Creating Complicated Lives

Download or read book Creating Complicated Lives written by Marelene Rayner-Canham and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2012-12-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why have Canadian women scientists been written out of the historical record? Who were they? What did they accomplish? What were their life paths? These are some of the questions answered in this authoritative work. Over decades of research, Marianne Ainley identified, tracked down, and interviewed surviving scientists. Creating Complicated Lives weaves the lives and work of these pioneers with the author's own experiences as an immigrant scientific technician and later a feminist historian. Ainley argues that we must look at the lives of women scientists through a new historical lens that takes into account both the advances of science and concurrent debates about the advancement of women. Rather than having linear career trajectories, many women shifted fields, coped with discrimination, and endeavoured to find niches in which they could make significant contributions. Never before has there been a survey of the lives and work of early Canadian women scientists. This nuanced study brings their stories to light, comparing, contrasting, and interpreting their very complicated lives.