In Their Own Words: What was it like for women to work in science?
While many women acknowledged the struggles they faced as women in science, not all felt the same way about their professional circumstances. Oral history interviews help fill in some of the gaps on what women thought about their work and place in the cultures of science. When Barbara McClintock, Evelyn Witkin, Priscilla Lane, Elizabeth Russell and Charity Waymouth were asked during oral history interviews to reflect on their position in laboratories or at conferences as one of the only women in the room they responded in a variety of ways. Explore more below to hear in their own words.
Barbara McClintock (1902-1992) received the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for her discovery of mobile genetic elements. In the 1950s, she discovered the occurrence of transposable genetic elements and their effect on gene expression; that is, that genes are not fixed like pearls on a string but that they move or "jump" around. McClintock remains the only woman to win an unshared Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. There are two academic biographies that exist about McClintock. One, by Evelyn Fox Keller, portrays McClintock as often working alone and isolated, whereas the other by Nathan W. Comfort presents McClintock as someone who didn’t mind being alone, but was very warm to people who approached her. From her oral interviews and those of her colleagues, we see that she was an influence on other scientists and that she had her own experiences with gender inequality in the sciences.
In the following interview, McClintock recounts her experience as a woman student at Cornell.
Evelyn Fox Keller: Altogether there weren't terribly many women in Cornell in those days, were there?
Barbara McClintock: Sarah Ratner was one. Do you know Sarah? She was there when I was there.
EFK: What was the ratio of women to men then?
BM: The ratio was kept constant at four men to one woman. The women were very much resented at Cornell; there had been a tradition. They put up a student union when I was first a grad student, and most of it was for men. A tiny little section at one end of the building was for women, and that had a reception, two small reception rooms, and a restaurant and a ladies room. The rest of the building women weren't allowed to go into. They charged dues for that building for everybody at the same rate, and I refused to pay them, and nobody ever said a word to me about it. I just wouldn't pay them. It took some time, I guess. Another thing, there were many men who really resented the fact that there was resentment against women at Cornell. The ones who really felt that they could show their resentment could be very ugly, and it got so ugly (this was relatively late, I can't remember) that one of the men who was involved in putting up this union put out a newspaper one day. It was called the Mourning Male. He put it out and he ridiculed the men that were harassing the women. It's interesting. Although the men did harass the women—a certain group did. For instance, there was one fellow that I went with when I was a junior, I guess and he was in one of the fraternities that scowled on anybody that went with a coed. He was so berated for going with me by his fraternity brothers that he quit. He quit college altogether, quit Cornell. It got that bad. But this Mourning Male that came out (I can't remember what date that was) broke the whole thing wide open, because here was a man who was involved in the building of the student union who had finally realized how critical the situation was. It was very critical. But interestingly enough, when a big prom came along it cleared out the women's dormitories; nearly everybody was invited, because there weren't enough women around. They just had to take them; at the time you didn't import people, except very rarely. There were no cars to bring them up from other places.
EFK: So you participated quite actively in the social life on campus?
BM: Yes, I did, both male and female activities. Yes, both. In my first two years I went out a lot, had a lot of dates. Then I finally decided I had to be more discriminating than average; I just couldn't do that. So I began to be much more discriminating.
EFK: Where you dating classmates in the school of agriculture, or only in the college?
BM: no no no. None of them were in agriculture. The one I got to know the best was pre-med.
EFK: So you had a kind of dual identity? You were on the one hand at the school of agriculture, and you lived at the college.
BM: Oh the place was small enough so that I had many courses in other colleges.
EFK: Oh you did.
BM: There was a third one at Cornell I should have mentioned, run by New York State, and that was home economics. That's mainly women of course. Later on they opened a hotel management college, but that was not in agriculture; that was much later.
EFK: So you took courses all around the campus.
BM: All around. You were allowed. Since most of the good biology courses were offered outisde—the strictly zoological courses; embryology, histology. I took embryology and histology and a first course in zoology, comparative anatomy. Some of them I just monitored; they let me take them without being registered. I took them, went to the lab and everything else. Invertebrate zoology. I took a series in zoology. They were all in the arts college, they were not in the ag school.
EFK: And you didn't encounter any resentment from your classmates in the courses or—
BM: Yes. There was a certain group of people. I forgot to say I was elected president of my class when I was a freshman.
EFK: How did you manage that?
BM: I don't know. I don't have the vaguest idea.
EFK: You were taking what, ten courses?
I didn't manage it, really, very well. No, I didn't manage it well at all. I didn't want it, and it just came. I didn't really want it, because it was just out of my field. But it came. There was another interesting thing that happened, though, during that time. There used to be sororities at Cornell, and I remember that a number of people, where I was living in this outside house that I was able to contact when I got to Cornell (it was run by a private person, with all women in it, and nearly all may have been freshmen, too), were invited out to rushing parties, and so forth. Then the invitations went out and I received invitation[s] and I accepted one. I got back to the rooming house and I found I was the only one who'd received an invitation. I was very put out. Many of these were very nice girls, and I was immediately [aware] (this was the first time I noticed this) that there were those who made it and those who didn't, and here was a dividing line that put you in one category or the other. And I couldn't take it, so I thought about it for a while, and broke my pledge, and remained an independent the rest of the time.
Issues of different treatment and inequality in pay and promotion is how Barbara McClintock remembered her early days as a woman scientist. Evelyn Witkin, who considered McClintock a role model, also remembered NcClintock’s experience with gender politics in science and it stayed with Witkin throughout her career.
Geneticist Evelyn Witkin (b. 1921) worked on DNA mutagenesis and repair. She studied biology at Columbia University with Theodosius Dobzhansky, who arranged for Witkin to spend time at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. While there, she discovered a UV-radiation resistant variant of E. coli. This sparked her interest in studying the variation in mutations induced in bacteria through exposure to UV radiation. Also at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory she met Barbara McClintock, whose lab was in the building next door to Witkin. In her oral history, Witkin remembers how exciting it was to be McClintock’s colleague while she was coming up with the ideas of transposable elements and their effect on gene expression; that is, that genes are not fixed like pearls on a string but that they move or "jump" around.
In the following interview, Witkin recalls her recollections of McClintock's struggles as a woman scientist.
Nathaniel Comfort: Did Barbara suffer professionally because she was a woman?
Evelyn Witkin: Oh god, yes. She really did. I suppose this is on the record, I don't know. But she talked about it a lot, particularly the early experiences after Cornell, at Missouri particularly, but after she completed her degree at Cornell. She talked about how her fellow students, who all got their degrees at about the same time and walked into one good job after another. And there she was, she couldn't get a job at all. And she was clearly the outstanding member of that coterie, and recognized as such. Her graduate work was fantastic, it was in all the textbooks. She was very—I wouldn't say bitter—but very conscious of that and it was a very major factor in her whole outlook. And then the treatment she had at Missouri...It's interesting by the way, I don't know if you know about the role Vannevar Bush played in her situation.
NC: No.
EW: Vannevar Bush was a very extraordinary person, and I wish this were better known. He was in many ways, of course, but he was president of Carnegie right after the war, and Barbara came to Cold Spring Harbor, I don't know what her official title was when she first came, but she was on a miserable salary. And it was Vannevar Bush who made Demerec appoint her to the staff in a serious position. I don't think that he would have, without Bush's twisting his arm. He was happy to have her there, he respected her and so on, and he wasn't going to waste a major appointment on someone he didn't have to, and in his view you didn't have to if it was a woman.
Women saw and remembered how each other were treated in science. In some environments, such as the Jackson Laboratory, women worked with men daily and were made more welcome than in other environments. At the Jackson Laboratory, women participated in gathering both in mixed groups with men and on their own. Organizations that supported their work as women scientists united them, for example the AAUW, which funded many women to study at Jackson in the early days of the research station.
Priscilla Lane (1921-2019) was an American genetics researcher. Known to her friends as “Skippy” she received an MS in Physiology from the University of California Berkeley in 1950. The following year she began working at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine as a research associate. She became interested in the Bar Harbor Mice and studied tumor formations. Lane worked at the Jackson Laboratory for 56 years and co-authored numerous papers on mouse genetics.
In the clip below, Lane discusses the difficulty women faced in the lab.
Susan Mehrtens: Has the Jackson been a good place for women to work?
Priscilla Lane: Yes, now there has been discrimination like everywhere, the woman is not quite on a par with the males. Women did not have an opportunity for a management job, until probably the late 1970's, it was a better opportunity for a male.
SM: How was teaching?
PL: The classroom male teachers made more money than the classroom female, there is no question about it. They were also given all the extra curricular activities bringing in the extra time for extra money. The Laboratory is a little bit slower in changing than some of the other places, but I think it has changed. I don't think there is any question. We now have women in management!
SM: At the time it was in the old form, I know some of my narrators have spoken of the Otter Creek Chowder and Marching Society.
PL: Oh, that was male only. Most of us didn't really care. If they wanted to have it, there were a few women who are always in a push. If you wait long enough the change will come. There are some things, but I don't think that was a particularly important thing to push. I do think that a career ladder was an absolutely important thing to push about, because it affected a lot of people.
Women at the Jackson Laboratory also spent leisure time together, both with their male colleagues at house parties and even formed their own all-women softball team: the “Lab Lovelies.”
Elizabeth Russell worked in the field of mammalian development. Known to her friends at the lab as Tibby, she did significant genetic research on mutations and hemoglobin through her study of mice. She served on the council of the National Academy of Sciences, was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Vice-President and later the President-elect of the Genetics Society of America, and was on the advisory council of the National Institute on Aging. She also was a Guggenheim Fellow and was elected to the Maine Women's Hall of Fame. She spent nearly five decades at the Jackson Laboratory.
Listen to the clip below to hear about camraderie among women at the Jackson Laboratory and the "Lab Lovelies."
Susan Mehrtens: When did the Lab Lovelies begin? Remember the Lab Lovelies, the women's softball team?
Elizabeth Russell: We sure had a women's softball team. I didn't play on it very well. I certainly went and cheered (laughter). I'm not an expert softball player!
SM: ... expert softball player.
ER: Have you heard the story of Charity and Margaret Green? Now when was that? Charity grew up in England; she certainly did not have regular experience as a childor a young person in softball, but she played. Marg was running to second base, I think, and Charity was there, and some way, it ended up with Marg trying to slide into Charity arching over her; it was just terribly, terribly funny. I went to those games a lot. I remember them; it was when my kids were 7 or 8--they're all in a six year span; there were some of them that were in junior high school.
SM: They never stuck you in the infield?
ER: Oh, they did sometimes. It didn't do them any good? (laughter)
SM: I was told that when you got up to bat, you could only bunt.
ER: Well, I'm pretty sure that's true. (laughter)
SM: Some people have a lot stronger recollections about this than you do!
ER: I think some people must be remembering things I don't remember! I'm left-handed—I remember that I always faced the other way, and batted, and then sort of tried to get to first base. (laughter)
SM: That would be good for psychological intimidation of a pitcher, to have a southpaw.
ER: Oh,I'm sure I scared them all to death! (laughter) Who told you that story?
SM: Fay Lawson remembers distinctly that you were at times in the infield, that they would never let you play any crucial base. (laughter)
ER: Well, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't have.
Not all women remembered their time in science as one of difference, nor did they feel their work environments treated them any differently.
Charity Waymouth was an English tissue culturist and biochemist. Educated in England and Scotland, Waymouth moved to the United States in 1952 to work on cancer research. Waymouth worked at the Jackson Laboratory until her retirement in 1982. At the lab she served as Interim Director and held leadership roles. Waymouth developed the chemically defined medium known as Waymouth's medium, which is used to study nutrition, metabolism, and growth in mouse cells. Her experience of the lab’s culture towards women—perhaps from her vantage point of having been in leadership, and having arrived later in the twentieth century—was a bit different than Russell and Lane.
In the following clip, Waymouth discusses her perception of women's place at the Jackson Laboratory.
Susan Mehrtens: How did he treat you as a woman? Did you feel there was any difference between your treatment and the men?
Charity Waymouth: Certainly not. We had a lot of women already on the staff then. There was Tibby, and Emilia Vicari, and there was—Well, Elizabeth Fekete came with him originally, when the lab first opened. She was one of the original staff members. So there was—no, I mean it was not a novelty at all to have women on the staff. Marianna Cherry, and you know, a number of women had been members of the staff over a period of years. So no, I don't think they were treated any differently in any way.
These personal stories and experiences help add nuance and context to historians’ larger understanding about women’s access to science and the history of women’s pursuit for equality in professional spaces.
Further Reading
Comfort, Nathaniel C. The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W.H. Freeman & Co, 1983.
Mehrtens, Susan. “Finding Aid for JAX Oral History.” Oral History Collection 13 (1987). https://mouseion.jax.org/oral_history/13.
Morantz-Sanchez, Regina, Cynthia Pomerleau, and Carol Fenichel. In Her Own Words: Oral Histories of Women Physicians. Westport, Conn: Greenwood Press, 1982.