HG Wells Science & Society Lecture 2015
Keynes Lecture Theatre 5, University of Kent
Inspired by utopian dreams, H G Wells imagined a future characterized by science, equality and justice – and in 1919, the suffragist leader Millicent Fawcett declared triumphantly, ‘The war revolutionised the industrial position of women. It found them serfs, and left them free.’ Their optimism was premature. World War I did benefit British women by enabling them to take on traditionally male roles in science, engineering and medicine. But even though women over 30 gained the right to vote, conventional hierarchies were rapidly re-established after the Armistice. Concentrating mainly on a small group of well-qualified scientific and medical women, marginalized at the time and also in the secondary literature, I review the attitudes they experienced and the work they undertook during and immediately after the War.
Patricia Fara has an Oxford degree in physics, and she now teaches in the History and Philosophy of Science department at Cambridge, where she is the Senior Tutor of Clare College. Her major research area is eighteenth-century England, but she also writes and lectures on topics related to women in science. A regular contributor to popular journals, she has appeared on radio programmes such as In our Time as well as TV documentaries, most recently on Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein and Marie Curie. She has published a range of academic and popular books on the history of science, including Newton: The Making of Genius (2002), Erasmus Darwin: Sex, Science and Serendipity (2012), Pandora's Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlightenment (2004) and Science: A Four Thousand Year History (2009), which has been translated into nine languages and was awarded the Dingle Prize by the British Society for the History of Science.
