07/11/2025
In 1993, a historian gave a name to something that had been stealing from women scientists for centuries—and in doing so, she named it after another woman history had tried to erase.
For hundreds of years, women made discoveries that changed the world.
They mapped the stars. Discovered elements. Invented technologies that saved millions. Unlocked the secrets of DNA, nuclear fission, and the composition of the universe itself.
And then their names disappeared.
Their work was credited to male colleagues. Their contributions were footnoted, minimized, or erased entirely. History books wrote them out. Textbooks forgot they existed.
It wasn't accidental. It was systematic.
Until Margaret W. Rossiter decided to write them all back in.
Margaret was a historian of science at Cornell University. And she was noticing a pattern that no one had formally named.
Women scientists kept vanishing from history.
Not because their work wasn't important. Not because they hadn't made discoveries. But because the system was designed to erase them.
In 1993, Margaret gave this phenomenon a name: the Matilda Effect.
The systematic denial of credit to women scientists, whose work was attributed to their male colleagues or simply forgotten.
But here's the brilliant part: she named it after Matilda Joslyn Gage, a suffragist and abolitionist who had raised this exact alarm back in 1883.
Gage had written that women's scientific achievements were routinely stolen or ignored. She'd documented it. Called it out. Demanded change.
And then history forgot about Matilda Gage too.
So Margaret named the phenomenon after her. A woman who'd identified the erasure of women was herself erased—until another woman made sure her name would be remembered for recognizing what the world refused to see.
It was an act of historical justice wrapped in an academic term.
Margaret W. Rossiter was born in 1944, growing up fascinated by both science and history—two worlds that rarely acknowledged women's contributions to either field.
She earned her PhD in the history of science from Yale in 1971. This was a time when women historians were rare, and women studying the history of women in science were nearly nonexistent.
But Margaret saw something massive that everyone else was missing.
Where were the women?
She knew they'd been there. She'd seen their names in footnotes, in acknowledgments, in the backgrounds of laboratory photographs. But their stories weren't being told. Their contributions weren't being taught.
Someone had to find them.
So Margaret set out on what would become a 40-year mission to restore women scientists to history.
Her research method was painstaking.
She combed through university archives, scientific journals, personal letters, institutional records, looking for women whose names had been buried in the footnotes of history.
And she found them. Hundreds of them.
She found Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray crystallography was critical to discovering the structure of DNA, but who was largely overlooked while James Watson and Francis Crick received the Nobel Prize.
She found Lise Meitner, who co-discovered nuclear fission but was excluded from the Nobel Prize, which went only to her male colleague Otto Hahn.
She found Nettie Stevens, who discovered that s*x is determined by chromosomes, but whose work was overshadowed by her male colleague Thomas Hunt Morgan.
She found Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered what stars are made of—one of the most important discoveries in astronomy—but whose findings were initially dismissed and later credited to a male astronomer.
She found Chien-Shiung Wu, who conducted the experiment that disproved a fundamental law of physics, but whose male colleagues received the Nobel Prize while she was ignored.
And she found hundreds more.
Women who had worked in labs without titles, without salaries, often as "assistants" to their husbands or male colleagues, doing the intellectual heavy lifting while men took the credit and the recognition.
But Margaret didn't just document individual stories.
She analyzed the patterns. She showed that this wasn't a series of unfortunate coincidences or isolated incidents.
It was systemic. It was structural. It was deliberate.
Women were excluded from academic positions. When they were hired, they were paid less or not at all. Their discoveries were published under men's names. Their Nobel nominations were ignored. Their obituaries mentioned their husbands but not their work.
This wasn't because women were less capable.
It was because the system was designed to keep them invisible.
Margaret called it the Matilda Effect, and the name stuck.
It entered academic discourse, feminist scholarship, and eventually the broader culture. Now there was a term for what had been happening in the shadows for centuries.
But naming the problem wasn't enough for Margaret. She wanted to fix it.
Between 1982 and 2012, Margaret published her three-volume masterwork: Women Scientists in America.
Volume 1: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (1982) – Documented how women fought for access to education and scientific careers in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Volume 2: Before Affirmative Action, 1940–1972 (1995) – Chronicled the post-WWII period, when women's contributions were especially ignored despite their critical roles during the war.
Volume 3: Forging a New World Since 1972 (2012) – Examined the impact of affirmative action, Title IX, and feminist movements on women's participation in science.
Together, these volumes restored thousands of women to the historical record.
They became essential texts in the history of science, women's studies, and the fight for gender equity in STEM fields.
But Margaret's work didn't just stay in academic journals and university libraries.
It sparked real change.
Universities began reviewing their own histories, acknowledging women scientists they had overlooked. Scientific institutions started programs to ensure women received proper credit for their work. Awards and fellowships were created to honor women scientists, both past and present.
Textbooks were rewritten. Course curricula changed. The names that had been erased were written back in.
For her work, Margaret received some of the highest honors in academia:
The Sarton Medal – the highest honor in the history of science
A MacArthur Fellowship (the "Genius Grant")
A Guggenheim Fellowship
And in 2020, the History of Science Society created the Margaret W. Rossiter History of Women in Science Prize, awarded annually to scholars continuing her mission.
But perhaps the greatest tribute was seeing her work cited, built upon, and expanded by a new generation of scholars determined to ensure that women's contributions would never again be erased.
Margaret W. Rossiter is now in her eighties. She spent over 40 years researching, writing, and teaching about women in science.
She didn't just uncover forgotten names.
She changed how history is written.
She forced institutions to confront their complicity in erasing women.
She gave a name—the Matilda Effect—to a phenomenon that had been invisible for centuries.
And she made sure the world could never again claim ignorance.
Because now, when a woman scientist's work is overlooked, we have a name for it. We can call it out. We can recognize the pattern. We can fight it.
Think about what Margaret accomplished:
She took centuries of systematic erasure and made it visible.
She found the women history had hidden and brought them back into the light.
She named the problem after another woman who'd been forgotten for identifying the same problem—creating a recursive act of historical justice.
She spent four decades digging through archives so that today's women in STEM would have role models, predecessors, proof that they belong in these fields.
She didn't just study history. She corrected it.
And here's what matters most:
Every time a young woman in a science class learns about Rosalind Franklin now, that's Margaret's work.
Every time an institution reviews its hiring practices to ensure women get credit for their research, that's the Matilda Effect being fought.
Every time a woman scientist's name appears in a textbook alongside the discovery she made, that's Margaret Rossiter's legacy.
She gave voice to the voiceless.
She made visible what had been deliberately hidden.
She ensured that the women who discovered the structure of DNA, who split the atom, who mapped the stars, who changed the world—would finally be remembered for it.
Margaret W. Rossiter didn't just document history.
She rewrote it.
She took the erasure of women scientists—something that had been happening for centuries but had never been formally recognized—and she gave it a name that couldn't be ignored.
The Matilda Effect.
Named after a woman who'd been erased for calling out erasure.
It's brilliant. It's justice. It's a middle finger to every institution that thought women's contributions could be quietly stolen.
And it's a reminder that sometimes the most revolutionary act is simply refusing to let history forget.
Margaret spent 40 years making sure the world would never again claim ignorance about what had been stolen from women scientists.
She found them. She named the theft. She demanded recognition.
And she won.
Today, when we talk about Rosalind Franklin and DNA, when we acknowledge Lise Meitner's role in nuclear fission, when we teach about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin discovering what stars are made of—
That's Margaret W. Rossiter's victory.
The women who changed the world but were written out of history?
She wrote them back in.
And made damn sure they'd stay there.
