Disputed Questions of Occupancy: Gender, Embodiment, and Laboratory Training in Biology at Radcliffe College

Feminist science studies scholars have identified how the professionalization of science during the nineteenth century marginalized women-identified scientists and contributed to a masculine culture of science that continues to struggle with issues of gender equality today. In the life sciences, while over half of doctoral degrees are now awarded to women-identified scientists, the number of women-identified full professors in biology remains under twenty percent. Research suggests that this pipeline problem centers on the postdoctoral period, five to seven years of advanced training characterized by highly individual experiences both inside and outside the laboratory. Significantly, it is the extra-laboratory, or “after hours” factors – masculine cultures of networking, environments hostile to work/life balance, and sexual harassment – that women often cite for leaving the field.

My paper takes up the question of how informal, “after hours” laboratory cultures developed in the nineteenth century and argues for the primacy of social interactions, extra-laboratory rituals, and intimate relationships in shaping the gendered experience of scientific training. I focus on the development of the Radcliffe Zoological Laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Between 1894 and 1910, the entrance of Radcliffe College women into an established masculine culture of biology at Harvard College transformed the gendered experience of graduate training for both male- and female-identified practitioners. It created deeply felt gendered thresholds in previously all-male spaces and highlighted the role that fraternal social cultures in nearby boarding houses and weekend trekking clubs played in knowledge-making practices and in shaping scientific identities at the turn of the century.