By Navaratnarajah Kuganathan With a career spanning six decades British chemist Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin had a huge impact in the world of science and beyond. Her determination by X-ray techniques of the structures of important biochemical substances won her the Nobel Prize in Chemistry and earned her a place in history as one of the… Continue reading Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin and the Crystallography Quest
Elizabeth Colson's love affair with anthropology By Gaynor Cohen It was in 1978, at Stanford University in California that I was directed to the tiny lady on the other side of the crowded room. Could this really be the legendary 'giant' of my undergraduate years? As a student of social anthropology, I had been reared… Continue reading “From a young woman eager to learn to an old woman expected to know”: Elizabeth Colson
By Kate Kingsbury Grace Jones has gained international fame both within the music industry and on screen due to her androgynous image which challenges gender stereotypes and questioning of racial norms. It has been difficult for women in the music and cinematographic industries to escape the strait-jackets of normative gender roles, yet they- more than… Continue reading An Homage to Grace Jones: Icon of Incoherence
By Claire Thomas The closest that the American painter Georgia O'Keeffe and the English writer Virginia Woolf physically came was in the pages of the May 1925 volume of the modernist literary magazine, The Dial. Images of O'Keeffe's twin works, The Flagpole, preface Woolf's The Lives of the Obscure, an essay on the unexpected profundity… Continue reading Georgia O’Keeffe and Virginia Woolf
By Megan Price Sarah Belzoni was an extraordinary woman. Between 1815 and 1819 she travelled to Egypt, supporting her husband Giovanni Battista Belzoni who was attempting to find employment in Cairo. Their voyage to Egypt was a symptom of the early nineteenth century 'gold-rush' to North Africa where a new and exotic world was being… Continue reading A Buried Woman of Egyptology
By EJ Tritton Simone de Beauvoir has often been described as the 'mother' of modern feminism, and her most famous work, Le Deuxieme Sexe (published in 1949) as its 'Bible'. Yet 'Feminism' is a remarkably ambiguous concept. Wikipedia defines it as "a number of movements, theories and philosophies that are concerned with issues of gender… Continue reading The Second Sex
By Melanie O'Sullivan 'What a variable star 'fiend' Miss Leavitt is, one can't keep up with the roll of the new discoveries.'- Charles Young of Princeton, to Edward Pickering in a letter. The director of the Harvard College Observatory, Edward Pickering, frustrated with the inefficiency of his male assistants, once declared his 'maid could do… Continue reading Henrietta Swan Leavitt and the Harvard Computers
By Harriet Teare Irene Joliot-Curie's success as a scientist, principally involved in continuing the investigation into artificial radiation, rivalled even that of her mother, Marie. This article intends to briefly explore some of the outstanding science that led this woman, as part of a collaboration of husband and wife, to some of the extraordinary findings… Continue reading Irene Joliot-Curie: Pioneer of Atomic Science
Bluestocking Oxford 