Sexism in science has roots in Victorian whispering campaigns, claims new book

Jealous rivals’ attempts to destroy 19th-century chemist Sir Humphry Davy’s popularity by insinuating he was gay have left a legacy that means the so-called hard sciences remain a bastion of sexism, a new book claims.

Evidence unearthed by Dr Heather Ellis for her book Masculinity and Science, published by Palgrave, from the archives of the British Science Association, shows that Davy’s popularity created enemies who tried to destroy his reputation. Popular magazines, like the John Bull, launched vicious personal attacks on the chemist’s flamboyant dress and the charismatic delivery at lectures that had brought him a wide female following.

Describing him as the “Professor Brian Cox of his day”, the Sheffield-based academic said: “[Davy’s] lectures were very popular, especially with women and that enhanced his public reputation.”

Rivals also spread rumours of closet homosexuality, speculating on not only his dress, but also his close association with the Romantic poets, especially Southey and Coleridge, with the latter once declaring of Davy: “Had he not been the first chemist, he would have been the first poet of his age.”

“There was a definite attempt to ruin Davy’s career,” Ellis said. “The charges against him tended to reflect his foppish dress, association with aristocrats and that he wrote poetry about the natural world, as well as murmurs that he didn’t have a sexual relationship with his wife.”

One incident in particular was alighted upon as proof of “unmanliness”, Ellis said. On a visit to the Louvre, rivals noted his “apathy” and “total want of feeling” to the Venus de’ Medici, describing his behaviour as “against nature”. They also noted that a statue of Antinous, the male lover of the Roman emperor Hadrian, drew his admiration. “What a strange – what a discordant anomaly in the construction of the human mind do these anecdotes unfold,” the physician John Ayrton Paris declared in a biography of the scientist.

Ellis believes the accusations reflected both Davy’s humble origins as an apothecary’s apprentice in Cornwall and wider social change taking place as the 18th century folded into the 19th. “Davy was a transitional figure,” she added. The rise of a lower-middle-class chemist to the presidency of the aristocratic Royal Society was seen as a threat. “People talked about his elocution and that he ‘smelled of the shop’,” Ellis said.

The backlash against the scientist, who invented the Davy Lamp that saved the lives of miners, was not the only driver for turning science into a stereotypically masculine pursuit during the 19th century. As the century progressed, women were forced out of the laboratory, and eventually the lecture theatre, to fill supportive roles for so-called “men of science”, the historian noted, reflecting a hardening of gender roles throughout wider society.

As well as accusations against Davy, Ellis’s book reveals that rumours swirled around Thomas Huxley and Charles Darwin, although in both cases fingers pointed at their retreat from society and apparent enjoyment of domesticity rather than homosexuality. “Huxley was not helped by the fact that he described science as an escape from the world of men, a world where men cut each other’s throats,” she said.

Ellis believes the move from Enlightenment thinking and social inclusivity in science in the 19th century has had an impact on women in science that resonates today. “We still have the image of the scientist as a male geek or nerd,” she said. “Also, if you look at the scientists who were accused of effeminacy in the 19th century, they were working in the hard sciences, physics and chemistry, in which women remain under-represented. It is a cultural legacy you can link back to then.”