No Longer at the Margins: A Digital Project to Amplify Access to the Archives of Women in Science

Histories of science have long been concerned with the development of technologies and significant discoveries, celebrating the “lone” male scientists behind those developments. These histories have not only largely overlooked the collaborative nature of science, but also (and especially) the intellectual accomplishments and contributions of women in the production of scientific knowledge. While women have always been part of science, they have been pushed to the margins–or excluded altogether–from scientific institutions and teams. Indeed, “[w]omen have long been ‘in science,’ but not central to science” (Frank Fox 2006, quoted in Sugimoto and Larivière 2023). Nonetheless, women have always found a way to engage in the scientific enterprise. Archives, likewise, demonstrate that women have always been part of science–if we look close enough, we see they are there. But to say that finding women scientists in the archival record is only a matter of looking belies the complexities of archival research and of archives themselves, the societies they document, and the very real and entrenched biases which they evidence–all of which must be disentangled by archivists and archival researchers in finding women scientists in the archives. 

Taking the complexities of disentangling women scientists from the archival record, this paper discusses a project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities that seeks to amplify women in science by digitizing and enhancing access to the papers of several women who were involved in the domestic science movement. Domestic science was an important entryway into science for women. While women were often pushed to the margins of scientific fields and knowledge production, domestic science and the home itself could be a space where women “participated in science on their own terms” (Reser and McNeill 2021). In the context of science education at universities in the United States in a society that largely excluded women from having formal roles in science, domestic science was an important way in which women were able to receive science education and participate in science. Land grant universities in particular provided these avenues to pursue science education. Historian Amy Sue Bix notes that “...many in American society considered it inappropriate or odd for women to pursue science seriously. But at land-grant colleges, female faculty developed pioneering “domestic science” programs, where ideals of intelligent femininity justified teaching women chemistry, as well as physics, nutrition and household-technology” (Bix 2013). Domestic science is not only important for the study of science education for women at land-grant institutions, but also as a way that women were able to participate in the scientific enterprise. The papers of these women scientists include correspondence that illustrates the development of and debates about scientific concepts, as well as publications they authored on different topics. By digitizing the materials and using digital humanities tools and methods to enhance access to them, this project seeks to open up a greater awareness of the ways in which domestic science was a site of scientific knowledge production, and above all, the women who were important innovators in this space.