Visions of the Academic Workspace

This paper uses the scientific career of Ruth Hubbard (1924–2016) to examine the gendered dimensions of space in the Harvard Biological Laboratories. Trained as a biologist and biochemist, in 1973 Hubbard was the first woman to be granted tenure in the department of biology after almost three decades of conducting research in her husband George Wald's (1906–1997) laboratory. Hubbard's change in academic status had both material and intellectual consequences. She gained ownership over her own space in the Biological Laboratories building and shifted her research from the molecular process of vision to reinterpreting her scientific career and its spatial dimensions through the lens of feminist-informed history and sociology of science. Drawing on scholarship from the spatial turn in the history of science, the history of women and gender in science, and feminist science studies, I argue that Hubbard's career reflects a distinctive form of situated spatial knowledges. Situated within the biological laboratory, her pre-tenure scientific partnership with Wald produced knowledge representative of the “molecularization” of biomedicine during World War II and the postwar period; but situated within feminist epistemology and a growing extralaboratory network of feminists, activists, and women's studies scholars, her post-tenure scholarship, a form of interdisciplinary knowledge production, addressed the gendered social and economic structures of scientific practice. Tracking Hubbard's spatial history in the Biological Laboratories illuminates both patterns common to women in science during the 20th century and the distinctive way that the design and arrangement of space structured Hubbard's scientific and personal life.