In recognition of International Women's Day, the science-cultist Facebook page I Fucking Love Science posted a lot of memes about women scientists. One of my friends reposted the one above.
It's certainly interesting, so I decided to look Noether up in Margaret Wertheim's useful book Pythagoras' Trousers (Norton, 1997).
This
meme gives the false impression that Noether remained in Germany under
the Nazis. In fact, says Wertheim, she "soon found herself
desperately seeking a post abroad. Unlike Einstein and Hermann Weyl,
who had been installed at the Institute for Advanced Study in
Princeton, Noether was unable to obtain a research position. In the
end she took a post teaching undergraduates at the women's college Bryn
Mawr, but it was clear to everyone that she needed a place where she
could continue her advanced work. In 1935, just as it seemed the
Institute for Advanced Study was on the verge of appointing her, Emmy
Noether died as a result of complications from an operation to remove
an ovarian cyst." So, although at least she didn't have to dodge
Brownshirts in the US, she didn't receive the recognition she deserved
here either, and got shunted off to the side while her male colleagues
were taken better care of. As Wertheim observes, "Whatever resistance
Einstein himself had faced from the ivory towers of academe pales by
comparison with the treatment they [Noether and Lise Meitner, q.v.]
encountered" (190).
It's
good that women scientists are getting this coverage, but it
seems not only tokenistic but somewhat dishonest and evasive, since it
overlooks the fierce resistance that women in science faced, not from religious nuts, but from their male scientific colleagues -- or from
"science," as IFLS calls them -- right down to the present.
Oh,
and P.S.: Einstein's condescending remark about her, quoted in the meme, is interesting
too, when you consider that "When Einstein was battling with the
mathematics of general relativity, she was one of the people recruited
to help him" (ibid.).
