Abstract
Over the past couple of decades, scholars have shown that scientific practice and knowledge can be meaningfully analyzed as products of collaboration between marital partners. Generally, the preoccupation has been to compensate for female collaborators’ undervalued contributions to joint scientific work, for which the men typically received fuller professional recognition. The present volume revisits the question of how personal relationships and scientific practice intersected, but beyond the constraints of heterosexual marriage and with particular attention to the influence of cultural factors. Building upon recent trends in gender and science scholarship, the volume’s authors deeply analyze the dynamics of partnerships in relation to scientific work, focusing on how the partners’ social and political agendas, work-life (im-)balances, and public-relations strategies produced distinct forms of collaboration. In so doing, the authors expose collaborative processes as dynamic, malleable constructs as opposed to variations upon a monolithic theme across history. By analyzing particular collaborations – and their politics – in context, the authors avoid judging collaborative successes and failures against anachronistic measures. Indeed, our volume’s emphasis is in explaining how such measures came to be.
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Notes
- 1.
Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. xviii. Also appearing during this “crest,” see Vera John-Steiner, Creative Collaboration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), esp. Chapter 2, “Partnerships in Science,” pp. 39–62.
- 2.
Steven Shapin, “History of Science and Its Sociological Reconstructions,” History of Science 20 (1982), 157–211.
- 3.
Spencer Weart, “The Physicist as Mad Scientist,” Physics Today no. 6 (June 1988), 28–37.
- 4.
Alvin M. Weinberg, “Impact of Large-Scale Science on the United States,” Science 134, no. 3473 (1961), 161–164, and Derek J. de Solla Price, Little Science, Big Science (New York: University Press, 1963).
- 5.
Warren Bennis and Patricia Ward Biedeman, Organizing Genius: The Secrets of Creative Collaboration (Reading, MA: Addison-Weseley, 1997), p. xv.
- 6.
Ibid., pp. 1, 171–195.
- 7.
G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes, Women of Science: Righting the Record (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990).
- 8.
Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am, “Introduction,” in Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am, eds., Creative Couples in the Sciences (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 3–35, on p. 8.
- 9.
Ibid., p. 4.
- 10.
Particularly on the domestic context, see Pnina Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram, eds., Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987). As entry-points into the history of emotions, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Worrying about Emotions in History,” The American Historical Review 107 (2002), 821–845; Peter N. Stearns, “History of Emotions: Issues of Change and Impact,” in Michael Lewis, Jeanette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, eds., Handbook of Emotions (New York: The Guilford Press, 2008), pp. 17–31. Two centers devoted to the history of emotions are Geschichte der Gefühle, located at the Max-Planck-Institut für Bildungsforschung (Max Planck Institute for Human Development) in Berlin, and the Centre for the History of the Emotions at Queen Mary, University of London.
- 11.
Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am, “Introduction” (ref. 8), p. 8.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 6.
- 13.
On compensatory women’s history, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 13. Further volumes on collaborative couples include Ulla Fölsing, Geniale Beziehungen. Berühmte Paare in der Wissenschaft (Munich: Verlag C.H. Beck, 1999); Elizabeth G. Creamer and Associates, Working Equal: Collaboration among Academic Couples, RoutledgeFalmer Studies in Higher Education 25 (New York: RoutledgeFalmer, 2001), and Annika Berg, Christina Florin, and Per Wisselgren, eds., Par i vetenskap och politick: Intellektuella äktenskap i moderniteten. Umeå: Boréa Bokförlag, 2011.
- 14.
Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: Still a Useful Category of Analysis?” Diogenes 57, no. 1 (2010), 10. For the classic articulation of Scott’s argument, see Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Analysis,” American Historical Review 91 (1986), 1053–1075.
- 15.
Paul White, Thomas Huxley: Making The “Man of Science,” in David Knight and Sally Gregory Kohlstedt, eds., Cambridge Science Biographies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 5.
- 16.
Ibid., pp. 6–31; see also Paul White, “Science at Home: The Space between Henrietta Heathorn and Thomas Huxley,” History of Science 34 (1996), 33–56; Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marriage and Morals among the Victorians and Other Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, 1986).
- 17.
White, Thomas Huxley (ref. 15), p. 29.
- 18.
Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life: The Social Construction of Scientific Facts (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1979), Chapter 2.
- 19.
Useful portals into the rich literature are Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Donald L. Opitz, “Re-Imag(in)Ing Women in Science: Projecting Identity and Negotiating Gender in Science,” in Ida H. Stamhuis, Teun Koetsier, Cornelius de Pater and Albert van Helden, eds., The Changing Image of the Sciences, (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2002), pp. 105–139; and Ann B. Shteir and Bernard Lightman, eds, Figuring It Out: Science, Gender, and Visual Culture (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006), especially “Introduction,” pp. 1–13.
- 20.
Suzanne Le-May Sheffield, “Gendered Collaborations: Marrying Art and Science,” in ibid., pp. 240–264.
- 21.
In breaking open literary and visual representing processes to historical and sociological scrutiny, the now classic work is Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, corr. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). See also Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Marina Frasca-Spada and N. Jardine, Books and the Sciences in History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
- 22.
On women’s anonymity in literature, see especially Catherine Gallagher, Nobody’s Story: The Vanishing Acts of Women Writers in the Marketplace, 1670–1820 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994). For a famous case of (male) anonymity in science writing, see James A. Secord, Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). On the “familial format” in women’s scientific writing, Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760–1860 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); and Barbara T. Gates, Kindred Nature: Victorian and Edwardian Women Embrace the Living World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
- 23.
Claire G. Jones, Femininity, Mathematics and Science, 1880–1914 (Houndmills, Basingstoke, 2009), pp. 74–76, 81–83, 93–116.
- 24.
Historical work on scientific biography has grown in the past decade. Important entrés into the rich literature include Thomas Söderqvist, ed., The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), and Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, eds., Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). See also Juliette Atkinson, Victorian Biography Reconsidered: A Study of Nineteenth-Century ‘Hidden’ Lives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
- 25.
Margaret Rossiter, “The Matilda Effect in Science,” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993), 325–341.
- 26.
For a pioneering exploration of the relationship between private and professional contexts in science, and the “incidental concomitant exclusion of women,” see especially Abir-Am and Outram, Uneasy Careers (ref. 10) (quote on p. 4). On geographies of science, see especially David N. Livingstone, Putting Science in Its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Charles W. J. Withers and David N. Livingstone, eds., Geographies of Nineteenth-Century Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
- 27.
This shift is often summarized as “professionalization” of the sciences, a concept which has received wide historical critique. For an overview of the historiography, particularly useful is J. B. Morrell, “Professionalisation,” in R. C. Olby, G. N. Cantor, J. R. R. Christie, and M. J. S. Hodge, eds., Companion to the History of Modern Science, (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 980–989; for an example of the critiques in the case of Britain, see Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Public Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain (1991), rpt. edn. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003): “Undoubtedly, ‘professionalization’ does helpfully describe much of what differentiated intellectual life in 1930 from that of 1850, but the implied assumption about a direct path of development between those two dates may lead us to misperceive what was actually happening in, let us say, 1890” (p. 230). Michel Foucault conceptualized a related, broader cultural shift defined by scientific discourses; see especially Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1966).
- 28.
On the Marine Biological Laboratory as “summer resort,” see Philip J. Pauly, “Summer Resort and Scientific Discipline: Woods Hole and the Structure of American Biology, 1882–1925,” in Ronald Rainger, Keith R. Benson, and Jane Maienschein, eds., The American Development of Biology (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), pp. 121–150.
- 29.
Recent research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology into the dynamics of group work also points to the importance of women in contributing to a “collective intelligence” factor shown to be statistically significant to the effectiveness of group performance; see Anita Williams Woolley, Christopher F. Chabris, Alex Pentland, Nada Hashmi, and Thomas W. Malone, “Evidence for a Collective Intelligence Factor in the Performance of Human Groups,” Science 330 (2010), 686–688.
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Opitz, D.L., Lykknes, A., Van Tiggelen, B. (2012). Introduction. In: Lykknes, A., Opitz, D., Van Tiggelen, B. (eds) For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences. Science Networks. Historical Studies, vol 44. Springer, Basel. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-0348-0286-4_1
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