Building a Place to Learn: Spectroscopist Gladys Amelia Anslow’s Five Decades at Smith College

In the middle of the Twentieth Century, if you wanted to know about the bleeding edge of modern chemical spectroscopy, Gladys Anslow would have been at the top of your list of people to contact. She was a scientific dynamo, not only grasping the latest advances in technology to carve out major scientific results on a budget the fraction of that professors at larger colleges had at their disposal, but was a wizard at scientific administration, building up her own department while encouraging ties between disciplines that allowed new types of collaborations. 

Anslow’s five decades at Smith were a wonder of scientific research and mentoring, and yet when we speak of her, if we speak of her, it tends to be for two reasons: (1) that she was the first woman to use the cyclotron at Berkeley, which is true, but is not particularly representative of her career, and (2) that she was the friend of Dorothy Wrinch for two decades, and allowed herself to get tied up in Wrinch’s increasingly problematic personal war to prove the validity of the cyclol model of proteins. That is also true, and also not really representative of her life’s work - Wrinch had a brilliant model, Anslow helped her probe it a bit in the early 1950s, it famously didn’t pan out though Wrinch would continue to defend it beyond all reason for years to come (you can read the whole story here), and that’s pretty much the story. 

This happens a good deal in the history of women in science - historians rush to talk about tangential firsts and dramatic events, because those are easy to explain to publishers, while the real broad and deep scope of their life’s work gets left behind as too complicated and gradual to write about. But that’s why we’re here, so without further delay, let’s talk about one of the greatest experimental physicists of her age, Gladys Anslow (1892-1969). She was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1892, the last child of her father’s second wife, Sarah Cooley. Cooley was an accomplished musician, and passed that gift onto her daughter, who all through her childhood and high school years had assumed that music was going to be a major part of her future career. 

In 1909, she began attending Smith College, an institution which had opened its doors in 1875 and was, by 1909, a bustling center of women’s higher education. Here she fell under the spell of physics thanks to classes she took from Frank Waterman and Sue Avis Blake (1875-1955, a physics professor who trained at Bryn Mawr and would go on to teach at Vassar). She received her degree in 1914 (she had to take a year off after the death of her mother in 1911), and was immediately absorbed into the Smith faculty, serving first as demonstrator then as assistant in physics, during which time she came into the orbit of Janet T. Howell (1889-1969), whom we know today primarily as a leading physiologist of the 1920s and 30s who researched at Johns Hopkins and Bryn Mawr, but who in the 1910s was using her physics degree to do spectroscopic research at the Mt. Wilson Observatory. 

The idea of spectroscopy is a simple but incredibly powerful one - light passing through a substance will interact with the matter it passes through, with some wavelengths getting absorbed while others are allowed to move on. What gets absorbed and what gets ignored tells us important things about not only what atoms are in that substance, but about the structure of the molecules they are a part of (for more on how that works, check out our feature on spectroscopy legend Emma Carr). At the time, these measurements required deep knowledge in multiple fields, not just chemistry and molecular physics, but optics and engineering as well, and Anslow became an expert in this demanding field, receiving her Master’s degree in 1917 and splitting her time between her work at Smith and her doctoral research at Yale until she was awarded her PhD in 1924, followed closely by a promotion to associate professor at Smith, where she would remain until her retirement in 1960. 

In the early 1930s, she collaborated with the incredible Mary Louise Foster (1865-1960) who was employed as a chemistry professor at Smith, and her other job, while she was also giving time to developing rigorous scientific education programs for girls in Spain, before heading to Chile to pick up her other other job as a lab director at Santiago College. Together, Anslow and Foster published a series of papers from 1930 to 1933 studying the absorption of UV light by amino acids, yielding important data (crystallography techniques had only begun cracking organic compounds in 1923, and while those techniques were being refined, spectroscopic studies like these, though tedious in execution, were one of the best tools we had for investigating fine molecular structure).

Foster retired in 1933, and that gave Anslow the chance to sneak back into the realm of high energy physics, an area she had explored while at Yale, but did not have much opportunity to indulge in while at Smith. As it happened, her old classmate from her time at Yale, Ernest Lawrence (who had received his PhD there two years after she completed her own), had constructed an eight million volt cyclotron at UC Berkeley, and was wondering if she would like to come and do research with it for a while. She accepted, making her way to California in 1938, where the group approach to science necessitated by such large scale equipment impressed her, and when she returned to Smith, larger scale collaboration of scientists and departments would be something she repeatedly pressed.

At Smith, she had an eight foot tall Van de Graaff generator installed to further her studies of high-energy physics, the first ever built at a women’s college, but the arrival of World War II meant that her services would soon be required for the war effort, and in 1944 she was tapped to serve as the director of the Office of Scientific and Research Development’s communication and information section, responsible for moving critical information back and forth between scientists and the people who were using their inventions in the field for the war effort. She was awarded the President’s Certificate of Merit for this work in 1948, but the way funding had been doled out for scientific research during the war had put a major dent in her plans for Smith. Large scale scientific efforts like the Manhattan Project had meant huge infusions of cash going to select institutions, which were able to crank up the size of their research efforts to unheard of levels, and high energy physics was one of the most generously funded of these fields. Returning to Smith in 1945, looking at her Van de Graaff generator which had seemed so significant in 1939, she had to admit that her school would never be able to compete in this field with the mammoth programs that the war had born, and decided to shift scope back to her earlier studies, working smarter not bigger.

She leapt onto a new piece of technology, the Perkin-Elmer Model 12 spectrometer, securing one for Smith in 1948 and building her research program around its unique modular flexibility that allowed her to tailor its components to her particular research needs, including the development of a two-beam system that the company would adopt for the 1950 model (in one-beam spectroscopy, you shine a light through a solution of the substance you want to study, in a two beam system, one light goes through a container of the pure solvent, and another through the solution, providing immediate data on what absorptions are from the molecule in question, and which are from the material those molecules happen to be in).  These were years of intense UV absorption research and also of her persistent attempts to expand the facilities available to chemistry and physics students at Smith, resulting in the eventual construction of a sprawling center to house all of the sciences and promote their intercommunication. These were also the years when she worked with Dorothy Wrinch, whom she had met in 1943, to investigate the viability of her doomed cyclol theory of protein structure, publishing a paper on the subject in 1953. These sorts of studies are all part of an experimental physicist’s work. Sometimes your chums in theoretical physics or molecular mathematical modeling bring you something, and it’s up to you to test it, and more often than not, nothing comes of it, but you have to keep on trying. 

In her fifteen years of post-war work at Smith, she constructed one of the nation’s premiere centers of spectroscopic research, and pushed Smith science into the age of large grant research projects through her own mix of administrative savvy, scientific insight, and inexhaustible energy, and if we have room enough in our hearts to lionize the great women crystallographers of this era, surely we have room enough to admire the great spectroscopists as well. Anslow retired in 1960 from the institution she had been serving in one form or another since 1909, and passed away from cancer some nine years later, on March 31, 1969, but not before living to see the construction of her great hope for Smith, the Clarke Science Center, which opened its doors in 1967 and which, with some technological renovations in 2005, continues to serve students to this day.