GST 1990: Women in Science, Medicine, and Engineering

Sec. 001 (2 credits); Sec. 002 (4 credits)

Instructor: Dr. Marsha L. Richmond
Associate Professor, Interdisciplinary Studies Program

Office: A/AB, 5700 Cass Avenue, Room 2307
Tel. (Office): 313-577-6499; (Home): 734-741-4465
Fax: (Office): 313-577-8585
Office hours: Mondays, 3:00-5:00pm, or by appointment
Email: marsha.richmond@wayne.edu
Web page: http://www.cll.wayne.edu/isp/mrichmon

Course description:

This directed studies is attached to IST 2020: Changing Life on Earth. The course provides an introduction to issues connected with women's participation in the fields of science, medicine, and engineering.  It particularly focuses on such topics as: the barriers women have had to face in participating in science--in educational institutions or in establishing careers in scientific, medical, and engineering fields; the strategies women have employed to overcome these difficulties; ways that women have used to combine scientific/medical/engineering careers with family; the special problems faced by women of color in science, medicine, and engineering; and the contributions women have made to scientific, medical, and technical fields.

Required Books:

Available at the Wayne State University Bookstore, Barnes & Noble:

Format:

Because this class is a directed studies, there is no required class meeting. However, it is recommended that students come to class before the beginning of the biology class (i.e., at 9:00am) so that we can discuss the readings and issues that they raise.  Students enrolled in the 2 credit course will select two of the required books.  Students enrolled in the 4 credit section will read all three books. 

Grading:

Students will prepare analytical essays ("response pieces") on the required readings. These essays will evaluate a selection of articles in the books, focusing on issues they present and providing examples from some of the biographical sketches of women in science. The essays should be 5-7 pages in length and not simply describe the book's content but provide critical reflection on some of the issues raised by the articles.


INTERNET RESOURCES ON WOMEN'S HISTORY

There are a number of resources available through the electronic media available at the Wayne State Libraries as well as on the internet. A few web sites of interest to those studying women in science include:

  • Ada Project Bibliographies on Women in Science and Engineering
  • American Women's History
  • Archives of Women in Science and Engineering
  • Bibliography on Women in Science
  • Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering
  • History of Race in Science
  • Faces in Science: African-Americans in the Sciences
  • Women at the Marine Biological Laboratory, Wood's Hole
  • Select Bibliography on Women in Science, Medicine, and Engineering

    The following "Select Bibliography" of books and articles treating women's participation in science, medicine, and engineering encompasses but a small portion of the growing body of literature on women in science and medicine. For a fuller list, see the extensive bibliography on women in science published in 1993 by the Women's Studies Librarian of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    Biographies:

    Abir-Am, Pnina G. and Dorinda Outram, eds. Uneasy careers and intimate lives: women in science, 1789-1979. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

    Keller, Evelyn Fox. A feeling for the organism: the life and work of Barbara McClintock. New York: W. H. Freeman, 1983.

    Ogilvie, Marilyn Bailey. Women in science: antiquity through the nineteenth century: a biographical dictionary with annotated bibliography. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT press, 1986.

    McGrayne, Sharon Gertsch. Nobel Prize women in science: their lives, struggles and momentous discoveries. New York: Birch Lane Press, 1993.

    Pycior, Helena M., Nancy Slack, and Pnina Abir-Am, eds. Creative couples in the sciences. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996.

    Sands, Aime. "Never Meant to Survive: A Black woman's journey--an interview with Evelynn Hammonds," in The "racial" economy of science: toward a democratic future. Edited by Sandra Harding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.

    Women in medicine:

    Bonner, Thomas Neville. To the ends of the earth: women's search for education in medicine. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992.

    Leavitt, Judith W., ed. Women and health in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984.

    Morantz-Sanchez, Regina M. Sympathy and science: women physicians in American medicine. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

    More, Ellen S. Restoring the balance: women physicians and the profession of medicine, 1850-1995.  Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999. 

    Women in particular sciences:

    Gould, Paula. "Women and the culture of university physics in late nineteenth-century Cambridge," British Journal for the History of Science 30 (1997): 127-150.

    Johnson, Jeffrey A. "German women in chemistry, 1895-1925," Pts 1 and 2. NTM: International Journal of History and Ethics of Natural Sciences, Technology and Medicine n.s. 6 (1998).

    Kidwell, Peggy. "Women Astronomers in Britain, 1780-1930," Isis, 74 (1984): 534-546.

    Ogilvie, Marilyn Bailey. "Obligatory Amateurs: Annie Maunder (1868-1947) and British Women Astronomers at the Dawn of Professional Astronomy," British Journal for the History of Science, 33 (2000): 67-84.

    Richmond, Marsha L. "Women in the early history of genetics: William Bateson and the Newnham College Mendelians," Isis, 92 (2001): 55-90.

    Shteir, Ann B. Cultivating women, cultivating science: Flora's daughters and botany in England, 1760-1860. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996.

    Warner, Deborah J. "Women Astronomers," National History 88, no. 5 (1970): 12-26.

    Women in engineering:

    Canel, Annie, Ruth Oldenziel, and Karin Zachmann, eds. Crossing Boundaries Building Bridges: Comparing the History of Women Engineers, 1870s-1990. Harwood Academic Publishers, 2000.

    Reynolds, Terry, ed. The Engineer in America: A Historical Anthology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

    Stanley, Autumn, Mothers and Daughters of Invention: Notes for a Revised History of Technology. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993.

    Trescott, Martha Moore, ed. Dynamos and Virgins Revisited: Women and Technological Change in History. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1979.

    Gender questions in science:

    Harding, Sandra. Whose science? Whose knowledge? Thinking from women's lives. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.

    Kohlstedt, Sally Gregory and Helen E. Longino, eds. Women, Gender, and Science, a special issue of Osiris 12 (1997).

    Shiebinger, Londa. Nature's body: gender in the making of modern science. Boston: Beacon, 1993.

    Women and science institutions:

    Richmond, Marsha L. "`A lab of one's own': The Balfour Biological Laboratory for Women at Cambridge University, 1884-1914," Isis 88 (1997), 422-455.

    Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982.

    Rossiter, Margaret W. Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940-1972. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

    Sociological analyses:

    Cole, Jonathan R. Fair science: women in the scientific community. New York: Free Press, 1979.

    Zuckerman, Harriet, Jonathan R. Cole, and John T. Bruer, The outer circle: women in the scientific community. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991.

    Last updated: 23 August 2003

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