88 4. WOMEN MATHEMATICIANS
3.3. Four modern pioneers. The struggle for a woman's right to be a scientist
or mathematician was very much an obstacle course, similar to running the high
hurdles. The first hurdle was to get the family to support a scientific education.
That hurdle alone caused many to drop out at the very beginning, leaving only a
few lucky or very determined women to go on to the second hurdle, gaining access
to higher education. All of the women discussed above had only private tutoring
in mathematics. The second hurdle began to be surmounted in the late nineteenth
century. On the continent a few women were admitted to university lectures without
being matriculated, as exceptional cases. These cases established a precedent, and
the exceptions eventually became regularized. In Britain the University of London
began admitting women in the 1870s, and in the United States there were women's
colleges for undergraduate education. The opening of Bryn Mawr College in 1885
with a program of graduate studies in mathematics was an important milestone
in this progress. Once a woman had surmounted the second hurdle, the third and
highest of all had to be faced: getting hired and accepted as a scientist. The four
pioneers we are about to discuss had to improvise their solutions to this problem.
The fundamental societal changes needed to provide women with the same assured,
routine access that men enjoyed when pursuing such a career required many decades
to be recognized and partially implemented.
Charlotte Angas Scott. One of the first women to benefit from the relaxation of
restrictions on women's education was Charlotte Angas Scott, who was born in
Lincoln, England on June 8, 1858. Like many of the earlier women, she was fortu-
nate in that her parents encouraged her to study mathematics with a tutor. She
attended Girton College, Cambridge and took the comprehensive Tripos examina-
tion at Cambridge in 1880, being ranked as the eighth Wrangler (that is, she was
eighth from the top of the class of mathematics majors). However, the Tripos alone
was not enough to earn her a degree at Cambridge. She was very fortunate in being
able to go on to graduate work in algebraic geometry under the direction of one of
the greatest nineteenth-century mathematicians, Arthur Cayley (1821-1895). She
earned a first (highest-rank) degree from the University of London in 1882 and,
with Cayley's recommendation, the Ph. D. in 1885. Having now surmounted the
second hurdle, she faced the third and highest one: finding an academic position.
Cayley, who had spent some time a few years earlier at Johns Hopkins Uni-
versity in Baltimore, knew that Bryn Mawr College was opening that year. On
his recommendation, Scott was hired there as a professor of mathematics. There
she was able to set rigorous standards for the mathematical curriculum. When the
American Mathematical Society was founded a few years later, she was a member
of its first Council. Another of the nine women among the original membership of
the AMS was her first Ph. D. student. Her contributions to mathematical scholar-
ship were impressive. She published one paper giving a new proof of an important
theorem of Max Noether (1844-1921) in the Mathematische Annalen, a very presti-
gious German journal, and many papers in the American Journal of Mathematics,
which had been founded by her countryman James Joseph Sylvester (1815-1897)
when he was head of mathematics at Johns Hopkins. From 1899 to 1926 she was
an editor of this journal, and in 1905 she became vice-president of the American
Mathematical Society.
Near the end of her career the American Mathematical Society held a confer-
ence in her honor at Bryn Mawr. and one of the speakers was the great British
