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"It's a footnote that brought me to study women in the history of science. I was researching Flinders Petrie, who had been at University College, London for about fifty years. He worked with Margaret Murray – a woman he mentioned one time through his autobiography : "My colleague Miss Murray... " She started with him in the 1890s and was his complete counterpart in the department when he was gone for excavation. So she would teach 9 to10 classes per year. She gets one mention in his autobiography, and so I thought there is more to her than this, and I found she was such an amazing woman who lived a hundred years. She had a really long, rich, fascinating career but you wouldn't even have known anything about her because he mentioned her one time! Women are still kind of footnoted, at least marginalized. Things have gotten better, but are still pretty bad. It is important for women to stick together because they do still deal with institutionalized discrimination.

What ever you want to do, you can do it! I always got this encouragement from my parents. I wanted to be an archeologist, and I became an historian of women in science. And when you are a woman talking about women, you always have to justify it. At S&T I teach history of science in different chunks, like our ideas about the cosmos or about the body... One particular day I focus on women's issues and I say: "I'm going to talk about these women throughout the course of the semester but I want you to know that their struggles are very different from those of men – they had to dress as men or to come in through back doors and sit in the back of the classroom." Some women might think that they come across to their male colleagues as an engineer or scientist first. No, they will come across to them as a woman first! And women had to perform better than men to
be considered equal, that is sort of unwritten in the institutional rules."

Kathleen Sheppard
Assistant professor, history and political science department, Missouri S&T

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