Women and men, in western society, have (or at least are supposed to have) equal access to educational advancement. There’s nothing about a PhD degree inherently advantages one gender or the other. But there used to be. In Europe up until about the 1700s, women and girls were typically not welcome in most educational settings. But then on October 29, 1711, Laura Bassi was born in Bologna, which at the time was located in the “Papal States.”
Bassi’s family was prosperous; her father was a lawyer, and although at the time she wasn’t sent to school, she was privately tutored at home by her cousin Father Lorenzo Stegani. Stegani must have been as good a teacher as Bassi was a student; she learned to read Latin (which you had to know if you were going to read practically anything in those days), and also to speak and write that language. Speaking and writing Latin were skills in much shorter supply. She also learned math, philosophy, logic, and “natural philosophy,” which is what we call science.
While Father Stegani began her education when Bassi was about five, by the time she was a teenager her primary tutor became Gaetano Tacconi, a professor of medicine at the University of Bologna. He was also the family doctor for Bassi’s family. Bassi studied with Tacconi until she was 20, about when she got interested in Newtonian science. Tacconi was not well read in that area, but he had already introduced her to Prospero Lambertini, a prominent figure in the Catholic Church and the soon-to-be Archbishop of Bologna. Lambertini was so impressed by Bassi’s intellect that he arranged for a public debate between her (she was 20 at the time) and four professors from the University of Bologna. The subject was a manuscript of Bassi’s: forty-none theses on Philosophica Studia. It was more or less the equivalent of an oral defense of a dissertation.
Bassi acquitted herself quite well in the debate, and on May 12 of 1732 (less than a month after the debate took place) the University of Bologna awarded her a doctoral degree. She was the first woman to receive a doctorate in science, and only the second woman to earn any sort of doctorate (the first had been Elena Piscopia, more than fifty years before).
Bassi became quite well known in Bologna, and was known as the “Bolognese Minerva.” Minerva is the Roman goddess of wisdom. She set another mark by becoming the first woman elected to the Academy of Sciences in Bologna, also in 1732. She became a professor of natural philosophy in the University of Bologna, and for thirty-one years delivered one formal lecture per year. She reportedly wanted to do more teaching there, but the University still restricted the number of public lectures she was allowed to deliver. But they granted her request for funding to perform experiments at home, where she also delivered lectures outside the University’s reach. Among other things, she studied electricity and Newtonian physics — two areas not yet available for study at the University itself.
Bassi authored 28 scientific papers, although she was able to publish only four during her lifetime. In 1776, when she was 65, the prestigious position of Chair of Experimental Physics opened at the Bologna Institute of Sciences, and Bassi was appointed. She served in that capacity for the next two years, and hired her husband, who held a doctorate in anatomy, as her teaching assistant. She died in 1778 from an “attack in the chest,” which in retrospect was probably a heart attack.
There’s a marble statue of Bassi in the Bologna Institute, and there’s a crater on Venus named for her. The crater matches a high school and a city street in Bologna, also named for Laura Bassi. In 2019 the National Institute of Oceanography of Italy named a research ship the Laura Bassi, and since 2018 graduate students have been eligible for the Laura Bassi Scholarship. You can see a celebration of Bassi in the Google Doodle from April 17, 2021.
