This absorbing book is timely. Published during many celebrations and reflections on the centenary of both the partial winning of female suffrage in Britain and the ending of a terrible global war, it has a unique approach in that it focuses on one significant, but usually ignored, aspect: the contribution of women in science (including mathematics and medicine) to the war effort and the impact this had, not only on the war but also on science and medicine generally and on the women themselves. Thoughtfully contextualized and illustrated by telling examples throughout, Patricia Fara's A Lab of One's Own provides a highly readable and compelling picture of a multifaceted, vital contribution by women that hardly appears in scientific, medical, or technological histories of the war.

An excellent opening chapter signals many of the strengths of Fara's account. A photograph of Newnham College, Cambridge's cricket eleven of 1908 allows her to comment on women flouting contemporary mores in that they are cricketers, dressed in a kind of “uniform” and at university. Furthermore, the captain is shown to be Ray Costelloe, a mathematics undergraduate who had the “unfeminine” ambition of wanting to be an electrical engineer. She later became Ray Strachey, the famous author of The Cause—the history of the nineteenth-century Women's Movement and the fight for the vote that took until 1928 to be fully achieved. Such details lead to brief but important comments on girls’ education at the time, their unequal position in higher education and in employment opportunities, class issues, suffrage struggles, and the impact of war.

Newnham's unusual archive—detailing about six hundred Newnham members’ activities in World War I, including doctors who worked on front line, chemists developing explosives and poison gases, biologists researching tropical diseases, and mathematicians in intelligence work, many doing extraordinary things in terrible conditions—alerted Fara to the fact that she did not know about these women. Yet she is a physics graduate herself and a reputed historian of both science and of women's place in it.

Fara explains how the long prewar struggles over education, employment, and social, economic, and political rights and especially the suffrage, all had to battle against widespread, long-held assumptions, underpinned by social, philosophical, and scientific theories of female inferiority and inability to think rationally. Fara demonstrates that, although women contributed in so many ways to the war effort, particularly in the dangerous munitions factories and in nursing, such prejudices continued—even if they became gradually somewhat muted—and were reinforced afterwards.

The main strength of the book lies in Fara's vivid picture of women in science in this period. Indeed, the extent of their involvement and achievements might be surprising to many readers. Women's disadvantages covered much more than access to higher education: even those who succeeded had to overcome many hurdles and prejudices to attain a career in science, and if they did, were often shunted into lesser positions, paid less, and excluded from common rooms and many professional scientific societies. Yet many persisted, and some even achieved highly, especially if mentored or tutored by sympathetic male scientists. From the relatively small number of female scientists came many from the growing number of universities, eager to help the war effort and, indeed, finding unprecedented scientific opportunities. Some filled the posts of absentee male scientists; others fitted into the growing range of scientific and technological research in universities and in naval, radio, and industrial developments. Fara gives many absorbing examples, many of them culled expertly from secondary literature, including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. She cites women scientists who took over museums, took up posts or research in chemical and metallurgical industries, academia, counterespionage, and electrical warfare, all supplying crucial work for their country, yet underpaid and treated unequally at the time and largely forgotten afterwards.

This was particularly true of the many females in medicine whose immediate offers of service were summarily dismissed by the British War Office until their sterling voluntary endeavors in Europe and on the Eastern front received such glowing reports that in 1915 the War Office willingly utilized their expertise and efficient organization in Britain. Among others, Fara includes the stories of women like the radiographer Helen Gleichen and the radiologist Florence Stoney; the surgeon Louisa Garrett Anderson and her companion, the physician Flora Murray, both formerly militant suffragettes; and of the Scottish hospital units inspired by Dr. Elsie Inglis, which, despite appalling conditions, under women such as the early psychiatrist Dr. Isabel Emslie Hutton, transformed medical care in Serbia and on the Eastern Front.

Women scientists also contributed in other ways. For example, Dr. Mona Geddes, a nutritionist, was put in charge of the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps in Britain in 1917, while Helen Gwynne-Vaughan, a university botanist and specialist in fungi, held the same role in France. These women endured mockery, long hours, low pay, and appalling living conditions but were disregarded once the war over and criticized for masculine ways.

Few women scientists enhanced their careers by their war work, however important it was. Meteorologist Margaret Fishenden and pioneering academic Marie Stopes, whose expertise was on plant fossils and mining, were among the rare exceptions. Others did take opportunities hitherto denied them, and undoubtedly women's war work did change some attitudes. Yet Fara's analysis of women's enduring struggles for scientific recognition and more equal treatment add a sobering dimension to this fascinating history. It was realizing the reality of entering science for women in the past and the lessons from this for understanding the present and improving the future that led Fara to write this excellent book. I urge all those interested in a fuller understanding of the past, of women's part in the war, and in science to read it.