ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Unorthodox Women, Unorthodox Ideas in Modern Biological Research

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

This session investigates how women in modern biology forged alternative scientific worlds by challenging dominant epistemic norms, institutional hierarchies, and gendered expectations. Bringing together the cases of Gertrud Tobler-Wolff (1877-1948), Lynn Margulis (1938-2011), Barbara McClintock (1902-1992), and Agnes Arber (1879-1960), it highlights how figures marked as “unorthodox” generated transformative insights precisely by refusing to conform to established frameworks of authority.
Engaging directly with the conference theme “Shifting Perspectives: Plural Worlds, Contested Sciences,” the session foregrounds forms of epistemic disobedience that have too often been sidelined in canonical histories of biology. Tobler-Wolff’s botanical work across colonial and fascist contexts, Margulis’s persistence with the once-heretical endosymbiotic theory, McClintock’s relational understanding of the genome, and Arber’s holistic morphology all exemplify plural ways of knowing that unsettled reductionist, masculinised visions of scientific practice.
By tracing how gender shaped both the reception and later remembrance of these ideas, the session interrogates how scientific authority is constructed through inclusion, exclusion, and the (retrospective) production of outsider status. Together, these papers demonstrate that attending to unorthodox women and their unconventional approaches is essential not only for diversifying the historical record but also for reimagining what counts as method, as knowledge, and as science in a plural and contested scientific community.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Stephen P Weldon, University of Oklahoma

Individual Presentations

• Gertrud Tobler-Wolff (1877-1948) and colonial botany in the Third Reich - Dorit Maria Nicola Brixius, Dresden University of Technology

• Making a scientific rebel: Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) and the popularization of the endosymbiotic theory - Matthis Krischel, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf, Germany

• Barbara McClintock (1902–1992): Listening to the genome beyond the outsider myth - Felicitas Petra Söhner, Department of the History, Philosophy and Ethics of Medicine

• Agnes Arber (1879–1960): Between romantic morphology and modern biology - Vera Maximilia Straetmanns, Ruhr-University Bochum

Session Organizers

• Vera Maximilia Straetmanns, Ruhr-University Bochum

• Matthis Krischel, Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf, Germany