I was asked by someone in the community to write on women scientists. There are a lot of them, some dating back to the Nineteenth Century or earlier. Usually they were ignored or suppressed, but they often contributed greatly to their fields and some succeeded despite being sidelined. Only recently have their contributions been recognized and many of the earlier ones are still obscure. I will start with Libbie Henrietta Hyman, who wrote a definitive series of books on invertebrate zoology, despite being generally unfunded (except by her own efforts) and being stuck in a small office as an unpaid associate. Despite numerous obstacles she received her Ph.D. in 1915 from the University of Chicago. Her books were considered the last word on invertebrate anatomy even when I was at the University of Arizona. I have three of the set titled "Invertebrates" (she never finished the second Mollusca volume and the Arthropoda, but considering the handicaps under which she worked that is hardly a criticism!) The series was published by McGraw-Hill, New York and London, starting with Volume 1, "Protozoa through Ctenophora" (1940) 726 pp., with 221 multi-drawing "Figures", mostly original! Volume 2 came out in 1951 and covered "Platyhelminthes and Rhynchocoela: The Acoelomate Bilateria" and contained 550 pages and 208 figures. The last volume that I possess was Volume 3 "Acanthocephala, Aschelminthes and Entoprocta"with 572 pages and 223 figures. She followed these with volumes on the Echinodermata (1955), the Smaller Coelomate Groups (1959) and the Mollusca I (1967). Even though she never finished the project the six volumes she did complete were a stellar achievement.
Libbie Hymen was born in 1888 in Des Moines, Iowa. Her early life was pretty well blighted by two immigrant parents who were either uninvolved (her father) or possessive (her mother). Her three brothers were (along with the rest of the family) dismissive of her actually going to college and it is a great wonder that she ever got anywhere. Fortunately after graduating from the Ft. Dodge High School in 1905 and taking a factory job, her German and English teacher from the high school encouraged her to go to the University of Chicago. She was badly treated in botany, which she had first thought to major in, but was welcomed to the zoology department. She received her B.S. (Phi Beta Kappa) in 1910 and was taken on by the progressive zoologist C. M. Child and subsequently finished her Ph.D in 1915. She returned home only to be derided for her work. None the less she started publishing laboratory manuals and found that they made enough on royalties that she could make a living. When her mother died she finally left home and, after a tour of the European museums, settled in New York, being made an honorary research associate at the American Museum of Natural History in 1937. She never was paid, even though she received honorary degrees from several major institutions and the Gold Medal of the Linnaean Society of London. Libbie Hyman personified the successful professional women from the period who could not get paid employment because of their sex. During her career she produced enough solid work to easily get a professorship at a major university, had she been male. However she was always very modest about her accomplishments, saying that her major talent was as a translator of other people's work.
She died of Parkinson's Disease in 1969, just after I entered the University of Arizona as a zoology student transferring from a local junior college. Her contributions to invertebrate biology and anatomy in pulling disparate publications together into a well-written and well-illustrated set of volumes certainly were basic to the course in Invertebrate Zoology that I took as an undergraduate at U. of A.
References: Libbie H. Hyman and G. Evelyn Hutchinson. 1991. Libbie Henrietta Hyman. National Academy of Sciences, Biographical Memoirs, Vol. 60: 103-114. On line at:http://www.annelida.net/bio/hyman.html Wikipedia. Libbie Hyman. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libbie_Hyman