Fox Keller Anomaly

In Evelyn Fox Keller’s article “The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics”, she describes her struggles as a physics graduate student at Harvard in 1957 (Fox Keller, 2001, p. 9). Throughout her story, she details her at-odds situation with the physics department, her male peers, her advisor, and the two other female graduate students in the physics department. She starts off by being rejected by Cal Tech and the wildly successful professor under which she wanted to study, followed by being persuaded by her would-be advisor to attend Harvard for her graduate studies (Fox Keller, p. 9). During her first year, Fox Keller was unable to take her preferred class, despite being told before she arrived that all of her academic hopes and dreams could be made

14). The anomaly part comes from the fact that she socially alienated her peers, and did not make an effort to fit in with the social norms of being a graduate student, including positively interacting with her department. So in a sense, Fox Keller herself was to blame for making herself an anomaly. By positioning herself as the outsider (and therefore anomaly) she was unable to fulfill the typical graduate student role of the intellectual social butterfly. Through her alienation, she found herself unable to motivate herself to continue with her physics graduate work, and eventually focused her studies on molecular biology, effectively removing herself from the male-dominated physics sphere (Fox Keller, p. 15). Prior to commencing her graduate studies, Fox Keller had idealistic goals for her academic future (Fox Keller, p. 9). When she did not reach those lofty goals, she failed to differentiate herself from her peers who did not achieve success themselves, despite being handicapped by her gender (Fox Keller, p. 16). Inevitably, she became the anomaly of her