproportionately large number of women in radioactivity research. Instead, the emphasis here is on the institutional context in which women involved themselves in radioactivity in interwar Vienna. This approach places greater importance on contingencies of time and place and highlights the significance of the cultural and political context in a historical study while at the same time shedding light on the interrelation between scientific practices and gender.

Designing (for) a new scientific discipline: the location and architecture of the Institut für Radiumforschung in early twentieth-century Vienna

This essay explores how Viennese physicists who specialized in radioactivity research embodied visions of their new discipline in material terms, through the architectural design and the urban location of their institute. These visions concerned not only the experimental culture of radioactivity, or the interdisciplinarity of the field, but also the gendered experiences of those working in the institutes laboratories, many of who were women. In designing the Institute for Radium Research at the end of the 1910s – the first such specialized institute in Europe – physicists and architects were also designing the new discipline in a strong sense. In the architectural form of the building one can trace the aesthetics of the new discipline, the scientific exchanges of its personnel and the image of a newly formed community in which women were more than welcomed.

FROM CAMBRIDGE TO VIENNA: THE SCINTILLATION COUNTER IN FEMALE HANDS

SUMMARY Until recently scientific instruments were usually considered as having merely an antiquarian interest for the historian of science. In the recent historiography of science, instruments have come to be recognized as part of the material culture of the laboratory. They are never just about nuts and bolts, for instruments reflect gender hierarchies and politics within laboratories and the possibility of gaining epistemic control over the performed experiments. In this essay I discuss the use of the scintillation counter in two different experimental cultures that of Cambridge and Vienna in the 1920s, focusing especially on the role of women in handling and transforming the instrument in the Viennese setting.