Margaret Rossiter, Caroline Seely, Professional Mathematics, and American Masculinities

Rossiter’s work, for example, documented the reality that earning a PhD rarely led to research-oriented employment for American women in the early twentieth century. Instead, women scientists were often confined to “women’s work,” such as assisting other researchers, teaching young women, or performing clerical jobs. As Rossiter has demonstrated, the rise and professionalization of “big science” brought with it new administrative and auxiliary roles that were generally deemed “appropriate” for women. Although other forms of science may have generated more assistant-type roles than mathematics did, Seely’s work was crucial to new forms of bigness in American mathematics that resulted from a rapid period of fundraising and professionalization throughout the 1920s.^[i]

Overall, Rossiter’s publications have helped document the specific practices and trends that have kept women out of science and women scientists out of the spotlight, thus making science seem like something that women don’t do. My own research on mathematics and masculinities asks a related and somewhat complementary question: What has made mathematics seem like something that men do? The historical exclusion of women from the category “mathematician” is part of the answer. But I am also interested in the cultural dynamics that have worked to associate mathematics with different kinds of people, perceptions, and ways of being in the world. As such, the analysis of gender in my research is less about categories such as men and women and more about the processes of power and identity that are formed in and around cultural activities and products such as mathematics.^[ii]

Somewhat paradoxically, part of my analysis considers how Seely and her administrative labor helped to enact new forms of masculinity for early-twentieth-century American mathematicians. Specifically, I argue that Seely’s work served as a foil to the prestige of men’s research while simultaneously making said research possible. By the end of World War I, American mathematicians had established a professional hierarchy that valued the pursuit of abstract research above both applied research and teaching. This hierarchy was notably gendered, as women were often confined to teaching positions with full course loads while the prestige of abstract research was reserved for men. New forms of funding and institutional support that were central to American mathematics in the 1920s worked to intensify these dynamics. New postdoctoral fellowships bolstered the talents of promising young men, for example, while funding for publications benefitted researchers at the “top” of the professional hierarchy. Indeed, during this time, American mathematicians began to define themselves increasingly in terms of published research, new forms of funding, and international repute. Through her work at the AMS, including negotiating with printers, managing capital campaigns, and corresponding with mathematicians worldwide, Seely was central to developing these mechanisms of prestige and professionalism. At the same time, Seely herself and the “girls” she hired to help with office work became a point of contrast to professional researchers. As Rossiter has noted, even as the number of women scientists began to increase, “only a few were considered ‘professionals’.”^[iii] Although in fact Seely’s work relied on a range of mathematical and administrative expertise, her position reinforced pre-existing assumptions about women and menial labor while professional research reputation became its own form of masculinity. 

Throughout the 1920s, for example, attending and presenting at AMS meetings remained a central component of developing a professional research reputation. Seely both attended and presented at many of the AMS’s regular, annual, and summer meetings. For all meetings, she was a key organizer, and much of her work involved making separate accommodation and scheduling arrangements for men and women. In December 1922, she wrote to Richardson, referencing other AMS leaders, Thomas Fiske and Herbert Slaught:

The programme looks all right to me. It seems to me the women are well taken care of, and get a great deal of tea. I warn you there is always trouble about how we get seated at general dinners. The ladies don’t like to be segregated off in a corner (Fiske made that awful break once in New York), and yet if left to themselves are likely to segregate themselves and then be discontented because they have. Once Slaught had a good solution (wasn’t it in Chicago) of announcing that no two ladies were to be allowed to sit together; as there is always a superfluity of men, the women haters can get together in spite of this. I suppose I oughtn’t to give away trade secrets like this, but they all come and confide in me if they don’t like things.^[iv]

As Rossiter’s work has shown, by the 1920s women scientists had fought successfully to attend scientific conferences that were previously restricted to men. Yet, it was often in the informal spaces at conferences, such as dining rooms, that research partnerships, new ideas, and professional reputations were formed. To separate women from men at mealtimes would have meant separating them from professional research mathematics. 

It would not be an exaggeration to say that sustained efforts over the past half-century to support the advancement of women and other underrepresented scholars in science can be tied almost directly to the findings in Rossiter’s work. Indeed, few historians have had the level of impact on contemporary perceptions that Rossiter has had on our understanding of women’s participation in science. Like others, I hope to continue this work, in part by telling stories such as Seely’s.