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In this article, questions of public education in both environmental issues and science, more broadly, are examined in an effort to respond to Richard Aldrich’s call for historians of education to use their skills and understanding both to inform the present and to shape a more enlightened future. In particular, the lives and work of three women in science – Marianne North, Rachel Carson and Alice Stewart – are investigated through their art, writings and actions and through autobiographical and biographical material. The focus is on issues of natural history, the environment and the use and misuse of technology arising from their scientific work. In each case, how far they challenged the scientific thinking of their day or extended public understanding is explored while consideration is also made of how they were educated for their scientific careers, what impediments they faced and how far and in what ways they overcame them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Background: the belief that women and science, including mathematics and medicine, are incompatible has had a long and complex history and still often works to exclude women from and/or marginalise them in science. Purpose: this article will seek to explore gender and educational achievement through investigating how such gendered presumptions have persisted at various levels of science, despite perceptions of science itself changing over time and scientific studies expanding, differentiating and becoming professionalized. In particular, after a brief discussion of the historical debates on the provenance and lasting recurrence of gendered assumptions in science, it will try to discover how these prejudices affected the education of girls and women in England from c.1910 to c. 1939 and then, to widen the picture, make some comparison with the USA in the same period, although, necessarily in an article of this length, this analysis will be somewhat cursory. It will then bring the history up-to-date by examining the situation in England today. Sources of evidence:the article will proceed by using extensive local sources in case study research on Birmingham, by then the second largest English city. The comparisons with the situation in the USA in the same period and the examination of the present situation will be based largely on secondary sources. Main argument: factors of location, family background, supportive networks and greater educational, political and employment rights will be shown to have allowed some women to break through the barriers that hindered many from accessing or rising in science. Thus, it will be seen through the Birmingham example that there was a growing yet limited field of scientific practice for women, ordered by a gendered philosophy which routed them into specific areas. This picture was further permeated by class, wealth, identity, contacts, networks and location albeit this was modified by the scholarship system. Comparisons with the USA show that similar factors were present there, albeit in a different context. Twenty-first century sources indicate that on the one hand there is still gendered access and progress for females in science in England yet, on the other hand, there have been, and are at present, a number of initiatives seeking to overcome this. Conclusion: Even today, therefore, whatever sciences females do is affected by underlying gendered assumptions and structural power relationships which need to be understood. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

What forms of knowledge are deemed worth possessing in any period and who is allowed access to them are crucial questions for the historian of education. Science, now a core subject of study, has long been seen as 'masculine', especially at its highest levels, although the historical reasons for this have been somewhat neglected in education. This paper compares and analyses the interrelationships of education, gender and science at both the end of the long eighteenth century and in the early twentieth century in order to explore issues of knowledge and gender and demonstrate the use of a historical perspective [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the interrelationship between science and the ideas of gender. Definition of the term 'science'; Concept of gender by feminine philosophers and historians; Elucidation on the neglect by historians of education on gender conceptualization; Methods that reveal the discovery of the roles of women in scientific history; Case studies on Dame Hilda Rose and Mary Somerville.