Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick, Country House Science, and Personae for British Women in Science at the turn of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

Higher education for women in the fields of science and mathematics significantly expanded in the United Kingdom at the end of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. A major force in that expansion was Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick (1845–1934), the mathematically talented head of Newnham College, Cambridge, and researcher in experimental physics at the University of Cambridge’s Cavendish Laboratory. In this article I examine Sidgwick’s role in advancing science education for women, focusing on her construction of a scientific persona for British women that drew upon her evangelical Anglican values of family and domesticity. I argue that Sidgwick’s work contributed to an enterprise of ‘country house science’ in which other members of her extended family were engaged, and that her case contributes to a reorientation of the historiography from a focus on recovery of women’s peripheral contributions to the positioning of the work of science education for women more centrally in our narratives about women in science.