Margaret W. Rossiter

Margaret W. Rossiter (born July 1944) is an American historian of science, and Marie Underhill Noll Professor of the History of Science, at Cornell University. Rossiter coined the term Matilda effect for the systematic repression and denial of the contribution of women scientists in research, whose work is often attributed to their male colleagues.

Margaret Rossiter and her twin brother Charles were born into a military family at the end of the Second World War. The family eventually settled in Massachusetts near Boston, first in Malden and then Melrose. Rossiter first discovered the history of science as a high school student, when she says she was more interested in the stories of the scientists than the actual experiments because "in lab sections we could rarely get the actual experiments to come out 'right.'" Eventually Rossiter became a National Merit Scholar and in 1962 went to Radcliffe to study Mathematics. Instead, she switched majors to chemistry and then history of science, ultimately graduating in 1966. While studying at Radcliffe she developed an interest in the history of American science, a field that was just beginning to be explored.

After graduating from Radcliffe, Rossiter spent the summer working for the Smithsonian before going on to do a master's degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. After earning her M.A. she moved on to the history of science department at Yale where she continued her interest in American scientific history and earned a second M.Phil. She completed her PhD at Yale in 1971, working on the topics of agricultural science and American scientists in Germany. Upon graduation she received a fellowship at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard.

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