Biographies

Ida Freund was the first woman to become a university chemistry lecturer in the UK, at a time when the subject was almost exclusively the domain of men. Born in Austria, she was educated at the Vienna State Training College for Teachers. In 1882 she enrolled at Girton College, Cambridge, to read natural sciences. On graduating she was initially appointed lecturer in chemistry at the Cambridge Training College for Women, but having been in post for only a year, she joined the staff of Newnham College as a demonstrator (junior teacher) in chemistry (1887). Three years later she was appointed to a full lectureship, and here she remained until her retirement in 1913. At the end of the 19^th century, women were not admitted to the University Chemistry Laboratory until they had passed Part 1 of the Tripos. At Newnham, Miss Freund took responsibility for preparing her students for this hurdle. Her teaching duties appear to have given her little time for research and she published only one academic paper. What contemporary fame she had came from her 1904 textbook “The Study of Chemical Composition: an account of its method and historical development with illustrative quotations”. According to historian M. M. Mathieson Muir, this was “among the really great works of chemical literature”, but time moves on and the text itself now is mainly of interest to students of the history of chemical education.

 

Freund was clearly a person once encountered, always remembered. A former student recounts “In my day Miss Freund reigned supreme in the chemistry lab…She was a great character. Austrian by birth, she wrote excellent English, but never managed to speak it (fluently). She would break off a sentence and ask “Have I got you wiz me in zat?” Another reminisced, making reference to Miss Freund’s disability (she had a leg amputated in her youth as a result of a cycling accident): “Miss Freund was a terror to first year students, with her sharp rebukes for thoughtless mistakes. One grew to love her as time went on, though we laughed at her emphatic and odd use of English. Yet how brave she was, trundling her crippled body about in her invalid chair, smiling, urging, scolding us along to “zat goal which is ze Tripos”.

 

Ida Freund was an active feminist and supporter of women’s suffrage. She was a leading light among the women who fought for admission to the Chemical Society in the early 1900s. Sadly, Ida did not live to see success in her lifetime, and women were admitted to membership of the Society only in 1920, some six years after her death. As a legacy to her influence, friends and former students set up the Ida Freund Memorial Fund “to raise the standards of women teachers of the physical sciences by giving them opportunities for further study”, and as a reward for excellence in science, Newnham still regularly awards a prize in her name.