Born: 8 July 1944, United States
Died: 3 August 2025
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women creator Allison Tyra’s book Uncredited: Women’s Overlooked, Misattributed, and Stolen Work.
At age 24, Margaret Rossiter was one of the few women in her graduate program at Yale in 1969. Dedicated to the history of science, the program nonetheless seemed entirely unaware that women also had been, and continued to be, scientists. At one point, Rossiter asked a group of professors “Were there ever women scientists?” and was conclusively told absolutely not, never, none. “It was delivered quite authoritatively,” Rossiter recalled. Even when someone mentioned two-time Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie, she was dismissed as essentially her husband’s assistant. Although she did not argue at the time, sensing there would be no point, Rossiter went on to a long career bringing such women’s stories to light. She also coined the term “Matilda effect” to describe a systemic bias against acknowledging women’s contributions, to the point of denying them altogether…
Science historian Margaret Rossiter, in her search for women scientists, found that the “territorial segregation” of women being cloistered within separate colleges was one reason they were more difficult to identify. With women excluded from medical schools in the 1800s, women’s medical colleges began popping up, but were often considered inferior to the “real” medical colleges attended by men…
In her research, science historian Margaret Rossiter found when reading letters of recommendation that male scientists would bend over backwards to come up with absurd reasons why a female scientist could not be promoted. Arguing, for example, because there is no precedent was what Rossiter termed “restrictive logic.” It is fascinating that men of science, who generally pride themselves on being logical, were fundamentally incapable of doing so. Women’s credentials, Rossiter wrote, “were dismissed as irrelevant in favor of stereotypes, fears, and long-cherished views.” Referring to the collective campaign by male professors to prevent German physicist Hertha Sponer from being appointed to full professorship at Duke University, Rossiter observed, “Sponer was evidently up against not only all the other applicants for a job at Duke in 1936 but also certain physicists’ collective views and misconceptions about all of womankind.”…
“(I)n my day (undergrad and grad in the 1960s) all women’s history had been forgotten or obliterated and was not taught at much of any colleges. When the founders of women’s history began to start research and writing (1970s), they all had to bone up and read Eleanor Flexner’s Century of Struggle, the only survey of the subject and for which the author had had a hard time finding a publisher,” says historian Margaret Rossiter.