2000 HSS/PSA Program 1 - History of Science Society

HSS Abstracts
source. According to John Burnham’s How Superstition Won and Science Lost,
psychology was one of many fields in which journalists supplanted scholars
as popularizers in the 1930s and beyond, with deplorable results. In my
presentation I will examine Burnham’s thesis using the Hearst newspapers’
Sunday supplement (American Weekly) as a primary source. Read by millions
each week, this newsprint magazine featured hundreds of articles on
psychological topics (at least one extensive article each week). In authorship,
these show the classic signs of boundary creation and specialization in science:
the philosophers and religious authorities of the early ‘20s are replaced by
university-based psychologists with specialist training and degrees. In content,
one sees the laboratory become the locus of scientific authority. Also, topics
addressed change from grand moral questions (is the family doomed by the
New Morality?) to those amenable to empirical research reported in academic
journals. Contrary to Burnham, at least one psychologist (Donald Laird of
Colgate University) volunteered to translate his work into tabloid-friendly
essays with his own photos to add authority and drama. In Laird’s writing and
in anonymous articles, published scientific research was woven into coherent
discussions of popular topics (e.g., can one read character from facial
qualities?). I will conclude with a review of historical approaches to
popularization that compete with or complement Burnham’s.
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Robert Hendrick St. John’s University
Gender Stereotyping in Visual Images of French Science Popularization,
1870-1914
Perceiving it to be a panacea for problems facing France after 1870, scores of
popularizers worked to create a favorable public image of science. Directing
their efforts at the middle classes, popularizers found it profitable to foster the
ideology of that group. Hence, they made science popularization a means of
ideological defense. Since this was a period when growing feminist demands
significantly challenged the ideology of the middle classes, one area where
the popularizers defended existing dominant assumptions was in their adoption
of a negative conception of the role of women in society. This paper examines
the stereotypical negative view of women incorporated in the popularization
of science and medicine in France from 1870 to 1914. Specifically, it deals
with visual images depicting science, and women’s relationship to it, in various
art forms of the period. Examining how science was portrayed in the Salon art
of painters such as Jehan-Georges Vibert, Henri Gervex, Georges Chicotot,
and in the sculpture of Louis-Ernest Barrias, makes obvious the gender
stereotyping present in images of French science. By comparing these negative
portrayals of women in science with illustrations that appeared in newspapers,
popular science periodicals, and in science books, I show how the “low” art of
the period reinforced the prevailing depreciative perception of women’s