A Lab of One's Own: Science and Suffrage in the First World War

by Patricia Fara

Overview

2018 marked a double centenary: peace was declared in war-wracked Europe, and women won the vote after decades of struggle. A Lab of One's Own commemorates both anniversaries by revealing the untold lives of female scientists, doctors, and engineers who undertook endeavours normally reserved for men. It tells fascinating and extraordinary stories featuring initiative, determination, and isolation, set against a backdrop of war, prejudice, and disease.
Patricia Fara investigates the enterprising careers of these pioneering women and their impact on science, medicine, and the First World War.

Suffrage campaigners aligned themselves with scientific and technological progress. Defying protests about their intellectual inferiority and child-bearing responsibilities, during the War they won support by mobilizing women to enter conventionally male domains. A Lab of One's Own focuses on the female experts who carried out vital research. They had already shown exceptional resilience by challenging accepted norms to pursue their careers, now they played their part in winning the War at home and overseas.

In 1919, the suffragist Millicent Fawcett declared triumphantly that 'The war revolutionised the industrial position of women. It found them serfs, and left them free.' She was wrong: Women had helped the country to victory, had won the vote for those over thirty - but had lost the battle for equality. A Lab of One''s Own is essential reading to understand and eliminate the inequalities still affecting professional women today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198794998
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	354
Sales rank:	1,017,703
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Patricia Fara lectures in the history of science at Cambridge University, where she is a Fellow of Clare College. She is the President of the British Society for the History of Science (2016-18) and her prize-winning book, Science: A Four Thousand Year History (OUP, 2009), has been translated into nine languages. In addition to many academic publications, her popular works include Newton: The Making of Genius (Columbia University Press, 2002), An Entertainment for Angels (Icon Books, 2002), Sex, Botany and Empire (Columbia University Press, 2003), and Pandora's Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (Pimlico, 2004). An experienced public lecturer, Patricia Fara appears regularly in TV documentaries and radio programmes such as In our Time. She also contributes articles and reviews to many journals, including History Today, BBC History, New Scientist, Nature and the Times Literary Supplement.

Table of Contents

Preserving the Past, Facing the Future1. Snapshots: Suffrage and Science at Cambridge2. A Divided Nation: Class, Gender, and Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain3. Subjects of Science: Biological Justifications of Women's StatusAbandoning Domesticity, Working for the Vote4. A New Century: Voting for Science5. Factories of Science: Women Work for War6. Ray Costelloe / Strachey: The Life of a Mathematical SuffragistCorridors of Science, Crucibles of Power7. Scientists in Petticoats: Women and Science Before the War8. A Scientific State: Technological Warfare in the Early Twentieth Century9. Taking Over: Women, Science and Power During the War10. Chemical Campaigners: Ida Smedley and Martha WhiteleyScientific Warfare, Wartime Welfare11. Soldiers of Science: Scientific Women Fighting on the Home Front12. Scientists in Khaki: Mona Geddes and Helen Gwynne-Vaughan13. Medical Recruits: Scientists Care for the Nation14. From Scotland to Sebastopol: The Wartime Work of Dr Isabel Emslie HuttonCitizens of Science in a Post-War World15. Inter-War Normalities: Scientific Women and Struggles for Equality16. Lessons of Science: Learning from the Past to Improve the FutureBibliography

Editorial Reviews

"In short, in A Lab of One's Own Patricia Fara has done a great service to the memory of several leading female scientists in World War I...I would recommend it to scholars interested in learning more about the scientific work conducted by British women during World War I." — Katie Baca, Harvard University, Nuncius

From the Publisher

A Lab of One's Own is an engrossing, exciting tale of uncelebrated scientists who innovated and experimented against a background of grand historical events. The numerous heroines named in its pages, many of whom come and go with only a brief mention, challenge the reader to keep track. Yet their very multitude underscores Fara's underlying argument that there is nothing unusual about a feminine engagement with science…For all Fara's erudition and scholarship…she writes without a trace of stuffiness. She also avoids whining about chances missed or credit denied. With the same refreshing approach to perceived injustice that she displayed in earlier books like Pandora's Breeches and Science: A Four Thousand Year History, Fara bends her talents to a sprightly telling of what happened…

The New York Times Book Review - Dava Sobel

12/18/2017
Fara (Science: A Four Thousand Year History), a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, shares the captivating stories of the unheralded British women whose valuable scientific and medical work contributed to an Allied victory in WWI. These “scientific pioneers” were marginalized by their contemporaries and, until now, largely passed over by historians. Fara ranges over a broader time period than the four years that encompassed the war and offers “new ways of thinking about the early twentieth century by looking simultaneously at the involvement of science and of women.” The book’s first two parts comprise a crisp discussion of politics and society in Britain, highlighting suffragist activism. Fara lays out the historical connection between science—particularly its role in determining the status of women—and suffragists, who used science to argue for equality. The war takes center stage at the narrative’s midpoint, but without the familiar battle accounts. Fara vividly recounts the experiences of the educated, capable women who stepped into men’s jobs as chemists, cryptographers, statisticians, meteorologists, and doctors. She brings the book’s two halves together in the penultimate chapter, evaluating how these expanded roles for women in wartime affected the movement for gender equality. Fara tells this remarkable tale with intelligence and verve. Illus. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

2017-12-05
A scholarly study of the role of suffragists in the years leading up to World War I, of women scientists during the war, and of the kind of discrimination they still face today.Fara (History and Philosophy of Science/Univ. of Cambridge), who has written previously on both the history of science and the place of women in that history (Scientists Anonymous: Great Stories of Women in Science, 2007, etc.), introduces readers briefly to the status of women and then takes a closer look at the suffragist movement that had been hammering away for years at the barriers preventing women from full participation in society. When the war called men away, women became essential replacements in traditionally male jobs in science, technology, and medicine, but they were often seen as temporary, inferior, and cheaper replacements. The author provides profiles of many of the educated, talented, and resourceful individuals who temporarily filled these jobs. However, as Fara notes, for many of these women, "the War seems to have represented a career hiccup rather than a life-altering event." When the men returned, many women were forced into lower-status positions, if they kept a job at all. Still, the war had given women a taste of independence and had shown that social change was possible and that there would be no going back to prewar conditions. Furthermore, writes Fara, women had successfully demonstrated their competence, and many had acquired professional qualifications not previously available to them. The author concludes that the suffragists had a clear goal—getting women the right to vote, a right that was granted in 1918 to British women over 30—but that the discrimination facing women continues to be "elusive, insidious, and stubbornly hard to eradicate." Choice selections from Fara's wide reading open each chapter.A densely written, well-documented history of the British experience that will resonate with American women as well.

Kirkus Reviews