Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics , Nina Byers and Gary Williams , Cambridge U. Press, New York, 2006. $35.00 (471 pp.). ISBN 978-0-521-82197-1
The first apparatus to measure the surface tension of water. The first observation of nuclear recoil during radioactive decay. The first understanding of the composition of stars. What do these “firsts” in the development of modern physics have in common? All were made by women, and vignettes of their contributions appear in the essays in Out of the Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century Women to Physics , edited by Nina Byers and Gary Williams. Does it matter that the discoveries were made by women? The writers of the essays and, in several cases, even the women profiled seem ambivalent on that point.
Byers and Williams have selected 40 women physicists whose work contributed substantially to the development of physics in the century before approximately 1976. Byers is a theoretical physicist and professor emerita at UCLA; Williams’s research is in low-temperature physics, and he is a professor in the department of physics and astronomy, also at UCLA. The physics they cover in the book is quite broadly defined; included are women who have worked in areas as diverse as biophysics, crystallography, geophysics, mathematical physics, cosmic-ray physics, and physical chemistry. Essays are arranged chronologically, and each were written by a practicing scientist or science historian familiar with the specific subject. In several cases the writer is a family member of the woman being profiled. Each essay is divided into three parts: science, biography, and bibliography. It is admirable and distinctive to first cover the stories of important physics discoveries whose provenance has in many cases been forgotten. Yet the book’s separation of science from biography may be why several of the essays are redundant in the scientific and biographical parts: The work one does is not neatly separable from the social conditions under which that work is produced. Gender is hardly irrelevant when considering what these particular physical scientists were able to accomplish.
The collection of essays begins with science historian Joan Mason’s description of the innovative work of Hertha Ayrton (1854–1923) with carbon arc lamps. Ayrton’s groundbreaking text, The Electric Arc, was published in 1902, the same year in which the Royal Society “pronounced that a married woman was not a ‘person’ eligible for fellowship under the Charter” (page 21).
Similarly fascinating is Jean-Pierre Adloff and George B. Kaufman’s story behind the discovery of francium in 1939 by Marguerite Catherine Perey (1909–75). It was not until 1962 that Perey was elected to the Paris Academy of Sciences. She was the first woman to be elected; even Nobel laureates Marie Curie and her daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, had been denied admission. Those facts speak volumes about the attitudinally challenged conditions under which Perey worked.
David Cline’s essay on prominent particle physicist Sau Lan Wu, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is the final profile in the book. Wu was admitted to Harvard graduate school in 1963, but she was not permitted to enter the men’s dorm, where she might have joined her classmates in study sessions. She was the only woman in her entering class. Wu was permitted to attend commencement ceremonies when she received her master’s degree the following year; she was not, however, allowed to attend the celebratory lunch afterwards. Tradition simply did not permit such a thing. Despite the affront, Wu returned to Harvard to complete her PhD.
The women described in the essays are nothing if not persistent. Several express reluctance—perhaps necessary to their successes—to dwell on the barriers they faced: Bertha Swirles Jeffreys (1903–99), about whom Ruth Williams writes, “quite emphatically” stated that she would have preferred to be profiled “in a book entitled ‘Contributions of People to Twentieth-Century Physics’” rather than in one emphasizing work done by women (page 189).
Although barriers to women’s work in physics did erode during the 20th century, physics lags behind other sciences in the percentage of women attaining degrees in the discipline. For example, the American Institute of Physics has statistics that show that in 2001 approximately 46% of high-school physics students were female (http://www.aip.org/statistics). Four years later, only about 23% of bachelor’s degrees in physics went to women.
As an incentive for young women to pursue physics, and for their instructors to encourage them, Out of the Shadows could be more useful in a key area: It needs a collective bibliography. The insights provided by the essayists are crucial in explaining succinctly—occasionally too succinctly—the major accomplishments of each of the women profiled. However, the bibliographies associated with the essays are uneven and generally lack familiarity with the work of historians of science. The book features no women who were born after 1950. Clearly, the question “What challenges are going to face me when I go to graduate school?” did not cease to be relevant for women physicists in 1976.
Students whose interests are piqued by Out of the Shadows would benefit from references to other sources, in print and on the Web, that would bring the story of women in physics into the 21st century. The book does cover a lot of ground. Some readers might be surprised to find a few names missing—perhaps Rosalind Franklin, for one; on the other hand, many stories of women physicists whose contributions have not been adequately profiled elsewhere are in the book. Despite its ambivalence in addressing the issue of gender in the scientific community, Out of the Shadows is a worthwhile contribution to the overall story of the rise of modern physics.
