---
title: "Women in science"
chunk: 7/25
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_science"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:51:28.816114+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

Among the successful scientists were Nadezhda Suslova (1843–1918), the first woman in the world to obtain a medical doctorate fully equivalent to men's degrees; Maria Bokova-Sechenova (1839–1929), a pioneer of women's medical education who received two doctoral degrees, one in medicine in Zürich and one in physiology in Vienna; Julia Lermontova (1846–1919), the first woman in the world to receive a doctoral degree in chemistry; the marine biologist Sofia Pereiaslavtseva (1849–1903), director of the Sevastopol Biological Station and winner of the Kessler Prize of the Russian Society of Natural Scientists; and the mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaia (1850–1891), the first woman in 19th century Europe to receive a doctorate in mathematics and the first to become a university professor in any field.

==== Late nineteenth century in the United States ====

In the later nineteenth century the rise of the women's college provided jobs for women scientists, and opportunities for education.
Women's colleges produced a disproportionate number of women who went on for PhDs in science.
Many coeducational colleges and universities also opened or started to admit women during this period; such institutions included just over 3000 women in 1875, by 1900 numbered almost 20,000.
An example is Elizabeth Blackwell, who became the first certified female doctor in the US when she graduated from Geneva Medical College in 1849. With her sister, Emily Blackwell, and Marie Zakrzewska, Blackwell founded the New York Infirmary for Women and Children in 1857 and the first women's medical college in 1868, providing both training and clinical experience for women doctors. She also published several books on medical education for women.
In 1876, Elizabeth Bragg became the first woman to graduate with a civil engineering degree in the United States, from the University of California, Berkeley.

=== Early twentieth century ===

==== Europe before World War II ====
Marie Skłodowska-Curie, the first woman to win a Nobel prize in 1903 (physics), went on to become a double Nobel prize winner in 1911, both for her work on radiation. She was the first person to win two Nobel prizes, a feat accomplished by only four others since then. She also was the first woman to teach at Sorbonne University in Paris.
Alice Perry is understood to be the first woman to graduate with a degree in civil engineering in the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in 1906 at Queen's College, Galway, Ireland.
Lise Meitner played a major role in the discovery of nuclear fission. As head of the physics section at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin she collaborated closely with the head of chemistry Otto Hahn on atomic physics until forced to flee Berlin in 1938. In 1939, in collaboration with her nephew Otto Frisch, Meitner derived the theoretical explanation for an experiment performed by Hahn and Fritz Strassman in Berlin, thereby demonstrating the occurrence of nuclear fission. The possibility that Fermi's bombardment of uranium with neutrons in 1934 had instead produced fission by breaking up the nucleus into lighter elements, had actually first been raised in print in 1934, by chemist Ida Noddack (co-discover of the element rhenium), but this suggestion had been ignored at the time, as no group made a concerted effort to find any of these light radioactive fission products.
Maria Montessori was the first woman in Southern Europe to qualify as a physician. She developed an interest in the diseases of children and believed in the necessity of educating those recognized to be ineducable. In the case of the latter she argued for the development of training for teachers along Froebelian lines and developed the principle that was also to inform her general educational program, which is the first the education of the senses, then the education of the intellect. Montessori introduced a teaching program that allowed defective children to read and write. She sought to teach skills not by having children repeatedly try it, but by developing exercises that prepare them.
Emmy Noether revolutionized abstract algebra, filled in gaps in relativity, and was responsible for a critical theorem about conserved quantities in physics. One notes that the Erlangen program attempted to identify invariants under a group of transformations. On 16 July 1918, before a scientific organization in Göttingen, Felix Klein read a paper written by Emmy Noether, because she was not allowed to present the paper herself. In particular, in what is referred to in physics as Noether's theorem, this paper identified the conditions under which the Poincaré group of transformations (now called a gauge group) for general relativity defines conservation laws. Noether's papers made the requirements for the conservation laws precise. Among mathematicians, Noether is best known for her fundamental contributions to abstract algebra, where the adjective noetherian is nowadays commonly used on many sorts of objects.
Mary Cartwright was a British mathematician who was the first to analyze a dynamical system with chaos. Inge Lehmann, a Danish seismologist, first suggested in 1936 that inside the Earth's molten core there may be a solid inner core. Women such as Margaret Fountaine continued to contribute detailed observations and illustrations in botany, entomology, and related observational fields. Joan Beauchamp Procter, an outstanding herpetologist, was the first woman curator of Reptiles for the Zoological Society of London at London Zoo.
Florence Sabin was an American medical scientist. Sabin was the first woman faculty member at Johns Hopkins in 1902, and the first woman full-time professor there in 1917. Her scientific and research experience is notable. Sabin published over 100 scientific papers and multiple books.

==== United States before and during World War II ====

Women moved into science in significant numbers by 1900, helped by the women's colleges and by opportunities at some of the new universities. Margaret Rossiter's books Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 and Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940–1972 provide an overview of this period, stressing the opportunities women found in separate women's work in science.