Science and Technology

By: Michael L. Nowak

Source:

 Black Women in America, Second Edition

Science and Technology

In a 1980s study, hundreds of ninth and tenth grade schoolchildren were asked to draw a scientist. Predictably, their caricatures depicted a white man with a beard and glasses in a white lab coat. That representation clearly illuminates some of the obstacles that have historically blocked the paths of women—particularly minority women—who have wished to make their way in the various fields of science. Not only has it historically been difficult for black women to gain entry into the predominantly white male areas of study but also those who have succeeded in spite of the odds have gone largely unrecognized.

Unseen Scientists

The earliest efforts of black women in science were practical ones. They were connected, not with laboratories or university classrooms, but rather with healing illness and preventing death. While Gaspard Bauhin and Carolus Linnaeus were developing the science of botany in Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, women of African descent in the Americas were using their intimate knowledge of herbs and other healing plants to soothe the wounds of slavery. While the science of obstetrics was being developed by Ignaz Semmelweis, black women were becoming the midwives of the American South.

Not surprisingly, then, the first black women to break into the ranks of established scientists were those in the field of medicine. Almost a century before black women began to make advances in “pure science,” they were fighting their way into medical schools. Within five years of the end of the Civil War, three African American women had become doctors. Within twenty-five years of the war's end, there were 115. Still, virtually none were officially considered researchers.

The other practical scientists among black women were the inventors. By the end of the nineteenth century, a number had made contributions to the creation of domestic items, complex mechanical devices, and health aids. In the last fifteen years of the nineteenth century, five black women received United States patents. The owner of a furniture store, Sara E. Goode, designed a “Folding Cabinet Bed,” precursor to the sofabed. Miriam E. Benjamin devised a “Gong and Signal Chair” that was eventually adopted by the U.S. House of Representatives for signaling pages. Anna Mangin designed an improved pastry fork, and Sarah Boone improved the ironing board. Lyda A. Newman invented an easy-to-clean hairbrush.

In the first half of the twentieth century, black women researchers and inventors continued to operate outside conventional scientific venues. They designed everything from a juicer to a form of central heating, from a permanent wave machine to a “Torpedo Discharge Means” using compressed air. From these humble beginnings, black women went on to become active participants in all areas of science. They moved from the kitchen and the childbed and into outer space.

Breaking Early Barriers

It took nearly a century—from 1876 to 1972—for a black woman to follow in the footsteps of the first black man to receive a PhD in physics. As of 1940, more than twenty-five thousand men and two thousand women held doctorates in the sciences. According to Evelyn M. Hammonds, fewer than a hundred of these recipients were black, and of those, fewer than ten were women.

Until the mid-twentieth century, women in general were at a disadvantage when it came to studying the sciences. They were considered ill suited for scientific study and, as a result, were excluded from scientific academies and institutions. This prejudice was not exclusively American. Women were not allowed membership in Britain's Royal Society of Science or France's Academy of Science. Those few women who managed to get doctorates in science usually found themselves teaching in women's colleges, institutions not equipped for groundbreaking research. Those who managed to do research despite these restrictions were often cheated of both credit and remuneration by male colleagues.

The barriers were even higher for the few African American women who pursued scientific study. Almost without exception, they earned their undergraduate degrees at the historically black colleges of the South, which were even less likely than were women's colleges to have the resources necessary to educate a scientist. Furthermore, these students were discouraged from pursuing this line of study as a practical matter because black students were unlikely to be hired by a scientific institution. Like black men, African American women were faced with the belief held by many white scientists that, as W. E. B. Du Bois stated, “the exact and intensive habit of mind, the rigorous mathematical logic demanded of those who would be scientists is not natural to the Negro race.”

After Marie Curie was twice awarded the Nobel Prize without being admitted to the French Academy, even some male scientists began to wonder if the situation was, strictly speaking, in the tradition of scientific impartiality.

Certainly, there were many black women who rejected all the prejudices and constraints. Not only were they attempting to transcend the conventional racist and sexist wisdom of the white majority, they were often at odds with their own communities about which roles in society were acceptable for their gender. Among the pioneers awarded PhDs were Ruth Ella Moore (bacteriology, Ohio State University, 1933), Inez Beverly Prosser (educational psychology, University of Cincinnati, 1933), Ruth Howard (psychology, University of Chicago, 1934), Jessie Jarue Mark (botany, Iowa State University, 1935), Flemmie P. Kittrell (nutrition, Cornell University, 1936), Roger Arliner Young (zoology, University of Pennsylvania, 1940), Ruth Lloyd (anatomy, Western Reserve University, 1941), and Marguerite Thomas (geology, Catholic University, 1942).

A New Day

The 1940s brought tremendous growth in scientific institutions in the United States. Preparation for war necessitated intensive research in all areas of science, and the demand for science graduates grew. After the war, the legal and political attack on institutional prejudice began to open doors for minorities, and black women walked through them with determination. In 1943 Euphemia Lofton Haynes was awarded the first PhD in Mathematics. Both Marjorie Lee Browne and Evelyn Boyd Granville were awarded doctorates in Mathematics in 1949, from the University of Michigan and Yale University, respectively. This was a huge step forward. Haynes went on to teach for forty-seven years in the Washington, DC, public schools and became the first woman to chair the District of Columbia school board. When she died, she left $700,000 to endow a chair and a student loan fund at Catholic University, her alma mater. Both of the later women would go on to have distinguished careers in university teaching and in research—Browne in topology and Granville in computers.

In 1955 Elizabeth Lipford Kent continued the tradition of black women in nursing by earning the first PhD in that field from the University of Michigan. Black women had come a long way from the days when they were not allowed into the American Nurses Association because they were considered ignorant, ill trained, and unprofessional.

It was a black woman scientist who gave Thurgood Marshall the ammunition he needed in his legal battle against “separate-but-equal” discrimination. The crux of the issue to be presented to the courts was whether, in fact, separate was inherently unequal. Mamie Phipps Clark, while she was a graduate student at Howard University in the late 1940s, began doing research into the development of racial identity in children. Her master's thesis, “The Development of Consciousness of Self in Negro Pre-School Children,” put forward what her research had shown: African American children had a sense of their “blackness” by the time they were three years old, and they suffered a negative self-image because of it. Clark and her husband, Kenneth, continued to research and publish on this subject while she did her work at Columbia, where she received her doctorate in 1944. When Marshall needed proof of the negative effects of segregation on black children, he found it in the Clarks' research, which was cited by the Supreme Court in its Brown v. Board of Education decision.

The real breakthrough for black women came after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In the years and decades that followed, obstacles to education were forcibly removed and opportunities for research and employment encouraged by law. The result was an influx of black women into the very fields from which they had so long been excluded.

In one area in particular black women made an important contribution. The 1960s brought the beginning of the development of America's space program. With that program came the need for mathematicians like Granville, who worked on the Project Mercury and Project Vanguard space programs, and Sylvia Trimble Baseman, who did research for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and founded the Center for the Scientific Applications of Mathematics at Spelman College. Patricia Cowings earned her PhD in psychology from the University of California in 1973 and, after her postdoctoral work, immediately joined NASA. By 1976 she had become the first African American woman to enter scientific astronaut training, participating as a payload specialist on a simulated life sciences space shuttle mission. She did not get to actually go into space, but the Autogenic Feedback Training Exercise she developed in the late 1970s and early 1980s was tested by Mae Jemison on her historic first flight. Christine Darden, one of the first black women to receive a doctorate in mechanical engineering, went to work for NASA before she even began work on her graduate degrees and eventually headed sonic boom research at that agency.

The Future

Though black women achieved what once seemed unattainable, there were still limits to be overcome in the early twenty-first century. Despite the women of NASA, most of the groundbreakers held degrees in the biological or social sciences, the areas most likely to be open to women. Though that slowly changed, as recently as 1995, according to a National Science Foundation study, more than half of the science and engineering master's degrees earned by African Americans were in psychology or the social sciences. Fully 72 percent of those awards went to women.

Interestingly, young black women were not and perhaps have never been intimidated by the sciences. A study done at the Catholic University of America indicated that young black women in high school were confident of their abilities to handle science and mathematics and had positive attitudes about those subjects. Unfortunately, they were just as likely, as were their more intimidated white counterparts, to lose interest in science in college. In an attempt to counter that problem, in 2003 NASA awarded a $4.5 million grant to Spelman College to support its Women in Science and Engineering Scholars program (WISE). The initial goal of WISE was to attract talented students into the sciences and increase the participation of minority women in science and engineering careers. The program was designed to include ten-week summer research sojourns at any of the ten NASA centers.

There were other persistent obstacles to full participation in science for black women. Prejudice continued to thrive in certain fields into the early twenty-first century. Unconscious discrimination against African Americans, women, and, especially, African American women was an even greater enemy. Negative attitudes about the capabilities of children have been shown to begin at the earliest stages of education. It is ironic then that science—with its emphasis on objectivity, impartiality, and the unbiased search for truth—should be one of the great bastions of discrimination.

Simultaneously, more scholarship needs to be done to discover the heretofore hidden accomplishments of black women in the history of science. In a landmark book, Black Women Scientists in the United States, the historian Wini Warren states, “An honest attempt to illuminate the experiences of Black women scientists…could make a significant contribution—both to efforts aimed at increasing the participation of minorities in the sciences and to the history of science in America.”

See also Clark, Mamie Phipps; Cowings, Patricia; Darden, Christine; and Kittrell, Flemmie Pansy.

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