Early Documentation of Women in Chemistry, Bacteriology, Medicine, and Laboratory Instruction, 11 Photographs including Identified Individuals, circa 1900 to 1946

Women in Laboratory Sciences

Photograph

Women in laboratory sciences photo archive, circa 1900 to 1946, documenting women’s movement into chemistry, bacteriology, hospital medicine, and classroom experiment at a time when scientific training and professional advancement remained largely organized around men with barriers of entry for women. The group begins with a pharmacological laboratory where one woman stands among men, predating suffrage in the United States, and continues through school laboratories, hospital laboratories, press photographs, and postwar images of young women handling test tubes and glassware. World War I drew women chemists into schools, universities, analytical laboratories, and war work, while World War II accelerated laboratory demand again through bacteriology, antibiotics, and industrial drug production.

Photo archive of 11 mixed phtoographic mediums, including albumen, silver gelatin, and real photo postcard photographs, various sizes ranging 5 x 4 inches to 8 x 10 inches, United States and Europe, early 20th century. The images show women and girls conducting experiments at benches lined with burners, flasks, pipettes, test tubes, reagent bottles, and laboratory stands; a large pharmacological classroom with nearly all male staff and students and one woman present; high school girls in an early science classroom; two nuns or a nun and nurse working in a laboratory at Saint Anthony’s Hospital, Rockford, Illinois, identified on verso as early 1930s; and a bacteriological laboratory scene dated October 2, 1923. A 1926 Acme press photograph identifies “Miss Virginia Trelease, chemist student at Northwestern University, Evanston, Ill.,” using liquid oxygen from a Heylandt liquefier to fry an egg over “burning ice.” Other images show two young women captioned “Resa Yusko and [Bla? Pesala]” in 1946, smiling while handling laboratory equipment, and a 1927 press photograph of Mrs. August Rus Oppenheim, Mrs. Oswald Jimenis, and Mrs. Arthur Bunker of the Southern Women’s Educational Alliance posting a Metropolitan Opera benefit notice, evidence of women’s educational fundraising alongside the scientific scenes.

The photographs trace women’s scientific labor from gendered access to instruction into wartime necessity and postwar professional visibility. In the early twentieth century, women who entered chemistry and medicine often worked through teaching, nursing, hospital laboratories, and applied science, fields that admitted them more readily than elite research posts while still relying on their technical skill. During World War II, penicillin moved from laboratory microbiological study in 1940 to mass production by 1945, a shift that depended on fermentation work, laboratory handling, and industrial coordination rather than discovery alone. Light surface wear, toning, occasional creasing, press stamps, captions, and handling marks; some images faded or rubbed. Overall good condition. A concentrated visual record of women learning, demonstrating, and performing laboratory science across the decades when modern medicine and chemistry increasingly required their work while still limiting their recognition.

Item #23583

Price: $750.00