Wise Women
(Sabias)

The hidden face of science: the fascinating stories of the female protagonists of the obscured history of science, the face of women who have remained invisible until now

Could it be that women are absent from the history of science because men didn’t allow them to take part in it? That’s not true. Despite the prohibitions, in every period and every civilization there were women who made relevant contributions to one or several fields of knowledge. What happened to them?

In classical Greece, women exercising certain learned professions were subject to the death penalty. Later, when universities were created, a rule prohibited women, and that ban continued until less than a century ago. In the early 20^th century, erudite medical doctors gave supposedly scientific arguments to explain women’s mental weakness. Others stated that the habit of studying exposed them to serious, permanent damage to their reproductive organs.