A detailed account of the status of women scientists during an important transition period... Offering valuable information on women scientists and suggesting additional research opportunities, Rossiter's second volume stands as a significant contribution to both women's history and the history of American science.(George E. Webb American Historical Review)
Highly readable and exquisitely informative. Rossiter's documentation of this gloomy chapter in the history of women striving to make a place for themselves in science serves as a pungent antidote for questions concerning the fairness of affirmative action.(Journal of American History)
What we have here is a remarkable example of historian as detective... The attention Rossiter gives to identifying individuals and the details she provides about marriage, barriers... underrecognition, disappointments, and—yes—real accomplishments and rewards breathes life into her frequently poignant account.(Science)
Rossiter's resourcefulness and thoroughness yield a cornucopia of information... [Her] formidable achievement is to provide a full, complex picture of the marginalisation of American women scientists in this era... I recommend this book to anyone involved in science: the questions about the sexual politics of science it tackles and provokes are too important to be ignored.(New Scientist)
Rossiter marshals an astounding array of evidence to assess women's work, roles, productivity, and advances as American scientists. Not content to study only those women who held collegiate faculty posts, she also examines female scientists in government, industry, and self-employment, devoting strong chapters to each... Most impressive in its careful, scientific approach to data that others have previously offered, analyzed, and packaged.(Harvard Educational Review)
An engaging and eye-opening book... This is a story not only of science, but of the resolution and courage of women scientists who struggled to continue in their professions even when confronted repeatedly with adversity.(Chemical and Engineering News)
Margaret W. Rossiter is the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science at Cornell University and editor of Isis and Osiris. Her book Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 is also available from Johns Hopkins.