Here the central concern is Canadian women's collective and individual contribution to scientific inquiry and their response to technological innovation. In her own contribution to the collection, Ainley elaborates a temporal framework for understanding the impact of professionalization on women who aspired to a life of science. Despite the new educational opportunities opening to women after 1870, Ainley argues that the segmentation of the natural sciences into increasingly specialized, university-based disciplines at the end of the nineteenth century effectively excluded women from positions of power within the profession as a whole. Her argument is persuasive.

Harriet Brooks, Canada's first Woman Nuclear Physicist (1898)

But Ainley does not attempt to explain how gender constructs informed the process by which science was professionalize and institutionalized at the turn of the century; how certain forms of knowledge were defined as inherently masculine or feminine; or how scientific constructions of gender were evoked to legitimate the exclusion of women from positions of power within the profession.

Virtually all of the contributors to Despite the Odds assume that women's marginalization in science is, as Ainley notes in her brief introduction, "the result of complicated historical processes," but only a few of the essays in the anthology attempt to examine science and technology as gendered constructs (p.18). Historians Diana Pederson and Martha Phemister, for example, trace the relationship of gender and sex role stereotypes to the dissemination of photographic technology among Ontario women between 1839 and 1929.

Their conclusion, that "contemporary sex role stereotypes combined with the nature of the technology to limit women's active participation as photographers, and encouraged a more passive, "feminine" role as consumers of the products of photography, "suggests how women's cultural alienation from science and technology has been effected and perpetuated. Similarly, Pederson and Phemister's assertion that "the successful achievements of the few did not in any way challenge the widely-held view that women were technological incompetents" could serve as the collective thesis of the essays in this anthology (pp.88-89).

How the odds in favour of women's growing participation in science can be improved is the subject of the contemporary essays in part three. Among the issues discussed are how educators can help girls overcome many of the self-imposed and structural barriers to computer usage; how the widespread designation of science as "masculine" often alienates many of the brightest female; and how female has begun to inform both the subject of scientific research and the ways it is conducted. A warning of the potentially dire ramifications of the continued socialization of women and girls as scientific outsiders, and the consequences for society of the perpetual under-utilization of women's scientific abilities, is a fitting conclusion to a text that so compellingly demonstrates the significance of women's contribution to the development of science in Canada.

Being itself a pioneering effort in the history of Canadian women and science, Despite the Odds of necessity has a limited scope and purpose. Perhaps its most important contribution to Canadian scholarship in general is its reclamation of the experiences of yet another sorely neglected group of middle-class professional women. But, as Wendy Mitchinson's recent work on the Victorian medical profession's view of female sexuality suggests, how we regard the experience of women in science must be delimited by our understanding of how women and their social roles have been defined and validated by practitioners and disseminators of scientific inquiry.