Matilda Josyln Gage was one of the most radical suffragists who not only campaigned and advocated for female rights, but also for Native American rights and abolitionism.
Famously referred to as “the woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time”, she was ostracised by other suffragists upon claiming that organised Christianity had oppressed women for centuries, an opinion that she had voiced in her 1893 book Woman, Church and State, which later on inspired an entirely new generation of activists.
Gage’s 1870 pamphlet, Woman as Inventor, argued that women had invented the deep-sea telescope and numerous other innovations, but rarely received public acclaim for them. This eventually led to the coining of the term ‘Matilda Effect’ by Margaret Rossiter, a science historian, in 1993 and has since been understood as ‘the work that women have done throughout history that has never reached posterity’.
It has been more than a century since the 8th of March was coined International Women’s Day, and it seems that we have upheld the tradition of fighting for equal rights, opportunity, and simultaneously celebrating milestones and the advancement of women in various fields. It is only fitting that we try and give credit where it is due by highlighting the stories of some of the women who fell victim of the Matilda Effect.
Rosalind Franklin
Perhaps one of the most famous names amongst female scientists, Rosalind Franklin was a British scientist who is best known for her contributions in determining the molecular structure of DNA. She joined the Biophysical Laboratory at King’s College London in 1951 as a research fellow and applied X-ray diffraction methods to study DNA. It was due to her X-ray photographs that Watson and Crick were able to suggest that DNA was a double helix, with two strands wound around each other.
A Guardian article suggests that while Watson did see ‘photograph 51,’ which helped everything ‘click’ into place, they needed precise measurements and data points of the molecule, which could only be obtained from observations of the X-ray crystallography structures that were being studied by Franklin. These numbers were provided by her in an informal report that was given to Max Perutz of Cambridge University, who later passed them onto Bragg, who then gave them to Watson and Crick in 1953. While the data in the report was not confidential, there is no doubt about the fact that the duo had acquired it without Franklin’s permission.
Whether or not Watson and Crick stole Rosalind Franklin’s data is still up for debate, but various sources argue that the reason this myth exists is due to Watson’s memoir ‘The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA’ and his attitude, rather than the facts. However, there is no denying that Rosalind Franklin was not given enough credit for her crucial contribution until years after her death.
Lise Meitner
Lise Meitner was an Austrian born Jewish physicist who helped discover the radioactive element protactinium. She was also the first to coin the term ‘nuclear fission’. After fleeing Nazi Germany, Meitner continued collaborating with chemist Otto Hahn, whom she had discovered several isotopes with. Upon his insistence, Meitner and Frisch came up with the theory of nuclear fission which utilised the liquid drop model in order to explain how uranium nuclei split. This research was published on February 11, 1939.
However, when Hahn published his results in Nature earlier in January 1939, he failed to credit Lise Meitner as his co-author, a mistake that he never bothered correcting after the war ended. He later went on to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944, and in 1997, Physics Today concluded that the omission of Lise Meitner’s name was “a rare instance in which personal negative opinions apparently led to the exclusion of a deserving scientist” in the awarding of the Nobel Prize.
While Lise Meitner won many awards, such as the Enrico Fermi Award, Max Planck Medal, the Lieben Prize, and even had element 109 on the periodic table, meitnerium, named after her, she was overlooked for a long time for her pioneering work in nuclear physics, making her yet another ‘victim’ of the Matilda Effect.
Nettie Stevens
Gregor Mendel’s revolutionary work on heredity in pea plants led to a renaissance of sorts in cytogenetic studies. His work established the laws of segregation and independent assortment in reproductive cells, but it was Dr Nettie M. Stevens ‘Studies in Spermatogenesis’, published in 1905 that provided indisputable evidence that the inheritance of the Y chromosomes initiated male development in mealworms.
By working on mealworms, she was able to determine that males produced sperm that contained both X and Y chromosomes, whereas the female reproductive cells only contained X chromosomes. This helped reach the conclusion that gender was determined based on genetics, that of X and Y chromosomes, and not environmental factors like food and temperature, which was a common belief of some scientists at that time.
However, despite her groundbreaking work which shifted society’s perspective, Nettie Stevens did not win any significant awards in her lifetime, and did not get enough recognition for her work. Regardless of the importance of her research, and the over 6000 peer-reviewed articles on the topic of sex chromosomes since, ‘Studies in spermatogenesis’ has been cited fewer than 100 times.
After examining the presence of the Matilda Effect through the stories of these brilliant scientists, it becomes evident that the contributions of women in science have been overshadowed by the systemic biases present in our society since time immemorial. Their stories serve as stark reminders of the persistent barriers women in STEM have faced, and continue to face, in receiving due recognition.
While their legacies refuse to be forgotten, their stories are reminders that we must fight for a future where no scientist is erased. Where no woman has to work twice as hard for half the credit, and where the next Rosalind, Lise, or Nettie is celebrated in her time – not just in hindsight.
