{"id":14305,"date":"2020-03-16T16:45:50","date_gmt":"2020-03-16T20:45:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/biology.mit.edu\/?page_id=14305"},"modified":"2021-03-29T11:33:14","modified_gmt":"2021-03-29T15:33:14","slug":"womens-history-month-2020","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/biology.mit.edu\/news\/womens-history-month-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Women’s History Month"},"content":{"rendered":"

Women at the forefront of MIT Biology<\/strong><\/h2>\n

\"Black<\/h3>\n

In honor of Women\u2019s History Month, meet two of the first female students to earn biology degrees at MIT.<\/h3>\n

Saima Sidik<\/h4>\n

 <\/p>\n

In MIT\u2019s 1887 annual report<\/a>, former Institute President Francis A. Walker included a section titled, \u201cWomen as students in the Institute.\u201d He predicted: \u201cThe number of young women attending the Institute of Technology is never likely to be large, considering the nature of the professions to which our courses lead, and the severity of our requirements for admission and for graduation.\u201d More than 100 years later, it\u2019s clear Walker was sorely mistaken; today, women comprise<\/a> around 40% of the student body and 58% of the students in the Department of Biology. But, for decades, only about 5% of MIT\u2019s students were female.<\/p>\n

In 1958, decades after Walker\u2019s report, Marilynn Bever was one of 28 women in her first-year class of 652 students. \u201cI was aware that MIT women are often regarded with suspicion, as being somehow \u2018different\u2019 from normal coeds,\u201d Bever later wrote. She was so fascinated by this attitude that she wrote a thesis<\/a> for her bachelor\u2019s degree in anthropology in which she catalogued early female MIT students and documented their experiences. Bever reported that Caroline Augusta Woodman was the first woman to obtain a Course 7 bachelor\u2019s degree in 1889, and that Helen Louise Breed became the first woman to earn a PhD from MIT\u2019s Department of Biology in 1937. In honor of Women\u2019s History Month, meet these two women who helped set MIT on a path toward gender equality.<\/p>\n

Caroline Augusta Woodman<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Woodman (pictured above, second from the left) was born in 1844<\/a> in Minot, Maine near a textile manufacturing center<\/a>. After graduating from high school in nearby Portland, Maine in 1866, Woodman taught at Portland\u2019s Center Grammar School for Girls. By 1874, she\u2019d moved from the coast of Maine to the banks of the Hudson River and earned a bachelor\u2019s degree<\/a> from Vassar College, which had recently opened as an all-women\u2019s institution.<\/p>\n

According to the Vassar Registrar\u2019s Office, early Vassar students took a prescribed set of courses rather than declaring a major, so Woodman studied art, science, languages, and religion, netbet online sports bettingamong other topics. Her transcript indicates that she supplemented these classes with \u201cspecial courses,\u201d which the 1870-71 course catalogue described as \u201cintended only for ladies of maturity,\u201d as the college\u2019s faculty felt that students should complete the usual curriculum before venturing on to these more complex topics. Vassar\u2019s faculty must have seen Woodman as an accomplished scholar, as she was allowed to take extra classes in German, chemistry, math, astronomy, and geography.<\/p>\n

The foreign language skills that Woodman learned in these special courses must have served her well after completing her degree, as she traveled around Europe<\/a> before moving to the Finger Lakes in upstate New York, where she taught at a high school for girls for about twelve years. But in 1889 she found herself back in college and earning a second bachelor\u2019s degree, this time at MIT.<\/p>\n

Just as Woodman joined Vassar during its incipient years, she came to MIT when the Institute consisted of only a handful of buildings near Copley Square<\/a> in Boston\u2019s Back Bay. Graduate degrees had only been established a few years earlier, and the first dormitory wouldn\u2019t be built for another decade. Today\u2019s MIT undergraduates can choose interdisciplinary programs<\/a> in Chemistry and Biology (Course 5-7) or Computer Science and Molecular Biology (Course 6-7). But in Woodman\u2019s time, even the name \u201cBiology\u201d was new to the department, which had been previously called \u201cNatural History<\/a>\u201d and re-named to encompass modern aspects of the expanding discipline such as techniques for preserving food safely.<\/p>\n

\"Black
An MIT Biology lab photographed the year Woodman earned her degree. Credit: Photogravure Views of the Mass. Institute of Technology, Boston, 1889, by Henry Lewis Johnson<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Course 7 was a small program when Woodman arrived. MIT\u2019s yearbook, MIT Technique<\/em>, shows that there were only about 10 biology undergraduate students. Although few women attended the Institute as a whole, MIT Biology had a strong female presence by comparison; there were at least five women in the program. However, many of these women were classified as \u201cspecial\u201d students<\/a> \u2014 a category intended for students taking select classes rather than pursuing full degrees \u2014 and few of them were able to complete the classes necessary to earn a bachelor\u2019s degree.<\/p>\n

Woodman did earn her second bachelor\u2019s degree, later becoming a physiology instructor in the Zoology Department at Wellesley College, where the student newspaper<\/a> described her as \u201ca teacher of experience.\u201d A picture from the Wellesley Archives<\/a> (above) depicts her overseeing a group of young women as they examine a model human body, concoct mixtures of chemicals, and take notes on their experiments.<\/p>\n

In 1895, Woodman moved back to her home state and accepted a position as a librarian at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. Five years later, a student publication<\/a> reported that she had added substantially to the library\u2019s collections, instituted the Dewey decimal system, and was constructing a card catalogue.<\/p>\n

By the time Woodman died in 1912, she had experienced much more of the world than most people from the rural mill town where she was born. From studying at Vassar during the school\u2019s first decade, to traveling through Europe and paving the way for women in MIT Biology, she strayed far from home, then returned to tell the tale.<\/p>\n

Helen Louise Breed<\/strong><\/h3>\n
\"Black
A picture of Helen Louise Breed when she earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1931. Credit: Wellesley College netbet online sports bettingArchives, Library & Technology Services.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It would be 30 more years before Helen Louise Breed joined MIT in the fall of 1933 and became the first woman to earn a PhD from MIT Biology. The Great Depression was in full swing; although enrollment, staff, and funding had decreased, life went on relatively normally for those lucky enough to remain at the Institute. On September 25, 1933, the student newspaper The Tech<\/a><\/em> reported that the first-year class had successfully captured the sophomore class president and dunked him in Lake Massapoag during their orientation. Several alumni were also returning to the Institute to offer career advice to current students, and the Architecture Department had added a course in city planning to its curriculum. \u201cPeople didn\u2019t talk much about the Depression,\u201d said one MIT alumna whom Bever interviewed. \u201cWe were all busy studying.\u201d<\/p>\n

Breed had a strong interest in medicine before attending MIT. Her PhD thesis contains a short biography in which she wrote that after completing a bachelor\u2019s of arts at Wellesley college, she took premedical courses at Harvard and at Radcliffe. But research caught her attention, and she ended up devoting the next few decades to studying the microbes that cause disease rather than treating patients in the clinic.<\/p>\n

Breed\u2019s interests were well in line with MIT\u2019s research priorities, as Course 7 had a strong focus on microbiology, infectious disease, and food safety when she attended. In fact, MIT Biology was called Biology and Public Health<\/a> in Breed\u2019s time, having been re-named from simply Biology in 1911. Many graduate students took classes in<\/a> bacteriology, planktonology, and fermentation, whereas today\u2019s students<\/a> might be more likely to study nucleic acid structure or the mutations that lead to cancer. The department\u2019s student population<\/a> had increased dramatically since Woodman\u2019s time, and there were around 90 biology students when Breed attended, a quarter of which were in graduate programs. Female students NetBet sportwere relatively rare, and Breed was one of around 10 female biology students.<\/p>\n

Breed performed her PhD research in Murray Horwood\u2019s lab in the Biology Department, where she assessed how efficiently bacteria use various organic molecules to generate the cellular energy that they use to live and reproduce.<\/p>\n

\"Diagram\"
Breed\u2019s automatic pipette. Credit: “The Comparative Availability of Monohydric Alcohols As Sole Sources of Carbon for Certain Bacteria,” 1937, by Helen Louise Breed, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Distinctive Collections, Cambridge Massachusetts.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Today, these types of experiments might be performed by high school students, but the techniques Breed employed were novel at the time. To quantify bacterial growth, she needed a device that could measure the amount of light absorbed by a liquid culture of bacteria. Such instruments are common in today\u2019s labs, but Breed\u2019s was custom-built by Marshall Jennison, a professor in the Department of Biology.<\/p>\n

Breed used her own engineering skills to advance her studies as well. The long hours of pipetting required to grow many species of bacteria in many kinds of media motivated her to construct an automatic pipette (left) using a series of tubes and flasks. While today\u2019s graduate students often use a much smaller version of this device, called a repeater pipette, Breed\u2019s creation warranted an appendix in her thesis.<\/p>\n

Job prospects were limited for all MIT graduates during the Depression, but Breed found work in her field after graduating. In 1940, census records<\/a> showed that in addition to having married and changed her last name to Arnold, she was working as a bacteriologist. Similarly, her death certificate from 1999 shows that Breed had a career in scientific research at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital.<\/p>\n

For her thesis, Bever also interviewed several women who were Breed\u2019s contemporaries at MIT during the 1930s. Attitudes towards the few women who studied at the Institute varied, and one student recalled a faculty member telling her, \u201cWe tolerate females around here, but we don\u2019t encourage them.\u201d In contrast, another student suspected the dean of the Architecture Department may have paid for her scholarship out of his own pocket because he was so determined to keep her at MIT.<\/p>\n

Despite the hardships, Bever and her interviewees said they obtained a thorough education at MIT, and it\u2019s likely that Breed and Woodman left the Institute with the same impression. \u201cI had some marvelous teachers,\u201d one woman said. \u201cWe were pushed, we were pushed, we were pushed<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

Top image: “Physiology Class: Woodman oversees a group of Wellesley\u2019s physiology students as they perform lab experiments.” Credit: Wellesley College netbet online sports bettingArchives, Library & Technology Services.<\/h5>\n
Special thanks to the MIT Libraries and Institute Archives<\/a>, the Registrar’s Office at Vassar College, and\u00a0Deb Smith.<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Women at the forefront of MIT Biology In honor of Women\u2019s History Month, meet two of the first female students to earn biology degrees at MIT. Saima Sidik   In MIT\u2019s 1887 annual report, former Institute President Francis A. 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