Academy of Sciences Opens to a Woman
In 1925, Florence R. Sabin became the first woman ever elected to the National Academy of Sciences. A male journalist for New York Times Magazine kept his 1925 profile article mostly free of misogyny… mostly.
Harold Walker began his article:
Susceptible as woman is to the appeal of romance – and adventure, too – it is not surprising that a woman who has just risen to eminence of a kind never before attained by any of her sex in America, should speak of the endeavor which led her there as a “romantic adventure.”
Despite that debatable opening, most of the rest article was actually fairly factual and stereotype-free: describing her pioneering research on blood and tissues, her status as the first woman president of the American Association of Anatomists, and her work in an area which “[plays] a major, absolutely vital part in the health of every member of the human race.”
Sabin died in 1953. Since 1959, she has been one of the two statues representing Colorado in the U.S. Capitol Building’s Statuary Hall.
The second such woman wouldn’t be elected to the National Academy of Sciences for another six years after this article’s publication, until 1931: Margaret Floy Washburn, the first U.S. woman to earn a psychology PhD.
Academy of Sciences Opens to a Woman: Dr. Florence Sabin Describes Her Successful Blood Investigations as Romantic Adventure
Published: Sunday, May 17, 1925