Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A Lab of One's Own describes the experiences of some extraordinary but sadly neglected scientific women who tasted independence, responsibility, and excitement in World War One. Understanding the past is crucial for improving the future, and Patricia Fara examines how inherited prejudices continue to limit women's scientific opportunities.Suffragists aligned themselves with scientific and technological progress. Defying arguments about intellectual inferiority and child-bearing responsibilities, during the War they won support by mobilising women to enter conventionally male domains, including science, industry, medicine, and the military. A Lab of One's Own reveals these women's stories, celebrating successes and analysing setbacks. In 1919, the suffragist Millicent Fawcett declared triumphantly that "The war revolutionised the industrial position of women. It found them serfs, and left them free." She was wrong: although women had helped the country to victory and won the vote for those over thirty, they had lost the battle for equality. Men returning from the Front reclaimed their jobs, and conventional hierarchies were re-established - although now the nation knew that women were fully capable of performing work traditionally reserved for men.

Table of contents provided by Syndetics

• List of Illustrations (p. xi)
• List of Abbreviations (p. xiii)
• Part I Preserving the Past, Facing the Future
• 1 Snapshots: Suffrage and Science at Cambridge (p. 3)
• 2 A Divided Nation: Class, Gender, and Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (p. 14)
• 3 Subjects of Science: Biological Justifications of Women's Status (p. 30)
• Part II Abandoning Domesticity, Working for the Vote
• 4 A New Century: Voting for Science (p. 49)
• 5 Factories of Science: Women Work for War (p. 69)
• 6 Ray Costelloe/Strachey: The Life of a Mathematical Suffragist (p. 92)
• Part III Corridors of Science, Crucibles of Power
• 7 Scientists in Petticoats: Women and Science before the War (p. 115)
• 8 A Scientific State: Technological Warfare in the Early Twentieth Century (p. 134)
• 9 Taking Over: Women, Science, and Power During the War (p. 149)
• 10 Chemical Campaigners: Ida Smedley and Martha Whiteley (p. 166)
• Part IV Scientific Warfare, Wartime Welfare
• 11 Soldiers of Science: Scientific Women Fighting on the Home Front (p. 183)
• 12 Scientists in Khaki: Mona Geddes and Helen Gwynne-Vaughan (p. 197)
• 13 Medical Recruits: Scientists Care for the Nation (p. 216)
• 14 From Scotland to Sebastopol: The Wartime Work of Dr Isabel Emslie Hutton (p. 239)
• Part V Citizens of Science in a Post-War World
• 15 Interwar Normalities: Scientific Women and Struggles for Equality (p. 265)
• 16 Lessons of Science: Learning from the Past to Improve the Future (p. 280)
• Endnotes (p. 287)
• Bibliography (p. 309)
• Picture Credits (p. 323)
• Index (p. 325)

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

Fara (Science: A Four Thousand Year History), a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, shares the captivating stories of the unheralded British women whose valuable scientific and medical work contributed to an Allied victory in WWI. These "scientific pioneers" were marginalized by their contemporaries and, until now, largely passed over by historians. Fara ranges over a broader time period than the four years that encompassed the war and offers "new ways of thinking about the early twentieth century by looking simultaneously at the involvement of science and of women." The book's first two parts comprise a crisp discussion of politics and society in Britain, highlighting suffragist activism. Fara lays out the historical connection between science-particularly its role in determining the status of women-and suffragists, who used science to argue for equality. The war takes center stage at the narrative's midpoint, but without the familiar battle accounts. Fara vividly recounts the experiences of the educated, capable women who stepped into men's jobs as chemists, cryptographers, statisticians, meteorologists, and doctors. She brings the book's two halves together in the penultimate chapter, evaluating how these expanded roles for women in wartime affected the movement for gender equality. Fara tells this remarkable tale with intelligence and verve. Illus. (Mar.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

For many, "women on the home front" calls WW II readily to mind, but in the US and Europe, it was during WW I that women first took on crucial military, manufacturing, and technical roles. Several monographs explore British women's contributions, including Airth-Kindree's Munitionettes (1987), Braybon's Women Workers in the First World War (1989), and Grayzel's Women's Identities at War (1999). However, despite works such as Aubin and Goldstein's The War of Guns and Mathematics (CH, Apr'15, 52-4262), there is much still to tell of women's participation in the workforce as scientists and mathematicians. Similarly, histories of women's suffrage in Britain often tend toward biography or take the long view. Fara (Univ. of Cambridge) marks the simultaneous centennials of armistice and suffrage by highlighting the overlap between the suffrage movement and women's war work in STEM fields. Not all women workers lobbied for the vote, but all struggled to have their professional efforts taken seriously. They engaged in myriad activities, from health and medicine to education and espionage. Fara thoroughly documents her research, but her prose is accessible to nonspecialists. Her organizational choice to structure some chapters as thematic and some as biographical, however, is puzzling. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --Amy K. Ackerberg-Hastings, independent scholar

Kirkus Book Review

A scholarly study of the role of suffragists in the years leading up to World War I, of women scientists during the war, and of the kind of discrimination they still face today.Fara (History and Philosophy of Science/Univ. of Cambridge), who has written previously on both the history of science and the place of women in that history (Scientists Anonymous: Great Stories of Women in Science, 2007, etc.), introduces readers briefly to the status of women and then takes a closer look at the suffragist movement that had been hammering away for years at the barriers preventing women from full participation in society. When the war called men away, women became essential replacements in traditionally male jobs in science, technology, and medicine, but they were often seen as temporary, inferior, and cheaper replacements. The author provides profiles of many of the educated, talented, and resourceful individuals who temporarily filled these jobs. However, as Fara notes, for many of these women, "the War seems to have represented a career hiccup rather than a life-altering event." When the men returned, many women were forced into lower-status positions, if they kept a job at all. Still, the war had given women a taste of independence and had shown that social change was possible and that there would be no going back to prewar conditions. Furthermore, writes Fara, women had successfully demonstrated their competence, and many had acquired professional qualifications not previously available to them. The author concludes that the suffragists had a clear goalgetting women the right to vote, a right that was granted in 1918 to British women over 30but that the discrimination facing women continues to be "elusive, insidious, and stubbornly hard to eradicate." Choice selections from Fara's wide reading open each chapter.A densely written, well-documented history of the British experience that will resonate with American women as well. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Patricia Fara lectures in the history of science at Cambridge University, where she is a Fellow of Clare College. She is the President of the British Society for the History of Science (2016-18) and her prize-winning book, Science: A Four Thousand Year History (OUP, 2009), has been translated into nine languages. In addition to many academic publications, her popular works include Newton: The Making of Genius (Columbia University Press, 2002), An Entertainment for Angels (Icon Books, 2002), Sex, Botany and Empire (Columbia University Press, 2003), and Pandora's Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (Pimlico, 2004). An experienced public lecturer, Patricia Fara appears regularly in TV documentaries and radio programmes such as In our Time. She also contributes articles and reviews to many journals, including History Today, BBC History, New Scientist, Nature and the Times Literary Supplement.