the Exhibit
In all fields, the history of women in culture and civil life is a history of marginalization and even today, in Italy and around the world, gender equality, strongly conditioned by stereotypes, struggles to make headway. Since primary school, girls and boys are told that there are things for boys and things for girls and, among things for boys, there is science and scientists. In this journey we will talk about women who, despite achieving top-level results in the scientific field, are ignored and have been ignored by the cultural history of humanity.
The phenomenon of the failure to recognize women’s achievements in science, of belittling their successes and, at the same time, attributing them to their male colleagues, goes under the expression “Matilda effect”, coined by the historian of science Margaret W. Rossiter in 1993 who, studying biographies and historical facts, realized that there were dozens and dozens of stories of female scholars who since antiquity had been systematically excluded from the history of science 1. And it is this “invisibility” that has given rise to the still deeply rooted idea today that science is a man’s thing.
To give visibility to some of these women scientists, in 2023 we decided to dedicate each day of the Cagliari Science Festival to one of them. At the opening of the event, the scientist of the day was introduced to the audience and the challenges she faced due to her gender, which she overcame with pride and determination, were highlighted. The illustrative totems formed a successful traveling exhibition.
1 The name Matilda comes from Matilda Joslyn Gage, an American women’s rights activist, who in 1870 published the essay “Women as Inventor” in which she was the first to describe how several scientific discoveries and inventions were the result of the work of women who remained anonymous.
The double challenge: being a female scientist and being a scientist woman.
[Ihithe, 1940 – Nairobi, 2011] Kenyan environmentalist and activist. In 2004 she was the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. She was a Kenyan parliamentarian and Assistant Minister for Environment and Natural Resources in the government of President Mwai Kibaki, between January 2003 and November 2005.
[Turin, 1919 – Milan, 1998] Pediatrician, psychoanalyst, partisan and former deportee from Nazi concentration camps. Despite being from a Jewish family, he managed to graduate in Medicine in 1943, as the fascist racial laws allowed those already enrolled to complete their university studies. Thanks to her medical degree she managed to survive the concentration camps where she was interned.
[Shanghai, 1912 – New York, 1997] Chinese physicist, she carried out his research activity mainly in the United States. She participated in the Manhattan project and was among the first women to occupy a prominent place in the panorama of world physics in the twentieth century. She was the first winner of the Wolf Prize for Physics in 1978, for conducting the experiment that bears her name.
[Sassari, 1886 – Sanremo, 1978] Botany and naturalist, she was the first woman in Italy to obtain a teaching qualification in botany, in 1915, at the University of Cagliari. From 1926 to 1929 she directed the Botanical Garden of the University of Cagliari, before returning to carry out research at the Experimental Floriculture Station of Sanremo. Silver medal of merit of the Italian Red Cross and Bronze medal of civil valor.
[Tehran, 1977 – Stanford, 2017] Iranian mathematician, she mainly carried out research in the field of geometry. Professor of mathematics at Stanford University since 2008, in 2014 she was the first woman to win the Fields Medal, as well as the first person of Iranian citizenship to receive this recognition.
[Montbrison, 1758 – Paris, 1836] French chemist, she actively collaborated in the experiments of her husband, the chemist Antoine Lavoisier, and, with her notes and drawings of the experimental apparatus used, she contributed to making her contemporaries understand her methods and results. Subsequently, she continued to disseminate his works and recover his notes and laboratory instruments.
