Women pioneers II

One of my most-read blog posts is this one, where I highlighted some trailblazing women scientists—Helen Jennings, Klara von Neumann, Mary Tsingou, Helen Abby, Miriam Kretzschmar, and Fan Chung Graham—in fields related to network science and computational social science. In the eight years since that post, I learned about more, and now is the time for a follow-up. On the other hand, I’m probably missing many, so there might be a third installment of this post.

Elizabeth Bott was a social anthropologist whose Ph.D. thesis about the social networks of working-class families in London is still a classic that inspired—among other things—Tessa Cubitt‘s work on community structure in networks (published in Clyde Mitchell and Jeremy Boissevain’s edited volume Network Analysis: Studies in Human Interaction). (Boissevain was another underappreciated early network scientist, but that’s, for obvious reasons, material for another post.)

As it is conveniently small yet conspicuously structured, the literature on social network analysis often features the “Southern women” data. This data set came out of the structural anthropology research program at Harvard in the 1930s, headed by Lloyd Warner, and the fieldwork in Natchez, Mississippi, intended to paint a broad picture of social structures across social classes and the racial divide. The field workers were two married couples (one white, one black), and I assume Mary R Gardner did most of the collection of the southern women data since the nodes are white women. The other woman on the project, Elizabeth Davis, did not appear as an author on the most famous documentation of the project, Deep South. I just suppose it has something to do with the structural racism that was the topic of the study itself.

Mary L. Northway used the sociometry method developed by Helen Jennings and Jacob Moreno to study children’s social life. She wrote the very readable A Primer of Sociometry, with the interesting thesis that children can understand their context better if they see themselves in their social network (which could be visualized by a pegboard as follows):

Finally, Margaret Mead was probably the most famous woman scientist of her time. An anthropologist whose studies about family life and sexuality in Samoa struck a chord with the post-war West looking for some perennial truths to hang on to in a changing world. She was also a proponent of cybernetics, computer simulations and later systems theory, and one of the first to think of cultural norms and knowledge (a.k.a. wisdom of crowds) from a systems perspective.