Abstract
This chapter focuses on women in American mathematics during the century leading up to the founding of the AWM in 1971. In particular, it reviews results that appear in the authors’ 2009 book Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD’s and in the supplementary material that can be found on the webpage http://www.ams.org/publications/authors/books/postpub/hmath-34-PioneeringWomen.pdf. To provide context for the understanding of women’s early participation in American mathematics, we summarize the family backgrounds, education, and employment of the 228 women who earned doctorates before 1940. We provide details of the experiences and contributions of a number of these women.
We dedicate this chapter to the memory of our dear friend Uta C. Merzbach, who mentored us both from the time we met in January 1978 until her death on June 27, 2017.
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Notes
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One of the “girl teachers” was then 44 years old and had received her PhD in 1909.
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These interruptions were frequent, but not always, because of family responsibilities.
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For some, but not all of these women, marriage affected their professional situation adversely.
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Mayme Logsdon was a widow when she got her doctorate, Grace Murray Hopper was divorced early in her career, and Evelyn Wiggin Casner and Mina Rees did not marry until they were in their 50s when their careers were well established.
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The MAA Council changed its name to the Board of Trustees in 1920 while Cowley was a member.
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Of the 1,025 women questioned by Hutchinson, 371 had degrees in natural science or mathematics. Of the 371 nearly 40% were in chemistry
References
Budget Files, Department of Mathematics, College of Letters and Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives.
Early Women Doctorates Collection, Mathematics Collections, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution. Catalog number 2006.3037.
Green, Judy, and Jeanne LaDuke. 2009. Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD’s. Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society.
Green, Judy, and Jeanne LaDuke. 2016. Supplementary Material for Pioneering Women in American Mathematics. http://www.ams.org/publications/authors/books/postpub/hmath-34-PioneeringWomen.pdf. Accessed 14 Oct 2016.
Hutchinson, Emilie. 1929. Women and the Ph.D.: Facts from the Experiences of 1,025 Women Who Have Taken the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Since 1877. Greensboro: North Carolina College for Women.
Mathematics Department Papers, Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Archives.
Patterson, Samuel White. 1955. Hunter College: Eighty-five Years of Service. New York: Lantern Press.
R. G. D. Richardson Papers, Brown University Archives.
Wayne State University Archives.
Women Mathematicians and NMAH Collections. http://americanhistory.si.edu/collections/object-groups/women-mathematicians. Accessed 14 Oct 2016.
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Green, J., LaDuke, J. (2017). Pioneers: The Pre-1940 PhD’s. In: Beery, J., Greenwald, S., Jensen-Vallin, J., Mast, M. (eds) Women in Mathematics. Association for Women in Mathematics Series, vol 10. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66694-5_2
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