Women in STEM
- History Fix Podcast
- Mar 15
- 40 min read
Updated: Mar 22
Episodes 154 & 155: How 12 Courageous Women Shattered Gender Norms to Revolutionize Math and Science Fields
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Part 1: In 1847, 150 members of the all male student body at Geneva Medical College in New York were tasked with an unexpected mission. The Dean had received an application for admission to the school. Nothing crazy there, the Dean received applications often and was responsible for deciding whether or not these hopefuls would be accepted. This time was different though, because the applicant was a woman. At the time, 1840s, there weren’t many medical schools in the United States and precisely none of them admitted women. Unsure what to do, the Dean passed the decision on to a group of 150 students, all men of course. If all 150 of them approved, the woman would be accepted. If even one disapproved, she would not be. The men read the application again and again, laughing. Surely this was some kind of practical joke, they thought. Surely this application was sent by a rival medical school as a joke, making fun of us. Eager to get in on the fun, all 150 students approved, formally accepting the applicant, Elizabeth Blackwell, into Geneva Medical College. But Elizabeth Blackwell was no joke. She was a real, flesh and blood woman and she would go on to become the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, graduating first in her class in 1849. Elizabeth Blackwell is less of an anomaly than you might think, though. While math and science fields remain mostly dominated by men to this day, many women have left their marks, courageously defying gender norms to usher in revolutionary new ideas that changed the world forever. But here’s the thing - Elizabeth Blackwell, Nettie Stevens, Lise Meitner, Florence Siebert, Cecilia Payne, Grace Hopper - how many of these women have you heard of? And how many have been erased from history, their contributions all but forgotten? Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I tell surprising true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I’m always so in awe of women, historical women, who managed to pursue their math and science related passions. Like, truly. These fields were so completely male dominated for so much of history it’s really remarkable that any woman managed to bust her way in. So, I want to focus on some of these women in honor of women’s history month. I’ve touched on a few already in the past, Ada Lovelace from episode 3 who invented computer programming well before computers ever became a thing, I did a mini fix about Marie Curie that you can find on the Patreon. And then I’ve mentioned others in passing, Lise Meitner, Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein. But, to be honest, I wasn’t sure how many women in STEM I’d be able to dig up. And then I started digging and there are so many of them, it was very difficult to narrow it down to an amount that could fit into an episode of History Fix. In fact, I was unable to do that, so this is going to be a two part episode. This week, we’ll talk about 6 women who shattered gender norms for their times, becoming truly world changing pioneers in critical math and science fields. And next week I have 6 more women in STEM for you. But, I want you to keep track, you guys. I want you to tally up as you listen this week and next week, tally up how many of these women you have heard of. I want you to record that number and then I want you to think about what these women accomplished and where we would be without their accomplishments. How would your life be different if it weren’t for these 12 women. That’s your homework.
Our first woman in STEM is Elizabeth Blackwell. I hate to admit it but I had not heard of Elizabeth Blackwell. Elizabeth is most known for being the first woman in the United States to receive a medical degree. But you guys, she goes so far beyond that. Her story is so incredibly inspirational. We’re starting with a bang here. Elizabeth got her medical degree in the US but she was not from the US originally. She was born near Bristol, England in 1821 and she was the third of nine children in her family. Her father, Samuel Blackwell was a sugar refiner, quaker, and, as many quakers were, an anti-slavery activist. In 1832, the Blackwell family moved to the United States, so Elizabeth would have been 11 years old at the time. They settled in Cincinnati, Ohio. But, then, in 1838, Elizabeth’s father died leaving the family in a bad financial situation. In order to support the family, Elizabeth, her mother, and her two older sisters all began working as teachers which was one of the only jobs women could actually do at the time.
Elizabeth had a bit of a change of heart though, after a conversation with a dying friend. This friend told her, as she lay dying, that the whole ordeal would be much easier to bear if only she had a female physician. She was being tended to by strictly male doctors and she felt like a female doctor would have been more comforting, or whatever. So, at this time, there were very few medical colleges in the United States and none of them accepted women. Most male physicians didn’t even have medical degrees. They just worked as apprentices under other male physicians and then got to work. You know, do you need a doctor or not? Does it really matter if he has a medical degree if he’s the only one in town who can save you? The need was there and so the lack of degrees was often overlooked. But there were medical colleges and medical degrees were becoming more and more of a thing, right this is the 1800s when the modern medical field was practically invented. It was essentially the wild west before that.
While teaching, and with this push from her dying friend, Elizabeth lived with the families of two physicians in Asheville, North Carolina and then Charleston, South Carolina who mentored her. At this point, she really makes up her mind. She wants to be a doctor. Like a legit doctor. She goes to Philadelphia to seek out some Quaker friends there. She hopes these friends can help her get into medical school, although, remember, literally no medical schools admit women. She’s going to try anyway. Most of the people who are trying to help her suggest that she either go to Paris to study medicine or disguise herself as a man to try to get into one of the schools in the US. Those are her options. But Elizabeth doesn’t do either of those things. She starts applying to medical schools in the US as a woman and she is rejected over and over again. The reasons for rejection included, number one, that she was a woman and therefore intellectually inferior. And, number two, that she might not actually be intellectually inferior. That she might prove to be competition to the men and that she could not expect them to, and I quote “furnish her with a stick to break our heads with,” end quote. Like they were so worried, so afraid, that she might prove women were actually capable and intelligent and therefore competition to men, that they would not even give her the chance to prove it in order to keep men on top. Barf.
But, despite many rejections, Elizabeth did finally receive an acceptance letter to Geneva Medical College in Geneva, New York. Here’s the thing about this acceptance letter though, it was meant to be a practical joke. Yeah. Apparently the Dean and the faculty at the school who usually decided who to admit were unable to make a decision because of Elizabeth’s gender. So, they let 150 male students vote to decide. If even one of them voted no, Elizabeth would not be admitted. Well, all 150 of them voted yes, because they thought that her application had been submitted by a rival school as a joke. So they were like, joking back, all agreed to let this fictitious joke woman in, and Elizabeth was accepted. She didn’t see it as a joke, though. She took this acceptance very seriously and she showed up to Geneva Medical College, a real flesh and blood woman, ready to prove her worth.
It was a hard road, though of course. The road of a pioneer is always hard. Elizabeth faced a lot of discrimination while at school. She was often forced to sit separately at lectures and left out of labs altogether. She was shunned by the townspeople in Geneva for defying gender norms. But, despite all of that, she graduated first in her class in 1849, finally earning the respect of her professors and classmates. It seems they’d handed her the stick after all. After Geneva, she continued her training at hospitals in London and Paris, although she was usually relegated to working as a midwife or nurse. During this time, she focused on raising awareness about preventative care. She observed that male doctors rarely washed their hands between patients and that this quite often led to the spread of disease and infection. I talked about this quite a bit in my episode about childbirth, how male doctors delivering babies with dirty hands contributed to a lot of childbed fever, infection, that killed many many women. Elizabeth starts championing for the washing of hands which, to us now is like a no brainer, but back then there was very little understanding of germs and how they spread.
Elizabeth returned to New York in the 1850s but had trouble establishing herself as a doctor there because of gender discrimination. She opened up a clinic for poor women and then later, with her sister Dr. Emily Blackwell, she opened the New York Infirmary for Women and Children. Part of the mission of this infirmary was helping women and children, but also providing positions for female physicians. During the Civil War, the Blackwell sisters also worked to train nurses for Union hospitals.
In 1868, Elizabeth blended her two professions together, teaching and medicine when she opened a medical college in New York City. She left her sister Emily in charge there and made her way to London in 1875 where she became a professor of gynecology at the brand new London School of Medicine for Women. She also helped found the National Health Society and published several books, you know, just like, in her spare time. So where would we be without Elizabeth Blackwell? Well, very far behind. Elizabeth was a pioneer in women entering medical professions. She championed for the simple act of doctors washing their hands when no men seemed to recognize the necessity of that. She taught other women in the field. She trained nurses who saved the lives of Union soldiers during the Civil War, no doubt aiding in that victory. I didn’t even mention her involvement in the abolitionist movement and her efforts to educate Black children, that happened too. And then we look at where Elizabeth ended up, professor of gynecology, a medical field involving strictly women that had been massively overlooked forever due to the exclusion of women from the medical field. So you know, if you’re a woman, or anyone who appreciates doctors with clean hands, you should remember the name Elizabeth Blackwell.
Up next is Nettie Stevens. This one is going to make you mad, sorry. Nettie was born in 1871 in Vermont. Her mother died when she was only two years old and her father remarried and moved the family to Massachusetts. There, Nettie was sent to vocational school. For girls this meant they were either trained to be teachers or they were trained in the quote “domestic sciences” such as learning how to do laundry, which honestly, if you listened to my laundry episode, episode 65, was much more complicated than you think at the time. It was truly a science. Nettie was trained as a teacher and became a high school teacher in New Hampshire. She wanted more than this, though. Nettie dreamed of furthering her education and she did this, little by little, painstakingly of her own volition. The National Women's History Museum explains quote “She worked to save money towards that goal, investing her money back into her degrees throughout her education. First, she attended the Westfield Normal School, a teacher’s college. She continued her pattern of working, saving, and self-funding her education until she graduated. She sought additional training in the sciences, enrolling in 1896 at the age of 35 at the newly established Stanford University,” end quote.
So Nettie goes to Stanford where she starts studying biology, specifically zoology, genetics, and cytology - the structure and function of cells. By 1900 she had earned both bachelors and masters degrees in biology. Next, she headed to Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania to get her doctorate in biology. It was during her time at Bryn Mawr that she really started delving into the study of sex chromosomes. Genetics was a newly popular field of science and there was a lot that we did not understand. The National Women’s History Museum says quote “Over the course of human history, nearly all cultures have been fascinated and perplexed by the question of how sexes develop during pregnancy. Most ascribed this phenomenon to external factors. For example, in 15th-century Italy, women who were pregnant were told to eat warm foods and to avoid sitting on the cold ground to conceive a boy. In ancient Greece, one might eat lettuce and drink white wine in order to give birth to a girl. Not until the early 1900s did scientists begin to discover that biological sex is determined by genetics, transforming our modern-day ideas of human development, pregnancy, and chromosomes. Dr. Nettie Stevens was the first to provide concrete evidence for the genetic basis of sex in her two-part study: Studies of spermatogenesis (1905). Stevens produced this study as a postdoctoral research assistant at the Carnegie Institute of Washington. Through careful examination and experimentation, Stevens showed that the inheritance of the Y chromosome is connected with male development in several insect species. In her experiments, she noticed that male mealworms produced sperm with either a large chromosome (the X chromosome) or sperm with a small chromosome (the Y chromosome), but female mealworms only produced eggs with large chromosomes (X). She concluded that paternal chromosomes are responsible for sex determination,” end quote.
In 1910, Nettie made it on to the list of the top 1000 quote “men in science,” that’s what the list was called even though that year it actually had 18 women on it. They were like “nah, just keep calling it men in science. It has a nice ring to it.” Tragically, Nettie’s career was cut short when she died of breast cancer in 1912 at the age of 50. In just an 11 year career, she had published a staggering 38 manuscripts and made incredible breakthrough discoveries in genetics, specifically the discovery of X and Y chromosomes and how they determine gender.
Here’s the part I said would make you mad. Despite her discoveries, Nettie Stevens was essentially erased from the field after her death. Her discovery of X and Y chromosomes was credited instead to Edmund Beecher Wilson, a former professor at Bryn Mawr College who was involved in her research. In 1906, while Nettie was still alive, Wilson and another guy from Bryn Mawr, Thomas Hunt Morgan were invited to speak on these theories of sex determination at a conference. Nettie was not included. Thomas Hunt Morgan, who was Nettie’s advisor why she was getting her doctorate would later go on to claim a Nobel Prize in 1933 for quote “HIS discoveries concerning the role played by the chromosomes in heredity,” end quote. But get this, Thomas Hunt Morgan didn’t even accept this theory at first, that chromosomes were inherited. He disagreed with Nettie Stevens for decades even after she had proven that Y chromosomes were inherited and then accepted the Nobel Prize for discovering it. Barf again.
So, why do we need Nettie Stevens? Well, since Nettie’s revolutionary breakthroughs concerning chromosomes and how they are inherited, we’ve been able to apply that knowledge in big ways when it comes to hereditary diseases and conditions like Turner Syndrome and Down Syndrome. Her story also stands as an example of how women’s hard earned contributions to society are often overlooked and even misattributed to men. I promise she wasn’t the first woman to be erased, nor the last. This kind of injustice hurts, not just the legacy of Nettie Stevens, but all women, all little girls who strive to enter math and science fields but don’t see themselves represented there, don’t feel welcome, don’t feel good enough. When in reality, they are, but that history has been hidden from them.
Our next woman in STEM is someone I’ve talked about before briefly in episode 144 about the Manhattan Project: Lise Meitner. But, she deserves a deeper dive. Lise was born in 1878 in Vienna, Austria. She was the third of 8 children born to a Jewish lawyer named Phillip Meitner and his wife Hedwig. Yes, Hedwig, like Harry Potter’s owl. Love it. Lise always loved math and science but those were not fields women could easily enter and so she trained as a French teacher. Is anyone else noticing a pattern here? All three of these women we’ve talked about so far were teachers before they were other things. I’m honored to count myself among them. In 1897, the University of Vienna finally began admitting women and Lise immediately applied and was accepted. She became one of the first women to earn a doctoral degree in physics in 1906 and only the second woman to receive a degree period from the University of Vienna.
During her work there at the University of Vienna, she became interested in radioactivity. This was a new concept. Back in 1896 a French physicist named Henri Becquerel had discovered that the element uranium gave off radiation. A bit later, Marie Curie, while working with uranium, coined the term radioactivity. So Lise’s interest is piqued. She goes to Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin to further her studies about radioactivity. At the time Berlin was in Prussia not Germany. And women were not admitted to universities in Prussia. So Lise couldn’t actually attend Friedrich Wilhelm University but she went anyway and she worked with another scientist named Otto Hahn in the basement of the laboratory. She couldn’t go in the rest of the laboratory, just the basement. But Lise and Otto were making some really awesome discoveries and so in 1912 they were invited to the newly founded Friedrich Wilhelm Institute where Lise was hired as assistant to physicist Max Planck in order to, you know, get her in, because women still weren’t allowed. This was a pretty lowly position. She mostly graded papers. But she was the first female scientific assistant in Prussia.
In addition to grading papers, she also, along with Otto Hahn, she also discovered nuclear fission. No big deal or anything. They discovered a bunch of other cool physics things I don’t really understand too, isotopes, the Auger effect, I don’t know. Lise became the first ever female physics professor at the University of Berlin. But then everything came to a screeching halt when Hitler came to power in the 1930s. Lise was Jewish and so this new regime was a big problem for her. She lingered in Berlin probably longer than she should have and was eventually snuck across the Dutch border in 1938, leaving behind all of her possessions.
She made her way to Stockholm, Sweden and continued her work there as a physicist. In 1944, Otto Hahn was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the discovery of nuclear fission. Just Otto Hahn. Lise was completely excluded despite the major role she played. So, to be clear, Otto Hahn first isolated the evidence that nuclear fission was a thing. Lise is the one who explained how the process actually happens. Otto was like “look something’s happening.” Lise was like “here, this is exactly what’s happening.” And yet, only Otto got that Nobel Prize. In fact, according to the Nobel Prize archive, Lise was nominated 19 times for Nobel Prizes in Chemistry between 1924 and 1948 and 29 times for Nobel Prizes in Chemistry between 1937 and 1965. Did she ever receive one? No.
It was Lise’s explanation of nuclear fission, her recognizing the devastating potential of this new discovery, that prompted fellow physicists Leo Szilard and Albert Einstein who had both escaped Nazi Germany to the United States, to write to US President FDR during World War II that, you know, hey, this technology exists it could potentially be used to create a bomb unlike any the world has ever seen and, by the way, they know about it in Germany. Because Lise’s partner Otto Hahn was still in Germany. This letter kick started the Manhattan Project which developed the first nuclear bomb. That’s all episode 144, go back and listen if you missed it. Lise was asked to join the Manhattan Project, to travel to Los Alamos, New Mexico and be part of that but she declined saying quote “I will have nothing to do with a bomb,” end quote.
Lise Meitner lived to the ripe old age of 89 and passed away in her sleep in 1968 in Cambridge England. Much later, in 1997, a new element called Meitnerium was named in her honor. So where would we be without Lise Meitner? Well her co discovery of nuclear fission undeniably changed the world in both good and bad ways. This discovery ushered in the atomic age, paving the way for the development of nuclear power and also nuclear weapons. Wherever you stand when it comes to nuclear technology, it’s still safe to say that Lise’s impact on the world was nothing short of explosive.
In 1990, a year before her death, American biochemist Florence Siebert was inducted into the Women’s Hall of Fame. Around that time, she sat down for an interview in which she reflected on her very long life, she was 92 at the time. In this interview she says quote “it never dawned on me that I was ever going to be considered important,” end quote. So, what makes Florence Siebert, a woman you’ve probably never heard of so important?
Florence was born in 1897 in Pennsylvania. Pretty wild that someone born in the 1800s was still alive up until my 3rd birthday. Speaking of 3 year olds, when Florence herself was 3 years old, she personally experienced the impact of infectious disease. Both Florence and her older brother contracted polio in 1900. They luckily both survived but Florence faced lifelong complications. She had learned to walk again using leg braces but she was left with a limp for the rest of her life. And so, Florence was disabled from the time she was 3 years old because of this bout of Polio. But, she never let that stand in her way. She ended up earning a PHd from Yale University in biochemistry in 1923. Through her research there at Yale, she realized that bacterial contamination in vaccines were giving people infections, they were causing fevers in people who had been vaccinated. And so she developed a method to distill the water used in vaccines in order to prevent contamination.
After Yale, Florence went on to teach at various colleges, most notably, she taught for 27 years at the University of Pennsylvania. During her career as a biochemist, she mostly focused on tuberculosis. Tuberculosis was a centuries long pandemic. It is currently considered to be the world’s oldest and deadliest ongoing pandemic. TB is an airborne infectious disease caused by bacteria that mostly attacks the lungs and is usually fatal if left untreated. Luckily we can treat TB with antibiotics today but, if you listened to my antibiotics episode, episode 62, then you know that antibiotics are a pretty new thing. And so for centuries TB was more or less a death sentence. Florence started studying tuberculosis in 1930 before antibiotics were available. German microbiologist Robert Koch had identified the bacteria that caused the disease which is called mycobacterium tuberculosis. He also discovered that injecting “old tuberculin” into a patient’s arm would cause a reaction that would reveal whether or not they had been infected with tuberculosis. If they had been infected, a red bump would form at the injection site. It was a test to see if someone had TB or not, which is a big deal because it’s very contagious and it just spreads through the air. If someone with TB coughs on you, you could easily get it. So being able to test if someone was infected was a big deal as far as controlling the spread of the disease.
So what does Florence have to do with this? Well, Koch’s test was unreliable and often produced false negatives which kind of cancels everything out, right? If you give someone the test and they test negative but they might actually still have TB then what’s even the point of the whole test? Enter Florence Siebert. Florence was the first person to identify the specific protein that triggers an immune response that makes this red bump form in people who have been infected with TB. She was also able to purify this protein and create large quantities of it, this tuberculin purified protein derivative, or PPD that is used to this day for TB tests. This made the test much more reliable and accurate. I personally have had this stuff injected into my arm. I had to be tested for TB to work with children when I started teaching. I’m sure many of you listening right now have had a TB test done. That’s Florence Siebert, that stuff they’re injecting, she invented that stuff. And, in this way, we don’t send tuberculosis infected people into schools to infect our children. In addition to teachers and childcare workers, Healthcare workers, employees in homeless shelters and nursing homes, and people who work at correctional facilities, prisons, jails are all tested using Florence’s purified protein derivative in order to control the spread of tuberculosis which is still a thing guys. It’s not eradicated like smallpox or almost eradicated like polio. Tuberculosis is alive and well. It’s just much less deadly thanks to antibiotics and thanks to the work of Florence Siebert.
We gotta take it out of Earth’s atmosphere for this next one. Cecilia Payne was born in 1900 in Wendover, England. While studying at Cambridge University, she fell in love with science. But she wasn’t sure which field of science she wanted to pursue. Then, in 1919 she had the chance to attend a lecture, that made that decision for her. Astronomer Arthur Eddington gave a lecture about his recent expedition to observe the 1919 solar eclipse. This observation proved Einstein’s theory of general relativity. So Eddington is telling the crowd this at this public lecture. Cecilia is in the crowd and she is just enraptured. She is hanging on to his every word. She later recalled quote “The result was a complete transformation of my world picture. When I returned to my room I found that I could write down the lecture word for word,” end quote. So it was clear which science she wanted to pursue: physics, specifically astrophysics. Cecilia later had a chance to speak with Arthur Eddington at a Cambridge Observatory open night for the public. At this event, she told Eddington that she wanted to be an astronomer and he recommended some books for her to read. Turns out, she had already read all of those books. So Eddington invited her to use the observatory’s library where she just absolutely buried herself in the latest astronomical journals.
But, Cecilia’s potential was very limited at Cambridge. At the time, women could not get advanced degrees there, only men. So in 1923 she moved to the United States to further her studies. She would go on to become the first person, male or female, to earn a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard. She also later became the first woman to head a department at Harvard as chair of the Department of Astronomy. But, before that, she dedicated her studies to trying to figure out what stars were made of. This was something a lot of men had been studying and failing at. They were all wrong. They were all coming up short. Cecilia applied the new science of quantum physics to this question and she was able to, not only disprove all of the other theories, but she was able to isolate 18 elements that make up stars and show that the composition of nearly all the stars was the same and that they were all mostly made of hydrogen and helium.
The director of Harvard College Observatory, Harlow Shapley, sent Cecilia’s thesis on this to Professor Henry Norris Russell at Princeton who had been trying and failing to figure this out himself and he replied that her findings were quote “clearly impossible.” So, because of this Cecilia actually included a sort of disclaimer on her thesis saying that the conclusion, that stars are made of mostly hydrogen and helium was quote “almost certainly not real,” end quote. But she should never have doubted herself because, within a few years, it was clear to everyone in the field that Cecilia was correct. The American Museum of Natural History writes quote “From the time she finished her Ph.D. through the 1930s, Payne advised students, conducted research, and lectured—all the usual duties of a professor. Yet, because she was a woman, her only title at Harvard was “technical assistant” to Professor Shapley. Despite being indisputably one of the most brilliant and creative astronomers of the twentieth century, Cecilia Payne was never elected to the elite National Academy of Sciences. But times were beginning to change. In 1956, she was finally made a full professor (the first woman so recognized at Harvard) and chair of the Astronomy Department. Her fellow astronomers certainly came to appreciate her genius. In 1976, the American Astronomical Society awarded her the prestigious Henry Norris Russell Prize. In her acceptance lecture, she said, “The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something.” As much as any astronomer, she had fully experienced that most important of all scientific rewards,” end quote. I find that really interesting that she won the prestigious Henry Norris Russell Prize when Henry Norris Russell was the one who called her conclusion quote “clearly impossible.” Maybe it should have been called the Cecilia Payne prize.
Our final woman in STEM this week is Grace Hopper. And I really do hope you’re keeping track of how many of these you’ve heard of. Feel free to pop your number in a comment somewhere. Grace Hopper was born in New York City in 1906. She graduated from Vassar College with her undergraduate degree in mathematics in 1928 and then went on to earn both her masters and her PHd also in mathematics from Yale University. Grace’s story differs from all these other ladies though because she didn’t stay strictly in the academic world after that. When Pearl Harbor was bombed in 1941 and the US entered World War II, Grace decided that she needed to be part of it. She needed to do what she could to help. And so she attempted to enter the US military to help the war effort. She was initially denied because she was too small. She was 5 foot 6 but she was 16 pounds underweight for her height and so she was denied at first. She eventually received a waiver to join the US Naval Reserve Women’s Reserve. After completing an intense training program, she was assigned as a lieutenant junior grade to the Bureau of Ships Computation Project at Harvard University. There she worked on a project known as Mark I. Mark I was one of the world’s first computers. It was the first electromechanical computer in the United States. It was developed by a guy named Howard Aiken and Grace was part of his team. Her work with Mark I included computing rocket trajectories, creating range tables for new anti-aircraft guns, and calibrating minesweepers. She also wrote a 561 page user manual for Mark I. She later worked on Mark II and Mark III as well but eventually left Harvard because there were no permanent positions for women there at that time.
Later, Grace revolutionized computer programming by inventing the first compiler. I’m not going to pretend to know what that is but apparently it bridged the gap between human-readable code and machine language. Basically, she started writing computer programs in words instead of symbols, a language called FLOW-MATIC. Now she was told initially that this would never work but she went for it anyway and, it did work. She also helped develop COBOL, which, from what I understand, is like a universal computer language which made computers accessible to people who didn’t have like engineering or math backgrounds. It made them accessible to like normal people.
Outside of her prolific computer engineering career which earned her the nickname “Queen of Code,” Grace remained in the US military for 40 years, from when she entered during World War II in 1943 until she was 79 years old in 1986. This made her the oldest serving officer in the US armed forces, male or female. And she was highly respected. Her subordinates called her “Amazing Grace.” Grace died in 1992 and was buried at Arlington National Cemetery with full military honors. Throughout her life and since her death she has received more than 40 honorary degrees. In 1991 President George Bush awarded her the National Medal of Technology for quote “her pioneering accomplishments in the development of computer programming languages that simplified computer technology and opened the door to a significantly larger universe of users,” end quote. In 1996 the Navy a military destroyer after her, USS Hopper. And in 2016 she posthumously received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her quote “lifelong leadership role in the field of computer science.”
So, you know, what I think is so interesting about all six of these women is the clear throughline, this predictable theme that emerges where they face roadblock after roadblock because of their gender. All of them have trouble getting positions, getting into universities, getting degrees because of their gender. They are told again and again that they are inferior, that their ideas are wrong, couldn’t possibly be right, impossible, when in fact they are right. They are neglected when it comes to getting credit. They sit by while their male colleagues accept awards and acclaim. And, you know what, they never complain. Because they’re not in it for the awards and the acclaim. These women were pioneers in male dominated fields. They set the stage for other women, me and you, your mother, your sister, your daughter, to follow in their footsteps. In the words of Elizabeth Blackwell quote “For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women,” end quote. And so I say thank you to Elizabeth, Nettie, Lise, Florence, Cecilia, and Grace for their contributions to all women. Next week, more thank yous are in order, don’t miss it.
Part 2: Genevieve Grotjan was already feeling like a failure. Despite her love of math, despite earning a degree in math, she had been unable to land her dream job as a math teacher. It was 1936, the Great Depression, and jobs were hard to come by. She was lucky to land this position crunching numbers for the Railroad Retirement Board. It was a nice stable government job after all. But a government job meant passing the civil service math test. That shouldn’t be a problem. Genevieve was good at math. She completed the exam with ease and handed it in, went back to her desk. Little did Genevieve know at the time, her scores on that exam would catch the attention of William F. Friedman. Friedman didn’t work for the Railroad Retirement Board though. He was a cryptographer for the US army, tasked with heading the project to break the elusive Purple code used by Japan to communicate throughout the axis of evil during World War II. Little did Genevieve know, Friedman was looking for code breakers and her civil service test screamed code breaker. And so it seemed the aspiring math teacher turned number cruncher was destined for much greater things. Let’s fix that.
Hello, I’m Shea LaFountaine and you’re listening to History Fix where I tell lesser known true stories from history you won’t be able to stop thinking about. I am back this week with part two of my two parter on Women in STEM. As promised, I have six more incredible stories to share with you about women you’ve probably never heard of.
Now this first one may sound familiar if you listened to mini fix number 25 over on Patreon called “Back Door to War.” If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you should know that I have lots of exclusive mini episodes and other bonus content you can tap into at patreon.com/historyfixpodcast for just $5 a month. Patreon subscribers are literally what keep this show going. So, huge thanks to those who are subscribed. If you’re not and you’re a regular listener of the show, you should really consider it. Always linked in the description. But anyway, in mini fix 25 about the Pearl Harbor back door to war theory, I mentioned a woman by the name of Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein. Genevieve was an American mathematician and cryptoanalyst during World War II.
She was born in Buffalo, New York in 1913 and pretty much from the start was in love with math. From a very young age she aspired to be a math teacher, which is pretty much the only thing a girl who liked math could be in those days. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a math teacher, says the math teacher. Anyway, Genevieve graduated from the University of Buffalo in 1936 with a math degree and then tried finding a position teaching math. However, probably due to the Great Depression, she was unable to find a teaching job. I 100% understand this predicament. I graduated college in 2010 with straight As from a prestigious university and could not find a teaching job for 3 years thanks to the recession. So I deeply understand Genevieve’s struggles here. She instead took a job as a statistical clerk at the Railroad Retirement Board. This is a government organization that provides retirement benefits to past railroad workers. Because it’s a government position, Geneveive was required to take a civil service math test to, you know, prove that she could do the math needed for the job. Now, not only could Genevieve do the math needed for the railroad retirement job, she scored so high on the test that she caught the attention of US army cryptographer William F. Friedman.
Friedman was scouring the results of this civil service math test, coming from all sorts of government employees. He was looking for people who stood out as exceptionally talented mathematicians in order to recruit them to his cryptanalysis team. Genevieve's scores stood out especially because of her obvious skills in the areas of pattern recognition and logic. This is exactly what Friedman was looking for in a codebreaker. Because, 1939, the cusp of World War II, there are some pretty important codes waiting to be broken.
Friedman hired Genevieve to work as a junior cryptanalyst for the army’s Signals Intelligence Service or SIS. The main objective of the SIS in 1939 and 1940 was breaking the encryption used in Japan’s Type B Cipher Machine which was code named Purple. They needed to break this Purple code because they needed to know what the messages Japan was sending out said. Why? Because Japan was part of the axis of evil or whatever during World War II. To be clear, World War II had already begun as of September of 1939. The US did not enter the war until December 1941 but they were still working to crack this code in order to sort of stay on top of things and prepare for the possible inevitability of entering the war. They needed to know what these top secret Japanese messages said. In the end, it was Genevieve, in September of 1940 who eventually cracked the Purple code by picking up on patterns, discovering the cyclical nature of the code. I could go into detail here but it would be really boring. What you really need to know is that Genevieve figured out how the Japanese Purple code worked which allowed the SIS to build an equivalent Type B Code Machine, just like the Japanese were using, which allowed them to intercept almost all of the messages sent between Japan and its embassies in foreign countries. These intercepted messages served, throughout World War II, as the main source of information about Axis plans and movements.
After that, she was assigned to another project, the Venona project. World War II is over, the cold war has begun. So now, as part of the Venona Project, Genevieve works to decode encrypted messages sent by the Soviet Union’s KGB. She, just like before, she made a significant breakthrough which allowed the SIS, once again, to decode KGB messages. This was called quote “the most important single cryptanalytic break in the whole history of Venona,” end quote. Later, the Encyclopedia of American Women at War would call her cracking of the Japanese Purple code quote “one of the greatest achievements in the history of US codebreaking,” end quote.
In 1947, Genevieve resigned from her government job and started teaching math at George Mason University, which is really all she ever wanted to do anyway. She married a guy named Hyman Feinstein who worked as a chemist, actually, on the Manhattan project. Genevieve lived to be 93 years old, dying in 2006. It wasn’t until 4 years after her death, in 2010 that the National Security Agency inducted her, posthumously, into their hall of fame.
So, have you heard of Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein? And why does it matter? Well, do you enjoy freedom from fascist dictators? A fascist dictator from Germany killed as many as 20 million people in the years leading up to and during World War II. A nationalistic dictator from Japan who killed as many as 30 million people during that same time period? If so, than Genevieve Grotjan Feinstein matters a whole lot. It was her work in breaking the Japanese Purple code that led to the allied powers intercepting axis communications during the war which aided immeasurably in an allied victory. I mean that’s a mic drop by Genevieve.
Our next woman in STEM hails from the exact same time period as Genevieve. In fact, she was born just one year earlier in 1912 except in China. Chien-Shiung Wu is known to this day in China as the greatest female Chinese scientist of the twentieth century. Other nicknames include the First Lady of physics and the Chinese Marie Curie. So what earned her these title? Chien-Shiung was born in a small town in China in 1912, the same year that China transitioned from an empire to a republic. This would cause all sorts of problems with Japan over the next few decades which I really dig into in episode 142 about Pearl Harbor with my expert guest Quin Cho. And actually, we’re going to come back to this conflict next week too. But right now, you know, Chien-Shiung is just a small girl. She doesn’t know about all that’s to come yet. She was a middle child with two brothers. Her father did something rather unusual in China at the time in that he encouraged her to pursue her education as far as she possibly could. Her father even opened his own school that she attended when she was young. She later graduated from a University in Nanking, China, graduating in 1934 with a degree in physics. In 1936, she decided to move to the United States where she could earn an advanced degree in physics. So, let me just put that timing into perspective for you real quick. Chien-Shiung leaves Nanking, China in 1936. The very next year, in 1937 we have the Nanking massacre or the rape of Nanking. I’ve talked about this before. I will talk about it again. This is one of the most horrific historical events I never knew about. I don’t think many people in the Western world do know about it. The Nanking or Nanjing Massacre was a six week period of mass murder and rape in this Chinese city by the Imperial Japanese Army. The Chinese government maintains that as many as 300,000 were killed. So, Chien-Shiung left Nanking, the year before this happened.
She went to the United States where she studied nuclear physics at the University of California, Berkley. This also happened to be where J Robert Oppenheimer taught. You know that name if you listened to episode 144 about the Manhattan project. He was the leader of that project which developed the first atomic bomb. So Chien-Shiung studied under Oppenheimer. She graduated from Berkley in 1940, got married and moved to the east coast where she became the first female physics professor at Princeton. Okay, so 1940, she leaves California and heads east. Once again, Chien-Shiung has managed to escape tragedy just before it could befall her. After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, anti-Asian sentiment was strong on the west coast. People of Japanese ancestry were rounded up and forced into internment camps. Chien-Shiung was not Japanese but, if she had remained in California, she would have been heavily discriminated against and targeted anyway because of her Asian features. Luckily, she didn’t stay on the west coast. She left just in time.
In 1944 she took a job at Columbia University and got involved in the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb. She didn’t just get involved though, she made the whole thing possible. It was Chien-Shiung who figured out how to separate uranium into U-235 and U-238 isotopes using a process she developed called gaseous diffusion. This was critical. It was the only way to produce enough uranium to create an atomic bomb.
After the war, Chien-Shiung continued her work at Columbia University studying beta decay. During this time, she was approached by two other scientists, Tsung Dao Lee and Chen Ning Yang, who asked her to conduct a very difficult experiment to prove a theory they had about beta decay. I’m not sure why they didn’t just do the experiment themselves, maybe they couldn’t, but they asked Chien-Shiung to do it. She did the experiment successfully, it proved this beta decay theory they had and they, these two men, Lee and Yang, both received Nobel Prizes for it in 1957. Did Chien-Shiung get one of those Nobel Prizes for her part… nope. Did you really expect her to? Despite getting no credit, this experiment she conducted is referred to in textbooks as the Wu Experiment. Not the Lee experiment. Not the Yang experiment. The Wu experiment. Make that make sense.
Throughout her time at Columbia, Chien-Shiung also made breakthroughs while studying sickle-cell disease and she did receive many awards and honors - the Comstock Prize in Physics, the National Medal of Science, the Wolf Prize in Physics - and she was the first woman to serve as president of the American Physical Society. After retiring from Columbia in 1981, she focused on encouraging young girls to pursue careers in science through public speaking about her own experiences and support of educational programs for girls. She died in 1997 at the age of 84 and, this is the best part, I fully teared up when I read this part. Her ashes were buried in the courtyard of the school in China that her father had started, the place where it all began.
Once again, like with Lise Meitner, you know, Chien-Shiung’s contributions might be viewed as controversial because of her involvement in the invention of the atomic bomb. But you also have to consider her contributions to physics in general, her work with sickle cell, and her commitment to inspiring other young girls to pursue careers in science. I just can’t get over how Chien-Shiung always managed to be in the right place at the right time, or rather how she always avoided being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Up next is someone you have probably heard of thanks to the 2016 movie Hidden Figures: Katherine Johnson. Katherine Johnson is our first Black woman in STEM so far in this two parter. And you have to consider, you know, if white women faced roadblocks pursuing their math and science passions, think for a minute how much more difficult it was for Black women, border-line impossible. Katherine Johnson was born in West Virginia in 1918. Okay pause. Would you want to be a Black female in West Virginia in 1918? No. Why? Because literally all the odds are against you. You have no privilege. You have no opportunity. You have no power. That is the world in which Katherine Johnson was born. Now let me tell you what she made of it.
Katherine was brilliant as a young girl in school and she loved numbers. She was so good at math that she actually skipped several grades. By the age of 13 she was attending high school classes on the campus of the historically Black West Virginia State College. At 18 she moved on to attending the college itself, earning a math degree. She graduated in 1937 and began teaching at a Black public school in Virginia. How many of these women were teachers at some point? I’ve lost count now. In 1939, something rather remarkable happened quite a bit ahead of its time in West Virginia. They decided to integrate their graduate schools. West Virginia State University’s President hand selected Katherine as well as two Black men to be the first Black students in the graduate math program at the school. Katherine accepted the invitation but decided to leave the program soon after to start a family. It was kind of one or the other at the time. Women couldn’t really have both like men could.
She returned to teaching years later when her three daughters were older but it wasn’t until 1952 that Katherine found out about an open position at the all Black West Area Computing section of what at the time was called NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Today it’s called NASA, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. So Katherine goes to work for the precursor to NASA at the Langley research center in Hampton Roads, Virginia. She ended up working there for 33 years, calculating trajectories, launch windows, and emergency return paths for the first ever US manned space flights. Most notably, the successful mission of astronaut John Glenn, the first American in orbit. According to a biography by Margot Lee Shetterly on NASA’s website quote “In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. The complexity of the orbital flight had required the construction of a worldwide communications network, linking tracking stations around the world to IBM computers in Washington, Cape Canaveral in Florida, and Bermuda. The computers had been programmed with the orbital equations that would control the trajectory of the capsule in Glenn’s Friendship 7 mission from liftoff to splashdown, but the astronauts were wary of putting their lives in the care of the electronic calculating machines, which were prone to hiccups and blackouts. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Katherine Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” Glenn’s flight was a success, and marked a turning point in the competition between the United States and the Soviet Union in space,” end quote.
But if you were to ask Katherine Johnson what her greatest accomplishment was, she would say her contributions to the Apollo moon landing. It was Katherine who crunched the numbers that synced Apollo’s lunar module to the command module that orbited the moon, after all. She retired in 1986, saying of her time at Langley, quote “I loved going to work every single day,” end quote. Katherine received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015 and died in 2020 at the age of 101.
Let’s hang out in space for a little while longer with the rest of these ladies actually. It’s the space age. Next is Sally Ride. You may know Sally as the first American woman to travel into space. That’s sort of her claim to fame. But, let’s back it up to see how she got to that point. Sally was born in Encino California in 1951. She was very into tennis when she was young. In fact, as a teenager, she was ranked in the top 20 nationally in the junior tennis circuit. Sally actually dropped out of college her sophomore year to pursue a professional tennis career. But, after three months, she had a change of heart. She decided that getting a college education was more important and so she went to Stanford. I’m not sure how that works really. You drop out your sophomore year of college and then three months later you’re like actually never mind… mmm how bout Stanford? And they’re like sure! Come on! I don’t know, she must have impressed them. Sally eventually earned bachelors, masters, and doctorate degrees in physics from Stanford. So much for tennis.
After graduating, Sally saw an ad in the newspaper, a NASA ad. They were looking for people to join their astronaut program. I had no idea NASA looked for astronauts by putting ads in the newspaper but this was 1977 so, I don’t know, I guess things were different back then. So Sally applied to be in the astronaut program along with 8,000 other people. Of those 8,000 only 35 people were accepted and only 6 of them were women. So Sally entered the astronaut program where she completed a bunch of training.
In 1983, Sally was chosen as one of 5 crew members to go into space aboard the space shuttle Challenger STS-7, working as the flight engineer. No this was not the one that blew up. Not that Challenger. That happened a few years later. As the launch date approached, Sally was interviewed several times about preparations to go into space. She was repeatedly asked questions such as how space was going to affect her ability to reproduce and what kind of makeup she was going to take on the mission. Yes, y’all.
On June 18, 1983 Sally became the first American woman in space and also the youngest American in space. She went on another shuttle mission in 1984 and then worked on investigating the Challenger explosion in 1986. After that she worked as a physicist and physics professor at the University of California, San Diego. But her real passion was inspiring other girls to pursue careers in math, science, and technology with Sally Ride Science, a company she started in 2001. Sally Ride died in 2012 of pancreatic cancer at just 61 years old. She received a Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously in 2013, one year after her death.
We can’t leave space without talking about Mae Jemison. Mae Jemison was born in 1956 in Decatur, Alabama. Once again, not an ideal time or place to be a Black girl. Mae’s parents recognized this and moved the family to Chicago when Mae was around three years old. Mae graduated from Stanford in 1977 with degrees in chemical engineering and African American studies. Next she got her doctorate in Medicine from Cornell University. After that she worked as a medical doctor, a job that took her to Kenya in Africa. While there, she traveled to Egypt, Greece and Israel. She said after these travels quote “From all these places in Egypt and Israel, all the people, the ideas, one on top of the other, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Palestine, Israel, Romans, Nubians, and pharaohs, I began to understand the complexity of politics - and I also saw faith. I felt the wind gathering energy, and I understood that until we humans fully acknowledge how intertwined we are with one another, there will be endless suffering. Until people are willing to recognize and honestly, openly, and transparently discuss inequities, wrongs, aggression, violence, peace offerings, and history, not only will individuals suffer, but so will the planet,” end quote.
This time abroad inspired her to join the peace corps in 1983 as a medical officer. 1983 was the same year Sally Ride became the first American woman in space. Inspired by this, Mae applied for the astronaut program in 1985. Who knows if she would have been accepted or not because, due to the Challenger explosion in 1986, the program was paused. She applied again in 1987 and was one of 15 people chosen out of 2,000 applicants. In 1992, Mae went to space on the space shuttle Endeavor, becoming the first African American woman in space.
Mae worked for NASA for 6 years before leaving to combine her passions together. She had gained this valuable perspective while visiting Africa and especially Israel that everyone is intertwined and that we have to overcome inequities and violence or everyone and the Earth suffers. And so, after she leaves NASA, she sort of combines this mission, trying to help achieve this, with her space experience by starting an international space camp called The Earth We Share. She also taught at Dartmouth College and founded a consulting company called the Jemison group that focused on combining space and technology to improve everyday life on Earth. So, you know, she’s really trying to pay it forward here. Mae is really trying hard to make the world a better place and to incorporate her experiences and her perspective into achieving that goal.
Mae is the first of our women in STEM who is still alive as of the time of this recording. The National Women’s History Museum says quote “Mae Jemison currently lives in Houston, Texas and she stands by her principles, [quote within a quote] “Everyone should benefit from the bounty of this planet and its resources, not just those already well positioned. Solutions, technologies, and systems are more sustainable and beneficial when they are built drawing upon the full range of human perspective, skills, experiences, and talents.” She continues to inspire learners of all ages to reach for the stars,” end quote.
Our final woman in STEM, although there are so many others we could talk about, but the final one for now is Judith Love Cohen. I have been wanting to talk about Judith Love Cohen for so very long because she absolutely fascinates me. Even if you’ve never heard of Judith, I think it’s very likely that you’ve heard of her son, comedic actor and musician Jack Black. Judith was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1933. According to her Wikipedia page, by 5th grade her classmates were paying her to do their homework for them. Despite often being the only girl in her math classes, she decided she wanted to be a math teacher. She went to college to study math but ended up switching to engineering. After getting married, she moved to California where she worked as a junior engineer for North American Aviation during the day and attended the University of Southern California at night. According to Judith, she went through both her bachelors and masters degrees at USC without ever meeting another female engineering student.
After graduating with her masters degree in engineering in 1957, she went to work at Space Technology Laboratories where she would work until her retirement in 1990. During her time there, she worked on the guidance computer for the Minuteman missile. If you’re wondering what the Minuteman missile is, so was I. It is an intercontinental ballistic missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads over 6,000 miles away at speeds of over 15,000 miles per hour and it’s still active in the US today. Why? Well it’s supposed to be a nuclear deterrent. Like so other countries won’t drop atomic bombs on us because if they do we send out this thing. So Judith worked on that. She also, and this is considered the highlight of her career, she also worked on the Abort Guidance System that got the failed Apollo 13 astronauts back home safely. I have a whole episode about this, episode 25. Definitely go back and listen to that one if you missed it. It's a crazy story. Basically an oxygen tank exploded which forced the astronauts to pile into the lunar module to use as a sort of lifeboat to get back home before they even got to the moon. They’re piecing together, literally you guys, they’re piecing together duct tape, plastic bags, a sock to pull this off and it’s ultimately, unbelievably successful. This is where the famous audio “Houston we’ve had a problem” comes from, the Apollo 13 near disaster. Well, this Abort Guidance System that Judith worked on is what got the guys home safely in the lunar module.
Judith retired from aerospace engineering in 1990 and started a publishing company for children's books. She published a series of books called “You Can Be a Woman…” fill in the blank to encourage young girls to pursue careers in science and engineering. There was another series called “Green” that taught young children about protecting the environment.
My favorite story about Judith was told by her son Neil in a memorial tribute after her death from cancer in 2016. Neil says that, on the day Judith went into labor with his younger half brother, Jack Black, in 1969, she was troubleshooting problems with schematics. So she is fully working on the day she goes into labor. She manages to call her boss to tell him that she’s fixed the issue and then she delivers Jack right after. Truly illustrates the plight of a working mom. Like, I assure you none of the all male engineers she went to school with ever had to worry about workplace obstacles like that.
Once again we have to step back to consider the contributions of these women to our world today. Sure, they accomplished things, they cracked codes, they made scientific and mathematical breakthroughs, they went to outer space. But I’d argue that their most important contributions were as trailblazers. They opened the door for other women to follow in their footsteps, to follow them into careers in STEM. And for many, that was very intentional. We see them starting programs, publishing books to inspire young girls. To say, you know, “I did this and you can too.” Or, in the words of Katherine Johnson quote “Girls are capable of doing everything men are capable of doing. Sometimes they have more imagination than men,” end quote. Imagination, sure. A few other words come to mind too, though. Courage, determination, resilience. Because it’s one thing to get a doctorate in physics or math or whatever and make some amazing discovery or crack a code or go to space as a man in the early to mid 1900s. It’s another thing altogether to do that as a woman. The obstacles were nearly insurmountable. These women, Genevieve, Chien-Shiung, Katherine, Sally, Mae, and Judith plus six more last week, stand as testaments to what women are capable of. After all, anything men can do women can do bleeding.
Sources:
The College of Scholastica "12 historical women in STEM you've probably never heard of"
US Women in Nuclear "Women in Nuclear History: Lise Meitner"
The National Museum of Nuclear Science & History "Lise Meitner"
The Royal Society "Florence Siebert: From polio survivor to medical pioneer"
American Museum of Natural History "Cecilia Payne and the Composition of Stars"
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