Ruth Schwartz Cowan (born 1941) is an American historian of science, technology and medicine noted for her research on the history of human and medical genetics, as well as on the history of household technologies. She is also the author of a widely used textbook on the social history of American technology.
Cowan was born in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Betty (a home-maker and antique-dealer) and Louis E. Schwartz (an attorney and office manager). She co-wrote a book detailing their assimilation as Jewish immigrants with her husband Neil. [1]
She attended the Brooklyn public schools, graduating (in 1957) from Midwood High School. Cowan has a B.A. in zoology from Barnard College, an M.A. in history from the University of California at Berkeley, and a Ph.D. in the history of science from Johns Hopkins University. [2] Her doctoral dissertation, "Sir Francis Galton and the Study of Heredity in the 19th Century," was supervised by William Coleman.
Cowan was a professor of history at SUNY Stony Brook from 1967 to 2002. She also served as Director of Women's Studies from 1985 to 1990 and Chair of the Honors College from 1997 to 2002. [2] [3] Cowan is a Professor Emerita at the University of Pennsylvania. [4]
Cowan's book More Work for Mother found that since 1700, "technological change shifted the burden of domestic labor from adult men and children to mothers and wives." [3]
Cowan's More Work for Mother received the Dexter Prize from the Society for the History of Technology in 1984. [3] In 1997 the Society for the History of Technology also awarded her the Leonardo da Vinci Medal.
Cowan received the John Desmond Bernal Prize in 2007 for distinguished scholarly contributions to the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS) for her textbook A Social History of American Technology.
Cowan was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2014. [5]
Ruth Fulton Benedict was an American anthropologist and folklorist.
Marie Charlotte Carmichael Stopes was a British author, palaeobotanist and campaigner for eugenics and women's rights. She made significant contributions to plant paleontology and coal classification, and was the first female academic on the faculty of the University of Manchester. With her second husband, Humphrey Verdon Roe, Stopes founded the first birth control clinic in Britain. Stopes edited the newsletter Birth Control News, which gave explicit practical advice. Her sex manual Married Love (1918) was controversial and influential, and brought the subject of birth control into wide public discourse. Stopes publicly opposed abortion, arguing that the prevention of conception was all that was needed, though her actions in private were at odds with her public pronouncements.
The technological and industrial history of the United States describes the emergence of the United States as one of the most technologically advanced nations in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries. The availability of land and literate labor, the absence of a landed aristocracy, the prestige of entrepreneurship, the diversity of climate and large easily accessed upscale and literate markets all contributed to America's rapid industrialization.
Ruth Myrtle Patrick was an American botanist and limnologist specializing in diatoms and freshwater ecology. She authored more than 200 scientific papers, developed ways to measure the health of freshwater ecosystems and established numerous research facilities.
Daniel J. Kevles is an American historian of science best known for his books on American physics and eugenics and for a wide-ranging body of scholarship on science and technology in modern societies. He is Stanley Woodward Professor of History, Emeritus at Yale University and J. O. and Juliette Koepfli Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus at the California Institute of Technology.
Frances Elizabeth Holberton was an American computer scientist who was one of the six original programmers of the first general-purpose electronic digital computer, ENIAC. The other five ENIAC programmers were Jean Bartik, Ruth Teitelbaum, Kathleen Antonelli, Marlyn Meltzer, and Frances Spence.
Ruth Sager was an American geneticist. In the 1950s and 1960s she pioneered the field of cytoplasmic genetics by discovering transmission of genetic traits through chloroplast DNA, the first known example of genetics not involving the cell nucleus. The academic community did not acknowledge the significance of her contribution until after the second wave of feminism in the 1970s. Her second career began in the early 1970s and was in cancer genetics; she proposed and investigated the roles of tumor suppressor genes.
Americanization is the process of an immigrant to the United States becoming a person who shares American culture, values, beliefs, and customs by assimilating into the American nation. This process typically involves learning the American English language and adjusting to American culture, values, and customs. It can be considered another form of, or an American subset of Anglicization.
Ruth Milkman is an American sociologist of labor and labor movements. She is Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center and the director of research at CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies. Between 1988 and 2009 Milkman taught at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she directed the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.
Esther Marley Conwell was a pioneering American chemist and physicist, best known for the Conwell-Weisskopf theory that describes how electrons travel through semiconductors, a breakthrough that helped revolutionize modern computing. During her life, she was described as one of the most important women in science.
Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences is a 1997 book by former executive editor for physical science and history at Princeton University Press Edward Tenner that is an account and geography of modern technology.
Judy Wajcman, is the Anthony Giddens Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is the Principal Investigator of the Women in Data Science and AI project at The Alan Turing Institute. She is also a visiting professor at the Oxford Internet Institute. Her scholarly interests encompass the sociology of work, science and technology studies, gender theory, and organizational analysis. Her work has been translated into French, German, Greek, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Chinese and Spanish. Prior to joining the LSE in 2009, she was a Professor of Sociology in the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. She was the first woman to be appointed the Norman Laski Research Fellow (1978–80) at St. John's College, Cambridge. In 1997 she was elected Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia.
From 1919 to 1929, primarily North America and parts of Europe experienced the rise of the Roaring Twenties. Social and economic circumstances underwent dramatic changes. The economic power and high employment of the United States allowed Americans to spend more extravagantly on entertainment. War veterans returned home seeking relaxation and comfort instead of returning to their factory or agricultural duties. Watching movies and listening to the newly invented radio became increasingly popular during this period, which further encouraged the desires of people for Hollywood style lives of indulgence and ease. This extravagance was ignited by the introduction of Henry Ford's Model T, a car affectionately known as the "Tin Lizzie." Cars became a major source of freedom and adventure as well as travel, and cars greatly altered the standard of living, the social patterns of the day, and urban planning; and cars differentiated suburban and urban living purposes. In addition, the rise of cars led to the creation of new leisure activities and businesses. The car became the center of middle and working class life until the start of World War II.
Katharine Blunt was an American chemist, professor, and nutritionist who specialized in the fields of home economics, food chemistry and nutrition. Most of her research was on nutrition, but she also made great improvements to research on calcium and phosphorus metabolism and on the basal metabolism of women and children. She served as the third president of Connecticut College.
Pauline Gracia Beery Mack was an American chemist, home economist, and college administrator. Her research in calcium, nutrition, radiation, and bone density began during the 1930s, and culminated in work for NASA when she was in her seventies.
Seymour I. Schwartz, was the Distinguished Alumni Professor for the Department of Surgery at the University of Rochester in Rochester, New York. He was one of the most prolific and honored surgeons in American history with further successes outside of the field of medicine as a renowned author and cartographic historian. His most notable accomplishments in surgery include being the founding editor-in-chief of Schwartz's Principles of Surgery, Chairman of the Department of Surgery at the University of Rochester (1987-1998), Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons (1996-2004) and President of the American College of Surgeons (1997-1998). After spending nearly 65 years in the field of surgery, he has published hundreds of research articles, textbook chapters, and received numerous honors in the United States and abroad. Schwartz has lectured throughout the world as a visiting professor and donated to many philanthropic endeavors. His influence on surgical education and leadership has impacted nearly every practicing surgeon in the world. Throughout his career, Schwartz has treated and changed the lives of tens of thousands of patients and trained generations of residents and fellows to share in his legacy and do the same.
Ruth Alice Armstrong was an American temperance activist. She served as the national superintendent of heredity for the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU). She wrote leaflets and letters of instruction for the organization, and lectured on "Heredity" and "Motherhood". Armstrong died in 1901.
Ruth Evelyn Hodge is an American archivist, author, educator, and community activist who has furthered the advancement of African-American and United States military history research and writing during the 20th and early 21st centuries. "African-Americans played a great part in building America," she said during a newspaper interview in 2000. "The more people know, the better they understand and the better they get along."
Wilhelmine "Minnie" Marie Enteman Key was an American geneticist. She was the first woman to gain a PhD in zoology from the University of Chicago, where she studied coloration in paper wasps. She contributed to the study of eugenics and was an influential teacher to Sewall Wright.
Autumn Stanley (1933–2018) researched inventions by women and patents obtained by women in the United States. She is widely known for her book titled, Mothers and Daughters of Invention.
