The Women In Science Archive

Valentina Tereshkova: The First Woman in Space ‘It is I, Sea Gull!’ The words, full of meaning both personal for the speaker and cultural for the country listening below, were the first spoken by a woman in space. On June 16, 1963, Valentina Teres...

Wishing a happy 89th birthday to Valentina Tereshkova who, on June 16, 1963 became the first woman to venture into space. Though her later political career has been largely lamentable, we can still celebrate this triumph of her youth.

tinyurl.com/2vt3rujp

#WomenInSTEM #AstroSky #WHM 🚀

Today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight features Marion Dix Sullivan (1802-1860), who was the first American woman composer to score a hit popular song. Her smash was The Blue Juniata, published in 1844 and recorded by Roy Rogers nearly a century later, in 1937.

#WHM #BookSky #MusicSky 🎹

The Strangers Within: Lynn Margulis and the Rebirth of Endosymbiosis In terms of cell count, ninety percent of you isn't you at all.  Bacteria, though by mass they only make up about two percent of a human being, account for nine out of every ten cells inside you.  Som...

Lynn Margulis would have been 88 years old today. Her 1966 paper "On the Origin of Mitoting Cells" was a powerful combination of older endosymbiotic theory with modern genetics that established the foundation for our modern understanding of eukaryotic cells.

tinyurl.com/2tj72jf8

#WomenInSTEM #WHM

Today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight features Kitty Kallen (1921-2016), who had a small mountain of top 5 hits during the height of the Big Band era, performing with the Jimmy Dorsey and Harry James bands. Let's take a small patch of time today to remember her craft!

#MusicSky #WHM #BookSky

Today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight features Maude Valérie White (1855-1937), who we continue to cherish for her musical settings of classic English poetry, including the work of Byron and Shelley, harnessing classical structures to deftly portray the shifts and subtleties in the words.

#WomenComposers

Physician Anna Broomall was born 179 years ago today. For three decades, she was a physician and professor in Philadelphia, working tirelessly to bring the antiseptic practices of Europe to the US to decrease the number of women dying from infections in childbirth.

#WomenInSTEM #MedSky #BookSky ⚕️

Egyptian nuclear physicist Sameera Moussa was born 109 years ago today. She was the first woman nuclear physicist in Egypt, and spent her career passionately pursuing the use of nuclear technology in medicine as a devoted member of the Atoms for Peace movement.

#WomenInSTEM #Physics #HistSci ⚛️🧪

Today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight features Marianna Martines (1744-1812), a gifted performer who was sponsored early on by Metastasio and given her early lessons by a young Joseph Haydn, and went on to be a composer of masses, keyboard sonatas, and oratorios.

#MusicSky #BookSky #WomenComposers

On today's #WomenInMusic Spotlight, we feature the Fisk Jubilee Singers, formed in 1871, featuring 4 men and 5 women performers. In an age dominated by minstrel shows, the Fisk Singers presented earnest programs highlighting the dignity and power of the Black musical tradition.

#MusicSky #BookSky 🎹

Wishing a happy 75th birthday to psychologist and geneticist Nancy Segal, who is most known for her studies of twins, and in particular of "pseudo-twins" - individuals born less than 9 months apart but who are raised as virtual siblings.

#WomenInSTEM #WomensHistoryMonth #PsychSky 🧠

Thanks for the article - our piece was mainly referring to the cases of living carriers immediately following Mallon, who didn't consistently have the recovery that was hoped for from the procedure. We've updated the wording to reflect that more clearly. Thanks again!

It's my 289th feature at the Women in Science Archive, all about the life of Mary Mallon, and the early history of the public health system as, armed with the insight of bacteriology, it felt its way forward in how to deal with the phenomenon of Living Carriers.

Typhoid Mary and the Public Health Dilemma of Living Carriers. On November 11, 1938, Mary Mallon, the woman known to the papers and to all of history ever after as Typhoid Mary, passed away on North Brother Island, where she had been lodged by the New York City D...

New Post! Today at the Archive we talk about the life of Mary Mallon, known to history as Typhoid Mary, and how the idea of Living Carriers confronted New York's public health system with a set of policy conundrums that are with us still.

tinyurl.com/5w6hrt6e

#WomenInSTEM #PublicHealth #MedSky ⚕️

Dame Carole Jordan – first female president of the RAS – 1941-2026 We are saddened to hear of the death of Professor Dame Carole Jordan – the first female president of the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) – who has passed away a...

A trailblazer (which I did not appreciate enough when I sat in her lectures!).

ras.ac.uk/news-and-pre...

Dale's newest book is hitting the shelves in England soon! It covers the evolution of romantic literature from antiquity up to our present world of Romantasy, Hockey Books, and Dark Romance. He is Adorably excited about it.

Dr. Mary Hancock McLean was born 165 years ago today. The daughter of a physician, she went on to become a medical missionary, surgeon, the founder of a medical dispensary for low income women, and the first woman admitted to the St. Louis Medical Society.

#WomenInSTEM #MedSky #HistSci ⚕️

Lead, TNT, and Rayon: Alice Hamilton's Battle Against Industrial Poisons. The lack of regulation in American industry during the early Twentieth Century is the stuff of horrific legend - from the grotesqueries of the meat industry as unveiled by Upton Sinclair to the additi...

Alice Hamilton was born 157 years ago today. Her skill in analyzing the chemical toxins workers in industry were exposed to in the early 20th century pushed Harvard to admit women professors, AND she was a fearless pacifist, and advocate for women and labor.

tinyurl.com/5t529jfz

#WomenInSTEM 🧪⚛️🏭

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features La Comtessa de Dia (c. 1140 - c. 1212), one of the handful of medieval trobairitz whom we know by name. We are fortunate enough to possess a few of her works, giving us a very important window into women's song in the Middle Ages.

#WomenInMusic #BookSky 🎹

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features Ida Emerson (1873-1945), a composer and lyricist whose 1899 smash hit "Hello Ma Baby" sold a million copies of sheet music, and was immortalized in the 1955 Warner Bros cartoon One Froggy Evening!

#WomenInMusic #MusicSky #BookSky 🎹

Wishing a happy 68th birthday to neuroscientist Brigitte Kieffer, who in 1992 published a landmark paper on the genetics of the delta opioid receptor, giving the world a powerful new way to study the mechanisms of addiction.

#WomenInSTEM #NeuroSky #BrainSky #BookSky 🧪🧠

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features Junie & TheHutFriends, a WeirdCore music outfit bringing some of the free wheeling vocal and electronic experimentation of the early 1980s to the social media age.

#WomenInMusic #MusicSky #BookSky 📖🎹

Chemist and physicist Ida Noddack was born 130 years ago today. In 1925 she and her husband co-discovered Rhenium, and her 1934 paper criticizing some results of Fermi anticipated the theory of nuclear fission.

#WomenInSTEM #ChemSky #PhysicsSky #HistSci 🧪⚛️

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features MC Lyte (b. 1970), whose 1988 album Lyte As Rock furthered the start made by Salt-N-Pepa's 1986 Hot, Cool and Vicious and brought a compelling new voice and set of experiences to the 80s rap scene.

#WomenInMusic #MusicSky #BookSky 🎹

Brazilian mathematician Marília Chaves Peixoto was born 106 years ago today. She was the first Brazilian woman to earn a PhD in math, the 1st to be inducted into the Brazilian Academy of Sciences and was, during her short life, an important researcher on structural stability.

#WomenInSTEM #MathSky

Today's Women in Music Spotlight features the iconic Janis Joplin (1943-1970), whose vocal style and stage presentation struck with the force of revelation at the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, and has served as a wellspring for country and rock performers ever since.

#WomenInMusic #BookSky #Music

Knowing When to Flower: The Classical Botany of Agnes Arber Evolution is great. As an explanatory idea, as a process governing biology, from just about any aspect you care to consider it, evolution is a magnificent thing. So magnificent, however, that it’s h...

Botanist Agnes Arber was born 147 years ago today. Her insights into the development of differentiated plant structures were a breath of fresh air in the early 20th century, and her 1950 book The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form, is still a great read.

tinyurl.com/4rnwcrwe

#WomenInSTEM #PlantSky 🌱

1st woman botanist elected as Fellow of the Royal Society: #BOTD 1879 Agnes Arber FRS, plant morphologist and anatomist, historian of botany and philosopher of biology. @wisarchive.bsky.social @admirablewomen.bsky.social @carvehername.bsky.social @feministory.bsky.social @carolemason.bsky.social

L'Astratto - Barbara Strozzi - Sophie Michaux, Benjamin Katz, Paul Morton YouTube video by Sophie Michaux

Here is a fun performance of Strozzi's incredibly meta, fourth wall breaking, song L'Astratto, which is a song about songs that keeps stopping itself mid-stream as the composer/singer changers her mind and pursues new ideas. And hey, check out that dope theorbo!!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fW6...

Today's Women In Music Spotlight features Barbara Strozzi (1619-1677), the prolific 17th century composer who took a very modern narrative approach to the song form, releasing eight collections of madrigals, cantatas, and arias in the 1620s through 1640s.

#WomenComposers #MusicSky #BookSky 🎹

Plant physiologist Marguerite Henrici was born 134 years ago today. She published some 80 papers during the 1920s through 1940s about the chemical and nutritional properties of South African grasses, establishing important base data for the regional food chains there.

#WomenInSTEM #PlantSky 🧪🌱