ABSTRACT
From the outset, the founding fathers of modern science in Europe excluded women from their powerful ‘new’ philosophy and, even after all legal barriers have been removed, women constitute only a small minority in all but a few of the life sciences. Those that have won sufficient prominence to warrant mention in the chapters of this book, for example, are notable exceptions. Feminists have naturally been keen to increase access for women into science — from the ‘first wave’ feminists who battled to gain for women the right to university education and the right to vote in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to the ‘second wave’ feminists of the women’s liberation movement which gained ground from the late 1960s onwards.
