Preliminary Programme

In this paper, I will use a biographical approach to the question of gender and scientific personae. I will base my analysis on the example of Hanna Rydh (1891-1964). In 1919, Rydh became the first woman in Sweden to take a PhD in archaeology. Besides her archeological research, she became known as a writer of popular science and travel literature, as well as a feminist (Rydh was president of the International Alliance of Women 1946–1952, and president of the Swedish liberal-feminist organisation Fredrika-Bremer-Förbundet 1937–1949), as a liberal politician and, in 1931-38, as wife of the governor of the Jämtland region. In 1938 she herself candidated to become a governor, the first Swedish woman ever to do this (her candidature failed, however).

Rydh was active as an archaeologist throughout the 1920s as well as during several periods later on, which meant that she regularly ventured on prolonged research expeditions to foreign continents. She created a lot of attention as she wouldn’t let her academic career be thwarted by the fact that she was a mother with small children – a single mother too, as her first husband died just a few years into the marriage.

Several of the popular travel books that Rydh wrote and published took up women’s living conditions in different parts of the world as an important theme. This ties in well with the image of a committed, albeit far from radical feminist. At the same time, it has been pointed out that in Rydh’s early archaeological writings she often put forward representations of gender that would rather have worked to counteract female emancipation.

This may seem a great paradox. But perhaps it could also be interpreted as an example of the use of different personae in different contexts.

Questions that will be further explored in the paper are if Rydh cultivated a more gender-neutral persona in her scientific travel reports than she did in her socio-political and feminist texts and in her popular travel accounts, and to what extent this can be seen as a deliberate strategy in the pursuit of academic respect and status. (Show less)

Charlotte Cowdroy has not drawn much attention from historians. She is mentioned in very few academic articles and to my knowledge, so far, there have been no articles dedicated to her alone. Yet, it seems that she was relatively famous, especially among educationalists, in the 1920s. In her book, The London Experience of Secondary Education, historian Margaret E. Bryant even claimed that « her (Cowdroy's) success gave her an almost world-wide reputation »1.
Although she had been the headmistress of Crouch End High School and College for Girls since 1900, it was not until 1921 that Charlotte Cowdroy started making public her theories on girls' education. At the “coming of age” dinner of her school, she gave a speech entitled: “Girls are not boys and should not be educated as boys”.
As the headmistress of a girls' school, she was primarily concerned with the education of girls which she deemed vital not only to the future of the 'race' but also to women's happiness. The motto of her school was : “Live pure, Speak true, Right Wrong”.
She believed that the education of girls must be very different from that of boys. Her opinion was that women as mothers played a vital role in the future of the “race”, and therefore girls' education played a paramount part in the make up of a country, a misguided education policy would have, according to Cowdroy, appalling repercussions.
The aim of this paper will be to present Charlotte Cowdroy's views on girls' education and to show how they both concurred with and diverged from the dominant view of a woman's place in society during the inter-war period. (Show less)

In this paper, I introduce the project Scientific Personae in Cultural Encounters in Twentieth Century Europe. The objective of the project is to analyse the historical construction of scientific personae through scientific travel and international exchange in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden (with views to Germany), between the 1910s and the 1970s. Instead of focusing on the circulation of knowledge or technologies through international encounters, we study the circulation of new social identities. The research questions of the project are framed by three analytical categories: firstly, by the tensions and connections between nationalism, internationalism and universalism; secondly, by gender as a category which structures the practices and accounts of scientific international encounters of both men and women and, thirdly, by the role of specific disciplinary cultures in travel experiences and the formation of scientific personae. Methodologically, the project combines comparative and transnational history with discourse and rhetorical analysis, and analysis of visual representation. Basic sources include scholarship applications and travel reports, personal correspondence, published and unpublished travel letters, accounts of international conference visits, photographic reports and portrayals by scientists. The project connects historical studies about how science is conducted and what is required to become an acknowledged scientist, to the contemporary debates about skewed gender structures in academia. It uses the past to inform the present about how scientific personae are culturally and socially constructed, thereby challenging assumptions about “pure”, non-embodied science and knowledge production.
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Since the late 19th century, travelling has been a crucial part of science and being a scientist. Studying abroad, participating in conferences, visiting laboratories or research institutions or teaching abroad have become increasingly important aspects of science as a profession. Travel experiences have been formative not only in terms of knowledge exchange, but equally in terms of career development and academic identities. International exchanges have reinforced ideals of science as an international, universal enterprise, but at the same time, they have increased the awareness of national and local particularities, and of hierarchies between ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’. Travelling means being introduced to new scientific cultures. It incites to compare academic cultures and to reflect on the unspoken and seemingly evident practices of one’s own scientific background. It stimulates the formation of (new, collective) scientific identities or scientific personae that are connected to scientific practices.
Especially after the First World War, cultural encounters between scientists boomed, as institutionalized facilities for international travel and exchange were created through private and public funds and international organizations. In the case of Belgium, a major role was played by the Belgian American Educational Foundation, a private organization which was founded in 1920 with the remainder of the funds for humanitarian aid during the war. By awarding fellowships for advanced study or research in the United States, the BAEF played an important role in the ‘Americanization’ of academic life throughout the 20th century. In our paper, we will focus on the experiences of Belgian (mostly male) BAEF-fellows in science and medicine during the interwar years. Our analysis will be based on the fellows’ final reports for the BAEF in which they looked back on their research stay in the United States, and on the extensive travel correspondence of one of the fellows, the physician Marcel Florkin, future professor of biochemistry at the university of Liège. Their (partly formalized and stylized) observations on academic culture and laboratory life will be analyzed, with a focus on the relationship between gender and the performance of science.
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