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Minervas of Science, 1700-1950 - five online talks by Dr Patricia Fara
The concept of an intellectual woman has long been riddled with ambiguities. During the Enlightenment period, outstanding women were often identified with Minerva, the Roman goddess of wisdom and war. She was portrayed as a tall, athletic virgin clad in armour, a wise owl perched on her military helmet: although explicitly female, she displayed many of the attributes more commonly associated with men. Especially in science, such views have been slow to fade, and even today female scientists are sometimes judged by their gender and their appearance rather than their abilities.
Women have largely been excluded from conventional versions of science’s history, but they often played important roles. This series features examples drawn from the last quarter of a millennium to illustrate how some women successfully negotiated the obstacles confronting them. Through examining the contextualised lives and careers of particular individuals, these five talks – which stand independently but are inter-related – explore the concealed prejudices and unstated assumptions that still pervade modern society.
They take place every Thursday from 8 October to 6 November 2025 at 4.30pm (London) and, including Q&A, will last just under an hour. They are available for viewing for eight weeks after the last episode is streamed (until 1 January 2026).
Talks
Emilie du Châtelet was described by her lover Voltaire as a ‘great and powerful Genius, the Minerva of France’ – although he also called her ‘a great man whose only fault was being a woman’. After introducing several other renowned Minervas, this talk discusses du Châtelet’s international fame as the natural philosopher who translated Isaac Newton’s book on gravity from Latin into French and played a key role in Enlightenment debates about the shape of the earth.
Born in Germany, the astronomer Caroline Herschel was the first woman in Britain to be paid a salary for her scientific work. Famous at the time for detecting eight new comets, she has been eclipsed by her elder brother William, widely celebrated as a lone genius who discovered the planet Uranus. Even though she played a crucial role as his scientific collaborator, she has been forgotten, partly because of her own self-abasement and willing submission to his authority.
A prolific inventor, expert in electric lighting and close friend of Marie Curie, Hertha Ayrton was the first woman to read out her own paper at the Royal Society – but she was refused a Fellowship because she was married. An outspoken suffragette, Ayrton articulated an ideal that we have still not attained: ‘I do not agree with sex being brought into science at all. The idea of “woman and science” is completely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist, or she is not.’
Focusing on the chemist Martha Whiteley, the physicist Edith Stoney and the biologist Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, this lecture discusses the female scientists, doctors and engineers who helped to win the War by working in factories, laboratories and hospitals at home and overseas. After the Armistice, as returning soldiers reclaimed their positions, the old stereotypes returned and women were squeezed out once again. But Britain had changed forever: now the country knew that women were fully capable of taking over work traditionally performed by men.
Since her early death, Rosalind Franklin has become mythologised as the victim of male prejudice, a helpless heroine who was unjustly deprived of a Nobel Prize after taking the crucial X-ray photograph that enabled two ambitious opportunists to build their double helix model of DNA. This focus on gendered stereotypes detracts attention from her other substantial scientific achievements. Franklin’s DNA research occupied a relatively brief period in her successful career, which included making foundational contributions to modern understandings of coal and viruses.
Expert speaker
Dr Patricia Fara
Emeritus Fellow of Clare College, Cambridge and historian of science. She was President of the British Society for the History of Science from 2016 to 2018. She is currently President of the Antiquarian Horological Society, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the recipient of the 2022 Abraham Pais award of the American Physical Society. Her prize-winning Science: A Four Thousand Year History (2009) has been translated into nine languages. Her other highly acclaimed books include Life after Gravity: Isaac Newton’s London Career (2021) and A Lab of One’s Own: Science and Suffrage in The First World War (2018).
More tours led by Dr Patricia Fara
Frequently asked questions
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Dates & prices
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2025
Date
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Price
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