Present at the Creation

Pioneering Women in American Mathematics: The Pre-1940 PhD's, by Judy Green and Jeanne LaDuke (Volume 34 in the AMS/LMS History of Mathematics Series). Hardback, American Mathematical Society, 2009; xvi+349pp.; ISBN 978-0-8218-4376-5. Supplemental material online at

Margaret A.M. Murray ()

In the thick of studying for my mathematics Ph.D. qualifying exams at Yale in 1980, a headline in the New York Times taunted me with the question, Are boys better at math?[2] According to Johns Hopkins University researchers Camilla Benbow and Julian Stanley, SAT math scores showed that answer was yes[3]. In the 30 years since, I've probably read at least a hundred articles purporting to give the answer, invariably based upon the results of mathematics tests of one kind or another (see [1], [6], [7] for a non-representative recent sampling). Given our culture's endless fascination with numerical measures of women's mathematical aptitude, we have largely failed to attend to women's actual mathematical achievements. And when we have attended to those achievements, we've done so haphazardly, invoking the names of the same few women, over and over again.

But way back in 1978—two years before the Benbow and Stanley bombshell—Judy Green and Jeanne LaDuke set out to chronicle the lives and careers of the first American women in mathematics—to trace each woman's trajectory "from birth to death," collecting the details of "family background, education, work history, special contributions, extracurricular interests, and professional recognition," and compiling a complete list of "publications and professional presentations" (p. xv). Three decades later, Pioneering Women in American Mathematics is the spectacular result. And it turns out that women—hundreds of women!—were present at the creation of the American mathematical community. Prior to 1940, exactly 228 American women earned Ph.D.'s in mathematics and most went on to active careers in mathematical research and teaching. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Green and LaDuke, we now know more about this first cohort of American women mathematicians than we know about any cohort of mathematicians, male or female.

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Nowadays, a Ph.D. in mathematics is essentially mandatory for anyone pursuing a career of college-level research and teaching in the United States. But the modern Ph.D. degree, with its research emphasis, is a German invention barely 200 years old [10, p. 2]. In 1874, Russian-born Sofya Kovalevskaya was the first woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics; this was at Göttingen, where—with her friend, the chemist Yulia Lermontova—she became one of the first women to earn a modern Ph.D. in any field [9].

In America, for almost as long as women have been admitted to institutions of higher education, they have been earning Ph.D.'s [12, p. 133], including Ph.D.'s in mathematics. In 1862, Yale University awarded the first American Ph.D. to anyone, and the first such degree in mathematics [10, p. 3]. In 1882, Christine Ladd-Franklin became the first American woman to earn a Ph.D. in mathematics, at Johns Hopkins University; unfortunately, the Hopkins trustees could not bring themselves actually to award her the degree until forty-four years later (p. 5-6). But just four years after Hopkins denied the degree to Ladd-Franklin, Columbia University showed no such compunctions in the case of Winifred Edgerton Merrill, who became the first American woman awarded a Ph.D. in mathematics—and the first woman awarded a Columbia degree of any kind (pp. 246-47).

By the end of the 19th century, ten American women had earned Ph.D.'s in mathematics (from Columbia, Cornell, Bryn Mawr, Göttingen, and Yale), as compared to approximately 120 men. As American women's participation in higher education grew during the first three decades of the 20th century [12, p. 63], the numbers of American women earning Ph.D.'s in mathematics did, too. From 1900 to 1939, these numbers approximately doubled every decade; over the years 1920–1939, approximately one out of every seven Ph.D.'s in mathematics in the United States was awarded to a woman (pp. 114-15).

In the years following World War II, owing to complex sociopolitical forces, women's share of the Ph.D.'s dropped precipitously ([10], [11]). An oft-cited statistic (from Benbow and Stanley [4], [8]) asserts that, among the mathematically talented, boys outnumber girls by approximately 13 to 1, corresponding to a presence of women of just over 7%. Perhaps one reason this statistic has gained so much traction is that it matches so well with the proportion of mathematics Ph.D.'s awarded to women during the first three decades after the war [10, p. 5]. Indeed, it was only in the early 1980s that women's share of the U.S. mathematics doctorates rebounded to their pre-World War II levels (p. 118). To those who assume that American women are just now attaining critical mass in research mathematics, statistics on the pre-1940 women Ph.D.'s often come as a bit of a shock.

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In Pioneering Women in American Mathematics, Judy Green and Jeanne LaDuke bring these statistics vividly to life. The book is organized into three main sections. The first section is an 118-page essay summarizing general trends in the biographies of the women as a group; separate chapters are devoted to stages in the life course, from childhood origins through education, employment, career development, and scholarly productivity. The second section, of roughly 200 pages, is devoted to separate biographical sketches (one page or less) of each of the women in the study. These two sections, taken together, constitute the whole of the printed book.

The third—and potentially most valuable—section consists of nearly 700 pages of complete "bio-bibliographic entries" on each of the 228 women, available at the AMS website at no charge in a fully-searchable pdf format ([5]). For each mathematician, the online bibliography includes a list of publications, both by and about the individual, along with a full list of the archival sources the authors consulted. Even so, the authors warn, "in a few cases the bibliographies are so wide-ranging that only selected publications are listed"! In offering this database to the public for free, the authors hope that it will serve as a resource for future scholarship (p. xvi). All the participants in the ongoing debate on gender and mathematics—from pundits to policy analysts, from Larry Summers to Larry King—should spend some time with this truly priceless data.

As a general matter, write Green and LaDuke, these women had parents who were not especially well-to-do or well-educated; some had no formal schooling whatsoever, while perhaps a dozen of the parents had doctoral degrees (pp. 14-15). Altogether, about half the women in this group earned their bachelor's degrees from women's colleges, with the lion's share (about 28%) coming from just seven schools: Wellesley, Goucher, Hunter, Mount Holyoke, Vassar, Smith, and Bryn Mawr. At these schools in particular, the largely-female faculty were very active in the mathematical community; through their connections, they guided many of their students to graduate school and helped them to launch their careers (pp. 19-24). Thus, in a very real way, one generation of women in mathematics "begat" another.

By far the leading grantor of mathematics Ph.D.'s to women during the prewar years was the University of Chicago, with twenty percent of the total. Chicago's first woman mathematics Ph.D., Mary Emily Sinclair (Ph.D. 1908), enjoyed a thirty-year career on the faculty of Oberlin College and took an active role in the MAA. The second Chicago Ph.D., Anna Pell Wheeler (Ph.D. 1910), spent most of her career at Bryn Mawr College, where she maintained an active research program, directed seven doctoral dissertations, and became department chair, while at the same time holding several offices in the AMS. Several other Chicago Ph.D.'s went on to chair the departments of major women's colleges, including Mary Evelyn Wells (Ph.D. 1915) at Vassar; Gillie Larew (Ph.D. 1916) at Randolph-Macon; Jewell Hughes Bushey (Ph.D. 1924) at Hunter; Julia Bower (Ph.D. 1933) at Connecticut College; and Marie Litzinger (Ph.D. 1934) at Mount Holyoke. From these positions of leadership they exerted a positive influence on successive generations of women in mathematics.

But several other Chicago graduates found employment at coeducational universities, including Pauline Sperry (Ph.D. 1916) at Berkeley; Olive Hazlett (Ph.D. 1915) and Echo Pepper (Ph.D. 1925) at Illinois; and Mayme Logsdon (Ph.D. 1921) at Chicago, where she supervised four doctoral dissertations, including that of Anna Stafford Henriques (Ph.D. 1933). Hazlett, in particular, was the single most prolific mathematical researcher among the pre-1939 American women Ph.D.'s, and "placed well within the top ten percent of all research mathematicians who earned degrees by 1933" (p. 98).

In addition to the University of Chicago, six other institutions granted 10 or more Ph.D.'s to women during the years 1886-1939: Cornell (21), Bryn Mawr (19), Catholic (14), Yale (13), Johns Hopkins (12), and Illinois (12). All but one of the Ph.D.'s awarded by Catholic University were awarded to women from Catholic religious orders, many of whom were already teaching at Catholic women's colleges at the time they earned their degrees.

Altogether, eighteen of the pre-1940 Ph.D.'s were awarded to Catholic nuns; eighty-four degrees went to women who married at least once; and 126 Ph.D.'s went to lay women who never married. "While many of the women were likely to face discrimination at some time in their careers," note Green and LaDuke, married women seemed to suffer far more structural discrimination (p. 66). "Of the women who married, 40 percent married men with Ph.D.'s in mathematics while another 21 percent married men with Ph.D.'s in other fields" (p. 67), giving rise to numerous two-body employment problems, further complicated by widespread anti-nepotism policies. These policies stipulated that two members of the same family could not be employed by the same department or institution; in practice, these policies were generally used to deny employment to women. Anti-nepotism rules remained in force at many colleges until the passage of Title IX in 1972 ([10], [11]).

By contrast, many of the pre-1940 women Ph.D.'s formed lasting personal partnerships with other professional women. "We no of know instance of a close female friendship having a negative professional consequence," write Green and LaDuke, adding that "such friendships apparently contributed to the fulfillment of personal and professional lives" for a number of their subjects (p. 71). As a group, these pre-1940 Ph.D.'s enjoyed spectacular longevity—with a median age of eighty-four and including several centenarians (p. 3)—giving the lie to the old myth that women are simply too physically fragile to do mathematics.

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In this wikified age of instant information—where anyone is free to create (or destroy) knowledge on the Internet from the privacy of their own PC, or iPhone, or Blackberry—it could be easy to dismiss Pioneering Women in American Mathematics as just another database. But to do so would be to trivialize years of historical detective-work and meticulous documentation. To compile this information, Green and LaDuke drew on myriad sources, ranging from questionnaires, personal correspondence, standard refererence works, and mathematical journals, to university archives, census reports, and certificates of birth and death. Even so, the paper and electronic record was often insufficient. In the mysterious case of Olive Hughes (Ph.D. 1934), a student of Anna Pell Wheeler at Bryn Mawr, the archival record goes cold as early as 1935. "[A]n extensive search for information about the date, place, and cause of her death" ultimately led the authors to Hughes' gravesite in rural Saskatchewan, where they learned she had died in an accident in 1936 (p. 209). Even so, despite three decades of inquiries, it has been impossible for the authors to determine where the accident took place.

The case of Olive Hughes is just one of many in which Green and LaDuke gleaned valuable information by traveling to a subject's birthplace or burial ground. On occasion they were assisted by interested colleagues and friends; while living in Southwest Virginia in 1998, for example, I took a trip to Pulaski County to locate and photograph the gravestone of Gillie Larew. It's not uncommon, of course, for a scholar to track down obscure details about a single biographical subject. The remarkable thing about Green and LaDuke is that they tracked down such details, not for a single subject, but for 228 subjects at once.

Pioneering Women in American Mathematics is a labor of love and the work of a lifetime: a stunning historical achievement as well as a generous gift to the mathematical community. Check out the website, buy the book—and spread the word.

Works Cited

[1]T. Andreescu, J. Gallian, and J. Mertz, Cross-cultural analysis of students with exceptional talent in mathematical problem-solving, Notices. Amer. Math. Soc.35 (2008) 1248-60.

[2]Are boys better at math? New York Times, Sunday, December 7, 1980.

[3]C. Benbow and J. Stanley, Sex differences in mathematical ability: Fact or artifact?Science 210(1980) 1262-64.

[4]C. Benbow and J. Stanley, Sex differences in mathematical ability: More facts, Science222 (1983) 1029-31.

[5]J. Green and J. LaDuke, Additional material for the book Pioneering Women in American Mathematics; available at

[6]J. Hyde, S. Lindberg, M. Linn, A. Ellis, C. Williams, Gender similarities characterize math performance, Science321 (2008) 494-5.

[7]J. Hyde, J. Mertz, Gender, culture, and mathematics performance, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA106 (2009) 8801-07.

[8]C. Kessel, Background for the AWM petition concerning the inclusion of Dr. Camilla Benbow on the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, 2006; available at
html

[9]A. Koblitz, A convergence of lives. Sofia Kovalevskaya: Scientist, writer, revolutionary. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick NJ, 1993.

[10]M. Murray, Women becoming mathematicians: Creating a professional identity in post-World War II America. MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2000.

[11]M. Rossiter, Women scientists in America: Before affirmative action 1940-1972. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD, 1995.

[12]B. Solomon, In the company of educated women. Yale University Press, New Haven CT, 1985.

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