50 years ago

Women who have had a university education want to use their capacities to the full and to make a contribution to society. How can they combine this with marriage and motherhood? Mrs. Judith Hubback, herself a graduate mother, tried to find this out by sending out, in 1953, a questionnaire to 2,000 married women graduates ... It is found that the marriage rate for women graduates is almost up to the normal, that they tend to be more fertile than average, that it takes some fifteen years before the last child is at school, that circumstances during the period of raising children give little opportunity for systematic intellectual pursuits or for an outside career, but that part-time teaching is the career most easily combined with family life ... A whole chapter is devoted to overtiredness, due to diffuse, routine domestic work, which leads to frustration, and it is found that work outside the home, even part-time, results in a freshness of outlook and not in extra fatigue. In the discussion, the need is stressed for a sane compromise between the biological aspects of a woman's life, as a mother carrying on the race, and the intellectual side developed by a university education.

From Nature 15 February 1958.

100 years ago

Prof. Dunbar, as the result of a series of experiments conducted over a long period and with every care, has come to the conclusion that the bacteria are not an independent group of organisms, but, together with some of the yeasts and moulds, are stages in the life-history of green algae ... A pure culture of a single-celled alga belonging to the Palmellacia was obtained, but by modifying the culture medium by the addition of acid, alkali, or traces of copper salts, other organisms, generally bacteria, occasionally moulds and yeasts, and even spirochaetes, made their appearance in the pure cultures.

From Nature 13 February 1908.