Negotiating in/Visibility

The twentieth century was a period when women started gaining access to science education and careers in unprecedented numbers, but why have they continued to be largely absent from the 'collective memory of science'? This volume seeks to investigate the politics of (in)visibility that helped relegate women to peripheral positions in the annals of twentieth-century science and understand how they negotiated their circumstances in regional and socio-political contexts that transcend the usual focus on the Western world. The chapters draw on a wide range of historical material and a multilingual archive in languages as diverse as Chinese, Czech, English, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Japanese and Romanian. They combine individual and collective portraits of women in science with discussions of institutional structures, work and associational cultures, science and domesticity, the pedagogy of science and science communication. Moving beyond simply theorizing (in)visibility, the contributors offer strategies for mainstreaming the history of women in science and rethinking our definitions of science, scientists and scientific labour to write more inclusive histories of knowledge making, pedagogy and communication.