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The Power of Weak Competitors: Women Scholars,
“Popular Science,” and the Building of a Scientic
Community in Italy, 1860s-1930s
Paola Govoni
Science in Context / Volume 26 / Special Issue 03 / September 2013, pp 405 - 436
DOI: 10.1017/S0269889713000124, Published online: 25 July 2013
Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0269889713000124
How to cite this article:
Paola Govoni (2013). The Power of Weak Competitors: Women Scholars, “Popular Science,” and
the Building of a Scientic Community in Italy, 1860s-1930s. Science in Context, 26, pp 405-436
doi:10.1017/S0269889713000124
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Science in Context 26(3), 405–436 (2013). Copyright C
Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S0269889713000124
The Power of Weak Competitors: Women Scholars,
“Popular Science,” and the Building of a Scientific
Community in Italy, 1860s-1930s
Paola Govoni
University of Bologna
E-mail: p.govoni@unibo.it
Argument
The history of Italian “popular science” publishing from the 1860s to the 1930s provides the
context to explore three phenomena: the building of a scientific community, the entering of
women into higher education, and (male) scientists’ reaction to women in science. The careers
of Evangelina Bottero (1859–1950) and Carolina Magistrelli (1857–1939), science writers and
teachers in an institute of higher education, offer hints towards an understanding of those
interrelated macro phenomena. The dialogue between a case study and the general context in a
comparative perspective will help us understand why Italian scientists, in the last decades of the
nineteenth century, unlike their British colleagues, did not close the doors of the university on
women. The case confirms the history of so-called popular science as a useful tool for historians
of science generally and also when dealing with the awakening of a new social actor: in this case
the “new woman” who, from the 1870s, was determined to take up science in a professional
capacity.
The Italian “popular science”1literature to which I will be referring, non-specialist
science literature written by experts for a lay public and for colleagues from different
sectors, was rooted in an ancient tradition as old as publishing itself. It was during the
1Discussions on the use of expressions such as popular science, popularization or communication of science have
been rich and important among histor ians and sociologists of science (Whitley 1985; Cooper and Pumphrey
1994; Secord 2004). On the nearly thirty-year-old ongoing debate, see Topham 2009. Here I shall be using
the historical phrase (or, “umbrella label”) “popular science” which, like “popularization of science,” handled
correctly may serve as a useful tool of communication within the history and sociology of science, technology,
and medicine, as well as with other disciplines, not to mention scientists, students, and the lay public (Govoni
[2002] 2011, 20–21; Lightman 2007, 9–10; O’Connor 2009, 333). At present our knowledge of nineteenth and
twentieth centuries Italian popular science is limited to its “top-down” manifestations: literature produced by
the experts and professional scientists involved in exposing science to a lay public. In that context, until World
War I, in Italy the expressions popular science (scienza popolare), science for all (scienza per tutti) and vulgarization
(volgarizzazione) were used, whereas from the 1920s the expression science popularization (divulgazione scientifica)
began to be used. For the differences, and the precautions to be taken when using these labels in Italian and
English, and on the history of the tradition of “popular science” in Italy since the early modern era, reference
will be made here to Govoni 1997, [2002] 2011, 2009b, and 2011a, b, and c.
406 Paola Govoni
eighteenth century, however, that experts began to popularize natural philosophy in
ways that gradually became more complex. Together with educational, religious, or
anti-religion objectives, its use increasingly included political aims, both the politics of
science and politics tout court. The science narrated in a language and in genres accessible
to the non-expert (in an age when communication for specialists was in Latin), through
dialogues and almanacs in the time of academies and specialist journals, and through
lessons by itinerants in salons or coffeehouses, reached not only the interested and
self-taught elites, but also entrepreneurs and state and ecclesiastical officials, who were
of vital importance to the natural philosopher and the technologist (Golinski 1992;
Stewart 1992). As historians and sociologists of science and technology now realize,
thanks to an increasing literature on the subject, the links between experts, politicians,
entrepreneurs, and the public intensified with the spread of industrialization until
the successful emergence around the mid-nineteenth century of a literature which in
various languages celebrated a “science for all,” science pur tous,Wissenschaft f¨
ur alle,
scienza per tutti. It is now accepted that in the construction of the public image of the
modern scientist, that literature played a crucial role.2
In the decades after political unification (1861) Italy saw several (male) scientists and
university professors become well-known as authors of successful literature of scienza
popolare. Yet, because of a very high illiteracy rate, Italian readers in the liberal age,3as
we shall be seeing, belonged in most cases to a restricted elite of the literate and well
off.
After three more or less idyllic decades, the relationship between Italian scientists and
popular science writing started to change when, following the international recession
of the 1880s, the Italian publishing sector in general experienced a crisis (Zamagni
[1993] 1997, chap. 1). Science, technology, and medicine book titles published
yearly proportionally declined more than other fields (fig. 1). In terms of demand, the
fall in the number of scientific publications between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries may be attributed to the public’s changes in taste as the age of positivism
was superseded by that of neo-idealism (Boringhieri 2010). One first question to
be answered is: what changed here on the side of production? Since the figure of
professional science journalist or writer was lacking in Italy up until the 1920s, what
altered in the commitment of scientists as popularizers?
In the meantime, the success of scienza per tutti from the 1860s to the 1900s
had made a concrete impression on various categories of readers, in the first place,
the scientists themselves. In statements of their aims, the popularizing scientists of
a positivist orientation showed they were trying to reach the poorer social classes,
2As far as I know, the only attempts at comparative studies of different national cases have been made in
Shinn and Whitley 1985; Porter 1992; Bensaude-Vincent and Rasmussen 1997; Papanelopoulou et al. 2009;
Schirrmacher 2009. For just a selection of the rich bibliography on the subject, I refer to the reference list.
3By the liberal age is meant the period from the political unification of the country (1861), to the eve of fascism
(1922).
The Power of Weak Competitors 407
Fig. 1. Percentage of science, technology, and medical titles over the total of book production,
1861–1940 (sources: ISTAT 1976, 58, 1986, 97).
to help them emancipate themselves financially, and to free them from centuries of
“obscurantism,” that is to say the influence of the Catholic Church. Vice-versa, the
Catholic popularizing scientists aimed to “defend” that same public from the attacks of
the so-called “priests of science,” politically close to those liberal elites who, in power
in the early decades after unification, raised significant barriers to the ambitions of the
Vatican (on the Italian history of the period, see Davis 2000). However, the reality
could be sometimes more interesting than that. The public activities of scientists of
various shades of opinion (naturally including less crystal clear positions as well as those
outlined above), were also directed at defending common interests.
In Nuova Antologia, a non specialist magazine read by every good Italian bourgeois,
reviewing the volume by the geologist and abbot Antonio Stoppani (1824−1891),
Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910) managed to praise both the enemy and himself by
stating that “rationalists and Catholics alike may shake the hand of the author [Stoppani],
forgetting he is an abbot; because in him, above the priest of the God of Nazareth stands
the priest of that eternal divinity whose name is science” (Mantegazza 1872, 204–205).
Mantegazza was a physiologist, anthropologist, and a freemason who held anticlerical
views; he argued for evolution, popularized the precepts of birth control, and was
throughout the liberal era a bestselling author. Stoppani, who in 1876 published one of
the most famous Italian books, Il Bel Paese (The Beautiful Country), a long term success
on natural science, was an anti-evolutionist geologist and the author of ferocious attacks
on “positive science” (Stoppani 1876, [1884] 1886; Vaccari 2009; Redondi 2012).
The (few) Italian scientists after unification,4scattered in a number of quite
peripheral centers, seeing themselves in their publications for the public, which often
4From the early official estimates (1862–63), the number of academic staff of all disciplines turn out to be 714 in
19 universities (Sulle Condizioni della Pubblica Istruzione ...1865, 137). That same academic year the number of
the official physics and natural sciences courses was 93. Unpublished data kindly provided by Ariane Dr¨
oscher,
408 Paola Govoni
presented them as heroes or priests of “modernity,” learnt to think of themselves as
belonging to a real community. They held a wide variety of political, religious, and
scientific positions, even at opposite extremes in the case of Stoppani and Mantegazza,
but they also had common interests, at least with regard to those politicians and
administrators in charge of the institutes where they worked and on whom their funds
for research depended.
Of course, the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and the middle classes also benefited
from the success of science for all, a literature spreading the idea of science and
technology as engines of economic “progress,” as well as social progress, just as the
self-taught workers, technicians, and artisans did in the limited number of areas being
industrialized (Lacaita 1973, 1990).
However, the benefits of the success of scienza per tutti were also enjoyed by another
protagonist, who like the “scientist” and the “entrepreneur,” was emerging on to
the Italian economic and social scene: the “new woman” of the lower-middle and
middle classes determined to graduate in order to gain access to the professions (De
Giorgio 1992, chaps. 5 and 6; idem 1996; Malatesta 2006, chap. 6). In Italy this was a
limited public of a few hundred women who were not a priority target for writers and
publishers of popular science. Yet a quantitative study of the first period of access for
women to Italian science higher education demonstrates that that science literature had
had more influence on those women in the orientation of their choices of profession
than the contemporary well known extraordinary national and international success of
books by authors who argued for the intellectual inferiority of women, such as Cesare
Lombroso (1835–1909), Gugliemo Ferrero (1871–1942), or Mantegazza (Lombroso
and Ferrero [1893] 2004; Mantegazza [1893] 1932; Babini et al. [1986] 1989; Gibson
2002, chap. 2; Govoni [2002] 2011, chap. 5; Wanrooij 2004). As we shall see, 32 per
cent of the first wave of women graduates between 1877 and 1900 chose to study
sciences or medicine.
Yet, judging from the data and the case studies available, it seems that in the period
examined here, Italian academics’ behavior toward women in science changed from
a relatively welcoming attitude during the age of the scienza per tutti, to a rejection
between the two World Wars. The exclusion women came up against in professional
science between the wars in Italy cannot be explained simply by fascism. It was, rather,
a situation that Italian women would have been subjected to anyway, like women
working in universities in other, more democratic western countries, such as the
United States and United Kingdom, after the advances made in the early years of the
century (Rossiter 1982, 190–193, 269–270; Dyhouse 1995, 138). It was in the last
decades of the nineteenth century that the behavior of academics toward women in
science in Italy therefore shows an anomalous trend, and the second question I need to
who I wish to thank here. On the history of Italian universities, among others, see Porciani 1994; Brizzi, Del
Negro, Romano 2007; Dr¨
oscher 2013.
The Power of Weak Competitors 409
answer here is: why were women in Italy not kept out of universities and professional
societies or associations, as was happening elsewhere?
In what follows I will suggest that at the root of scientists’ change in attitude toward
women in science between the 1870s and the 1930s we find the same reasons that
led scientists to carefully adjust their distance from so-called popular science. It was
in the course of that half century that the consolidation of a national community
of science practitioners came to an end, a process that experienced a final episode
in the participation of the scientists in research for the war effort during War World
I (Maiocchi 1980, 2000; Pancaldi 1993, 2006; Tomassini 2011). Those professional
practitioners, born between the 1880s and the beginning of the twentieth century, no
longer involved themselves in the business of publications at a layman’s level of language
as the scientists after unification had. The new scientists continued to popularize, but
concentrated on drafting university manuals and popularizing books of a medium-high
level (Evangelisti 1999; Govoni 2011b). It was this new scientist, in the years of the
postwar economic crisis, who understood that women, already increasing in numbers
in science faculties during the war, were dangerous competitors.
The lives and works of Evangelina Bottero and Carolina Magistrelli provide suitable
examples to follow the evolution from dialogue to clash between men and women in
the culture of science in the age of Italian national community building. They were the
first women science graduates in Italy in 1881, and in 1890 they became full professors
of science in an institute of higher education. Yet after four decades of success, in 1923
their careers ended in disaster.
I shall try here to make sense of this history, a case study in itself quite marginal,
involving a limited number of protagonists, by placing it in the context of two
macro phenomena I have been examining in-depth (Pomata 1998): the relationships
between professional scientists and non-specialist science literature, and between men
and women in higher science education in Italy from the 1870s to the 1930s. Since the
English speaking science market, as we shall see, was a model that was taken as an ideal
by some important Italian authors and publishers, a brief comparison with the British
situation – the best known and studied – will help us to understand what happened in
Italy.
The success and (relative) decline of scienza popolare in Italy
Readers of popular science in post-unification Italy were primarily men and women of
the rich bourgeoisie and the new lower-middle and middle classes; though only in the
few industrial zones, there were also a very few people from the lower classes. In 1861
at the national level the truly literate were no more than 10 to12 per cent of the adult
population. In 1901 the illiterate were still 48 per cent and in 1931, 20.9 per cent of
the population overall (De Mauro [1963] 2011; Cipolla 1969; De Fort 1995). In 1881,
the year of the greatest success of scienza per tutti (fig. 1), those belonging to the upper
410 Paola Govoni
middle class – borghesia – were around 11 per cent of the population (Barbagli and
Pisati 2012, 295; on the Italian bourgeoisie, see Meriggi 1993). It is likely that this 11
per cent of the population corresponded to non-occasional readers, and thus, arguably,
readers also of science literature.5With the spread of education the situation improved
a little but, compared to other European countries, Italians’ low propensity to read,
especially scientific material, would seem to be an endemic phenomenon (Eurostat
2011; Govoni 2011b).
Nineteenth-century Italian popular science, like that of other countries, was
nevertheless practiced by scientists not only for educational reasons and economic
advantage, but also to facilitate dialogue with colleagues in different sectors. The study
of that literature thus helps in understanding individuals’ scientific ambitions and those
of categories of scientists, a mixture of idealism and ambiguities in a role that was taking
decisive steps away from that of “natural philosopher” towards that of “scientist.” In
that evolution, foreign models, in particular British models, played a part.
Recent historical research has deconstructed the image of a two-dimensional
“Victorian science” produced by a growing and cohesive community of experts (among
others, see Sheets-Pyenson 1985; MacLeod 1996, 2000; Shteir 1996; Butler 1998a,
1998b; Lightman 1997; Desmond 1997; Gates 1998; White 2003; Morrell 2005). It is
now clear that each place and institution saw the individual expert as well as groups
of collaborators act differently according to the personal, scientific, career, political,
and religious interests involved. It remains true, however, that it was initially in the
United Kingdom that scientific practitioners became engaged in popular science and
educational policies often acting as a national community sharing a few important goals.
The image the public had of British men of science and which survived for a long time
through popular publications was typically an image of a new kind of “enlightened”
professional, tending towards the heroic, whose intellectual efforts found an immediate
application in terms of industrial, medical, social, and political “progress” (Meadows
2004; MacLeod 2007).
This was the sweetened and simplified image which was circulating among the
British public, and abroad, an image that reached Italy thanks to the alliance of some
scientists and publishers who had lived abroad in their youth as students or else in exile
for political reasons during the Risorgimento (on so-called Risorgimento Anglophilia,see
Isabella 2009, chap. 6).
If at the level of the reorganization of the universities and launch of new research
institutions the model, in Italy and elsewhere, was the German research university, the
model adopted by social reformers and popularizers of science to communicate with the
public was a different one. In this case the model was more often the United Kingdom
with its extraordinary personalities, like Michael Faraday, in both experimental and
5Data on the number of copies of the volumes published for the period under examination are not available,
only the number of titles (Ragone 1999). For the number of copies sold of some of the more successful science
books, see Societ`
a Bibliografica Italiana 1906; Govoni [2002] 2011.
The Power of Weak Competitors 411
popularizing fields; its experts, politicians, reformers, and popularizers, like Thomas
Huxley; its science market that produced scores of journals; its institutions, like the
Royal Institution; and its British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS).
Britain was also home to the Crystal Palace, whose mythical status internationally
established a new way of seeing the role of science and technology in “modern”
societies (among others, see White 2003; Cantor et al. 2004; Cantor and Shuttleworth
2004; Henson et al. 2004; SciPer Project web site; James 2007; Fyfe and Lightman 2007).
In 1873, again in the pages of the Nuova Antologia, commenting upon the decision
of a scientist colleague to publish his work exclusively in English, Mantegazza endorsed
his choice with enthusiasm, saying that English was the language “which today is read
by the majority of people of the educated world in both hemispheres” (Mantegazza
1873, 238–239). French remained the international language par excellence, German was
increasingly influential, but to read English was by that time indispensable for scholars
of nature and had been at least since 1859, with the publication of On the Origin of
Species.
In fact, the importance that the reformist and pragmatic culture emerging from
Scotland and England had for some of the protagonists of the history of the
relations between science and society in Italy is well known, starting from Francesco
Algarotti (1712–1764), one of the original Italian expert popularizers, author of the
internationally well-known Il Newtonianismo per le Dame, ovvero Dialoghi sopra la Luce
eiColori(Newtonianism for the Ladies, or Dialogues on Light and Colours, 1737).
The first edition of the book was placed on the Index by the Catholic Church,
not for the heliocentric arguments put forward, but for the political positions of its
young anglophile author, openly a freemason, accused of suffering from a “slow fever
of Lockeism” (Francesco Maria Zanotti to Eustachio Manfredi, February 7, 1733,
quoted in De Zan 1984, 136–7; Graf 1911; Govoni [2002] 2011, chap. 2; Mazzotti
2004). Carlo Cattaneo (1801–1869), politician and philosopher, a crucial figure in
spreading an idea of “progress” as the fruit of the interaction between the circulation
of scientific and technical culture, and social and economic development, was an
enthusiastic supporter of Bentham. He was respected by a variety of famous science
and technology popularizers, from the mathematician Francesco Brioschi (1824–1897)
to the technologist Giuseppe Colombo (1836–1921), from Mantegazza to the moderate
catholic naturalist and popularizer Paolo Lioy (1834–1911), the first to support Darwin’s
theories in Italy (Colombo 1934; Brioschi 2003; Vitale 2003; Thom 2004; Govoni
2011c). Indeed, the British context was taken as a model in politics, culture and
even at the level of scientific and educational institutions (Graf 1911; Are 1965;
Spini 1988; Lacaita 1995; Romano 1998). Carlo Luciano Bonaparte (1803–1857),
a zoologist born in France, but educated also in the U.S.A., looked to the BAAS when
promoting the Congresses of Italian scientists (1839) (Pancaldi 1981, 1982, 1983;
Ausejo 1994; Casalena 2007). The physicist Carlo Matteucci (1811–1868), in his role
as Italy’s first minister of education after unification, looked to Germany as his source of
inspiration for the reform of the university system (Porciani 1994). Yet when seeking
412 Paola Govoni
to promote the diffusion of science and technology among non-experts, including
perhaps the lower class, he supported the spread of Letture scientifiche libere (Free Science
Lectures), lessons for all that were organized by private individuals, which were “a
very good import from Great Britain and America” (Sulle Condizioni della Pubblica
Istruzione [...] 1865, 217–218; Matteucci 1867, 8). The education systems of the
United Kingdom or United States were often cited as positive models by Pasquale
Villari (1827–1917), positivist historian, friend and correspondent of John Stuart Mill,
a powerful politician who promoted science in public education; Michele Lessona
(1823–1894), naturalist, university professor, and famous popularizer; Angelo Mosso
(1846–1910), a physiologist with an international reputation and a popularizer; Lioy
himself, and others too (Villari 1864; Lessona [1869] 1873, chap. 1; Mosso 1903, chap.
8; Laboulaye [1862] 1866; Lioy 1868). When an Italian Society for the Advancement
of Science (Societ`
a Italiana per il Progresso delle Scienze, SIPS) was actually set up at the
beginning of the twentieth century, the BAAS would once again provide its founder,
the mathematician Vito Volterra (1860–1940), with a model to follow. Volterra, among
other things, when he visited the United States was so impressed by its universities he
toyed with the idea of staying there (Goodstein 2007, 154, chap. 14).
The British science market was an important model also for publishers, although
obviously it was not the only one to influence them. Emilio Treves, who like
Cattaneo and Villari had married a learned Englishwoman,6was one of the most
important publishers of the so-called scienza per tutti, and the most successful Italian
publisher before World War I. In 1883, at the height of his reputation, Treves brought
together some of the most famous popularizing scientists and engineers to publish
a weekly which he hoped would become the “Italian Nature.” Treves believed that
“only the English Nature ... an admirable model, the French ... considerably lighter
[because] it includes everything as long as it has pictures and is entertaining.” As for
the German edition Treves claimed “it was worth very little in all aspects” (Treves
to Mantegazza, June 13, 1884, Mantegazza Papers). Like the case of the “Italian
Nature,” another interesting episode attesting popularizing’s transnational character saw
the Turin publishers, the brothers Dumolard, launch in 1875 the Biblioteca Scientifica
Internazionale. The series started as an Italian offshoot of the International Scientific
Series, brainchild of the American Edward L. Youmans and involving collaboration
between publishers and scientists to spread Darwin’s evolutionary theories (MacLeod
1980; Howsam 2000; Lightman 2007, chaps. 2 and 7; Govoni, [2002] 2011, chap. 3).
One could continue with many other examples.
Italy shared with other European countries some of the economic and social reasons
for the success of popular science between the 1860s and 1900. Other circumstances
supporting this success, however, were undoubtedly linked to its specific national
6On Ann Pyne Woodcock (1796–1869), Cattaneo’s wife, see Ciureanu 1961; Lacaita 2003, 36–41; on Suzette
Thompson (1841–1927), Treves’ wife, see Grillandi 1977, 176, passim. Linda White (1836–1915), Villari’s wife,
was an interesting author, journalist, and translator of whom we still don’t have a biography.
The Power of Weak Competitors 413
context, in particular the politics and rhetoric of unification. The elites in power
supported an idea of science regarded as the driving force behind “progress,” persuaded
it would rapidly help give the country an economic and social structure comparable to
that of other leading European countries. In these circumstances, popularizer scientists
enjoyed great success. There were a few women among them, such as Bottero and
especially Magistrelli, as well as Adele Masi Lessona (1824–1904), science writer and
ghost translator of some of Darwin’s works into Italian published under her husband’s
name, the aforementioned Lessona (Govoni [2002] 2011, chap. 4).
Although the evidence indicates that Italian social realities were among the worst
in Europe in the period 1870–1900, a generation of scientists and publishers, many
of whom had taken part in the Risorgimento, ensured that the percentage of scientific
books among all books published in Italy reached a peak at the turn of the century
that was not to be surpassed in subsequent decades (fig. 1).
At the individual level therefore, the writers’ situation in Italy, taking into account
the diverse contexts, may be compared to that of British writers. The same cannot be
said of the behavior of popularizer scientists as members of a national community of
professionals. The community in Italy was very fragile, as attested by a large number
of indicators, including one of the first international rankings devoted to evaluating
the scientific success of several European nations (Candolle 1873, tab. 9, 176–177).
South of the Alps, as is well known, there were no institutions comparable to the
Royal Institution or the BAAS; both the attempts made with the aforementioned
Congresses of Italian Scientists failed, as did the attempt in 1862 to establish the SIPS.
For reasons briefly referred to here, the success of popular science literature assumed a
different character from Britain: in Italy individual scientists were unable to cooperate
for middle- or long-term collective goals. While the production of book titles confirms
the success of individual authors, in 1871 only 69 of the 765 officially registered journals
were scientific, about 9 per cent of the total (from the data in Ottino 1875, 11). The
“Italian Nature” failed after only two years, and not through a lack of support from
the publisher, but instead because of the relative lack of collaboration by the project’s
scientists (Govoni 1997; idem [2002] 2011, chap. 6).
In the medium term, that intense political and publishing commitment of the
scientists had negative repercussions on their work in the laboratory. Hence for the
scientists of a later generation it became a matter of urgency to bring “national”
scientific production back to acceptable qualitative levels. To do this, a new generation
of scientists born roughly between the 1860s and the 1870s, as was Volterra, invested
in new challenging institutions to raise the quality of research. Thus in 1906 they
supported the re-launching of the SIPS, an initiative that provided good results during
World War I and between the two world wars, and which may be linked to the
birth of the National Research Council (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, CNR) in
1923. Between these two events, the complex operation that led to the creation of a
national community of scientists in Italy was completed during World War I, when
scientists were committed to new kinds of collaboration with the government and
414 Paola Govoni
with industry (Casella et al. 2000; Simili and Paoloni 2001; Cassata and Pogliano
2011). The operation was thus completed by young scientists born between the 1880s
and the early years of the new century. Since the figure of professional science writer
and journalist was lacking in Italy up until the 1920s, the reduced commitment of
scientists in the popularizing field in the first three decades of the twentieth century
quickly had repercussions for the publishing market. It is true that in Italy, as in Britain,
scientists’ lack of interest in scientific popularizing in the twentieth century was more
myth than reality (Bowler 2009; Govoni 2011a). However, it is also true that their
commitment to popularizing changed: the production of lower level literature fell,
while that of manuals and of generally higher level work increased, as can be seen,
for instance, with the popularizing activities of the young Enrico Fermi (1901–1954)
(Fermi 2009). As testimony to the cohesion reached by the scientific community, the
number of journals increased: in 1939 there were 637 scientific titles of various levels
(data source: CNR, 3 vols., 1939). It was this new scientist, aware of belonging to a
community with shared objectives and of growing prestige and power after World War
I, who realized that women in science could be competitors to be feared.
Women in higher science education south of the Alps
In the last decades of the nineteenth century scientists rose to positions of economic,
institutional, and political prominence at the same time that women entered higher
science education and the professions (Rossiter 1982; Abir-Am and Outram [1987]
1989; Seymour Eschbach 1993; Dyhouse 1995; Berti Logan 1998, 2004, and 2005;
Tullberg 1998; “Histoires de pionni`
ers” 2000; Maz´
on 2003; Rowold 2010).
Let’s briefly return to a comparison with the situation in the United Kingdom.
Although it is well known that in institutions like the BAAS the presence of women
was always important and encouraged by the men of science, the determination with
which sometimes those same scholars kept women out of most scientific societies
and universities for so long was also remarkable. In opposing women’s admission
to membership of the Ethnological and Geological Society, in his view “a place
of discussion for adepts,” in a famous passage Huxley declared he was convinced that
notwithstanding a hoped for improvement in education “five-sixths of women will stop
in the doll stage of evolution to be the stronghold of parsondom, the drag on civilisation,
the degradation of every important pursuit with which they mix themselves –
‘intrigues’ in politics, and ‘friponnes’ in science” (Huxley to Lyll, March 17, 1860, in
Huxley 1901, 228). It is true that among Darwinians, men and women, we know they
held kaleidoscopic positions regarding women’s place in nature and society (among
others, see Russett 1989; Desmond 1997; Richards 1983, 1997, 1998; Kohlstedt and
Jorgensen 1999; Desmond 2001; White 2003, chap. 1). Nonetheless, it is also true
that the choices of institutions have enormous power, and those made by universities
and professional associations and societies of the Victorian age legitimated de facto the
The Power of Weak Competitors 415
image of women as stuck at the “doll stage of evolution.” If in 1829 women had
been admitted to the Zoological Society of London and in 1839 to the Entomological
Society, the Linnaean Society only admitted them in 1905, the Royal Microscopical
Society in 1909, the Royal Geographical Society in 1913, the Geological Society in
1919, and the Royal Society in 1945; Oxford and Cambridge only granted degrees to
women in 1920 and 1946 respectively. This was the behavior of a community with an
ancient monastic and hence misogynist tradition behind it, but that was not all there
was to it (Noble 1993; Perrone 1993; McWilliams Tullberg 1998; Schiebinger 2004,
chaps. 4, 5; Higgitt and Withers 2008).
If on the one hand denying women access to universities and societies was the
defense of privileges acquired, on the other hand it was an idealistic battle in the name
of high standards reached in science and technology. To put it more simply, we may
say that if the scientist and inventor were by now “heroes,” the popular press did
not hesitate to cover women in ridicule when they assumed the role of students or
intellectuals. It is clear that the two upstarts, the scientist (man of science) and the “new
woman,” had to remain separate, in the public sphere as well as in the new temples
of knowledge, universities, and professional societies, places for “adepts” (“Ladies not
admitted,” Punch, March 21, 1896, 134).
Briefly recalling the well known British example helps us to understand why in those
same decades Italian scientists, though often sharing Huxley’s ideas on the position of
women in human evolutionary history, did not close the doors of the university and
professional societies on them.
In the decades after the unification in Italy, the eighteenth-century male natural
philosopher, usually financially independent because of noble, ecclesiastical, or upper
bourgeois extraction, was gradually being replaced by a middle class or lower middle
class male scientist. Also the first women graduates in science in the 1880s who
emerged on to the intellectual market often belonged to the lower middle class. They
enrolled in the university for the same reasons that men did: accession to a profession
to enable them to rise in the social order. However, the experiences of the first women
graduates demonstrate that the scientists they had to do with encouraged their studies
and professional activities (Govoni 2006, 2007, and 2009a). I believe the reason for this
collaboration did not simply lie in the tiny number of women science graduates and
in the liberal mentality of several post-unification scientists.
When in 1876 new university regulations were introduced, the law stated that
“Women may be enrolled in the register of students and auditors, where they
present the required documentation,” without needing to abrogate previous legislation
(“Nuovi regolamenti Universitari” 1876, 12). Important politicians and intellectuals
demonstrated some by no means banal involvement in the issue, yet nevertheless, the
women who embarked on the adventure were few (Howard 1977; Moretti 1989;
Raicich 1989; Cammelli and Di Francia 1996; Berti Logan 1998). The reasons had to
do with the economic conditions of the country and the lack of a tradition of girls’
grammar schools, for Catholic opinion was firmly opposed to adolescent co-education
416 Paola Govoni
Fig. 2. The choices of the first 224 women graduates in Italy (1877–1900) (source: Rav`
a 1902,
634–654).
(Soldani 1989; Ghizzoni and Polenghi 2008). According to the data of the ministry of
education, between 1877 and 1900 there were 224 women graduates, in a context of
female illiteracy of around 80 per cent in 1870 and around 60 per cent in the early
years of the twentieth century. At any rate, as already anticipated, seventy-two of those
first women graduates chose to graduate in sciences or in medicine (fig. 2)
If science was proclaimed to be “for all,” if indeed science was being preached as
the main tool needed to free people and nations from poverty and “obscurantism,”
why should that not apply to women? It was a public sphere context – national and
international – favorable to the sciences that contributed to women’s choosing to enroll
in increasing numbers for science or medicine degrees. And in fact, the scientific results
of Italian women researchers were highly thought of internationally.
If we exclude American and British women, who on their own account for around
two thirds of the scientific articles published by women and registered in the Catalogue
of Scientific Papers, 1800–1900, Italian women were the most productive among the
hundred and seventeen women scientists of other countries (fig. 3). The scientific
production of Italian women increased especially from the 1880s, which was clearly
when they began to frequent university laboratories. And in fact, most of the first
women graduates in the sciences had successful careers (Govoni 2006; Scienza a due
Voc i ... web site).
The brilliant professional beginnings of women in science, however, would not
continue proportionally after World War I, when there was the first important, general
increase in the number of women science graduates. In the academic year 1923–24
there were 330 women science graduates, and in 1926–1927 the percentage of women
graduates in sciences out of the total number of graduates in the sciences, male and
The Power of Weak Competitors 417
Fig. 3. Percentage of scientific publications of women by nation (except American and British
women) registered in the Catalogue of Scientific Papers, 1800–1900, of the Royal Society of
London (source: Creese 2004, 209).
female, was 37 per cent. Four of the first seventy-two women who graduated in science
between 1881 and 1900 became full professors in an institute of higher education:
Bottero and Magistrelli, Rina Monti (1871–1937) (Dr¨
oscher 2007), and Maria Bakunin
(1863–1960). By 1931 the number of female graduates in medicine, pharmacy, and
science had numbered over 200 a year for the previous fifteen years. Yet in 1931
only fourteen women enjoyed stable employment at various levels in the medical and
scientific sectors out of a total of 1,614 university teachers (ISTAT 1936, 74–75).
Relationships between men and women in science had changed during the liberal
era, as events in the careers of Evangelina Bottero and Carolina Magistrelli testify.
The Bottero and Magistrelli case
Evangelina Bottero and Carolina Magistrelli were two middle-class women from the
provinces, Bottero from Aqui in Piedmont, and Magistrelli from Mantua in Lombardy
(Bottero, ACS; Bottero Pagano, ASS; Magistrelli, ACS; Magistrelli Sprega, ASS). In
418 Paola Govoni
their teens, they met in Florence, where between 1875 and 1878 they attended the
complementary course at the Normal School. The Normal Schools were high schools
devoted to the training of primary school teachers, and the diploma did not grant
admission to the university (Soldani 2004). So when in 1878 Bottero and Magistrelli
moved to Rome to attend university lectures in the natural sciences faculty, they gained
admission as regular students after a complex bureaucratic process. In those years in
the Science Faculty there were interesting scientists such as Pietro Blaserna (1836–
1918), professor of physics, one of the most politically powerful scholars of his age, and
Stanislao Cannizzaro (1826–1910), a chemist, and like Blaserna, a powerful politician.
There were several occasions when Blaserna, Cannizzaro, and their colleagues gave
their support to Bottero, Magistrelli, and other women students, such as Margarete
Traube (1856–1912) (Registro dei verbali della Facolt`
a..., ASS; on Traube, see Nebrig
2012). Having embarked on some laboratory work in physics and chemistry, Bottero
and Magistrelli obtained prizes and grants, and on June 15, 1881, they were the first
women in Italy to graduate in the natural sciences (Registro della Carriera Scolastica,
ASS; for a first attempt at reconstructing this case and further reference on the Italian
bibliography, see Govoni 2007).
In 1883 they published a book on the telephone, and the same year, certainly
with the help of Blaserna, their mentor who wrote a preface to the book, they
were employed in the Royal Institutes of Female Higher Education, called Magistero
(Bottero and Magistrelli 1883).
In 1882, after a decade-long debate, two institutes of the Magistero were established
in Rome and Florence to train teachers for the female Normal Schools. The diploma
issued at the end of a four-year course did not have the legal value of a degree, but
Magistero professors enjoyed a status fully equivalent to that of university professors.
While Bottero and Magistrelli were working in the Roman institute, among the staff
were Giuseppe Dalla Vedova (1834–1919), a noted geographer; Luigi Capuana (1839–
1915), a successful writer; Fanny Salazar Zampini (1853–1914), writer and feminist
of international experience; Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936), playwright, essayist and
Nobel prize winner for literature in 1936; and Maria Montessori (1870–1952), the
internationally known anthropologist and educationist (Pesci 1994; Babini and Lama
[2000] 2010). In addition, an interesting feature of the Magistero was the important
place it reserved for the teaching of the natural sciences, and the few documents that
have survived show that Bottero and Magistrelli’s teaching included experimental work
(Bottero Pagano, ASS).
While Bottero abandoned writing, in 1886 Magistrelli published a pamphlet
on Conoscere e Amare nell’Emancipazione della Donna (Knowing and Loving in the
Emancipation of Woman) (Magistrelli 1886). In this she supported the idea that
women’s education must be devoted to their duties as wives but, above all, as mothers.
When Magistrelli published the booklet on the “emancipated woman,” she was a
professional and an established science writer; she was a woman who when she
graduated with Bottero saw herself many times mentioned in the international press
The Power of Weak Competitors 419
(among several others, see London Daily News, Wednesday June 29, 1881, 3; Royal
Cornwall Gazette, Friday 8 July 1881, 2; [The]Englishwoman’s Review 1881, 380; Hanson
Robinson 1881, 251; The Annual Register of World Events, 1882, 48). Moreover, we
know that in 1908 she would attend the First National Women’s Congress in Rome
(Atti del I Congresso ... 1912, 713). Why did she publish that pamphlet?
Her taking that public position was perhaps done with a precise career strategy in
mind. Magistrelli was the daughter of a cobbler, and her mother who had been widowed
had remarried, but had later divorced her second husband (Ruolo di Popolazione
FF 1626; Atto Notarile n. 11922/1995, 1 Novembre 1873, ASM). Quite possibly
Magistrelli did not wish to see doubts voiced about her “morality”: between 1885 and
1886 she was unmarried and in the process of obtaining tenure in a female institute of
higher education in a country which was overwhelmingly Catholic. But other possible
reasons which help us understand that booklet are offered by Magistrelli’s zoology book.
Between 1888 and 1891 Magistrelli published four science books with Paravia, an
important Turin publisher (Magistrelli 1888, 1890, 1891, [1888] 1897). Intended as
textbooks for female high schools, they were lavishly illustrated, and their structure
and language made them at the same time science books for a wider public.
Written in a sober but lively style, Magistrelli’s zoology book is perhaps her most
interesting. Prudently, from its very first pages Magistrelli wrote that nature should
be understood from an evolutionary perspective, quoting first Huxley and later
Lessona, the evolutionist zoologist we have already mentioned (Magistrelli 1888, iv,
27). Magistrelli opened the book with a description of the gorilla, comparing it to
human beings, and then described the animal world from the vertebrates down to the
protozoa, closing the book with a description of the human being.
A comparison between parental care in nature and in human society was a frequent
topic in Magistrelli’s zoology book; she paid special attention to maternal behavior
in several species, often comparing it to human mothers’ behavior. Clearly, her
evolutionary perspective was consistent with her view of women’s emancipation which
she had presented in the booklet published two years earlier. In the name of an
evolutionist interpretation of the role of the female, human and animal, Magistrelli
turned upside down the reasoning of those evolutionist scientists who, like the
celebrated Mantegazza, asserted the dominant role of the male, in line with a natural
selection resembling the “progress” of society (Minuz [1986] 1989; Landucci 1996a,
1996b; Rossi-Doria 1999). Both in the pages on female emancipation and in those on
zoology, Magistrelli simply ignored the male and emphasized the role of the female: in
nature, a role functional to the survival of the species; in human society a role functional
to the education of the individual, to “the family’s happiness,” and “to the glory, the
power and the future of the country” (Magistrelli 1886, 35).
Magistrelli’s writings confirm the importance that the diffusion of Darwinism had
had in relation to a positive role for women in society in Italy too; a positive role
which, theorized over in the name of the “nature” of women in a confused mixture
of social and biological arguments, would later on turn against Magistrelli herself.
420 Paola Govoni
Bottero and Magistrelli’s careers were rapid and brilliant: in 1890 they became
full professors with tenure: Bottero, then thirty-one, of physics, although she always
taught chemistry as well; Magistrelli, then thirty-two, of the natural sciences. In
the 1890s both married, adopting double surnames, Bottero Pagano and Magistrelli
Sprega (Bottero, ACS; Magistrelli, ibid.; Atti di Matrimonio, CM). After World War
I they were approaching retirement. In the meanwhile, Magistrelli Sprega had had
the satisfaction of becoming the dean of the Magistero several times. She was dean
in 1920, when the ministry of education appointed Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944),
the idealist philosopher who was among the fiercest opponents of positivist culture,
inspector of the Roman Magistero. It was on that occasion that Gentile saw the well-
equipped science laboratory and understood the importance of experimental science
in the Magistero (Bottero Pagano, ASS) that had been established by the two women.
In October 1922 Mussolini took over as prime minister and Gentile was appointed
minister for education. After two months, he wrote a letter to Bottero Pagano
announcing that the chair of physics in the Magistero would soon be suppressed (Gentile
to Bottero Pagano, December 3, 1922, Bottero Pagano file, ASS). On January 11, 1923,
adecreead personam eliminated the chair of physics that Bottero Pagano had held for
forty years (Ministero dell’Istruzione Pubblica 1923, I (8), 535). On March 13, Gentile
signed another decree transforming the Magistero into a co-educational institute at
full university level, and in the meantime he changed the rules for the recruitment
of professors, making the new rules retroactive; the new arrangement allowed him
to suppress Magistrelli Sprega’s professorship, too (Ministero dell’Istruzione Pubblica
1923, I (17), 1385–1390). At that point, he offered Bottero Pagano a job in a secondary
school; he also ordered the science lab to be dismantled. In July, Bottero Pagano retired
(Gentile to Bottero Pagano, March 5, 1923, in Bottero, ASS; Enrico Pagano to Gentile,
July 28, 1923, ibid.).
Only in November Gentile wrote a long and embarrassed letter to Magistrelli
Sprega: he was offering a job in a school for teenagers to the sixty-five year old
professor, author, and dean of the Magistero. This was her answer:
I thank Your Excellency for the kind words, but my dignity as [a] woman and teacher
after forty years of conscientious work as full tenured professor of an Institute of Higher
Education, of which on three occasions I held the post of Director with the esteem and
respect of my colleagues, as is well known to Your Excellency, does not allow me to
accept the post Your Excellency would have in mind for me. I would like to add that it
is highly deplorable that a government carries out reforms, in the public administration,
which expose a teacher in my position to suffer a humiliation such as the one, with the
best of intentions, that Your Excellency has inflicted on me with the letter to which this
replies (Magistrelli Sprega to Gentile, November 6, 1923, in Magistrelli Sprega, ACS).
Writing back, Gentile tried to find a compromise arrangement, but on Christmas Day
1923 Magistrelli Sprega closed the affair with a short note: “I enclose my application for
retirement in which I indicate simply the reasons that prevent me from accepting the
The Power of Weak Competitors 421
post offered to me, so that they may remain officially on record.” In the long document
attached she mentioned again the “insult to [her] dignity as a woman” besides the
scientific reasons that made it ridiculous for her to teach disciplines unknown to her
such as computisteria (business math) in a school for adolescents (Magistrelli Sprega to
Gentile, December 25, 1923 and enclosure, in Magistrelli, ACS).
We have no evidence that any colleague intervened in defense of Bottero Pagano and
Magistrelli Sprega, and this despite the fact that Bottero Pagano had been a member
of the Italian Physical Society since its foundation (1897), and Magistrelli Sprega a
member of the Society of Italian Naturalists, as well as a member of the SIPS from its
founding statute (Anon. 1897, v; Societ`
a Italiana di Scienze Naturali 1907, 15; SIPS
1908, 309).
Over the four decades spanning the careers of Bottero Pagano and Magistrelli Sprega,
the generation of post unification scientists who in previous decades had been involved
both in political unification and/or in the so-called scienza per tutti movement, had
retired. Some of those scientists had given their concrete support to the first women
science students and graduates, as had been the case with Blaserna, Lessona,7Lioy, and
Camillo Golgi (1843–1926), in 1906 co-winner of the Nobel prize (Mazzarello 2009,
chap. 14). These and other scientists had worked at a time when a national community
of experts did not yet exist. This absence of a national community can be seen in the
low number of scientific practitioners, the relative poverty of scientific achievements at
the international level, with the possible exception of mathematics (Bottazzini 1994),
the inability to lobby effectively once in Parliament (Montaldo 2011), and, as has been
mentioned, the inability of individually successful writers in the popularizing fields to
work together to produce journals and book series over lengthy periods.
Their weakness was also shown by their inability to perceive the threat from women
graduates in science as possible competitors, which scientists had already realized
in other countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States, and Germany.
Things changed when Italian scientists’ participation in wartime research resulted in
the construction of a community of professionals, which significantly increased in
numbers from 1915. New posts in the universities for natural scientists were arriving
(Dr¨
oscher 2013), while the number of women graduates in science also increased
considerably.
At the end of the war, Gentile noted that the universities had been “invaded by
women, who have now flooded into our universities” (Gentile 1919, 8). He was the
7Lessona’s support for women working in the field of knowledge may be found in his popularizing wr itings,
in his collaboration with his second wife Adele Masi Lessona (he publicly acknowledged her help), and in
the education of his daughters. He encouraged the employment of Clelia Bonomi as preparer in the zoology
museum that he directed, preferring her over other male candidates; while he was Vice Chancellor of Turin
University, in a report of his administration for the ministry of education on the number and behaviour of the
first women enrolled in the university, he added in his own hand how women students’ commitment and results
had been excellent (Fascicolo 1.19, ASUT; Fascicolo 3.5, ibid. I would like to thank Paola Novaria who kindly
provided me with a copy of these documents.)
422 Paola Govoni
spokesman for an academic community which felt it was under threat from women
graduates firmly determined to enter professional markets. What happened to women
in science in Italy during and after World War I was the result of different actions. On
the one hand, there was a silent exclusion by the relevant academics of women who
wished to make a career in the university. On the other hand, there was a political and
media campaign where the old positivist myths, insisting on women’s inferiority in the
name of evolutionary theory, found common ground with the attempts to overturn
that interpretation by scholars like Magistrelli and others of the next generation, like
Gina Lombroso (1872–1944). Physician, popularizer, and well known writer, author
of a book on women which was translated into twelve languages, Gina Lombroso
was the wife of Ferrero, who was co-author with her father, Cesare, of the well
known 1893 book Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (Lombroso
and Ferrero [1893] 2003; Lombroso 1920; Dolza 1990; Babini 2007). The feminism
aiming at emancipation and equality of writers like Gina Lombroso was considered to
be woman’s worst enemy, in that it distanced her from her main task, maternity (Bock
and Thane 1991; Allen 2005; Klein et al. 2012; on the long term reflections of parents
and children’s relationships on Italian society, see Barbagli et al. 2003). Emphasizing
the maternal role as the only emancipatory one for women was a position shared by
many feminists well into the twentieth century. The international diffusion of this view
coincided in Italy with the fragmentation into various associations, often in conflict
with each other, of the women committed to the feminist movement; then came
fascism (Key 1911; Pieroni Bortolotti [1963] 1975; Gaiotti De Biase [1963] 2002;
Buttafuoco 1991; Offen 2000; Pironi 2010; Vezzosi 2012).
The positions taken by women like Magistrelli and Gina Lombroso have been
labeled “antiemancipationist” or “contradictory” (Buttafuoco 1988, 110; Dolza 1990,
chap. 3). Yet, interpreted in the historical context of the first time women gained access
to higher education in the age of the success of scienza per tutti, those positions appear
on the contrary to be tragically coherent. Having grown up with the myth of science
as a culture capable of explaining all phenomena, even those of society, their attempt to
justify and valorize the maternal role of women in fact left basic prejudices unaltered,
confirming the image of women as not suited to intellectual endeavor. While Gina
Lombroso paid for the conflict between her intelligence and her successful career, on
the one hand, and her loyalty to Darwinian science, her father, and her husband, on
the other, by suffering depression and existential problems,8Magistrelli paid with her
profession and in concrete terms.
According to expert opinion, Gentile was opposed to racism on the grounds that it
was the result of that conception of mankind of the natural sciences to which he was
8Very interesting in this regard are the various unpublished versions of Gina Lombroso’s autobiography. These
are fragments in French and English, with a longer one in Italian, which she began to write in the 1920s. The
most interesting part – and the most tormented – concerning her being as a woman in her relationships with
her father and husband, is in the Italian part and refers to December 1914 (Gina Lombroso Papers.)
The Power of Weak Competitors 423
hostile (Turi 1995, 475). It is clear that he acted differently towards women. Ironically
for one of the fiercest enemies of positivist culture, he was the person who completed
the task begun by the materialist scientists, men and women, of whom he was so
contemptuous.
The evolutionist science popularizer best known in the liberal age, Mantegazza, in
a very successful book, republished during fascism, wrote:
Woman always was and always will be less intelligent than men ... . In the long history
of evolution she has always remained not far from her point of departure. Of course with
a better education she will in the future be able to give more to science; but I believe that
the distance that separates her from us [men] will always remain the same: because men
will progress at the same time as women do ... . The oppression, which women have
suffered from until now, is not sufficient to explain her inferiority. (Mantegazza [1893]
1932, 269)
At the end of World War I Gentile, who was contemptuous of writers like Mantegazza
for their epistemological crudeness, wrote that women were not suitable as teachers
because, “it has to be said, [they] do not possess and never will possess that lively
originality of thought, nor that iron spiritual vigor, which are the highest strengths,
intellectual and moral, of humanity, and must be the pillars of the education to form
the higher spirit of the country” (Gentile 1919, 8). Gina Lombroso, the founder,
among other things, of the Associazione Divulgatrice Donne Italiane (Italian Woman’s
Popularizing Association), held that if the objective of male “passion” is an abstract
and intellectual object, for women “this passion depends on the maternal nature that
pervades the entire spirit of the woman even when she is not yet a mother ...the first
consequence of this special passion is that the woman does not base her actions on
reason but on instinct” (Lombroso 1918, 7).
The rhetoric used by two contemporaries Gentile and Gina Lombroso was different,
but the substance was the same. During the postwar years of economic crisis this
interpretation of woman’s role was useful in discouraging women’s professional
ambitions, not to mention its use during fascism, when women were explicitly
“invited” to go back to the home (Le donne a casa) (Saraceno 1991, 200; on Italian
working and professional women between the wars, see De Grazia 1992; Curli 1998;
Galbani 2001; Vicarelli 2007; Wilsson 2009; on the contradictory relationships between
fascism and women in Europe, see Durham 1998).
Between Magistrelli Sprega and Gentile the clash was between two representatives
of different generations and of irreconcilable ideals concerning the role of science in
society and in education but, incredibly enough, not concerning the place of women
in nature and society.
Neither Gentile nor other fascist ministers introduced laws to prevent women from
working in universities, as they did in secondary schools and in other professional
sectors (Ballestrero 1996). And yet the cases of Bottero Pagano and Magistrelli Sprega
and others being studied at present illustrate that other ways could be similarly effective
424 Paola Govoni
in removing women from the professions; in this case, institutional reforms were used.
The reform of the Magistero, which aimed at the elimination of the teaching of
scientific experimentation, enabled Gentile to get rid of two unwanted women, very
much in the way. One other effective system was to assign women scholars to posts in
poor quality universities that were hard to reach, such as the University of Cagliari in
Sardinia; this was the case for botanist Eva Mameli Calvino (1886–1978), who worked
there for a few years after 1926. In those same years the mathematician Pia Nalli
(1886–1942) also worked there as director of the Institute of Mathematics; of the four
researchers who worked there, two were women. Giulia Degli Innocenti and Fanny
Fontana worked in the Institute of Geology, where there were three to four teachers
during this period. Two scholars worked in the Institute of Mineralogy: the director
and Giulia Martinez. In 1928–29 at the Institute of Physics Rita Brunetti (1890–1942)
was the director, Teresa Mundula her deputy, and Zaira Ollano assistant lecturer; the
only two men in the institute were a technician and the caretaker or porter. A situation
where the men were discriminated against is naturally somewhat suspect: with the
exception of Nalli and Brunetti,9who had significant careers, all the other women left
the university, including Eva Mameli Calvino (Govoni 2012). In the meantime with the
increase in the number of women graduates the figure of the female “collaborator” or
“voluntary assistant” took root. Studies of Volterra and Giuseppe Peano (1858–1932)
show how numerous the women graduates in mathematics were who, in the first two
decades of the twentieth century, were thinking about a career in research. From the
list of offprints preserved in Volterra’s library it turns out that of 135 women who sent
him science offprints, ninety-four were Italian women (Linguerri 2010, 28; on Peano
and women mathematicians, see Roero 2007). And yet, although both Volterra and
Peano seem to have been helpful equally towards male and female students, only four
of those women mathematicians had the chance to pursue a university career.
The efficacy of the male academic community’s strategies for excluding women is
proved by the data. Between World War I and the early 1920s the number of women
became really significant in Italian universities, and in 1921 they made up 10.4 per cent
of university students. The number of women graduates in the sciences in the academic
year 1923–24 reached its highest point of the first half of the twentieth century: 330
graduates. In 1931 the percentage of women graduates in science out of a total of
graduates in science, male and female, was 34 per cent. Yet that same year women
made up 0.87 per cent of science and medicine university teachers (data from ISTAT
1936, 49, 74–75).
The disproportion between the number of women graduates and that of women
researchers in science, technology, and medicine, was the result of a struggle between
competitors, men and women, which would continue throughout the twentieth
9While working at the University of Cagliari, Brunetti wrote to her fellow physicist Vasco Ronchi (1897–1988):
“The professor who stays too long in Sardinia also loses prestige locally” (Brunetti to Vasco Ronchi, January 23,
1932, in Camprini and Gottardi 2007, 154; on Nalli, see Branciforte and Tazzioli 2002).
The Power of Weak Competitors 425
century, and even today has still not been properly resolved, in Italy, as well as elsewhere
(AAUW 2010; Rossiter 1995, 2012; Abir-Am 2010; European Commission 2013;
MIUR 2013).
Conclusion
The history of Italian so-called popular science has been useful in helping us to
understand some of the neglected features of the relationships between the production,
circulation, and consumption of science between the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries. These studies of Italian popular science have provided the medium-term
context that allows us to grasp the choices made by the earliest women graduates,
as well as the process of professionalization of the figure of the scientist, with the
consequent quantitative growth of universities, as phenomena that to some extent
interacted with each other.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century in Italy women who wished to study in
universities were not excluded, and, indeed, the first women science graduates could
relatively easily acquire professional status. In the contemporary United Kingdom, by
contrast, the typical warlike reaction of experts was sending women out of professional
roles and back to “curiosity,” in the name of a community aware of the privileges it
wished to defend, as well as the high standards achieved in science. This was a science
which, at the same time, was providing “proof” of the intellectual inferiority of women.
Here I have argued that in Italy too, where those positions concerning the place of
women in nature were significantly successful, it was because of the late formation
of a national community that scientists were late to realize that women in science
could be competitors. Things changed after World War I, when women “flooded”
into the universities and applied pressure to enter the professions at precisely the time
when scientists were completing the process of forming a national community with a
growing, strong relationship to the state and to industry. At that point, and with the
coming of fascism, the old positivist theses on the maternity mission of women came
back, unwittingly supported by several women science writers and emancipationists.
In 1919 in the United Kingdom, Parliament approved the Sex Disqualification
(removal) Act, and in 1920 the Nineteenth Amendment prohibited any United States
citizen from being denied the right to vote because of their sex. But those landmark
moments did not save women in the 1920s from a reaction, which some have called a
backlash, which was the result of the advances made by women in the first decades of
the century (Rossiter 1982, 122).
Likewise, I suggest that the tragic political events in Italy from the 1920s onward,
when laws were introduced to hinder or block the entry of women into state
employment but not into the university, can explain only in part the worsening
relationship between men and women in science higher education between the wars
compared with the relative highs of an earlier period. Otherwise, the continuation
426 Paola Govoni
throughout the second half of the twentieth century of the marked discrepancy between
the number of women graduates, the scientific results of the women researchers and
their career opportunities would be inexplicable (ISTAT 2001).
That negatively evolving relationship between men and women in science in Italy
after World War I coincided with the decreasing interest of scientists in low-level
science literature, and both phenomena had a lot to do with the definitive building
of a national scientific community. The Bottero and Magistrelli case, and others now
being studied show that effective ways could be found by academics to push women
out of higher education.
The internationally recognized results in recent years achieved by the history of
“popular science” confirm it is a useful instrument to test the strategies – whether
pursued or contingent – of scientists and their communities. Following scientists, men
and women, in action in those sectors on the border between the lab, the markets
of science, politics, and various social and institutional actors, is extremely useful
for our understanding of what scientists do to construct their personal careers, their
public image, and their professional communities (Latour 1987): their commitment
to popularizing is clearly part of this complex network of relations and actions. The
building of a scientific community and the entry of women into higher education were
contemporary and interrelated phenomena that should in my opinion be regarded by
historians as one of the possible “natural experiments” in the culture of science that we
are in need of, if we want to understand the relationship between science and society,
as well as between men and women in science in the nineteenth century.
Acknowledgments
It is a pleasure to thank Arne Schirrmacher and the colleagues of the project Twentieth-
Century Science Communication in Europe for the discussions we shared during a
workshop held at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science of Berlin in
May 2010, when I presented an earlier version of this paper. I would also like to thank
Alexandre M´
etraux, for some important and generous suggestions, two anonymous
referees for their useful comments, and Brian Brege (Stanford University, History
Department), for his valuable editing of my English. I am especially grateful for the
conversations I have had with Marta Cavazza, Paula Findlen, Giuliano Pancaldi, and
Gianna Pomata over the years about men and women in science and its history.
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