The amateur versus professional distinction in science arguably became more acute in the decades up to 1900 and during the first years of the twentieth century. This was a time when the production of science moved to a mainly institutional setting, and when specialisation and fragmentation led to the creation of new scientific societies for whom the ‘professionalism’ of their membership or fellowship was often a signifier of status. Gender added another dimension to the amateur/professional dichotomy and to the meanings ascribed to knowledge produced in the domestic space.

Physicist and electrical engineer Hertha Ayrton (d. 1923) and botanist and film-maker Henderina Scott (d. 1929) both pursued their scientific research in a domestic setting. Ayrton won a Royal Society medal for her research and was the first woman to be nominated for a Royal Society Fellowship in 1902. Scott, who pioneered slow-motion films of plant growth, became one of the first ‘Lady-Fellows’ of the Linnaean Society in 1905. Both women can be understood as working at the periphery of the Royal Society and their science, to some extent, was accepted and valued by London’s masculine scientific élite. Despite this, contemporary understandings of their work were coloured by the domestic space of its production and the sex of its producer.

This paper will explore the ways in which gendered assumptions about the domestic influenced meanings ascribed to the scientific work of Ayrton and Scott. These meanings connected to issues of trust, credibility and status; they also impacted on the kind of research that these women were able to engage in. The tension created by Ayrton and Scott’s domestic spaces of experimentation is clear in contemporary representations of them and their work; it is also evident the acceptance (or otherwise) of their home-made science by London’s man-made scientific institutions.