Only 21% of physics bachelor’s degrees and 20% of physics doctorates were received by women in 2017 [1]. Female-identifying physicists also reported slower career progression as compared to men; just 10% of physics professors were women in 2014. There is a clear call to increase gender diversity in physics.

Women are staggeringly less likely to be involved in the field in the first place and more likely to prioritize family over physics as compared to men, likely due to societal standards and expectations. These statistics set the trends and expectations for women in the field: to choose a different career or choose family.

Historically, this trend is even more pronounced. Representation of historic women in physics is nearly nonexistent in mainstream media and academia.

Heidi Hui, former Director of Communications for the Society for Canadian Women in Science & Technology, answers the question of how we can increase diversity in the field by describing the necessity of having role models of all backgrounds [2]. By amplifying the voices of women in the field, more women may feel more welcomed and inspired to join, setting new trends. Demonstrating that anyone can be a physicist is important from a young age, as Jess Wade describes, because “representation of women scientists in the media also plays an important role in shaping girls’ and women’s ideas of what they can be” [3].

This past summer, I set out on a mission with the Center for History of Physics (CHP) and Niels Bohr Library & Archives (NBLA) to highlight two particular underrepresented female voices in physics: Katherine Clerk Maxwell and Émilie du Châtelet.

Both impressive women have been remembered most because of the men around them, rather than for the merits of their own accomplishments. Katherine is almost solely recorded in the context of her husband James Clerk Maxwell, and Émilie is remembered most as Voltaire’s lover; these women are nearly never mentioned without also highlighting these men. The same cannot be said of Voltaire or James Clerk Maxwell.

Though both women share this fate, the research processes to learn more about each woman were notably different. This is because of the vastly different circumstances of the women’s lives and the accessibility to information about them. Though formal education was either impossible or heavily frowned upon for women in the 1700s and 1800s, both Katherine and Émilie were able to contribute to physics research. However, Katherine is only recorded in a few documents of her husband’s correspondence with close friends, whereas Émilie was a prominent member of the French aristocracy during the revolution, and (despite gender discrimination) was able to make herself known and publish some of her own works.

I initially set out to find underdog stories of two amazing women in physics and publicize their stories as best as I could. I created teaching guides on each of them for young kids (found under AIP’s ‘Materials for Teachers and Students: Teaching Guides and Educational Games on History of the Physical Sciences,’ linked here ) [4] and wrote articles about their research and their lives in this attempt to amplify their voices. However, researching these two women was an eye-opening experience: records on Katherine were nearly nonexistent, and though sources on Émilie were far easier to find, her role is primarily described as related to her romantic affairs rather than her enormous intellect. The kind of investigation required to find the reality of their careers was therefore vastly different.

Katherine Clerk Maxwell’s Breadcrumb Trail

As she is relatively unheard of, researching Katherine’s work was very difficult and different from any analysis that I have done in previous academic settings. Records of Katherine were revealed through archival research, relying heavily on primary sources.

This means that I had to do a lot of digging through letters, postcards, papers, etc. All of these sources were in the context of James Clerk Maxwell, Katherine’s husband, as none of Katherine’s own records had been preserved. So, I spent weeks poking through James’ correspondence, his biography [5] that was written by one of his close friends, and any of his works around the times when I knew that Katherine may have been involved in research. I reached out to an expert of James’ life, Dr. Bruce J. Hunt, as well as the Cavendish Library and University of Cambridge that James himself worked at in the 1800s as they hold many of his archival records. This was all in an effort to try to find any element of Katherine’s existence and role in helping with her husband’s experiments.

One example of Katherine’s involvement in James’s work is revealed in his 1860 paper “On the Theory of Compound Colours, and the Relations of the Colors of the Spectrum.” [6] James Clerk Maxwell wrote down the observations of “observer J. (myself)” to represent himself on page 70. However, on the same page, there is a second observer listed as “another observer (K.)”. Though there is no name tied directly to observer K, correspondence between James and his close friend Lewis Campbell reveal that it is Katherine.

In addition, Katherine’s work on James’ experiments on gasses is disclosed through two sources of correspondence with James’ friends: in an 1877 postcard to Peter Guthrie Tait and in a biography on James written by two of his friends (Lewis Campbell and William Garnett) published in 1882. James was studying the viscosity of gasses, eventually producing “On the viscosity or internal friction of air and other gasses” in 1886. These experiments required a considerable amount of manual effort to produce steam and maintain different required temperatures. A fire had to be kept going for many days in some experiments, with ice employed to keep it cool in others, and “Mrs. Maxwell acted as stoker, which was very exhausting work when maintained for several consecutive hours” [5]. James also wrote in a postcard to Peter Guthrie Tait that “my better 1/2, who did all the real work of the kinetic theory is at present engaged in other researches. When she is done I will let you know her answer to your enquiry.” James thus reveals the physical work that Katherine put into the experiment, although Tait’s original enquiry, as well as following correspondence, has been lost.

Going through these archival sources was a tedious task, which ended with discovering barely more about Katherine than was already on her Wikipedia page. This is a result that is likely common among underrepresented voices like Katherine’s; there do not seem to be more records pertaining to her life other than side comments in her husband’s records and there is no recorded evidence of her after her husband’s passing. After James passed away, Katherine served as an executor to her husband, managing his personal papers. She sorted through his records and correspondence, donating most of his records to the Cavendish Laboratory Archives at Cambridge University, and to two of his friends (Lewis Campbell and William Garnett) who published the biography about James in 1882 [5]. However, Katherine decidedly did not donate personal letters or those pertaining to herself, so there is missing correspondence. These records relating to Katherine are presumably lost, as with much of the paper trail of her life. Researching what little I could find about Katherine took weeks of searching through archives, for nearly fruitless efforts.

The information about Katherine Clerk Maxwell that I was able to find through this archival research can be found in the fall edition of the AIP History Newsletter .

Émilie du Châtelet’s Astounding Impact

In juxtaposition to the lack of information on Katherine, Émilie’s life story is a mere Google search away. If the records of Katherine’s life are a meager archival breadcrumb trail, Emilie’s legacy provides a whole loaf of bread. There is an abundance of literature, papers, articles, and other secondary sources of work on Émilie; she was involved in the French aristocracy and revolution, is well-researched, written about by many, and kept her own records as well. Researching her took far less time, as many before me had already set out to write about this incredible and accomplished woman, even if they were still doing so in the context of the man next to her (Voltaire).

Archival research was less relevant to du Châtelet, so researching her consisted more of doing a literature review with library books and scholarly articles written about her. I did not need to spend weeks reading correspondence, or reach out to potential scholars and archives, and was instead able to use freely available sources. Many of the first sources I found relating to du Châtelet highlighted Émilie’s role in history as ‘Voltaire’s Mistress’ rather than as an intellectual in her own right: even when searching for academic content relating to Émilie’s life on the WorldCat database, two of the first four books contain the salacious titles: Seduced by Logic and Passionate Minds. I also learned of two plays about du Châtelet’s life (Legacy of Light and Emilie: La Marquise Du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight) - the only two that exist in English, to my knowledge - and both focus to some degree on her love story with Voltaire.

However, du Châtelet is incredibly disserviced by her portrayal as a seductress in history, as she was an incredibly accomplished physicist, philosopher, translator, and mathematician. She fought hard for a seat at the table in 1700s France, with many distinguished scholars (including Voltaire) writing of her intelligence. Some of her most notable work included: the physics of heat transfer (published in an essay competition with other works by Voltaire and Leonhard Euler), the philosophy of different ways of thinking about physics (in her very well received manuscript titled “Foundations of Physics”), reflections and expansions of Newton’s ideas, and the translation of Newton’s entire “Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica,” which included her own annotations and explanations of his theory and was published after she passed away. Even though she may have been a well-respected and inspiring woman of her time, the historical discrimination that remembers only her provocative pursuits is something that happens all too often with minorities in positions of power, intellect, or those possessing any coveted traits.

The product of my research and more information on Émilie du Châtelet can be found in a future AIP News Back Page or an Ex Libris Universum blog post, which is to be decided.

In Closing…

My research journeys with Katherine Clerk Maxwell and Émilie du Châtelet, though starkly different from each other, made me even more aware of the importance of raising the profile of both women, who I knew nothing about before this summer. Seeing how each woman was treated in comparison with the men in their lives was truly eye-opening and drove home the point that researching and amplifying the true stories of female voices in physics is essential. We need to raise awareness of historical women such as Katherine and Émilie in order for them to be role models of a more diverse field in the present, or else risk losing valuable advances in physics by discouraging women’s participation in the field. The inclusion of more women as role models is one clear way to do the essential job of incorporating more women in physics. Émilie du Châtelet even knew of the importance of increasing women’s roles in academia in 1735, before women had a right to a full education, when she wrote the following:

References:

[1] Porter, Anne Marie, and Ivie, Rachel. 2019. “Women in Physics and Astronomy, 2019.” AIP Publishing, March 2019. /statistics/reports/women-physics-and-astronomy-2019#:~:text=In%202017%2C%20women%20earned%2021,has%20not%20changed%20over%20time .

[2] Munir, Naima, and Hui, Heidi. “Representation and Role Models Are Key to Promoting Diversity in STEM.” Society for Canadien Women in Science & Technology, accessed July 21 2022. https://www.yourcareerguide.ca/education/representation-and-role-models-are-key-to-promoting-diversity-in-stem/# .

[3] Wade, Jess, and Zaringhalam, Maryam. 2019. “Why we need to keep talking about equality in physics.” PhysicsWorld: August 2019. https://physicsworld.com/a/why-we-need-to-keep-talking-about-equality-in-physics/ .

[4] American Institute of Physics. “Materials for Teachers and Students: Teaching Guides and Educational Games on History of the Physical Sciences.” Last modified 2022. /history-programs/physics-history/teaching-guides .

[5] Campbell, Lewis, and Garnett, William. 1889. “The Life of James Clerk Maxwell.” London: Macmillan & co. Page 181. https://www.sonnetsoftware.com/bio/maxbio.pdf

[6] Du Chatelet, Emilie, “Émilie Du Châtelet (1706-1749) The Saint Petersburg Manuscripts.” Center for the History of Women Philosophers and Scientists: December 2020. https://historyofwomenphilosophers.org/stp/documents/view/mandeville#translation .