2018 was the 100th anniversary of the Representation of the People Act, which enabled all men and some women over the age of 30 to vote for the first time. To mark this success in women’s rights, Museum staff members have chosen and written about a number of notable women that they find inspiring and have shaped science throughout history.
You’ll find some highlights of these women’s scientific careers in displays that are relevant to their research.
Jeannette Villepreux-power invented the modern aquarium for observing and describing octopuses and argonauts solving the long mystery of how argonauts make their distinctive egg cases.
Barbara McClintock was a geneticist who led the field in the study of chromosomes – the packages of DNA in the nucleus of cells – and how they affect cell behaviour. She was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1983 for her work.
Marie Curie was a pioneering physicist and chemist whose work focussed on radioactivity. She was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the first person and only woman to win it twice, and the only person to win the prize in two sciences.
Alice Ball was a chemist who very early in her career pioneered a treatment for Hansen’s Disease, known also as leprosy, which became known as the ‘Ball Method.’ It was the only working treatment until antibiotics were invented.
Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese experimental physicist whose experiments revolutionised our understanding of nuclear physics and Beta Decay – a type of radioactive decay in which protons in the nuclei of unstable elements convert to neutrons or vice versa.
Mary Anning was a pioneering palaeontologist who became globally renowned for important finds made along the Dorset coast. Her discoveries were some of the most significant geological finds of all time.
Rothschild was a world authority on fleas, butterflies, pyrazines and chemical communication. Her publications that she co-authored on flea anatomy and taxonomy are still considered to be the standard for many entomologists.
Marine biologist and conservationist whose various publications including Silent Spring inspired the environmental movement that led to the creation of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and helped advance the global environmental movement.
Joan Murrell Owens was a coral biologist and teacher born in Florida in 1933. She was the first African American woman to be awarded a geology PhD and transformed our understanding of the evolutionary relationships of button corals.
In 1991, at the age of 102 years old, Ethel Wallace, a former Oxford student contacted the Museum to share some of her recollections as a rare woman student at the university studying in the museum in the early twentieth century.
Eleanor Ormerod was a British entomologist, who played a pivotal role in establishing economic entomology, the study of insects that benefit or harm humans, domestic animals, and crops, as a science of national importance.
Maria Sibylla Merian was a remarkable entomologist and incredible artist. In her most famous work, Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium, 1705 she demonstrates both these skills exceptionally.
Esther Lederberg was an American microbiologist and a major pioneer of bacterial genetics. She discovered the bacteriophage lambda which has since become widely used as a tool in microbiology.
Margaret S. Collins was an entomologist specialising in termites and a civil rights activist. Collins was the first African American woman to earn a PhD in entomology. She earned the nickname ‘termite lady’ due to her extensive research into these insects.
Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin is the only British woman to have received the Nobel Prize for science. She was awarded the prize for Chemistry in 1964, in recognition of her work of establishing the structures of vitamin B12 and penicillin.
