Margaret Rossiter and her twin brother Charles were born into a military family at the end of the Second World War.
[2] She completed her PhD at Yale in 1971 with Frederic L. Holmes,[4] working on the topics of agricultural science and American scientists in Germany.
[2] Rossiter published The Emergence of Agricultural Science, Justus Liebig and the Americans 1840-1880, with Yale University Press in 1975.
Comments were made by several reviewers: The text is limited to mini-biographies of Eben Horsford, John Pitkin Norton, and Samuel William Johnson and is lacking study of economic impact and of regions beyond the states of New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, particularly of the South.
[3] During her fellowship at the Charles Warren Center, Rossiter began to focus on the history of women in American science.
She took a visiting professor position at UC Berkeley where she prepared her dissertation for publication, and then she turned her attention to a new book on women scientists.
[15] She published her first volume, Women Scientists in America, Struggles and Strategies to 1940, with Johns Hopkins University Press in 1982.
[16] After the publication of the first volume, Rossiter was asked to run the NSF's program on the History and Philosophy of Science while its director took a year of leave during 1982–1983.
Still unable to find a tenure-track position, she applied for the NSF's Visiting Professorships for Women program, and received a one-year appointment to Cornell, which she stretched to two years (1986–1988).
It was not until she received an offer of a tenured position with a substantial research budget from the University of Georgia that Cornell's administration decided to keep her, creating an endowed chair for her at the same time that a new Department of Science & Technology Studies was being created that included the History & Philosophy of Science & Technology program that hosted her appointment.
This second volume examines barriers to women's full participation as working scientists from World War II to 1972.
Thus, Carmen Magallón acknowledges that it was the work of Margaret Rossiter what inspired her to research the experience of the Spanish Women pioneers in the sciences.
The first she called hierarchical segregation, the well-known phenomenon that as one moves up the ladder of power and prestige fewer female faces are to be seen.