Jul 31, 2025
child’s play
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Russia
seen from Italy
seen from Poland
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from Italy
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from China
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Canada
seen from T1
seen from India
seen from Russia
seen from Greece
child’s play
Please submit a historical woman in science or an event important to women in science for inclusion in the calendar!
Lady Science Magazine is crowd sourcing data on women in the history of science to build a “On This Day in Women's Science History Calendar.” Currently, no calendar dedicated to women in science exists, and we want to change that. We hope this calendar will be a resource for students, museums, science and history organizations, and anyone invested in increasing the visibility of women in STEM online.
submit a historical woman in science or an event important to women in science
scientists & the experiment
Lady Science, the aesthetic.
This is for a fic I'm writing in portuguese for a challenge this month. It's super cool and I'm having lots of fun writing it.
The story is about a scientist who goes around in her time machine trying to save the world....even though she doesn't know what she's saving it from.
“What makes How to Become Beautiful unique is that it was not published in mainstream forums like middle-class women’s magazines. Instead, a dime novel press printed it as one of a series of “how-to” books. Others titles in the “Ten Cent Library” included How to Do Sixty Tricks With Cards, How to Become a Scientist, and How to Do It. Today, we generally consider dime novels to have been the purview of young adult men, but the existence of How to Become Beautiful suggests that women read these books as well. When publisher Frank Tousey released the anonymous How to Become Beautiful, he had every expectation it would influence thousands of female readers. The book offers general lifestyle advice and home remedies ranging from acne treatment and headache drops to toothpaste and lip balm. With these tips, the reader could transform into how “nature intended you to look.”
While appearing to be a collection of benevolent tips, How to Become Beautiful is actually a powerful persuasive tool based on a white supremacist vision of the world. It frames its lessons within an evolutionary argument: “Civilization has taken much from both manhood and womanhood … in the same ratio as men and women become civilized and cultivated according to the formulas of modern society, do they fall off in physical beauty.” In the late 19th century, Americans saw technological advances as signs that their society was evolving to greater degrees of civilization.
At the same time, Americans obsessively worried that “too much” civilization made them weak. They believed that progress created “nervous disorders” like neurasthenia and hysteria, which, if unchecked, could lead to individual illness and social degeneration. How to Become Beautiful responds to these concerns by arguing that the role of women in this race for the survival of the fittest is to increase their beauty. The book became an essential resource for American women to maintain their physical connection to an imagined Anglo-European civilization.
How to Become Beautiful’s cover shows three women in modest dress emerging, Venus-like from an open clam shell. Framed by heavenly light, their hair and complexion are perfect. They present themselves as idealized objects fit only for a pedestal. Like the images, the text also references classical Greek and Roman statuary as examples of what beautiful gendered bodies used to look like before the oppressive advance of civilization: “Consequently, when we behold the statues of Apollo Belvedere and the Venus of the Vatican, both made from living models centuries ago, we can comprehend our great decline in physical beauty.” This culture of beauty drew on well-circulated images in the natural sciences. The Apollo Belvedere statue was an often-invoked standard of whiteness and beauty in the mid-to-late 19th century. Most famously, it appeared in Josiah Nott and George Gliddon’s discredited 1854 book of racial pseudoscience, Types of Mankind, to represent whiteness as the pinnacle of human evolution. How to Become Beautiful’s use of the statue as an exemplar makes it clear that civilized “beauty” excludes women of color.
After casting beauty as the front line of a pitched battle for civilization, the book reassures the presumed female reader that beauty is easily attainable by aspiring to a strictly normative lifestyle. The book’s fundamental advice is: “Be temperate in all things.” To succeed, the reader must submit her body, emotions, and mind to a narrow range of thoughts, feelings, and experiences. She must moderate her habits by staying away from alcohol and tobacco, having regular, plain meals, and following regular bedtimes. She should keep all of the rooms of her home the same temperature and avoid cities. The book connects a mental regime to a physical one by commanding the reader “do not get excited at anything,” since this may “leave a wrinkle either in the mind or body,” which, it warns, “can never be eradicated.” Any excess leads to a mental or physical blemish, marring the body forever. To stay wrinkle-free, the reader must only “read cheerful books” because “fretting and looking on the dark side of things puts wrinkles on the face, exciting the brain unnecessarily” and lays “the foundation for disease.” It is of the utmost importance, above all, to “avoid all unnecessary excitement.”” - Robert Davis / Lady Science, “Welcome to Life as a Stepford Wife: The Politics of Self-Care in the 19th Century.” The New Inquiry, May 17, 2018.
Lady Science (NYC Sunrise) // Soul Capsule // Trelik // ‘99
