We have written elsewhere about women’s involvement in the editorial processes of the Royal Society (see Rostvik & Fyfe, 2018), but what about women as authors?
There was no rule explicitly preventing women from submitting papers to the Royal Society, as long as they (like any other non-fellow) could find a fellow of the Society to ‘communicate’ it on their behalf. (On women at the Royal Society, see Patricia Fara’s essay.)
During the 18th and 19th centuries, the contributions of a few women were acknowledged in work reported by others to the Royal Society. For instance, in 1696, an account of the unusually great age of a man in Yorkshire was supported by the signed testimony of Ann Savile – but piece was presented under the name of fellow and physician Tancred Robinson, who had asked her to write (published article).
In 1755, Louise Teale Belcher mentioned a strange movement in the water levels of Lake Ontario in a letter to a fellow of the Society; and a paragraph from her letter was published in the Transactions as ‘Extract of a letter to the Rev. Dr. Hales, F. R. S. from Governor Belcher’s Lady’ (published; original manuscript copy)
Similarly, Caroline Herschel‘s 1786 letter to a fellow (and friend of her brother) appeared in 1787 as ‘An account of a new comet. In a letter from Miss Caroline Herschel to Charles Blagden, M.D. Sec. R. S.’ (published article; original manuscript)
The first woman to feature as an author of a paper published in Philosophical Transactions was Mary Somerville in 1826. Like Herschel, she had close links to Royal Society networks through male family members (in her case, her husband).
It was not until the closing decades of the nineteenth century that a small but steady trickle of women authors began to appear in the pages of the Proceedings and the Transactions. In 1877, the pioneer doctor Frances Hoggan (nee Morgan) submitted two papers co-authored with her doctor husband: neither was published in full, but abstracts appeared in in the Proceedings. In 1884, Eleanor Sidgwick (nee Balfour), the vice-principal of Newnham College, Cambridge, appeared as co-author on a paper in Proceedings with physicist Lord Rayleigh. In 1886, we see the first published paper (in Proceedings) co-authored by two women, Alice Johnson and Lilian Sheldon, both of Newnham and working with physiologist Michael Foster.
After this, one or two papers a year were being submitted by women authors or co-authors. You can explore some of them in the dataset linked below. (In common with male authors, women authors in this period were more likely to be published in the Proceedings than in Philosophical Transactions.)
As part of our research project, we created a retrospective editorial database for the Royal Society journals. It is based on the ‘Register of Papers’ mantained, in handwriting, on paper, by the Society’s secretaries and their clerical assistants from 1853 to 1990. The database is as complete as we can make it for the years to 1900; thereafter, it contains a sample of two years in every decade [plus a continuous run from 1905-1915].
The ‘Register of Papers’ lists all papers submitted to the Society, with names of authors, communicators, and dates of refereeing and editorial decision-making. It is sometimes easy to identify female authors (if they are described as ‘Miss…’ or ‘Mrs…’), but in other cases, we have made the identification based on their forename, or biographical sources on that person.
Women who submitted papers to the Royal Society after 1853: a sample (i.e. the women who came after Caroline Herschel and Mary Somerville; fairly complete for the later 19thC, but only a sample for the 20thC) [Figshare]