Women catalogued, preserved, and organised scientific collections that shaped public and expert understanding of the natural sciences, yet their contributions have been largely written out of history. This project addresses a gap in the history of science: the overlooked work of women who managed scientific collections—often within their own families—between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. These women did not just tidy shelves; they decided what to keep, how to organise it, and what to publish, exerting real influence over how science was remembered and understood. The Darwin archive alone contains extensive evidence of such work, yet the “Darwin industry” has paid little attention to the women who shaped it. If successful, this research will change how museums and archives present scientific heritage. It offers a new methodology for uncovering hidden contributions in collections across East Anglian museums, from the Jane Saul Collection at the University Museum of Zoology to the Henslow family papers at Ipswich Museum. The impact is primarily on how we understand scientific practice itself—who gets credit, whose labour counts, and how knowledge is preserved. This is fundamental historical research, not applied science, but it could reshape how institutions curate collections and acknowledge the full range of people who built them.
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There is a pressing need for the history of science to refocus on aspects of women’s historical scientific work that have hitherto been overlooked or disregarded, including their active management of scientific collections and scientific legacies both within and extending beyond their own families. These activities – preserving, organizing, cataloguing, pruning, and publishing from collections they were often involved in creating – required considerable skill and expertise. Moreover, they were consequential for both public and even specialist understanding of the sciences. This research project is designed to explore the role of such women in the shaping of the natural sciences and their legacies between the late nineteenth and mid twentieth centuries. The Darwin archive, mostly held at Cambridge University Library, contains extensive evidence of such work. However, despite the ‘Darwin industry’ (founded by Charles’s granddaughter Nora Barlow), little attention has been paid to the significant contributions of numerous Darwin family women in shaping its heritage. Similar collections are spread across East Anglian museums, both within and beyond Cambridge, including the Jane Saul Collection at the University Museum of Zoology and the Henslow family papers at the Ipswich Museum. Drawing on several of these collections, this project will build connections, offering a wide-ranging comparative study of women’s engagement with both objects and manuscripts. It will significantly extend our understanding of the nature of women’s work in science, and of scientific practices more generally, offering a substantially new methodology for unearthing the hidden role of women in scientific collections.
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