INSPIRED BY THE NAME OF A 19TH CENTURY SUFFRAGIST, THIS EFFECT MAKES INVISIBILITY OF THE ACHIEVEMENTS ACHIEVED BY WOMEN SCIENTISTS.
The Matilda effect is the name that historian Margaret W. Rossiter coined in 1993 to point out the systematic neglect of female scientists in favor of their male colleagues, who took many of their credits throughout history. The 19th century suffragette and abolitionist Matilda Joslyn was the inspiration for giving this scourge its name. The work of the American sociologist Robert K. Merton in the sixties of the last century was also the starting point to analyze what happens to those who reach the finish line first and yet take the silver medal, or do not even get a mention. Merton called the success of great triumphant figures the “Matthew effect” based on the Gospel parable of the talents: “To anyone who has, to him will be given, and he will have more; But from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.” Applied to the pioneers of science, it translates into the invisibility of their achievements: gifted with talent, they collect the crumbs of recognition.
Women scientists are a fundamental axis of progress, as Matilda Joslyn wrote in Woman as an Inventor of 1883; an essay in which he gives first and last name to the technological pioneers. Her pulse does not tremble as she begins to denounce the false belief that they lack mechanical ingenuity, and that this negligence or ignorance entails their exclusion from the censuses of inventors in the United States. Experience, history and tradition prove the opposite: they were the first artists of the prehistoric caves where they created the imprint of their hands and the inventors of ceramics, a cutting-edge technology that encouraged various peoples to stop being nomadic. It reviews the powerful women of mythology and Antiquity as a principle of authority that reveals a matriarchal past, at the antipodes of contemporary patriarchy. Chinese chroniclers did recognize Empress Xi Lingshi, wife of Huangdi, as the inventor of the silk loom and sericulture in the 27th century BC. C. Later, Joslyn jumps to the Industrial Revolution: it seems that Catherine Littlefield never invented the cotton gin nor Louise Mclaughlin the ceramic enamel, Ann Harned Manning also never invented the reaper-harvester, and although Mary E. Walton sold a patent to the New York Metropolitan Railroad in 1891 for a sound-dampening system for trains, it has fallen into oblivion. The suffragette closes with a plea about the freedom of women to develop their faculties, access political power, enjoy the economic gains achieved with their work and tries to bring out the colors of nineteenth-century society by highlighting that the law did not even allow a woman to register a patent at that time, unless it was in the name of her husband. A very familiar reality for Spanish women who lived through the Franco dictatorship.
Rosalind Franklin is the epitome of the Matilda effect. In 1952, this chemist and crystallographer took one of the most famous photographs in biology: photo 51 showed X-ray diffraction, essential in describing the structure of DNA. Six years later, James Watson and Francis Crick started from their research and developed the double helix model for which they won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1962, together with Maurice Wilkins. Franklin, who died four years earlier, did not see it. In the award acceptance speech she was not mentioned even once, but Watson did speak of her in The Double Helix: “She deliberately refrained from enhancing her feminine qualities. (…) There was never carmine on her lips that contrasted with her black hair and, at 31 years old, her outfit showed no more imagination than that of English teenagers in blue stockings. Iris Montero Muñoz rescues the fragment in Not bad, to be women, a compendium of forgotten scientists, where, together with a brief biography, she fictionalizes her adventures through a short story. In these times when there is a clear reactionary tendency, it is more important than ever to make visible and say who reached the goal first.
