Margaret W. Rossiter, a historian whose trilogy, “Women Scientists in America,” documented in sharp detail the ways women were excised from the annals of science — and who coined the term “the Matilda effect,” named for the 19th-century suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage, to describe the age-old practice of attributing scientific achievements of women to their male colleagues — died on Aug. 3 in Salem, Mass. She was 81.
Her death, in a hospital, was caused by an infection after a fall last year, said her cousin Sherry Evers.
In the late 1960s, Dr. Rossiter was working on her Ph.D. at Yale — her focus was the history of agricultural science — when a comment from one of her male professors during an evening bull session puzzled her.
Who, she had asked, were the women in science? There were none, he said. Another professor mumbled something about Marie Curie being the exception. “I realized,” she told Smithsonian magazine in 2019, “this was not an acceptable subject.”
Yet a few years later, while riffling through a directory from 1906 called “American Men of Science,” Dr. Rossiter came across a few entries for women, the book’s title notwithstanding. The entries were short, but there they were. Why weren’t these women better known? Dr. Rossiter set out to tell their stories and to find their peers.
“I felt like a modern Alice,” she wrote, “who had fallen down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of the history of science that was familiar in some respects but distorted and alien in others.”
For the next four decades, between stints as a visiting professor at various institutions, she traversed the country in rental cars and combed through newspaper archives, college records, bibliographies, government employment data and other sources to uncover the hidden work of female astronomers, botanists, biologists, chemists, engineers, entomologists, geologists and physicists, to name just a few of the professions she investigated.
“Eventually,” she wrote in her introduction to the first volume of the trilogy, “Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940” (1982), “these materials transformed the project from a kind of collective biography of women scientists (hardly any of whose names are household ones) into a history of an occupational group whose status had risen and fallen over time as the women’s role responded to external events and pressures.”
The manuscript grew so long that she realized she would have to break it up into at least two volumes. The second, “Before Affirmative Action: 1940-1972,” appeared in 1995, followed in 2012 by “Forging a New World Since 1972.”
“Margaret had a lasting and transformative impact on the history of women in science,” said M. Susan Lindee, a professor of the history and sociology of science at the University of Pennsylvania. “She uncovered the social experience of women in science” — the lab assistants who never became managers, the geologists poring over data in government offices while their male peers were doing fieldwork, those who despite their advanced degrees didn’t get hired or promoted, or who were sidelined or fired when they married or got pregnant.
“They were invisible to history,” Professor Lindee added. “Their stories show us exactly how power works. That’s her real legacy.”
In Volume One of the trilogy, Dr. Rossiter introduced Maria Mitchell, an astronomer trained by her father and who located a new comet in 1847 — known colloquially as “Miss Mitchell’s Comet” — making her a celebrity at 28 and the first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Despite these accolades, she continued to work part time as a librarian on Nantucket Island, Mass. It wasn’t until 1862 that she was hired at Vassar College, where she became one of the country’s first female science professors.
Dr. Rossiter wrote about the female scientists at the Office of Scientific Research and Development — one of the largest U.S. agencies to employ scientists during World War II — whose names rarely appeared in any contemporaneous histories of the atomic bomb or any of the other defense-related projects that the office worked on.
Dr. Rossiter’s footnotes on this era showed her dogged detective work. She uncovered an army of women, among them the mineralogist Helen Blair Bartlett. She had left a job in the spark plug division at General Motors for O.S.R.D.’s ceramics branch, where she developed a nonporous porcelain to be used for the interior of the atomic bomb.
Of the examples Dr. Rossiter gave of the “Matilda effect” — a term she introduced in a 1993 article that appeared in the journal Social Studies of Science — one of the most notorious is the case of Lise Meitner, the Austrian-Swedish nuclear physicist, who with the German chemist Otto Hahn developed the theory of nuclear fission.
In 1944, he won the Nobel Prize for that discovery; she did not. Dr. Rossiter quoted from his autobiography, in which he seemed mystified by Dr. Meitner’s “disappointment” about the oversight, adding that she had been given honorary degrees in the United States.
The “Matilda effect” was but one of the many career blows that were queasily familiar to female scientists. So was the “harem effect,” a term Dr. Rossiter coined to describe male scientists’ habit of surrounding themselves with, as she put it, a “bevy of competent female subordinates who would not be as threatening as an equal number of bright young men.” (And who would presumably stay put, because their opportunities were so limited.)
She also detailed the strategy of “credentialism,” by which women hoped that if they accrued enough credentials, their gender became irrelevant. (It did not.) Another phenomenon she wrote about was “the honorary man,” a term that described a woman whose achievements were so spectacular that they weren’t seen as reflecting on the general properties of women. Marie Curie was the common example: “She’s good, but she’s no Madame Curie” was a typical put-down.
She wrote of how women poured into leadership roles in scientific fields during World War II — and how their enrollment surged in colleges and universities — only to find themselves sidelined or fired once the men returned.
“Trained to advanced levels,” Dr. Rossiter wrote in Volume 2, “they were, to use some military terms of the period, ‘camouflaged’ as housewives, mothers and ‘other,’ and ‘stockpiled’ in cities and college towns across America (where many still remain), ready but uncalled for the big emergency that never came.”
Margaret Walsh Rossiter was born on July 8, 1944, in Malden, Mass., near Boston. She and her twin brother, Charles Jr., were the only children of Mary (Madden) and Charles Rossiter, a high school teacher, who had met in college: Radcliffe for her, Harvard for him. Margaret grew up in Melrose, Mass., and was a National Merit Scholar and a math star at Melrose High School.
“Margaret, who plans to study math at Radcliffe this fall, lists biographies of the 17th century as her favorite reading matter,” The Boston Globe reported in 1962 in an article about local National Merit Scholarship winners. “That was before Newton developed the calculus,” she informed the paper.
She did study math at Radcliffe but she switched first to chemistry and then to the history of science before graduating in 1966. She received her first master’s degree, in the same subject, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her second, in American scientific history, at Yale, where she continued those studies, earning a Ph.D. in 1971.
It took her nearly two decades to find a permanent academic position. She found occasional work as a visiting professor, filling in for someone on leave for a year or two. She earned grants to fund her research, including a fellowship at Harvard, but she was often living on unemployment benefits. When she won a MacArthur Fellowship in 1989 — the coveted “genius” award — for her scholarship, she was hired full time at Cornell University.
Dr. Rossiter’s brother died in 2004. No immediate family members survive.
Dr. Rossiter retired in 2017, but as an emeritus professor she kept her office at Cornell, which became a warren of file cabinets and boxes and teetering stacks of papers — the legacy of decades of research and correspondence. She saved everything, including, she told Smithsonian magazine, a letter she received from a woman scientist after the publication of Volume 1.
“I greatly enjoyed your work,” the woman wrote. “I have spent a lot of money on psychotherapy because people kept telling me I was maladjusted.”
Penelope Green is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
The post Margaret W. Rossiter, 81, Dies; Wrote Women Scientists Into History appeared first on New York Times.
