Chapter 1: Matthew and the Matilda Effect | Einstein Myth

"Those who have plenty shall have more in abundance, while those who have little will find it taken away."

- Matthew Effect

"The bias against acknowledging women's achievements and attributing women's achievements to their male counterparts."

- The Matlida Effect

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The Matilda Effect, a term coined after the Suffragist and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn Gage the original author who brought light to the phenomenon of women’s achievements being attributed to the men around them. Matilda Gage fell victim to the very phenomenon that she had brought light upon. One would think it was because of the men around her but it wasn’t. Her fellow suffragist had written her out because Matilda believed that Christianity was the root cause of the suffering women had to endure. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, who did have the same beliefs as Matilda which would be later revealed, had to make compromises in pursuit of widening their body of voters (Dominus, 2019). It could directly be seen as an outcome of patriarchy, even then how does one reconcile with this? Especially a women, how do women reconcile with this?

​In 1993 Margaret W. Rossiter coined and explored the term the Matilda Effect through her paper titled ‘The Matthew Matilda Effect in Science’. In this paper Rossiter explores the institutionally placed barricades that directly effect, undermine and systemically have women’s achievements attributed to the men around them (Rossiter, 1993). She begins with what the Matthew effect is, the Matthew effect was originally not only attributed to women but also lesser known men scientists. Per the gospel of Matthew “those have plenty shall have more while those who have little will find it taken away”, (Steinmetz, 2019) this happened to lesser known male scientists as well, they weren’t given proper credit for their work till a scientist more well known speaks of the very same research that the lesser known scientist presents either in their own name or the well known scientist tries to promote the lesser known scientist in some or the other way (Steinmetz, 2019) (Rossiter, 1993).

​Rossiter has directly correlated it to the Matilda Effect that she had coined after Matilda Joslyn Gage, trying to first give the phenomenon that persisted in the sciences and every other perceivable field, a name by that future archivists had something to relate it to. She also tried to broaden the conversation to include women as also and more of a victim to the Matthew Effect. (Rossiter, 1993)

​Rossiter gives multiple examples of women scientists who were the victims of the Matilda Effect. For the purpose of this paper one woman scientist, Mileva Maric Einstein, will be explored and explained.

​Almost all are aware of Albert Einstein, the man behind the special theory of relativity (e=mc2), there are very few, almost none, who are aware that he had a collaborator, his first wife Mileva Maric Einstein.

​It was a love story, a typical one at that too. They were admitted into the same physics-mathematics sections of the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich in 1896. They wrote love letters to each other, they collaborated on projects (Gagnon, 2016).

​Albert’s parents strongly opposed Mileva and Albert’s union because Mileva wasn’t German or Jewish, she was too intellectually superior and she had a limp. Albert also didn’t want to marry her till he could make something of himself leading to the first paper that they wrote together but left Mileva’s name off of it in the final copy. There are two beliefs behind why this had happened, one because Mileva wanted to marry Albert and by helping him she was one step closer to that. The second reason was that during the time period any paper that had a woman’s name attached as a contributor would automatically have less credibility (Gagnon, 2016).

​They collaborated throughout their marriage which can be corroborated through the letters that were sent back and forth between them. Mileva and Albert’s sons also have corroborated this.

Mileva was asked by a scientist once why she had left her name off of the paper, she had told him a German pun which directly translated to “Why? The two of us are but one stone”, (Gagnon, 2016) this makes one believe that she had a romantic ideal that she didn’t need the credit as long as she had her husband and the work that she was allowed to pursue.

But this lack of wanting credit or believing that it is their lot in life is noticed in multiple women’s stories, one of them also being Esther Lederberg a microbiologist (Steinmetz, 2019). Or Margaret Wu who was never given authorship, her contribution was buried into the footnotes of a greatly cited paper (Yong, 2019).

Albert and Mileva got married in 1903, their marriage officially lasted till 1919, Mileva had moved out with her sons in 1914. One of the stipulations of the divorce was if Albert was ever awarded the Nobel prize Mileva would get the money which she was later denied. When Albert was threatened that Mileva’s contribution would be made public Albert had written back saying that no one would believe her (Gagnon, 2016).

Hans-Albert’s (Mileva and Albert’s second son) wife, Frieda, would try to publish the letters shared in between Albert and Mileva and their children but the Einstein Estate lawyers would come back with the ludicrous argument of wanting to protect/preserve the Einstein Myth. The

Estate had also blocked various other publication which could shed light on how much was Albert’s and how much of it truly belonged to Mileva. (Gagnon, 2016)

​Women have to combat multiple layers of institutional, societal bias, and when they succeed, when they show that they are an intellectual equal to their male counterparts this is the reward that society gives them.

Rossiter who had devoted her life to pouring through archives, bringing forth women who were buried under layers of footnotes, acknowledgements, who were pushed into the dark for the sake of the men, had stated that she had considered many layers of why this is a systemic problem but had not considered how much of a role harassment had played till the #MeToo movement. (Dominus, 2019)

Mileva wasn’t given credit even after her death, publications questioning how much was Albert’s work alone were blocked for years. The Estate was more keen on protecting the “Einstein myth” than giving the credit due to the first wife that Albert cheated in multiple ways.

The Matilda is entrenched in being beholden to the Matthew, systemically, institutionally, also in the very language we use.

​

Bibliography

1. Dominus, S. (2019, October). Women scientists were written out of HISTORY. It's Margaret ROSSITER'S Lifelong mission to fix that. Retrieved January 10, 2021, from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ science-nature/unheralded-women-scientists-finally-getting-their- due-180973082/

2. Gagnon, P. (2016, December 19). The forgotten life of einstein's first wife. Retrieved December 10, 2020, from https:// blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-forgotten-life-of- einsteins-first-wife/

3. Jones, J. (2018, August 02). "The Matilda Effect": How pioneering women scientists have been denied recognition and written out of science history. Retrieved April 07, 2021, from https://www.openculture.com/2018/08/the-matilda-effect.html

4. Philonomist. (2019, February 13). The Matilda EFFECT. Retrieved January 10, 2020, from https://medium.com/philonomist/the-matilda- effect-6335f34fe0b0

5. Rossiter, M. W. (1993). The matthew matilda effect in science. Social Studies of Science, 23(2), 325-341. doi:10.1177/030631293023002004

6. Steinmetz, K. (2019, April 11). Why don't we remember more trailblazing women scientists? Retrieved January 10, 2021, from https://time.com/ longform/esther-lederberg/

7. Yong, E. (2019, February 12). The women who contributed to science but were buried in footnotes. Retrieved February 2, 2021, from https:// www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/02/womens-history-in- science-hidden-footnotes/582472/

Chapter 2: Women | Einstein Myth

Abigail Adams - Political Aide | Carol Moseley Braun - Politician | Dorothy Vaughan - Mathematician | Helen Zia - Journalist | Ada Lovelace - Mathematician | Caroline Herschel - Astronomer | Elaine Chao - Politician | Henrietta Leavitt - Astronomer | Alice Coachman - Athlete | Caroline Louisa Daly - Artist | Elizabeth Magie - Inventor of the game Monopoly | Hertha Ayrton - Physicist | Alison Hargreaves - First woman to conquer Mt. Everest alone without bottled oxygen | Charlotte Scott - Mathematician | Elizabeth Peratrovich - Activist | Ida Tacke - Chemistry and Atomic Physics | Anna May Wong - Actor | Isabella Goodwin - Police Detective | Anne Davis - Mathematician | Christine Darden - Mathematician, data analyst and aeronautical engineer | Emma Soyer or Emma Jones - Artist | Jackie Mitchell - Pitcher | Artemisia Gentileschi - Artist | Claudette Colvin - Activist | Esther Lederberg - Microbiologist | Jeanne Baret - The first woman to circumnavigate the Globe | Barbara Boxer - Politician | Gertrude Jeannette - taxi driver | Bella Abzug - Lawyer and politician | Cora Belle Reynolds Anderson - Politician | Gladys Bentley - Performer | Jennifer Smith - Programming | Bessie Coleman - Pilot Billie Jean King - Athlete | Dorothea Bate - Palaeontologist | Hattie Wyatt Caraway - Politician | Jocelyn Bell Burnell - Astronomer | Chien-Shiung Wu - Physicist | Emilie du Chatelet - Mathematician | Isabel Rawsthorne - Artist | Helen Torr - Artist | Judith Leyster - Artist | Julia C. Addington - Politician | Marian Anderson - Opera Singer | Mary Somerville - Mathematician | Philippa Fawcett - Mathematician | Kalpana Chawla - Astronaut | Marie Curie - Physicist | Maryam Mirzakhani - Mathematician | Rosalind Franklin - Biophysicist | Karen Sparck Jones - Computer Scientist | Marie-Denise Villers - Artist | Mayawati Das - Politician | Sheila Dikshit - Politician | Katherine Johnson - Mathematician | Marion Walter - Mathematician | Matilda Joslyn Gage - Activist, Abolitionist, Author | Shirley Chisholm - Politician | Larisa Latynina - Athlete Lise Meitner - Physicist | Marsha P. Johnson - Activist | Miki Gorman - Marathon runner | Sofia Kovalevskaya - Mathematician | Mabel Stark - Animal Trainer | Martha Gautier - Geneticist | Mildred Didrikson Zaharias - Athlete | Sofonisba Anguissola - Artist | Manon Rheaume - Athlete | Mary Cartwright - Mathematician | Milicent Patrick - Makeup Designer | Sophie Germain - Mathematician | Margaret Macdonael Mackintosh - Artist | Mary Jackson - Mathematician and Aerospace engineer | Nellie Bly - Journalist, industrialist, inventor and charity worker | Sushma Swaraj - Politician | Margaret Wu - Programmer | Mary McLeod Bethune - Politician | Tou Youyou - Chinese pharmaceutical chemist and malariologist | Maria Agnesi - Mathematician | Mary Shelley - Author | Nettie Stevens - Geneticist | Vasundhara Raje - Politician | Whitney Wolfe - Co- founder of Tinder and founder of Bumble | Yuri Kochiyama - Civil Rights Activist

Pages and pages of women who are inventors, creators, athletes, leaders, inspirational figures of history, all of them buried under layers of erasure. Even when they scream that the research they have done belongs to them, society has found a way to relegate them to footnotes, forcing them to hide in the acknowledgements section rather than giving them the space in the authorship.

It is said that there are no women artists in the Renaissance period but there are. It is said that there aren’t any women mathematicians but there are. Women’s artworks were attributed to their husbands, or their male counterparts, this is seen in all areas of study and all time periods. Some women were lost because of the name change at the altar.

Marie Curie’s (a physicist) work, even having won two Nobel prizes, is attributed to her husband in scientific circles. 

Marie Curie is believed to be her husband’s assistant and having no part in pioneering any of the research she conducted. Esther Lederberg (a microbiologist) her husband and a few collaboratorsworked jointly on a scientific research project but she was never acknowledged when they had won the Nobel prize, only her husband and male collaborators were. Mileva Maric Einstein, Albert Einstein’s first wife, is known to have been a collaborator in his Nobel prize winning research but she was never credited. Her own husband did not give her the credit she deserved.Publications questioning how much of Albert’s work was only his own were blocked for years to preserve the Einstein Myth. Publication of personal letters in between Mileva, Albert and their sons were blocked as well to preserve the same Einstein Myth.

​There are women scientists, mathematicians, authors, artists, engineers, leaders despite an institutional bias against giving women credit, institutional bias against acknowledging women as intellectual equals to men. Women weren’t allowed into tertiary education institutions till the late 1900s. Some cultures forbid women from pursuing even basic education. Is it because women just have a bad marketing team as compared to men or did we, as a society, block women from being able to achieve anything because men need women’s free labour for them to have the mental space to be ambitious.

How much louder do they need to scream that it is their work? How much louder does their voice need to be for them to get the acknowledgement they deserve?

Most of all where are the Women of Colour who do not have European or American attached to their nationality?

Bibliography

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