Interview with author Patricia Fara

WWI gave Women Scientists a Chance to Shine 

By Simon Worrall
via the nationalgeographic.com web site

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, 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.

Patricia FaraSpeaking 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, 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 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. 

Read the entire article on the nationalgeographic.com web site.

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