Extralaboratory Life: Gender Politics and Experimental Biology at Radcliffe College, 1894-1910.

This article examines the history of Radcliffe College’s Zoological Laboratory, a women’s-only laboratory associated with the all-male Harvard College that became a centre for training women in animal biology. Radcliffe’s laboratory developed in the late nineteenth century in the face of Harvard’s fierce resistance to coeducation and popular scientific ideas that questioned women’s biological fitness for scientific study. This article documents how extralaboratory factors – such as masculine cultures of sociability, informal mentorship relationships and gender segregation in everyday academic life – carried over into the construction of experimental biology as a discipline. I argue that understanding how gender functioned in Radcliffe’s laboratory requires examining adjacent spaces and institutions on and off campus where scientific identities were forged, including neighbourhood boardinghouses and coeducational scientific society meetings. During this period, debates about the right approach to studying the natural world turned on competing visions of manliness in the field or at the laboratory bench. The entrance of Radcliffe women into male-dominated laboratory spaces motivated the articulation of new forms of scientific masculinities associated with the experimental rigours and professional aims of the turn-of-the-century ‘new biology’. More broadly, I contend that notions of scientific masculinity and the concurrent development of fraternal laboratory cultures served to exclude women from full participation in the biological sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]