I have a degree from Oxford in physics.” It was extremely satisfying, because it shut them up. I just glared at them and said, “Yes, I do. There would be a clutch of elderly men in the audience who would stick their hands up and say something patronizing: “Well, dear, you don’t quite understand gravity,” or whatever it was. Instead of a straight biography, it was an account of how he became so famous, and how his reputation shifted over the centuries. I used to give lectures after I wrote that book. I don’t think any other woman has ever written a book about him. He was dedicated to physics and maths, which are very masculine subjects. Why do you call him that?Īs far as I was concerned, he was the furthest removed from anything to do with women. I had not thought of Isaac Newton as particularly masculine. I got so angry about it that I decided I was going to take the most masculine case I possibly could. Gender studies was relatively new it was regarded as a woman’s subject, and it didn’t have the importance that it does now. It was in response to people who kept asking me to lecture on gender studies during my PhD and afterward because I was a woman. That was a definite programmatic decision. My first popular book was about Isaac Newton. “I learned very rapidly that I should never, ever reveal to anybody that I had a degree in physics from Oxford, because nobody-neither men nor women-would talk to me, because they’d regard me as completely abnormal,” she said. After graduating in 1969, Fara left the field to work in computer programming. Men dominated her physics classes, she said, and instructors and students alike parroted messages about female inferiority. Sexism in the field was direct and rampant. Raised in the London suburbs by her mother, a housewife trained as a nurse, and her father, who was a lawyer, Fara studied physics at Oxford University in the sixties. Her writing often emphasizes the contributions of translators, teachers, and technicians-previously unrecognized people whose work was crucial to the global development of science. Fara has spent her career unearthing new ways of viewing scientific history, and she has written about women’s contributions to science dating back to the Enlightenment period. This applies not only to wars and political movements, but also to the lives of scientists, along with their discoveries. “Every person who goes back can fish out a completely different set of facts and tell a completely different story,” said Fara, a historian of science at Cambridge University in the UK. Politicians, movies, and schoolteachers might have you believe that events unfolded one way, but the truth is far more complex and contradictory, as Patricia Fara well knows.

Science by Patricia Fara