Saving St. Germ by Carol Muske-Dukes

Author:Carol Muske-Dukes [Muske-Dukes, Carol]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4804-8477-1
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-04-30T20:48:00+00:00

The instructions were taped to the lab door. I stood reading and rereading them, not seeing them. Rocky was in there, I knew: I could hear the strains of Traffic. I couldn’t bring myself to push open the pneumatic door; I couldn’t bring myself to put on a public, cheerful face or even a private, suffering one. Jay had left me. He’d been gone for five days and I was edgy, sleepless.

I slumped down the hall to my office, let myself in, and turned on the harsh overhead light. My desk was covered with papers and graphs and spilled beakers and bent tubing. I moved to the bookshelves that lined the walls and ran my fingers along the dusty spines. I reached in my pocket for a crumpled pack of cigarettes and lit one, throwing the dead match at the wastebasket, just missing.

I smoked and stared at the titles: abstracts and biographies. There were occasional lives of women along the shoulder-to-shoulder stories of men in science. And what kind of lives were the lives of women scientists? Could they (should they?) be categorized as a type of life?

I crushed the cigarette in an old crusted beaker. It hadn’t tasted good. On my way down the hall, I’d been consoling myself with certain self-serving daydreams: even if my husband had left me, I was going to be renowned in my field (and here I might light a smoke and swagger a little). OK, OK, not a Nobel laureate, but a theoretician in whose wake perceptions of reality exploded, re-formed? As if a scientist’s life was in itself a neat vengeance!

I wrenched open a stuck window, sat down, and pulled my journal toward me. Papers fluttered a little; a photograph of Stonehenge I’d taped to the wall a year ago blew under a cupboard.

Imaginary Lecture:

A Brief History of Women in Science

After your father left me, I went on in the tradition of ... whom? I glanced up at a little wall chart I’ve made for myself—a random litany of the lost names. Aspasia, physician; Annie Jump Cannon, astronomer; Nettie Marie Stevens, cytogeneticist; Amalie Dietrich, naturalist; Jane Sharp, midwife; Hildegard of Bingen, cosmologist; Hypatia of Alexandria, mathematician and philosopher; Augusta Ada Byron, mathematician, inventor; Caroline Lucretia Herschel, astronomer.

All those lost lives! Of women who (like me) wanted only a little space, a little time to putter or theorize. Craved a little knowledge, dying to pursue an answer or two. I could hear the voices: a cry here, a comment there, bits of lives outside narrative, circling.

Late one night I made some notes, picking up volumes: personal memoirs, histories, biographies of men—extracting the odd offhand insight into the silent lives of sisters, mothers, wives, teachers, friends. The bits of lives flew to me like iron filings to a magnet.

Here’s The Compleat Midwives’ Book by Jane Sharp, a seventeenth-century British midwife. Jane stood at the childbeds of women who died, feverish and hemorrhaging—women who couldn’t have read their own tombstones. There is no anger in Jane’s voice, only resignation.

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