The history of science community learned with deep sadness that Prof. Margaret Rossiter passed away this summer. Most of us whose careers started in the 2010s weren’t fortunate enough to meet her: we know her by her foundational work. But Donald Opitz, a historian of women, gender, and science, knew her personally and shares a tribute to her here —Anna Doel

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With the death of historian Margaret Rossiter on August 3, the history of science lost one of its most influential, field-defining scholars. Best known for her foundational historical studies of American women scientists, Rossiter also advanced the study of agricultural chemistry as a topic in the history of American science. Her books are classics, but, as significantly, she made a lasting impact on the profession at large. Throughout a career spanning more than fifty years, she self-consciously “persisted despite a lot of discouragement” in “broadening and remaking the field” to embrace the formerly “controversial” subjects of women and gender. Today it’s hard to imagine the history of science without such focuses, but for Rossiter these were indeed “unimaginable” when she entered the field in the 1960s.

Margaret Walsh Rossiter was born on July 8, 1944, in Malden, Massachusetts, to Mary Julia Rossiter (née Madden, 1914–2005), and Charles Aston Rossiter (1911–1986), a US Army officer. Her parents attended Radcliffe and Harvard colleges, respectively, both graduating in 1934. During her father’s military service, she and her twin brother, Charles Aston Jr. (who predeceased her in 2004), lived with their parents in government-sponsored housing for married officers at nearby Army bases. After the conclusion of World War II and her father’s discharge, the family lived in Malden where her father taught high-school history.

In 1951 her family moved to nearby Melrose, Massachusetts, where Rossiter attended high school. Distinguishing herself as a National Merit Scholar, she entered Radcliffe College in 1962 expecting to major in mathematics, but she soon switched to chemistry, and then ultimately to the history of science, an interest she cultivated alongside her high school studies. Following Radcliffe, she pursued graduate studies, ultimately earning her PhD in the history of science at Yale in 1971 under the supervision of Frederic Lawrence Holmes. Yale University Press published her dissertation in 1975: The Emergence of Agricultural Science, Justus Liebig and the Americans, 1840–1880.

Rossiter’s focus on a physical science, agricultural chemistry, reflected an emphasis both of her education and of the “exact sciences” priority in the history of science at the time. AIP readers will appreciate her steadfast interest in the physical sciences, sustained even as she turned to studying women’s contributions, as we can observe in the contents of her book series, Women Scientists in America (Johns Hopkins, 1982 , 1995 , 2012 ). For physics-educated historians of science, myself included, her books catalyzed our own gender studies. In the first of her three volumes, for instance, she noted the key importance of the Cavendish Laboratory in offering an “entering wedge” for women, internationally, to research within physics, precisely at a time when the profession erected gender barriers to keep them out. In 2003 she summarized the contours of the historiography in her essay, “A Twisted Tale: Women in the Physical Sciences in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” for the Cambridge History of Science series.

For scholars everywhere, Rossiter’s research laid the bedrock for comprehensive, gendered studies of the history of women scientists within national contexts. She modeled this by relentlessly mining untapped manuscript and oral sources; by reinterpreting standard reference works ostensibly about “men of science” but in which women were very much present; and by charting the structural patterns that differentiated the career trajectories of women and men. By establishing and coining the predominant patterns familiar to many of us—“hierarchical” and “territorial segregation,” “women’s work” (in science), “the Madame Curie strategy” (or deliberate overqualification to compete for positions “sex-typed” as “men’s work”), and, most famously, “the Matilda effect” (the ubiquitous discrediting of women’s contributions alongside men’s)—Rossiter demonstrated how gender-attentive concepts and vocabularies could underpin and propel a new subfield.

Rossiter’s works inspired robust historical agendas on scientific couples, scientific families and households, feminized disciplines like home economics, women’s “subcultures,” and the impact of professionalization and institutionalization on gender stratification (through such policies like anti-nepotism rules). She noted that her foreign colleagues were “deploring the lack of similar volumes for their own countries,” but indeed a range of books—especially edited collections—came forth from many countries in the ensuing decades.

For the emerging generations of historians interested in women and gender in science, critical to our successes have been the “spaces” that Rossiter co-created to sustain networks and venues so vital to the new, “controversial” subjects. She was an early participant and founding member of the Women’s Caucus of the History of Science Society, formed in 1972, and the international Commission on Women in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine, as it was first named when established in 1981. Still a thriving society to this day, the Commission was the “space” in which I came to know Margaret personally. When we first met in a lunch line during a 1999 conference held at Newnham College, Cambridge, she quipped in her characteristic style, “the earrings are a good sign.” To a timid graduate student, the warmth of her comment instantly invited me to join in, rather than shy away. I know this to be true for many colleagues whose budding careers received such a Rossiter “boost.”

Encouraged by her Women’s Caucus colleagues, Rossiter applied for and was selected to edit Isis, serving as the journal’s first woman editor (1994 through 2003). She supported the endowment of the History of Science Society’s “Women’s Prize,” renamed for her in 2004 as the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize. In 2022 the Society presented her with its most prestigious award, the George Sarton Medal, in recognition of her distinguished, lifetime scholarly achievement.

Rossiter did much of what she accomplished in the field—up until 1990—without the stability of a tenured academic position, but instead with support secured through a string of grants, fellowships, and temporary positions. But as she recollected, a phone call she received in July 1989 “changed my career”—the caller being the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, who selected her to receive one of its “genius” grants. The award’s prestige and the advocacy of her supporters compelled Cornell University, where she held a contingent position, to appoint her to a permanently endowed professorship, the Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History of Science, in the newly created Department of Science and Technology Studies. She held the position until her retirement in 2023.

In addition to her MacArthur award, other honors included a Guggenheim Fellowship (1981), the Berkshire Prize (1983, for the first volume of Women Scientists in America), the Women’s Prize and Pfizer Award of the History of Science Society (1997, for the same title’s second volume), and fellowship in the Agricultural History Society (2007) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (2013).

Rossiter wondered in 2002 whether her foundational scholarship on women scientists was “opening up a new area for further work,” or “exhausting a thin terrain so totally that other scholars will be discouraged for decades to come.” She answered this immediately, noting the arrival of a robust, growing literature on women in science, and observing colleagues in other countries pushing for further national studies. Two decades later, when the Commission marked its 40th anniversary, with some reluctance Rossiter consented to giving hindsight remarks, despite preferring to look forward: “I agree a retelling of our history might be uplifting, but getting on with future plans is probably a better use of the group’s time.”

In that spirit, I have paused here to offer these impressions and recollections of a dear colleague and mentor, and the bedrock she laid for both a community and its dedicated field of study. But now it’s time for “getting on with future plans,” as Margaret Rossiter called upon us to do.

Donald L. Opitz
DePaul University
don.opitz@depaul.edu

References

A major source, from which most of the quotes are drawn, is Margaret W. Rossiter, “Writing Women into Science,” in Jonathan Monroe, ed., Writing and Revising the Disciplines (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 54–72. Further key sources are the following (listed chronologically): Rossiter, “‘Women’s Work’ in Science, 1880–1910,” Isis 71 (1980): 381–98; Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Rossiter, “New Commission on the History of Women in Science, Technology, and Medicine,” Science, Technology, & Human Values 7, no. 3 (1982): 116; Rossiter, “Opening Remark,” in International Conference on the Role of Women in the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in the 19th and 20th C.: Proceedings, Veszprém, August 15–19, 1983, 2 vols. (Budapest: MTESZ, 1984), II: ix–xi; Rossiter, “The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science,” Social Studies of Science 23 (1993): 425–41; Rossiter, email to author, July 6, 2022; Wikipedia Contributors, “Margaret W. Rossiter,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (accessed October 14, 2025). Note: The papers of Margaret W. Rossiter are held at the Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.

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