ABSTRACT After a productive start in the 1980s, laboratory history is now surprisingly neglected—not lab science, but the lab as social institution. To restart interest, I suggest that we see labs as period specific (early modern, modern, postmodern) and of a piece with each era's dominant social institutions and practices. In the modern era, for example, labs have become powerful and ubiquitous because their operating principles are those of the nation-state and its consumerist political economy. Their educational function is crucial: (...) labs have authority because they are an effective vehicle for educating en masse for life in modern states; they provide general entry to careers in scores of disciplines and a thousand occupations; and they embody prevailing ideals of a meritocracy of competence, transparency (through publication), and a universalistic logic of objectivity. An older microhistory of laboratory practices may thus be reborn as a systematic, macrosocial history of the lab. (shrink)

I think you would be amused if you were here now to see my lectures – in my elementary one I have got a front row entirely consisting of young women (some of them not so young neither, as someone says in Jeames' Diary) and they take notes in the most painstaking and praiseworthy fashion, but the most extraordinary thing is that I have got one at my advanced lecture. I am afraid she does not understand a word and my (...) theory is that she is attending my lectures on the supposition that they are Divinity and she has not yet found out her mistake.Professor J. J. Thomson to Mrs H. F. Reid, 4 November 1886When Joseph John Thomson used this light-hearted description to brighten up a letter to a family friend, women had been attending physics lectures at the Cavendish Laboratory for four years. Though the picture was designed to amuse the recipient, a married woman, joviality thinly disguised unease. Thomson's previously homogeneous audience had been physically split into two opposing sections with young, male students at the back and older, female students along the front row. Intellectual divisions were also apparent; the women took notes in a different, non-male way, and without the sharpness of a masculine mind they could not understand the content. The message was plain – the women had made a mistake. Their infiltration had been unsuccessful and they did not fit in. (shrink)

In the early years of Mendelism, 1900-1910, William Bateson established a productive research group consisting of women and men studying biology at Cambridge. The empirical evidence they provided through investigating the patterns of hereditary in many different species helped confirm the validity of the Mendelian laws of heredity. What has not previously been well recognized is that owing to the lack of sufficient institutional support, the group primarily relied on domestic resources to carry out their work. Members of the group (...) formed a kind of extended family unit, centered on the Batesons' home in Grantchester and the grounds of Newnham College. This case illustrates the continuing role that domestic environments played in supporting scientific research in the early 20th century. (shrink)

Participant observation, focus groups, and in-depth interviews were used to study the professionalization of women enrolled in engineering school. Two aspects of the professionalization process were examined: adapting to the professional culture and internalizing the professional identity. The study found support for a Goffmanesque interpretation of professionalization; engineering students learn how to manage others' impressions of them as professionals to gain their trust and confidence. Women also must learn to manage impressions male engineers hold of them. They present themselves as (...) competent, nonthreatening, and solidary members of the profession. (shrink)