Margaret Alic: Hypatia's Heritage

By FRANCES GRANT

Oppression never does anyone's chances any good. The surprising thing is that so many succeed from such dismal starting points. Through most of history this has been particularly true for women in science.

Margaret Alic's Hypatia's Heritage seeks to remedy the impression that lack of opportunity and educational restrictions have entirely excluded women from science until the past hundred years or so. Where the real stories of women scientists begins, led by the likes of Marie Curie, Alic finishes her study. Instead she has scoured the records for evidence of woman's hand in fields from astronomy to medicine, from antiquity to the late 19th century.

Readers hoping for revelations of women making discoveries which push the boundaries of knowledge, hitherto unknown female equivalents of Galileo and Newton, will be disappointed. This alternative history can only prove that, despite the constraints placed on their sex, many women have shown a strong scientific bent.

The major role women have played in science is as educated scholar, as interpreter and teacher of great men's work or collaborator. Some women carried out considerable experimental work and had great influence on men's ideas, but there is no example of a woman scientist in this book whose work has truly shifted the paradigms.

The heroines of this story are women who have managed to force their way in science, many self-taught, others with support of families or husbands or whose intellectual prowess could not be denied.

The book is first chronological, moving from antiquity to the age of enlightenment, then deals with particular fields.

Along the way, some real characters emerge, but you can't escape the feeling at times that Alic is talking up her heroines. This is because she employs such a broad definition of "scientist", including doctors, midwives, alchemists, instrument makers and natural philosophers.

And the book has the odd lapse into nebulosity - it begins with a sparsely sourced chapter on women's scientific role in prehistory and the scientific and intellectual attributes accorded to goddesses. What real women were doing is much more a matter for speculation. But even creating tools, as women gatherers did, can be classified as science, Alic argues.

That such inclusiveness is necessary to write a history of women in science for the period Alic has chosen is indicative of how limited a part they were actually allowed to play. But it doesn't strengthen any claim that women have played a vital role in science.

Women's Press

$34.95