Margaret Rossiter, the Marie Underhill Noll Emerita Professor of the History of Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, died on August 3. She was 81 years old.
A native of Melrose, Massachusetts, Dr. Rossiter earned her bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe College, a women’s liberal arts college that has since merged with Harvard University. After graduation, she worked for the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., before earning her first master’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She later received a second master’s degree and doctorate from Yale University.
Throughout her career, Dr. Rossiter centered her scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American science, with a particular focus on agriculture and women in science. During her graduate studies at Yale in the 1960s, Dr. Rossiter was told by professors that, up until then, there had been no women involved in scientific research. She challenged those claims and began her extensive, life-long research on historical women scientists and their contributions, finding numerous archives and records about women in STEM throughout the country. She went on to coin the term “the Matilda effect” to describe the bias against acknowledging the achievements of women scientists whose work is attributed to their male colleagues.
Dr. Rossiter joined Cornell in the mid-1980s as a visiting lecturer and was awarded a MacArthur “genius grant.” She ultimately joined the faculty full-time when Cornell created the department of science and technology studies and offered her an endowed professorship. Today, the department presents the Margaret W. Rossiter Women in Science award annually to a rising senior for an essay related to women in science.
The author of nine books, Dr. Rossiter published her last work, Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World Since 1972 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). She retired from Cornell in 2017.