The admission of the first women to the Royal Society of London

Abstract

An early skirmish in the history of women and the Royal Society was the proposal for the Fellowship of the physicist and engineer Hertha Ayrton, in 1902. This was not accepted, following Counsel’s opinion that she could not be a Fellow because she was a married woman (and the position of unmarried women was very doubtful). If the Society wished to admit women it should apply for a supplemental charter, which would be granted, given the support of a sufficient proportion of the Fellows. In 1906 Hertha Ayrton received the Hughes medal for original discovery in the physical sciences, 50 years ahead of the Society’s next award of a medal to a woman. In 1919 the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act removed legal barriers to the admission of women by bodies governed by charter. In the debate on the Bill, Martin Conway, Member of Parliament for the United Universities and a Vice-President of the Society of Antiquaries, raised an amendment specifying membership of the learned societies. This was opposed by the Solicitor-General, who declared that learned societies refusing to elect qualified women members would be acting in opposition to the will of the House of Commons and the intentions of the Government, and could be dealt with when their subsidies came before Parliament under the Civil Service Vote (not that they were). The Antiquaries elected women Fellows from 1920, as did the Chemical Society. At the Royal Society, no woman was proposed again until 1943.

Celebrating women conducting research in freshwater ecology … and how the citation game is damaging them

“…Even after women secured opportunities to study and hold academic positions, sustained research contributions by women were not celebrated; for example, very few national academies of science elected women members before 1945 (Mason 1992), and women continued to be barred from whole research areas, such as anything to do with Antarctica. As usual, these exclusions were justified by flimsy excuses.…”

Ladies, Gentlemen, and Scientific Publication at the Royal Society, 1945–1990

“…1944 that two more women were finally nominated for the Fellowship. 2 After a postal vote of the Fellows, Kathleen Lonsdale and Marjory Stephenson were duly admitted in 1945 (Mason, 1992).…”

Proceedings of the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM 2018)

“…However, although women could mix socially in mathematical and scientific circles, they could not hold an official position. Mary Somerville could make money from the sales of her books-her Mechanism of the Heavens, Somerville [1831], an acclaimed translation and commentary on the celestial mechanics of Pierre-Simon Laplace (1749-1827), Laplace [1798], became a recommended text for men studying for the Mathematical Tripos at Cambridge-and she could have a paper published by the Royal Society but there was no question of her being admitted as a Fellow of the Royal Society,Mason [1992]. The first women mathematician to be admitted was Mary Cartwright(1900-1998) in 1947.…”