Negotiating in/visibility : Women, science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century

Abstract

This volume explores, from global, multilingual and intersectional perspectives, the experiences of women in science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century. Some, like the American evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, were fairly visible actors in the academic and public arenas of professional science. Others, like the doctors working in secondary schools in interwar Romania or those who struggled to alleviate ‘women’s illnesses’ in famine-stricken rural areas during China’s Great Leap Forward, have been largely invisible – as medical practitioners, creators of knowledge, educators and subjects of historical inquiry. The volume investigates the nature and extent of women’s in/visibility in science, engineering and medicine in the twentieth century, seeking to document the factors that underpinned it and understand how women navigated their circumstances. When and why did women become invisible? When and how did they seek visibility? Was invisibility always a form of discrimination, exclusion and misrecognition or could it also become a strategy of resistance and survival? Drawing on hitherto-little-explored archives in Asia, Europe and North America, the contributors examine the in/visibility of women across multiple sites of medical practice, science-making, pedagogy and communication, such as the laboratory, the university, the clinic, the hospital, the home, the school and the media. They show that invisibility was the outcome of power asymmetries based on intersecting factors like gender, race, ethnicity, class, caste and age, and that women were not only present in science, engineering and medicine, but also exercised considerable agency in trying to negotiate institutional and intellectual hierarchies.