| Summary: | The life and work of the German pedagogue, sociologist and gender researcher M. Vaerting (1884– 1977) are analysed, with special attention to Vaerting’s use of gendered pseudonyms in writings on sex and reproduction. As Mathilde, Mathias, Mathilde and Mathias, or just M., Vaerting experimented with different personas and rhetorical strategies for promoting women’s issues and she encountered what were later named the Matthew – and Matilda – effects on the attribution of credit in science. Her story also sheds light on the entry of women into academia, ideas about heredity and eugenics and biological arguments for women’s rights in late Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany.
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