How World War I Brought Women Scientists Into the Spotlight

Later this year is the centenary of the
end of the First World War, one of the bloodiest conflicts in human
history, which led to the deaths of nearly 20 million people. But
as Patricia Fara shows in her new book, A Lab
of One’s Own^[1], the Great War also gave
some women the chance to emerge from the shadows and show their
mettle as scientists, whether by digging experimental trenches to
research trench foot, x-raying wounded soldiers on the battlefront,
or inventing explosives.

Speaking from Claire College, Cambridge,
where she is a fellow and president of the British Society for the
History of Science, Fara explains how Darwin’s theory of evolution
put forward the idea that women were intellectually inferior to
men; how American-born scientist Ray Costelloe became a leading
member of Virginia Woolf’s Bloomsbury Group; and how, even today,
women scientists still face enormous challenges, not least from a
lack of child care.

Set the scene for us, Patricia, by describing the position of
women scientists in Britain before The Great War, and how the
conflict changed it.

The position of women in Britain in science before the war was
very bleak. Only very good schools gave girls scientific educations
and, even if they had the education from school, to go to
university they had to get round their parents, who usually wanted
them to follow a conventional life. So there were very few women
studying science at university. Then the war came and changed
things enormously. A lot of men went off to fight, so in the
museums, for example, women were left looking after everything.
Dorothea
Bate,^[2] for instance, became a
great fossil expert and was in charge of the collections in the
Natural History Museum. But she was just getting paid on a
temporary staff basis. That was another problem. When the women
took over the men’s jobs, they earned far less money. When the men
went away, women were also allowed to lecture for the first time
because, previously, it had been thought unsuitable for them to
lecture in front of a mixed audience.

At Imperial College London there was a woman called Martha
Whitely^[3] who’d been studying
pharmacology, but switched her area of research during the war. She
dug an experimental trench in the gardens of Imperial College and
led a seven-woman team down into the trench. She even had an
explosive named after her, called “DW” for Doctor Whitely, and was
the first person to test mustard gas.

Many of the prejudices and stereotypes about women at that
time seem almost laughable today. Describe some of the most
egregious, and how they held women back.

The most egregious is probably the most famous. Charles Darwin^[4], the great British
scientific hero for his work on evolution and natural selection,
maintained that over the millennia men have been positively
selected because of their ability to fight and build houses and do
all the intelligent stuff, while women have been progressively
selected to bring up children, and do the cooking and washing up.
As the millennia have gone by, the differences between men and
women have only increased, so that women are intellectually
inferior to men. That was the prevailing ideology. There was
research into things like brain size and hormones. Many doctors
said there were physiological and anatomical reasons why women
could never be as intellectual as men.

One of the great pioneers you write about was Marie
Stopes. Tell us about this remarkable woman and how she
revolutionized our relationship to sex.^[5]

She is an interesting example because she is famous now for
opening up birth control
clinics^[6] and teaching women the
facts of life, which are now even taught in primary school. There
were an awful lot of women who, when they got married, neither they
nor their husbands knew where everything was, how to do it, as well
as all the issues with women’s health, like menstruation and
menopause. They were completely and utterly ignorant.

But though Marie Stopes is today best known for educating women
and men about how bodies work, before that she had a completely
different career, as the first woman lecturer in science at
Manchester University. She was a great expert on fossil plants and
did a lot of research into coal during the war. Then she suddenly
had this moment of inspiration. A clinical student of hers told her
about a woman who’d come in with a little baby. All her babies kept
dying and she couldn’t work out why. The woman’s doctor dismissed
it and said, “Go out and have more babies.” But what the student
doctor realized was that the husband had syphilis, and that
was why all the babies were dying.

Another fascinating woman, Ray Costelloe,
became a forgotten figure in Virginia Woolf’s famous Bloomsbury Group^[8]. She had American
connections, didn’t she?^[7]

She did. She came from a Puritan American family and was related
to Logan Pearsall
Smith^[9], the famous literary
critic. But she was brought up over here by her grandmother.
Costelloe was absolutely passionate about mathematics and
went to Cambridge to study, which was rare in those days. She
didn’t do particularly well in maths, because she spent most of her
time organizing a suffrage organization.

Ray Costelloe and her sister lie right at the heart of the
Bloomsbury Group. Her sister married into the Stephens
family^[10]—the Virginia Woolf
family—while Ray married into the Strachey family^[11]. She and Virginia knew
each other quite well but they regarded each other with suspicion.
Virginia thought it was a shame Ray Costelloe wasn’t interested in
clothes, and was a bit fat and clumsy, while Ray couldn’t stand the
fact that Virginia and her friends didn’t do anything. They
just sat around laughing, talking, and dreaming, while Ray went
out, ran committees, opened a welding school, and even built her
own house.

Some women scientists actually served on the front, didn’t
they? Tell us the extraordinary story of Helena Gleichen.^[12]

I learned about Helena Gleichen because she was given a portable
x-ray machine by the grandfather of someone who is still alive, who
rang me up and told me about her and gave me access to all her
correspondence. She was one of those upper-class women, born with
about six surnames, and was a distant cousin to Queen Victoria. But
she learned how to do radiography, and she and a friend of hers
went out to the Italian front. This was an incredibly dangerous
part of the war that hasn’t been talked about much during the
2014-18
commemorations^[13]. While in Italy, she
x-rayed thousands of soldiers, who had got bullets in their brains
and other parts of the body.

As with other women working in the war, like Marie
Curie^[14], she paid very little
attention to her own welfare and suffered quite badly from
radiation burns. After the war, she went back to being an artist,
but like for a lot of these women, the war was the most exciting
time in their lives, the nearest they could get to experiencing
what it felt like to be a man. They could make their own decisions,
use their own initiative, go where they wanted. So, although it was
dangerous, grueling, hard work, it was also very exciting and
stimulating.

They were both suffragettes, which was quite unusual, so they
engaged in quite violent action until the war started, when the
suffragettes stopped campaigning. They then went to Paris and ran a
hospital. The Home Office was extremely reluctant to recognize that
women could make any contribution on the front. But they did; and
eventually they ran an all-women military hospital on Endell Street^[15] in London, where they
cared for thousands of soldiers. They also carried out research on
war-based wounds and how to protect them. They were an
extraordinary couple of women.

“Longtime companion” is often code for lesbian, isn’t
it?

It is. And it was the same with various other people, notably
Ray Costelloe. But I didn’t want to write salacious stuff about who
was sleeping with whom because I didn’t think their private lives
were relevant to the story I am telling. A lot of people also
wanted to keep their private lives private. Perhaps we
should respect that.

There’s that saying by Dorothy Parker about the Bloomsbury set,
“They lived in squares, painted in circles and had sex in
triangles.” But women at the time generally ignored the topic. It
was quite normal for women to share a house or flat and nobody
asked what was happening. This was when Marie Stopes was having to
tell men and women how to have sex, so people just didn’t think
about women having sex together. Similarly, a lot of male gay
couples were living together and people also turned a blind
eye.

“Would you rather have a slap in the eye or a WAAC on the
knee?” was a standard joke in WWI. Tell us about the male
chauvinism in the Women’s Army Auxiliary
Corp and the bizarre discussion around
uniforms.^[16]

It’s always been a matter of contention what women should wear.
What you wore signaled class and many people criticized women for
wearing a uniform. But for women in the WAAC, it showed their
patriotism and devotion to duty, and that they were doing a man’s
job. A lot of them felt they needed to wear a uniform so that they
could be identified as legitimate members of the organization,
particularly if abroad. There were also accusations against them
that they were prostitutes and the only reason they were wearing
the uniforms was to infiltrate the camps so that they could have
sex with all the men.

There were endless debates about how long your skirt should be,
what type of badge you should wear, whether you should have breast
pockets because, although they’re very useful, they were regarded
as unseemly. The question of what you wear has always been such an
important matter to women. It was also physically very important.
There are several references to women wearing petticoats and
cumbersome clothes and the idea that, if you can take off these
constraining clothes, you’re going to free yourself not only
physically, but emotionally.

You write, “Glass ceilings and leaky pipelines continue to
present tough challenges to scientific women.” Explain that idea
and what we can do to change the way things are.

“Leaky pipelines” is the idea that at the moment, though roughly
equal numbers of men and women come into university to study
science, as you go up through academia, from student to
post-graduate to lecturer and professor, the percentage of women
gets smaller and smaller.

They’ve also carried out experiments with pretend interview
panels, who have been given sets of applications, which could come
from men or women. And it seems that, whether the selectors are
male or female, they all prefer the male applicants. That’s
frightening, because it makes one realize that even women have
internalized this prejudice against women, and have more confidence
that men are better at the job.

Some things, just in my own lifetime, are colossally different.
We’ve made enormous progress. Yet there’s still hidden prejudice.
For example, when you go into a university building and look
around, there are only men’s pictures on the walls. Or, if you look
at student’s science reading lists, it’s predominantly male
authors. Then, there’s the whole child care problem. Most women I
know cite that as being the major reason why there’s still
inequality between men and women.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.