When Dehn Gilmore, professor of English at Caltech, was investigating ideas for her next book, she had to look no further than her own family tree. As the great-great-granddaughter of German-born British scientist Sir Arthur Schuster—a Victorian-era physicist who coined the term "antimatter," popularized the X-ray in England, and built one of the largest physics labs in the world, among other achievements—she wanted to know more about the scientist in her lineage and his similarly successful siblings.
Her forthcoming book, which will publish in 2027, offers a panoramic account of Britain's cultural and intellectual history from 1870 through 1918 as told through the lives of four Schuster siblings who were a scientist, banker, lawyer, and social reformer. But along the way, Gilmore also gathered stories about Arthur's wife: her great-great-grandmother, Caroline "Cary" Schuster (1867–1962).
"I ended up with way more material on Cary than I could get into the book, and it was all incredible because her life was incredible," says Gilmore, who is also the executive officer for the humanities. Now, Gilmore has been able to highlight the life of Cary Schuster at length in an essay written for a special summer issue of the journal Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.
The special issue highlights how women longed to be part of scientific work in the 19th century and how the constraints on their participation got more significant and institutionalized toward the beginning of the 20th century. As author Anna Henchman writes in the issue's introduction, the essays featured "push back against that story of scientific gatekeeping by shifting the focus to women who valued collaboration over competition during the same period. They illuminate the acts of networking, mentoring, citation, and advocacy that envisioned science as a site of interaction and connection."
While not a scientist herself, Schuster did build a network of curious minds, helping her husband, who was a professor at the University of Manchester, establish their home and community as hubs of inquiry.
"Cary really was a key figure in constituting this literary and cultural scientific salon in Manchester," Gilmore says. "A lot of famous scientists and explorers passed through, and they all just came over for tea and dinner or house parties. As Arthur got more famous, they started to also play host to figures with broader cultural range."
Thanks to a great uncle with a passion for genealogy and passing down family stories, Gilmore learned of a guest book that all visitors to the Schuster home had to sign. The book was believed to be housed in the physics department at Manchester, so Gilmore traveled to the university to find it but came up empty-handed. Then, a fortuitous call with a retired physics professor revealed that it had been rescued from a flood in the department; with his help, she located the book in a school closet.
"From this guest book, I was able to reconstruct this whole circle of luminaries who had come through Manchester," Gilmore says. Visitors to the Schuster home included polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott, chemist Sir Henry Roscoe, science fiction writer H.G. Wells, and astrophysicist and Caltech founder George Ellery Hale, among many other well-known scientists, writers, politicians, and actors.
While Cary and Arthur built an extensive network of scientific and socially progressive friends and acquaintances, Gilmore notes that it was important to Cary that she not just be a hostess.
"I think she was eager to have her own life as a reformer and a knowledge producer," Gilmore says. "She gave scientists advice on various occasions, and she also was a really big activist for suffrage and for women to have a professional life. She was really kind of out there and considered herself to be a co-equal."
Among her many pursuits aimed at driving both scientific advances and social reform, Cary mentored young female scholars, one of whom was paleobotanist Marie Stopes, the first female faculty member at the University of Manchester. Although Stopes was known to be a proponent of eugenics, she was also a staunch advocate of reproductive rights for women—a viewpoint shared by Cary—and opened the first birth control clinic in the UK in 1921.
"In Marie Stopes's papers in the British Library, there were some letters back and forth between Cary and Stopes about birth control and Cary's own sex life," Gilmore says. "That was a wild thing to find in the middle of the British Library reading room."
The salacious letters weren't the first that Gilmore had read as part of her investigation of Cary's life, though.
"Cary has survived in the historical record to the extent she has because Chaim Weizmann, who was the first president of Israel and also a professor at Manchester for a time, seems to have fallen in love with her," Gilmore notes. "There's some incredibly racy letters that he wrote to her, and she rebuffed him."
But Gilmore hopes that Cary will be remembered as much more than just a scientist's wife or the focus of a politician's unrequited love. After a trip to India with Arthur, Cary gave a presentation on the geology of the regions they had visited, and the lecture was later published in the Journal of the Manchester Geographical Society. She also supported higher education for her daughter, who became the first female doctor at Manchester's Royal Infirmary; advocated for better treatment of governesses (private educators who lived with families to teach their children); and so much over her 95 years of life.
"Cary's story helps us see how intimately connected science and social reform were for lots of people at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century," Gilmore says. "There was a really strong sense of social mission that a lot of scientists carried, in the sense that science should be improving society. You were not just trying to discover things but also to make them better through discovery, which, in our particular moment, feels like a really important project."
Gilmore's essay, found in issue 22.1 of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, is called "Caroline Schuster: Recovering the Life of a Scientific Salonniere."
Dehn Gilmore
