February 25, 2005
Science
Historian to speak on MHC Faculty and the Rise of American Science
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Miriam Levin,
associate professor of history at Case Western Reserve University,
will give a talk titled “Not the Girls of Summers: Mount
Holyoke Faculty and the Rise of American Science” on
Wednesday, March 2, at 7:30 PM in Room L1 in Newcomb Cleveland
Hall of the Mount Holyoke Science Center.
Levin is the author of Defining Women’s Scientific Enterprise:
Mount Holyoke Faculty and the Rise of American Science (University
Press of New England, 2005), a book made all the more timely
by the recent controversy over suggestions by Lawrence Summers,
the president of Harvard University, that “innate differences” may
be one of the reasons that women do not succeed as well as men
at the highest levels of scientific and mathematical research.
Levin’s book makes a compelling case that Mount Holyoke's
founder Mary Lyon—who was a chemist—and the women
educators she recruited were able to stake out roles for women
in the scientific enterprise during the College’s first
century. She attributes their success to their ability to work
within the dominant New England Protestant culture, and to their
initiative and zeal to break new ground.
“'I am delighted to welcome Miriam Levin to campus,” said
President Joanne V. Creighton. “This book makes an important
contribution to the history of academic science in this country,
showing how modern science has roots in the close-observation
practices developed by pioneering women scientists, practices
that were at once supportive and transgressive. In so doing,
as the book’s editors note, 'Mount Holyoke itself becomes
an experiment that raises a basic question: Is there another
way of doing science?' Perhaps this study will serve as a corrective
to the notion that women are somehow poorly suited for careers
in science.”
Mount Holyoke’s story “is very different from the
narrative that most feminist historians of science have written
about women in science—these have concentrated on outsiders
trying to get in, on individuals making significant contributions
in the face of discrimination,” Levin said. “What
I saw at Mount Holyoke was the continual calibration of the relationship
between the goals of an institution and the goals of ambitious
women in light of market demand for science. As a result, the
story is that of the way women became participants in shaping
the American scientific enterprise through their work at Mount
Holyoke.”
Levin is the author of numerous publications on the history of
science, technology, and education. Among her books are Republican
Art and Ideology in Late Nineteenth-Century France, (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1986), a study of French government policies
aimed at integrating science and technology into the national
culture to control the course of industrialization along liberal
democratic lines; and When the Eiffel Tower Was New: French Visions
of Progress at the Centennial of the Revolution, (South Hadley:
Mount Holyoke College, distributed by University of Massachusetts
Press, 1989), an exploration in text and images of the ways in
which the French responded to technological innovations at the
time of the great universal expositions of 1889 and 1900. She
recently edited a collection of essays, Cultures of Control (New
York: Routledge, 2000), examining the modern use of technological
systems for economic and social ends.
Levin received her bachelor’s and master’s degrees
from the University of Michigan, and her doctorate from the University
of Massachusetts. She was a fellow with the Five College Women's
Studies Research Center at Mount Holyoke College in the spring
of 1993. More recently, she has been honored as visiting professor
at universities in Sweden and France.
Introducing Levin will be W. Donald Cotter, associate professor
of chemistry. Cotter recently has turned his scholarly attentions
to the study of the history of chemistry, focusing on the American
chemical community between 1890 and 1920.
Mount Holyoke has played a remarkable role in educating women
scientists since its founding. For most of the twentieth century,
Mount Holyoke graduated more women who went on to receive doctorates
in the physical sciences and engineering than any other university
or college in the nation. In the 1980s, despite its small size,
Mount Holyoke was the undergraduate college of more women who
went on to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry than any other institution
in the country. Today, one-quarter to one-third of Mount Holyoke’s
students major in science or mathematics— double the proportion
of women who major in math or science at comparable coeducational
institutions.
Q & A
with Miriam Levin
Lawrence Summers, the president of Harvard,
recently stirred up controversy when he suggested that “innate differences” might
explain why fewer women succeed in mathematics and the sciences.
What are your thoughts about that?
This question of inherited differences is a nonstarter, and
one that should have nothing to do with policy. What kinds
of differences
are you going to look at? What kinds of data are you going to
gather? What are the cause-and-effect relationships regarding
intelligence and work that can be established beyond a doubt?
Once you start this kind of research, people who want to make
certain kinds of policy begin to use these arguments against
the very people who are underrepresented. Didn't’t we already
discredit this approach when The Bell Curve was published 11
years ago? History shows that the examination of sex-based differences
in intelligence is just as biased as the bias it’s trying
to establish. Moreover, since scientific work varies with disciplines,
there is the question of what skills, talents, and abilities
we are talking about in any particular case. I think the study
of innate differences in intelligence has produced nothing but
questionable evidence that has been used to support keeping women
out.
How might an understanding of the history of science,
particularly women’s involvement in science, have led to
a different approach to this issue?
A historian would probably say that what we ought to study is
the cultural context in which women and men are educated and
work. Changing the culture, in some ways, is what’s most
important to allowing anyone who has the abilities and the talents
and the interest nd the drive to participate in science. The other
point that I would make here—and this comes out of looking
at Mount Holyoke—is that increasingly women have made their
own decisions about how to participate in science. I think it’s
possible for colleges and universities to enable women, and men
as well, to exercise a choice as to whether they want to go for
high-level research science, or focus on teaching or industry,
or take a less intensive approach—and to respect and help
them prepare for these choices.
Summers also suggested that women’s unwillingness or inability
to work 80-hour weeks could also be a factor. What’s your
reaction to that?
Actually, it sounds as though he’s blaming women, that it’s
their fault that they’re not at the top. He’s saying
that if they’re married or have children, they may have chosen
not to devote the amount of time it takes to climb to the top,
or they can’t make it to the top because they’ve got
too many other responsibilities. This is a sensitive subject, but
I think we do need to gather information from women and men about
the reasons for their choosing one or another kind of scientific
work to see where and how personal circumstances figured in the
results. The difficulty with President Summers’s statement
is that he’s proposed that we study bias, yet his own language
seems to be biased.
How does the history of science at the College bear on the current
discussion?
I think the history of Mount Holyoke tells us that science is quite
a varied endeavor, and that the production of scientific information
and knowledge involves lots of different people at different levels.
Mount Holyoke, I think, really makes the point that the college
level is a very important point at which scientists begin to be
formed in this country. Also, Mount Holyoke faculty have had a
strategy for dealing with questions about marriage and women with
children—they’ve been aware of these issues ever since
the founding of the College. They absolutely never entertained
the idea that biological differences between men and women made
a difference in intellectual abilities. They had Protestantism
on their side, in the sense that all souls are equal before God,
and all people have access and can understand God through nature.
That was something that they never relinquished, and whenever there
were opportunities to move ahead and to gain purchase and more
equality, they did it.
What got you interested in doing this research and writing the
book?
I just was so fascinated with the story. Mount Holyoke’s
story is very different from the stories that most feminist historians
of science have written about women in science—that they
were outsiders trying to get in, that they were discriminated against,
and that they against all odds were able to contribute important
things to science. What I saw here was the relationship between
the goals of an institution and the goals of ambitious women, and
the way women became participants in shaping the American scientific
enterprise through their work at Mount Holyoke. There is another
story to tell here, one about women who really felt enabled, and
women who contributed and participated. They were active. Beyond
that, I’m fascinated with the way in which science and religion
were interwoven throughout the College’s history and enabled
women to participate in shaping the scientific enterprise.
The
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