In August 1874 a group of chemists assembled at the former home and burial place of Joseph Priestley in Northumberland, Pennsylvania. They came to celebrate the centennial of Priestley’s discovery of “dephlogisticated air,” or oxygen, and to chart their field’s next 100 years. The gathering was partly organized in the pages of the journal American Chemist, inspired by a letter from chemist and botanist Rachel Bodley, dean of the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania.
Bodley’s ideas for the celebration set a whirlwind in motion. The attendees quickly decided to create a national society dedicated to promoting and professionalizing American chemistry. Bodley, already a member of the Philadelphia-based Academy of Natural Sciences, was named an honorary vice president of the planning committee. When the American Chemical Society (ACS) was finally formalized in 1876, Bodley became a charter member, the only woman granted that honor.
Bodley’s inclusion was remarkable. Other women who had helped organize the ACS charter were rebuffed, including Ellen Swallow Richards, a pioneering environmental chemist and the first woman ever admitted to MIT. Bodley’s resume was no less impressive: a student at the prestigious Polytechnic College of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, she was the first woman named professor of chemistry at an American medical school and an accomplished botanist.
Historically, few major Western scientific societies admitted women members or did so only on a provisional or honorary basis. Even by 1876 no woman had yet been admitted to the Royal Society or the Académie des Sciences (both in operation for more than 200 years), nor to the younger but influential American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743.
A few prominent societies began to open their doors to (white) women in the mid-19th century. The Academy of Natural Sciences admitted scientific illustrator Lucy Say to membership in 1841 (predating Bodley by several decades); the American Association for the Advancement of Science elected its first woman member, astronomer Maria Mitchell, in 1850. Women’s membership and participation in American scientific societies increased significantly during the 1860s and 1870s, and Bodley’s prominence in the ACS seemed a welcome sign of change.
But after another August gathering, just four years into the ACS’s existence, Bodley left the society she had been so key in founding, never to return. And it would be more than a decade before another woman joined the ACS’s rolls (the exceptional Rachel Holloway Lloyd, the first American woman to earn a PhD in chemistry).
Historians of science are often confronted with absences or departures like Bodley’s, women who pop up in lists of scientific societies and publications or receive awards and peer recognition, only to vanish again. Their stories are obscured either by the pressures of their own era or by the neglect and biases of later scholars.
The historical roadblocks and pitfalls these women encountered are too many to name, but in the case of Rachel Bodley, we have more than absence to reflect on. Bodley’s involvement in the ACS might have begun with a letter, but the impetus for her departure was printed in a pamphlet. Specifically, a record of an ACS banquet from August 27, 1880—the Misogynist Dinner.
Though barely 20 pages long, the booklet collects the speeches, toasts, and songs that made up the night’s entertainment and speaks volumes about 19th-century attitudes toward women’s participation in science and some chemists’ attempts to keep the laboratory a masculine domain. The hosts for the event were Henry Morton, first president of the Stevens Institute of Technology and the editor of the pamphlet, and Thomas Sterry Hunt, an internationally recognized chemist-geologist and member of the Royal Society. Both Morton and Hunt were, like Bodley, founding members of the ACS.
In Morton’s introduction he notes that women were barred from the Misogynist Dinner, even the wives of members who had mistakenly been brought by their husbands as guests. As he writes, “these ladies were refused admission, and actually turned away from the door.” Needless to say, the ACS’s only woman member—Bodley—could have expected the same treatment.
Women members of scientific societies typically participated in formal meetings, but they were regularly (often intentionally) excluded from informal entertainments.
After-meeting socializing frequently took place in clubs, smoking rooms, and other men-only spaces. The Misogynist Dinner was no exception: Morton’s notes remark on the “absorbing effect of cigar smoke” that was felt by the attendees. During the 19th century, smoking in public, or even being present while others smoked, was considered inappropriate for women. Yet “smokers” served as a major form of male socialization, and scientific societies’ meetings and banquets frequently concluded with group smoking or other masculine amusements such as billiards—a clear sign that women were not wanted.
In other words, women were welcome to perform some of the work and organization that kept scientific societies functioning, but they shouldn’t expect to reap equal benefits from the socializing that helped form tight bonds and establish intellectual partnerships among society members.
Men-only smokers might seem like a relic of a less enlightened era, but their legacy lingers in science. Groundbreaking physicist and Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, for example, was known to host meetings at strip clubs and to solicit undergraduate women for sex. And while more commonplace departmental social events—involving late nights and alcohol—might not seem overtly “men only,” the risk of harassment or unwanted advances often deter women from attending. As a result, many women in STEM (especially women of color) struggle to build peer relationships or find academic and professional mentors whose personal networks, recommendations, and support can be make-or-break in competitive fields.
The attendees of the Misogynist Dinner all knew and would have worked side by side with Bodley, Swallow Richards, and other accomplished, ambitious women chemists during the forming of the ACS. But these ties were not sufficient to prevent a night of misogynist mockery.
