a she-philospher.com Library publication
	Library Catalog No. DTB1985 (reissued 20 August 2012)
	Women as Audience and Author of Scientific Discourse: A Study of Early English Popularization Literature. Typescript (89 pp.), copyright © Winter Quarter 1985. (Item 1 of 3: Main Body of Paper)
	by Deborah Bazeley
	e-Copyright © 2004–2015 < http://she-philosopher.com/library.html > see also Part 1: Editor’s Introduction for Library Cat. No. DTB1985

Women as Audience and Author
of Scientific Discourse:
A Study of Early English Popularization Literature

(Philosophy, I say, and call it, He,
For whatsoe’re the Painters Fancy be,
     It a Male Virtue seems to me)
Natures great Works no distance can obscure,
No smallness her near Objects can secure.
     Y’ have taught the curious Sight to press
     Into the privatest recess
Of her imperceptible Littleness.

These lines (5–7 and 141–145), replete with sexual innuendo, were penned by Abraham Cowley in 1667 as part of a poetic panegyrick addressed “To the Royal Society.” The poem, commissioned by Thomas Sprat for inclusion within the introductory commentary prefixed to his famous apologia, History of the Royal Society, was widely circulated and well received. Certainly, no one thought to question Cowley’s literary exploitation of a sexual tension between an active, probing, masculine “Philosophy,” and a passive, coy and secretive, feminine “Nature.” Such gender-conscious associations were a daily commonplace within late-seventeenth-century scientific discourse.

What was not commonplace in the world of Restoration science was the presence of a woman at a meeting of the Royal Society on 30 May 1667 — the same year of publication of Cowley’s celebratory lyrics. On this date, Margaret Cavendish, “Mad Madge” (and Duchess) of Newcastle, became a historical footnote within the official minutes of Cowley’s cherished Royal Society when she confronted the membership of that all-male bastion in a brief, but flamboyant and highly controversial, visit. Bolstered by a retinue of servants and a profusive display of wealth and rank, Cavendish endured the probing, judgmental stares of academy members to witness firsthand the achievements of the Society and to have her presence as a “natural philosopher” publicly acknowledged within the scientific world. It was to be the only public intrusion of the Society by a woman for almost 300 years: it was 1945 before the first woman was elected to membership in the Royal Society, with her election then opposed by ten percent of the institution’s voting body (Stimson 238).

Despite the exclusion of women from Royal Society membership, correspondence, and meetings, the female amateur scientist was a flourishing sociological phenomenon by mid-eighteenth-century England. She makes her first recorded social debut at the close of the seventeenth century with the appearance of a new literary type, known alternately as the “she-philosopher,” “philosophress,” or “philosophical lady.” This new subcategory of learned lady struts frequently across the Restoration stage, the object of satiric comment and lewd innuendo, and is caricatured repeatedly in popular literature — emblems, periodicals, essays, dialogues, poetry, polemical tracts. Her literary image yields, on the one hand, a portrait of the usurper virago, pretentious to excess in her learning, language, and lifestyle, a woman dangerously out-of-bounds, and thus disruptive of domestic order. Later popularization literature with a specific scientific content yields a radically different vision: the portrait of a learned domestic(ated) companion for man, a woman of controlled imagination, with a new-found religious reverence for the natural and social order.

The real woman behind this Janus-faced image, and the nature of her relationship to the “new science,”<1> has yet to be “reconstructed” with any sort of historical accuracy. All too often, scholars have been content to identify the image as the woman, accepting without question the distorting perspective, fantasies, and fears embedded in contemporary literary accounts of women. Feminist historians, in quest of a truer picture of women’s lives, have now begun to situate the literary image within its historical context and to probe the conditions which nurtured its growth: “We ask not only what the image of woman was and whether it corresponded to reality, but who created it and what function it served in a larger social setting,” write Bridenthal and Koonz (3).

To the extent that the “she-philosopher” is a literary/linguistic construct, we must critically examine its sudden emergence in the literature of Restoration England and any associated influence in the realm of social values and social relations. Inherent within the very nominal itself is the notion that “philosophy” (in the sense of “natural philosophy” — the scientific study of nature) is the proper province of man. The “she-” prefix (indicting the woman “philosopher” as an aberration of the norm) yields a neat codification, both in language and in thought, of Cowley’s poetic conceit. Such sex-linked associations, still prevalent today, obscure the very real and comprehensive nature of women’s contributions in science and technology. Thus, in 1764, Voltaire, despite his intimate knowledge of the scientific and technological achievements of the brilliant Émilie du Châtelet, could authoritatively state in his role as encyclopedist for the “new science” that “There have been very learned women as there have been women lawyers, but there have never been women inventors” (entry for “Women” in his Philosophical Dictionary; quoted in Stanley 5). The still-surviving seventeenth-century definition of science as an intrinsically male endeavor is in reality an egregious distortion of historical fact. As such, before we can reconstruct the relationship of women to science during the important period 1650–1750, we must first “unthink” (Bush 152) the images contained in the label of “she-philosopher” which dissociate women from modern scientific praxis, and “rethink” those images within the historical context of changing conditions in science and society. As Carolyn Lougée notes, “the roots of sex role ascription lie in visions of social organization and social utility, rather than in abstract notions of sexual nature” (4).

Anne Fausto-Sterling and other feminist theorists currently probing the relationship between women and science have argued cogently that “the definitions of [Western] science grow from patriarchal as well as class relationships” (43). As explained by Elizabeth Fee:

Fee’s summary description is intended to explain an important aspect of scientific practice in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the role of “modern” science in constructing definitions of gender and place in the social hierarchy is evident as early as the thirteenth century (Lemay), and even earlier in the scientific theories of the venerable “ancients,” Aristotle and Plato (Dickason, Lange, Whitbeck). During the seventeenth century in particular, with the widespread and systematic dissemination of contemporary scientific theories and the advent of a popularization literature addressed specifically to a female audience, the controlling elements of patriarchal ideology incorporated within scientific practice permeated the social fabric to an unprecedented degree.

Critical to any understanding of woman’s changing relationship to science during the era of the “scientific revolution” is the role of popularization literature in the definition and development of the English “she-philosopher” of the early 1700s. Starting with the almanacs of the mid-1600s where sales averaging 400,000 copies annually indicate that roughly one family in three purchased an almanac each year, the publication statistics for popular literature with an explicit scientific content are impressive.<2> Every one of the scientific popularization texts addressed to a female audience and issued before mid-eighteenth century passed through multiple editions. From three editions of the first such popularization text, Margaret Cavendish’s 1666 The Description of a New World, to an estimated 100 editions (including German, Dutch, Italian, Greek, and English translations) of Fontenelle’s 1688 Entretiens sur la Pluralité des Mondes, the profitability of such literature was guaranteed. Even the “non-literary” scientific primers written for women during the early years of the eighteenth century by Charles Leadbetter and Jasper Charlton were reprinted more than once. In addition, science dictionaries and encyclopedias, as well as the published texts of popular scientific lecturers, addressed in almost all cases to members of both sexes, were frequently reissued. Furthermore, journals that catered to the interests of the “she-philosopher” such as the Athenian Mercury (1690–1697), the Free Thinker (1718–1721), The Female Spectator (1744–1746), and the Ladies Diary (1704–1840) were consistently among the bestselling periodicals in what rapidly became an intensely competitive market. Most were reissued as bound volumes after their demise, and reprinted several times.<3>

It is tempting to hypothesize from such statistics that large numbers of women absorbed their scientific information by way of reading, but such speculation must be tempered by the literacy figures for women during this period.<4> Even so, it is possible to speculate that the influence of this large body of popularization literature, supplemented as it was by the mass consumption of scientific apparatus and the marked attendance of women at the lecture sessions of the popularizers, was indeed of some consequence. During the early decades of the eighteenth century, the “business of experimental philosophy” (Newton’s phrase, as quoted in Thackray 155) was a flourishing enterprise. It was no accident that many popularizers were at the same time Royal Society members, instrument-makers, authors, tutors, and lecturers who appropriated all aspects of the verbal medium, including the pulpit, from which to peddle their wares. Entrepreneurs such as Benjamin Martin and James Ferguson were manufacturers and retailers of scientific paraphernalia first, and authors to the “Fair Sex” second. Typically, popularization texts referenced other texts by the same author and contained advertisements for his instruments, which in turn required his services at a series of lectures explaining their use, which in turn yielded a printed lecture text and oftentimes private tutelage by the author-lecturer, whose lessons would then require the purchase of his latest texts, and so on. Every aspect of the popularization effort was thus interrelated and communicated the same message.

Gerald Meyer, the sole scholar to date of this particular body of literature, contends that, taken as a whole, the popularization texts addressed specifically to a female audience document the “rise” and intellectual progress of the “she-philosopher” from an “eager but scientifically naive” dilettante to a “seasoned scientific amateur.” To prove his point, he structures his own text chronologically, beginning in the 1650s with discussion of Margaret Cavendish (a “charming” but “untutored” and essentially ignorant novice) and ending in the 1760s with discussion of Margaret Bryant (well-informed, highly-skilled professional expositor/teacher). Not surprisingly, he also notes a change (characterized as increasing sophistication) in the type of scientific information conveyed within various written and oral texts composed for, by, or about women during this hundred-year period. Over the span of years, he argues, such texts come gradually to substitute mathematical formulae for romantic trappings, and to develop a “non-literary,” rather than “literary,” prose and structure. Undoubtedly, Meyer has isolated an important trend within this body of popularization literature; however, it is possible to generate a different set of assumptions from the same material, and arrive at a rather different explanation. Rather than a “mildly mad” (2), “precursor of the scientific lady” (104), Margaret Cavendish could be situated within a historical context of equally enthusiastic and naive male virtuosi, and viewed as brilliantly attempting to articulate a feminist science<5> in an age of still changing, competing alternatives; Margaret Bryant could be viewed as the passive inheritor of a popularization tradition defined and dominated by men, culminating in the professional exposition of the male perspective by a woman; and “increased sophistication” could be reinterpreted as the final triumph of an immutable “Philosophica Britannica,” hostile to feminism and to women in general.<6>

I.

While some scholars are beginning to focus attention on the importance of Cartesian/Lockean rationalism as an impetus to the development of a seventeenth-century “feminist” sensibility (e.g., Joan Kinnaird, Carolyn Lougée, Katharine Rogers, Michael Seidel, Hilda Smith), the “she-philosopher” herself has received scant attention. The tendency in criticism dealing with this period (e.g., Meyer 104; Smith 60–61, 63, 74; Kinnaird 60) is to dismiss the “philosophical lady” as a dilettante enthusiast, whose amateur experimental dabblings with fleas and other collectibles bear no significance for serious inquiry and study in the history or philosophy of either science or feminism. There are a number of things wrong with this approach. As documented by Rousseau and Porter, “there is nothing incongruous about the conjunction of amateur with high-quality science” (4). Indeed, the eighteenth-century, in particular, “witnesses the ‘amateurization’ of science; natural history is the creation par excellence of amateurs” (4). Reading scientific journals and corresponding with the editors; studying the use of globes, quadrants, micrometers, microscopes, telescopes, and other scientific apparatus; engaging avidly in the collection of fossils, exotic creatures, and other rarities for observation, study, and decoration of the private space within the home; incorporating elements of scientific speculation in poetry, diaries, letters to friends, casual conversation — these are all valid and indispensable ways of exploring scientific ideas and contributing to the body of scientific knowledge. The role played by such activities, together with various “extrarational” or “extralogical” components of thought (e.g., intuition, subjectivity, irrationality, aesthetic preferences, philosophical prejudices), in making important discoveries is well evidenced throughout the history of science and technology (e.g., Fee, Ferguson, Hacker, Keller), despite what the rhetoric about science generally acknowledges.

To the extent that contemporary scientific practice permeates and controls the everyday lives of the mass public, women had, of course, throughout human history (and also human “prehistory”) been involved in scientific activity and study. Like their male counterparts, women were never “scientists” in the sense that we use that term today, but then neither had the practice of medicine, chemistry, pharmacology, or technology been separated from the sphere of everyday praxis to become the proper purview of the “professional” scientist. With the advent of the “new science” in the seventeenth century, the popular practice of science in England was gradually subsumed, and finally appropriated, by the “gentleman amateur” (and his compatriots in the rising commercial classes who aspired to such status), eventually becoming fully “professionalized” in the late nineteenth century. (Berman) The scope and extent of women’s scientific activities changed accordingly, as documented in the sudden appearance of the character of “she-philosopher” towards the end of the seventeenth century — in truth, a perfect metaphor for woman’s enforced alienation from the newly-evolving science. As such, the effects wrought by the “new science” on the lives of Englishwomen were pervasive.

Traditionally, women’s scientific activities complemented their social and domestic roles. Tradition has also mandated that these activities be denied inclusion under the categories “science” and “technology.” As Fausto-Sterling points out, there is great need for “the (re)discovery of women scientists” both within and outside the arena of traditional science (42). We need to learn more about the development of scientific knowledge within traditionally female spheres of expertise, and also to fully acknowledge those contributions made by women within the “mainstream” of science and technology (while recognizing at the same time the alternative methods and directions of advance which have been stifled or disallowed).<7> In accepting the underlying myth of the “she-philosopher,” it has been easy to disregard the fact that “european peasant women bound moldy bread over wounds centuries before Alexander Fleming ‘discovered’ that a Penicillium mold killed bacteria” (Stanley 12), or that “witches, who were among the early women healers, developed the use of herbal remedies such as ergot (to hasten labor), belladonna (to inhibit uterine contractions in the threat of miscarriage), and digitalis (for the treatment of heart ailments), all of which pharmacologists still use today” (Fausto-Sterling 43). Because the number of women writing either for publication or posterity has been so small, it is difficult to know with certainty the extent or breadth of women’s scientific practice. Specifically, for the period with which we are concerned, there are few writings attempted by women which are still extant; nonetheless, even within this limited group of publicly vocal and educated women, it is possible to discern a wide range of approaches and imaginative responses to the “new science” throughout the seventeenth century. We can only surmise from this that such variety and activity extended to an even broader spectrum of women whose manuscripts have been destroyed or their writing voices silenced by the joint forces of family, custom, and history.

The practice of agriculture, botany, chemistry, horticulture, animal husbandry, medicine, and pharmacology were, to varying degrees, normal responsibilities of the seventeenth-century housewife, depending upon class, and whether her household was situated in the city or country. From “the Lady at the Court, to the Cook-maid in the Country,” women of all classes were admonished to excel at a wide range of household accomplishments, ranging from needlework and various “Mechanick Arts” to gardening and surgery, from preserving and cookery to arithmetic and herbal lore.

The aristocratic lady was expected to minister charitably to her less fortunate neighbors, such ministrations usually encompassing medical care. Within the scope of this extended village household, the woman aristocrat served as physician, healer, apothecary, and surgeon. In this multi-faceted role, she gathered herbs, flowers, and other natural ingredients required to prepare prescriptions; she cultivated her own herb gardens and experimented with herbal cures; she employed the apparatus and procedures of the still-house to distill and chemically process medications; she tested, refined, and developed medical recipes; and she compiled encyclopedic “manualls” detailing “Receipts in Physick and Chyrurgery.” The dedication and achievements of some women in the medical field (e.g., Elizabeth Grey, Duchess of Kent, 1581–1651; and Anne Murray Halkett, 1622–1699) were so extensive as to win international acclaim.

At a lower social level, women also practiced medicine, within the home and local community, although more restricted in their financial outlays for equipment and experiment, and in the amount of leisure time available for study and practice. Elizabeth Ray,

In addition to the practice of “folk medicine,” usually associated with the “white witch” (although sometimes, with murderous consequences, coupled to witchcraft in general), the practice of midwifery afforded lower-class women with one of the few available opportunities to profit directly from their skills and labor. Despite the encroachment of the “man-midwife” in the slowly expanding and remunerative field of childbirth, the lowly-paid midwife was still the master of her craft. At the close of the seventeenth century, women continued to dominate the field of midwifery. Some midwives even turned to print in order to articulate exciting new directions for future expansion and professionalization of the field.<8>

During mid-century, women of all classes studied astrology, alchemy, Van Helmont, and Paracelsus, and participated in the embryonic scientific activities associated with the “new science.” Typical of the age was Virginia Ferrar, whose experiments with silkworms were eulogized by Samuel Hartlib in his 1652 text, A rare and new discovery of a speedy way, and easie means, found out by a young lady in England for the feeding of silk-worms .... Also sharing utilitarian appeal, the field of chemistry, with its obvious medical applications (e.g., iatrochemistry), held a particular attraction for women researchers who could afford to finance laboratories and participate in chemical studies. In an age when formalized education for women was virtually non-existent, it is significant that the most prestigious school for “gentlewomen” during the century emphasized rigorous scholarship in the “new science,” including multiple science courses within the curriculum of study for young ladies.<9> In addition, the mid-century resurgence of women astrologers ensured that lower-class women also received instruction in the more basic precepts of the “new science,” while at the same time popularizing various technologies which, it was assumed, would result (directly or indirectly) in the “improvement of nature.” Women also assumed an important, albeit unacknowledged, role in the formation and development of scientific societies and organizations, not only by providing an indispensable support network through patronage, but also by acting as audience, adviser, confidante, and colleague during lengthy experimental sessions and periods of intense philosophical debate and discussion.<10>

Small changes in the scientific activities of women begin to be perceptible in the final decades of the seventeenth century, however, as the “new science” begins to consolidate its sway over educated opinion, and changes in the economic fortunes of the laboring, merchant, and aristocrat classes combine to redefine woman’s social and domestic roles. The “new science,” with its abstruse technical vocabulary, voluminous discursive output, and complex logic (mathematical, experimental, theoretical), required a scholarly education supplemented by disciplined study and research. Few men could invest the energy and leisure needed, and of the many “gentleman amateurs” pursuing scientific activities at the turn of the century, the vast majority were mostly eclectic and erratic in their studies, any order and cohesiveness of purpose being provided mostly by the elaborate correspondence network inherited by Henry Oldenburg from Samuel Hartlib, and further codified by Oldenburg in 1665 with the publication of the Royal Society’s journal, Philosophical Transactions. Women of all classes, like lower-class males, enjoyed far less intellectual freedom and education than upper-class men, leaving them at a distinct disadvantage in any attempts to channel and control the “new science” when it finally intruded into their traditional spheres of activity. This loss of democratic control over the scientific endeavor — in the terminology of Lewis Mumford, the substitution of an “authoritarian” for a “democratic” technics — is well described by Christopher Hill:

The emergence of the science “specialist,” whose role was to mediate between material existence and a “true” interpretation of that existence, coupled with the separation of scientific activity from domestic life, resulted in the gradual exclusion of women from their traditionally creative, innovative, and participatory role in the social aspects of scientific practice. Despite a flood of scientific publications during the latter half of the seventeenth century, only one woman, Margaret Cavendish (1623–1673), dared to speculate publicly in print on the most relevant scientific issues of the day. The only other woman to write extensively and systematically on issues of scientific theory was Anne Finch (1631–1679), Viscountess of Conway.<11> Despite the proliferation of “she-philosophers” dating from about the 1690s on, there were, significantly, no further original contributions by Englishwomen in the field of scientific theory during the seventeenth century, and none at all during the first half of the eighteenth century.<12>

A letter from the correspondent “Philo-Naturae” to The Female Spectator in 1745 summarizes rather well women’s changing status in regard to the “new science.” With great enthusiasm, “Philo-Naturae” claims for every upper-class woman the potential of becoming a “fair Columbus,” an explorer and discoverer of new natural worlds:

In this passage, however, the act of scientific discovery has been feminized and specially suited to woman’s increasingly restricted social role. Most important, perhaps, it has been separated from any context of scientific theory or knowledge; the power of “speculation” (i.e., explanation, interpretation, synthesis) is reserved for exercise by Royal Society members only. “Fresh discoveries” are now defined by their absence from a book — the enclyclopedia of natural philosophy — rather than by their social use value for purposes of medicinal care or human nurture. And woman’s social practice is redefined as group study within the limited circle of “little troops” of ladies who vie with one another in “pretty emulation,” with all its overtones of jealousy and competitiveness, in their new creative role — searchers after the perpetually “novel” and different, discoverers of nature’s toys and baubles.

Since Alice Clark wrote her pioneering study on the changing economic status of seventeenth-century Englishwomen, other researchers, although frequently taking issue with Clark’s methods and inaccuracies, have not contested her concluding theory that a general loss of economic status marks the experience of both upper- and lower- class women within agriculture, the professions, and the skilled trades during the seventeenth century. This loss of economic status continues into the eighteenth century, observable particularly in

The enforced leisure of women as a marker of class and social status severely restricted their scientific practice. Mental and physical exertions were discouraged, and women’s studies and activities were largely circumscribed within the private sphere of home, family, and close friends. For aristocrat and upwardly-mobile bourgeois women, medical ministration to the poor and neighborhood needy was no longer a natural function of class. Ironically, women’s abilities to heal the sick and ailing were neglected in lieu of what Celia Fiennes described as “these Epidemick diseases of vapours, should I add Laziness?”<13> For the laboring-class woman of the early eighteenth century, it was primarily changing work patterns, coupled with poverty or meager financial resources, that contributed to her gradual exclusion from the socialized practice of science and medicine. As the laboring-class family gradually lost its traditional hold on the land and the cottage economy, women (and men) were pushed out of the traditional work situations which encouraged active participation in the newly-developing agricultural and technological sciences. Although the “new science” would not supplant traditional “folk medicine” within lower-class culture for some time, this was more probably a result of the inability to afford the services of “professional” doctors than an unquestioned faith in traditional medical practice. In those cases where lack of money did not preclude choice, wealthier families hired practicioners of the “new science” rather than the “old woman” used in earlier years. Nowhere is this situation more evident than in the rapid ascendancy of the male midwife during the eighteenth century, with an accompanying denigration of the traditional skills and experience of female practicioners. As the use of such tools as the forceps<14> became commonplace, and new information concerning the anatomy and functioning of the human body was revealed, women, who were denied the legal use of one, and excluded from any knowledge of the other, were refused opportunities for professional advancement and subordinated to their less-experienced, but more “expert” male counterparts.

This gradual loss of female control over all aspects of the scientific endeavour resulted in the need for a technique of popularization that would accommodate an alienated and exclusionary science to the everyday lives of women. Women, as well as men, had to accept the teachings of the “new science” even if they did not understand them: to use an analogue drawn from the contemporary context, “The modern factory worker knows nothing of the Quantum Theory or the Double Helix but he believes without question that scientists do and can explain the natural world” (Plumb 333). Women (and many men) at the beginning of the eighteenth century believed no such thing, and were particularly drawn to traditional, alternative explanations of the material world sanctioned by personal experience and practice. During the seventeenth century, women learned their science through apprenticeship and the act of doing, the accumulated experience of countless women before them being passed from generation to generation primarily by way of folklore and oral tradition. By mid-eighteenth century, women learned their science second-hand from popularization texts and from the few men circulating within their domestic sphere. Since knowledge of the natural world was no longer tied to everyday life or cultural tradition, it had to be newly grounded in a life experience that was slowly evolving along compatible lines.

“I would have men take women for companions, and educate them to be fit for it.” These were the words of Daniel Defoe, writing at the turn of the eighteenth century (Reynolds 313). Echoing his sentiments, Samuel Johnson later proclaimed mid-century: “a man of sense and education should meet a suitable companion in a wife. It was a miserable thing when the conversation could only be such as, whether the mutton should be broiled or roasted, and probably a dispute about that” (Rogers 32). Johnson was not the only one to find domestic bliss and order in a redefinition of the housewife as intellectual “companion” for her husband. The popularization literature teaching women about the “new science” was saturated with similar counsel. Scientific studies were to complement (rather than subsume) woman’s domestic role. For example, in 1719, the “Free-Thinker” advises one “Lavinia ” (unhappy in her yearnings for urban pleasures previously rejected in lieu of a life spent in solitude as a rural “philosophress”): “if Lavinia, to the precepts of Philosophy, would add an agreeable husband, who delights in the sedate pleasures of life, it would very much facilitate the cure” (quoted in Meyer 57). Thus, women’s newly-obtained knowledge of the world was to be contained within the domestic sphere, rather than pursued as a separate (or solitary) activity outside of the home. Quoting from another 1719 issue of Ambrose Philips’ The Free-Thinker, Meyer writes:

Thus did the scientific gentleman attempt to negotiate himself into a position of economic maneuverability regardless of resources, and to ensure for himself a marriage that would function according to the controlling principles of reason (not passion), which he daily admired in the mechanical workings of heaven and earth. It was the ultimate fantasy of the “new science”: “the change and improvement” of nature, a result of the “experimental activity of man,” extended into that uncontrollable frontier of emotional activity — sexual relations, women, and family. With less visionary fervor, and in a more pragmatic vein, Dr. George Hickes, author of the remarkably popular and influential text Instructions for the Education of a Daughter (published in 1721), recommended the study of arithmetic for women, again as a means of promoting domestic order: “She ought also to understand the Four first great Rules of Arithmetic; you may make good use of them, in teaching her thereby to keep your Accompts.... Now’t is sufficiently known how much Exactness of Accompts conduces to the good Order in Families” (quoted in Reynolds 292).

Given such a limited context of use, it is not surprising to find that the science education afforded to women in the popularization literature of the day was meager at best, teaching only the bare rudiments of Cartesian speculation and Newtonian mechanics. As early as 1703, Lady Mary Chudleigh was well aware of the modicum of learning available to women in the “new science”: “But ’t is not reasonable to expect that a Woman should be nicely skill’d in Physics: We are kept Strangers to all ingenious and useful Studies, and can have but a slight and superficial Knowledge of things” (quoted in Reynolds 147). Although the venerable Dr. George Hickes advised that women be properly instructed in arithmetic, he did not find natural philosophy “adapted to the Understanding of Women, or at least not to fall within the Bounds of what concerns their Duty” (quoted in Reynolds 293). In his Instructions to a Princess, he comments further:

The popularization literature which advocated such study disavowed any intention of producing true scholars in the “new science,” and properly “adapted” all information for its female audience. At mid-century, “Cleora” (correspondent to The Female Spectator) argued that women should study history, geography, some of the more agreeable parts of mathematics, and a natural philosophy revised for the ladies in the successful tradition of Fontenelle — “Enchanting Philosophy, its path strewed with Roses” (quoted in Reynolds 217). Another correspondent, Philo-Naturae, also recommends passionately that women pursue scientific studies, always, however, within certain parameters: “It is easy to see, that it is not my ambition to render my sex what is called deeply-learned”; women need cultivate only “a general understanding” of the “new science” (Reynolds 217). Even the “deeply-learned” Mary Wortley Montagu recommends in a 1753 letter to her daughter that her granddaughter, who appears to have a proven aptitude and ability in mathematics, regard her learning as a means “to pass away cheerfully a longer life than is allotted to mortals. I believe there are few heads capable of making Sir I. Newton’s calculations, but the result of them is not difficult to be understood by a moderate capacity” (Reynolds 206). The implication is always the same — women are to study the “results” of an individual fait accompli, focusing their learning on product rather than process, appropriating for use the final interpretation rather than the skills to produce and assess such interpretations.

Along with a smattering of knowledge in mathematics, astronomy, and physics, the “she-philosopher” avidly studying contemporary popularization literature also learned a new way of interacting with the material world on a daily basis. She learned to redefine her experiential base in home, work, and family as explained by, because operative within, a “vulgarized” Newtonian universe which neatly circumscribed woman’s changing place and status within the newly-defined natural world. Not only had she lost control over the “new science,” but in learning its dicta, she relinquished the critical powers of an alternative vision grounded historically in the domestic and social practice of generations of women. As recognized by various early feminists, the liberating potential of the “new science” was at first enormous; however, as presented in the popularization literature, such potential was harnessed and domesticated, redirected into channels of duty and subservience. In her brief summary of Cartesian methodology, Kinnaird identifies its obvious attractions for seventeenth-century women:

In its most radical form, Cartesian speculation led women such as Margaret Cavendish and Lady Mary Chudleigh to hypothesize new worlds where women shared the responsibilities of knowledge and socio-political control equally with men; and it led feminist theorists such as Poulain de la Barre and Mary Astell to formulate formidable arguments derisively attacking a passive acceptance of the status quo. A growing acknowledgement of woman as a “rational being” encouraged such intellectual explorations on a larger scale. But the popularizers did not advocate that women be educated in the precepts of “Reason” in order to upset the social order. Rather, the logic of scientific reason was to operate as a check on woman’s presumed emotional instability and intensely sexual nature (LeGates 32–33). It was to counteract her subjectivity, her imagination, her capacity for dissent. In 1684, Dr. George Hickes lectured from the pulpit concerning

The efforts expended by many popularizers (such as Robert Boyle and John Harris) to construct a “natural” theology were a direct response to the alternative visions of the dissenting religious sects and their many female members. With the imprint of the civil war years still fresh on their minds, the popularizers both acknowledged and feared any uncontrolled, emotional response to God and heavens. At the same time, a countercheck was also needed against women’s attraction to “judicial” astrology (the practice of prognostication) and traditional superstitious lore. The well-known predilection of astrologers for political prophecy was not regarded favorably by crown or government in England, both of which employed various laws and royal injunctions licensing the press throughout the course of the seventeenth century in an attempt to exercise control over what was clearly regarded as seditious activity. The immense popularity of astrological predictions, which possessed, like other forms of prophecy, an obvious subversive potential, was a constant worry for those in positions of power throughout the century (Capp 23–101). Thus, an issue of the Athenian Mercury was self-congratulatory in the results of its sustained battle against the lures of astrology, claiming that the Athenian Society had provided no more

Ambrose Phillips was equally explicit in his The Free Thinker: the periodical was devoted to an attempt at fortifying the female mind “against the idle fears and superstitions of the vulgar”; thus, a sufficient understanding of the “new science” would enable women to “behold the uncommon operations of Nature, unmoved by any other passion but admiration” (quoted in Meyer 66 and 70). The difficulty was in controlling woman’s reasoning such that, once set in motion, it didn’t complete a pendulum swing from superstition to atheism, with concomitant ramifications in the social world. Mary Wortley Montagu vividly captured this fear in verse:

The intricacies and nuances involved in the domestication and control of feminist rationalism are readily apparent in the early popularization literature of the “new science,” where, by mid-eighteenth century, a generic tradition has been established which subverts its own beginnings as exploratory dialogue between woman, nature, and the “new science.” Writing in 1713 in a September issue of The Guardian, Addison presents a half-serious-half-satiric portrait of the “new science” properly domesticated, with more than an intimation of the role played by the popularization literature in this process:

This is precisely what the popularization literature attempted to encourage — a habit of thought which, by analogy, linked the now alien and unfamiliar “new science” to every facet of woman’s day-to-day existence. Margaret Cavendish, the first author to popularize to a specific female audience, had also deliberately forged links between a distinctly female experience and the intellectual explorations of the “new science.” However, such links were not the result of a series of carefully wrought analogous relations, whereby the known everyday world of the woman is incessantly likened to the greater material world of God’s creation as revealed through scientific scrutiny. Cavendish did not, as did more traditional popularizers of the “new science” both before and after her, attempt to reconceptualize experience in support of theory. On the contrary, drawing from the precepts of her own everyday life experience, Cavendish formulated an imaginative ontology which challenged the more orthodox theories of the day with equal interpretive power. In turn, what she chose to popularize to her female readers was not her theory, but her act of theorizing, and the stimulus that prompted her to scientific inquiry: i.e., the excitement of intellectual discovery and the satisfactions inherent in the power to create and the power to explain. This was heady stuff, indeed, to address to a popular (and specifically female) audience. And it constituted an auspicious beginning for public dialogue conducted between women and the “new science.” But it was never more than that. The most influential texts in this genre, those which ultimately defined generic protocols, would look back to other models than that first articulated by Margaret Cavendish, and would develop in a radically different direction — the formulation of the “she-philosopher.”

II.

The earliest popularizer of the “new science” in England was John Wilkins, with his first text in this genre, The Discovery of a World in the Moone, published in 1638. Wilkins’ text was extraordinarily successful, with two printings in its initial year of publication, followed by revised editions in 1640, 1684, 1707, and 1802. The immense popularity of this text, and the recognition accorded it throughout the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, assured it a position of importance and influence within the genre of popularization literature; it was, for many, a model text for both study and imitation.

Wilkins’ Discovery was constructed within an elaborate Aristotelian framework (“The order by which I shall bee guided will be that which Aristotle uses in his booke De Mundo (if that booke were his)” (94)) consisting of thirteen separate propositions, each of which is subjected to “proofe” by argument (as a series of “pro” versus “con” statements build assent and invalidate opposition), the total cumulation of proofs designed to “perswade beliefe” (25) in the end/beginning assertion of the text. Thus, Wilkins masterfully constructs a rigorous rhetorical logic designed to elicit and control reader participation in the “battle of the books” documented in the bibliographic marginalia of his text. His purpose is double-edged: to popularize (and establish as “true”) certain aspects of the “new science,”<15> and equally if not more important, to initiate “gentlemen” of leisure into the process of scientific “discovery,” and by so doing, to excite their imaginations in such a manner as to stimulate their further participation in contemporary scientific activities.<16> An early recogni tion of the “many Heads and many Hands” needed for the completion of later scientific projects clearly prompted his concern. As articulated by Wilkins at the end of his text, his vision of the future included the newly-emerging scientific activities of the day in an explicitly nationalistic dress and role — specifically, the maintenance (through extension to the “celestial” sphere) of British colonial power:

This linkage between scientist and colonial adventurer is further emphasized by repeated analogies that liken the individual pursuing discoveries in the world of the “new science” (most obviously, the reader) to both Francis Drake and Christopher Columbus, two well-romanticized figures in early seventeenth-century England, the ultimate profiteering discoverers of a “new world.” The audience appeal in such associations was effective enough to turn the scientist-adventurer into a commonplace literary image by the end of the century.

“Discovery” is a prominent motif in Wilkins’ text, from its title page to the concluding passages on futuristic space travel. The text itself is presented as a discovery of “new truths in Philosophy,” which for centuries lay buried under the weight of Aristotelian authority and deceiving sense perceptions. As the prose unfolds to the reader, Wilkins’ Discovery strips away the layers of theoretical and perceptual inaccuracies which deny the teachings of the “new science” to reveal “truth” within the very process (act) of assertion undertaken within the text. Thus, through a smooth rhetorical metamorphosis, “truth” has become argument, its discovery, reader assent:<17>

Throughout Wilkins’ text, there is an unresolved tension between “truth” and “common opinion,” “the generall consent of others,” “the common opinion of others,” “the common opposition,” “the silly multitude.” Frequent references are made to “the insufficiency of common opinion to adde true worth or estimation unto any thing”: most specifically, “... it is not the commonesse of an opinion that can priviledge it for a truth, the wrong way is sometimes a well beaten path, whereas the right way (especially to hidden truths) may bee lesse trodden and more obscure” (19). It was a problem that would plague the popularization literature of the “new science” for at least two centuries, a problem endemic to a genre attempting to discredit popular perception while at the same time addressing itself to a popular audience. Even earlier than Wilkins, Galileo had been forced to confront the difficulty of establishing the “truth” of something unprovable in common terms, of making “shared” something which essentially was not. Wilkins approached the problem with great rhetorical skill, and relative success. Although contemporary commentators might occasionally ridicule his visionary fervor regarding interstellar flight or lunar inhabitants, not a one took issue with his methods of argument and appeal. No one appeared to notice the textual confusion observable even in the double title page where Wilkins wavers between truth delivered to his audience as prediscovered (page one entitled “The Discovery of a World in the Moone” and accompanied by an illustration showing a distinctly animated heavens — busy, active planets with circles and dotted lines tracing out influences and patterns of movement around a bountiful sun at the center) or as still discoverable (page two entitled “Or, A Discourse Tending to Prove, that ’tis probable there may be another habitable World in that Planet” with no accompanying summary illustration). The one title page denies, while the other solicits, reader participation in the construction of “new truths.”

Similarly, Wilkins’ “appeal to reason” must be only partial to be effective. As Janice Moulton notes, “experience may be a necessary element in certain reasoning processes....[A]dversarial arguments could be pointless if it was experience rather than argument that determined philosophical beliefs” (162). To the extent that common experience invalidated the teachings of the new philosophy, there was an added complication in proof by argument. Thus, when “new truths” are in contradiction to commonsense experience, Wilkins proclaims against the errors of the senses:

However, when the perceptions of the senses bolster his arguments from “reason,” Wilkins advocates sense observation:

At other times, Wilkins will blatantly impose the sense perceptions of others onto his audience, attempting to teach the reader to see with, for example, Galileo’s eyes rather than his (or her) own: “I shall next produce the eye-witnesse of Galilaeus, on which I most of all depend for the proofe of this Proposition”; he continues with

Thus Galileo’s sense perception, extrapolated and presented in diagram form, is used to predetermine (and interpret) what we will later see and experience ourselves when observing the same phenomena. This manipulation of sense data is then couched within the rubric of “reasoned argument” (the text), where sense perceptions are being amassed as evidence in support of a theory which in turn negates their validity.

Barbara Shapiro, in her scholarly studies of Wilkins, notes that the ambivalences so readily apparent in this early text appear to be resolved in his later works, which she describes as “less vague and contradictory” (40). This is hardly surprising. In her important study of issues concerning “probability,” “truth,” and “certainty” during the seventeenth century, Shapiro herself notes the gradual consolidation of a new epistemology only beginning to be articulated in the 1630s when Wilkins first began publishing. During the course of the century, while working in concert with other prominent “scientists” and Royal Society members, Wilkins further refined his ideas and methods until they appeared to have the consistency of a workable program. However, the contradictions rooted in the discourse of popularization literature remained. In the new epistemology, as in the old, “truth” remained the province of an educated elite, firmly rooted within the limited experiential context of this elite, and deemed “certain” only when it commanded the “assent” of a group of “reasonable,” “rational” men. As described by Shapiro, the credo was more sophisticated, perhaps, by century end, but at base, it merely echoed the premises of Wilkins’ 1638 text:

Wilkins’ Discovery pioneered a rhetorical methodology and audience approach which contained in embryo many concepts later associated with the Royal Society and Restoration science. Interestingly enough, however, he did not anticipate the growing importance of women to popularization discourse and the “new science.” The intended reader of the Discovery was clearly male, and within the world of the text, woman is excluded (Adam, for example, is portrayed as heroic intellect, perhaps because of Eve’s significant absence and thus non-participation in the burgeoning scientific activities of Wilkins’ early Paradise), although the female gender is assigned (as was typical at the time) to nature, the planet Venus, and a rather peevish moon. It was instead a compatriot of Wilkins, Robert Boyle, who was the first popularizer of the “new science” to specifically include women among his intended audience. His 1664 Experiments and Considerations Touching Colours was an instant popular success. With its fifty experiments, and incessant commentary on a broad variety of commonplace life experiences (male and female),<18> Boyle’s text was designed to appeal to a wide audience in the hopes of broadening interest in issues of scientific experiment and controlled speculation. Although Boyle himself (“who love to measure physical things by their use, not their strangeness, or prettiness”) considered the experiments described in his text to be “trifles,” he knew from experience that they were novel and intriguing enough to “so many persons of differing conditions, and even sexes,” that “those that are any thing curious will scarce be able to see them, without finding themselves excited to make reflections upon them” (663):

Grounded in the observable terrestrial sphere, where sense perception was more often to be trusted, Boyle’s text avoided some of the more difficult issues that plagued Wilkins. In Boyle’s ambitious and brilliant pedagogy, the ignorant observations of the educated (and uneducated) layperson were no longer the point of origin for an unyielding prejudice against the teachings of the “new science,” but rather a fertile seedbed of real-life phenomena requiring experimental consideration.

Margaret Cavendish, the first popularizer to specifically address a female audience, drew from the literary experiences of both men. She utilized Boyle’s pedagogy applied to Wilkins’ subject matter, within a unique framework of feminist speculation and fantasy. As to be expected, the combination of the three was too bold to find ready acceptance then, or now. Indeed, her 1666 popularization text, The Description of a New World, called the Blazing-World, is considered the most outrageous in a long list of outrageous works, and for one critic at least, indicative of her madness: this text “convinces us that its creator was, on one occasion at least, dangerously far from sanity” (Perry 265). Even Marjorie Nicolson, at times sympathetic to Cavendish, as well as an avid enthusiast of seventeenth-century literary “voyages to the moon,” finds the Blazing-World too bizarre; she tells her readers:

Order out of chaos. In seventeenth-century England, that was the clarion call of the “new science,” its promise to man to rebuild his lost world of Eden through the empirical manipulation and control of nature. This “rationalist attempt to escape from the intractable web of contingency” extended from nature to man, as the “new science” strove to also impose order on the confusions of mind and natural language, culminating finally in what Gerald Gillespie describes as the “new superdiscourse of science,” alternately defined as “the mature habit of demystification, of deconstruction and reconstruction” (122, 125, 128). But Margaret Cavendish refused to write in an orderly fashion according to the male-oriented discourse patterns of the “new science”; equally important, she refused to be silenced. With blatant disregard for the dominant male visions of order and control, Cavendish openly courted disorder in her writings:

Repeatedly in her scientific writings she chose to align herself with nature rather than method, with the object rather than the perpetrator of order.

Despite the tremendous social pressures directed against a woman writing during the seventeenth century, Cavendish wrote voluminously — fourteen works in fifteen years, some with a page count exceeding 700 — in almost every genre (drama, poetry, fantasy, biography, autobiography, epistle, oration, essay, fable, science fiction), and on almost every subject. In a favorite metaphor, writing was her “offspring,” the “Child of my Brain.” More than that, her text was her identity — without it, there was no “her”story, no record of individual existence:

In addition to historical specificity, Cavendish desired “fame,” a posterity of her own. Denied the type of public life that enabled a man to achieve social approval and applause, Cavendish cultivated a literary substitute which forced her dialogue into the public arena:

But as Jane Gallop notes in a fascinating study of scientific method and female sexuality, “public female discourse” continuously confronts a tradition in Western culture that defines woman’s relationship to language in terms of two intractable myths (woman as a member of the “silent sex”; woman as “liar”):

Cavendish was not alone among women writers in being consistently accused of writing books suffering from a “definite lack of structure or continuity” (Smith 61), books that “defy analysis” because of their uncontrolled and “disjointed” rambling (Gagen 39). “Sympathetic” critics have rushed to excuse such verbal excess with reminders of women’s limited education, hoping to rescue the female author from charges of literary and intellectual incompetence with the salvo of increased “naturalness” and other ingenuous charms. These traits then become the (undesirable) markers of a “feminine” style. Writes Henry Perry regarding Cavendish’s Blazing-World,

Exaggerated fantasy. That was the other hallmark of Cavendish’s discourse — her refusal to reign in her imagination and be restricted by generic boundaries requiring her to structure her world view in ways that were incompatible with her experience. For the twentieth-century reader, even more steeped in distinctions concerning “fact” and “fiction” than Cavendish’s seventeenth-century audience, this is perhaps the most difficult aspect of her work to “overcome.” Now, as then, readers are uncomfortable with her merging of science, self, and the fantastic within a single discourse. Thus, B. G. MacCarthy criticizes Cavendish for her “fantastic, exaggerated, and unstable” Blazing-World (124) which “riddles” the reader with a “fatal volley of ‘Atomes’” and other “scientific poppycock” (125, 123). Yet elsewhere, while analyzing texts where flashes of Cavendish’s literary “genius” (usually a self-contained short story, essay, or fable) can be easily abstracted from their convoluted context and companion philosophic speculations, MacCarthy praises Cavendish as “a realist” who “wrote feigned stories, but ... made the distinction that they should not contain feigned estimates of life.” (128) However, when Cavendish authored a 1656 text entitled Nature’s Pictures drawn by Fancie’s Pencil to the Life, she regarded “Atomes” and moral issues as component aspects of nature, viewing both as equally suitable subjects for “Fancie’s Pencil.” To dismiss such interrelations within her texts, valuing individual parts only in their separation from the whole, is to impose our own need to “clearly segregate the fantasy from the fact” (Smith 713) on the judgment process, while at the same time ignoring the complexity of her meaning and message. To immediately discount Cavendish’s scientific inquiries because fairies dance before the lens during microscopical investigations is too simple.

Typically, “fairies” belonged to the language of poetry and fiction, not “natural philosophy,” and yet Cavendish frequently utilized this imaginative construct for purposes of scientific description and explanation:

To a seventeenth-century scientific community struggling to develop a technical nomenclature deemed suitable for precise scientific description of the material world, Cavendish’s assimilation of literary metaphor within the language of scientific discourse was alarming. As Wilda Anderson points out in her penetrating analysis of Lavoisier’s systematic rhetorical distortions, “‘Nature’ is a product of the language, and not merely an object of study in the material world”; “an institutionalized process of judgment ... has been built into the language” of science (770). Looking through the microscope, Cavendish saw, not the “Machines of Nature” of Robert Hooke (“The Preface” n. pag.), but groupings of remarkably hyperactive “fairies,” thus describing a new world of scientific discovery in terms of her own imaginative experience. Within this dynamic naming process, “fairies” took on a new material form; the multiple realities of experience, imagination, and scientific investigation coalesced in exciting ways within a single image; and another word was enriched by its expanding, rather than contracting, definition. For Cavendish, this was natural philosophy at its best — a method of synthesis, of contextualization. The majority of seventeenth-century English scientists did not, however, share this potentially dangerous view.

Cavendish’s Blazing-World (“a work of Fancy”) was first published in 1666, together with her Observations upon Experimental Philosophy (“my serious Philosophical Contemplations”), the two texts, “having some Sympathy and Coherence with each other,” joined together “as two Worlds at the end of their Poles” within a single cover. In 1668, the Blazing-World was twice reissued without the accompanying Observations, and with a slightly amended preface addressed “To all Noble and Worthy Ladies”:

Again, an unabashed mixture of genres. Although Cavendish herself frequently admitted to a private dislike of romances, she did realize their immense popularity and influence as patterns for social behavior, and used the form frequently.<19> As was typical for her, however, her Blazing-World was “romance” with a difference. For starters, the narrator, knight errant, and lady love are all female, and at times, virtually indistinguishable from one another. The four distinct male characters are never described — physically or emotionally — and they assume only minor (and usually passive) roles in the action of the text. What little romance exists, in terms of protestations of love, constancy, and desire (desexualized as the need for companionship), is shared between two women. And the usual “romancical” characters, such as dragons and other unearthly creatures, are humanized (Bear-men, Bird-men, Worm-men, Fish-men, Ape-men, Fox-men, etc.) and given colorful material form (the free-form mixture of fantasy and scientific reasoning evidenced below is typical of this text):

The action consists mostly of conversation and observation, coupled with some travel (by sea or “AEreal Vehicle”) and a final explosive battle scene directed and won by the two female protaganists, at this point “Platonick Lovers” sharing a single female body. In some ways, the text is a feminist rewrite of Genesis — Eve eats the entire apple of knowledge and reigns in peace. She enters “Paradise” by boat rather than rib, recreates it in her own image, and when disorder and dissension (and her own boredom with perfection) result, she returns it to its original form. Period. No lingering sin, guilt, or punishment from above. Indeed, no above. At the same time, Part II (the third, or “fantastical,” section) of the text constitutes an aristocratic fantasy re-working of the English civil war, where Cavendish as author-protaganist accomplishes what her husband, as commander of the Royalist troops in the northern regions, could not. An imaginative appropriation and military use of science and technology, hidden skillfully under a mantle of magic and bejeweled splendor in dress and attire, enables a woman (with two women’s souls) to enforce the unity of states under the rule of one monarch, one religion, one language. As always in her texts, no matter the genre or method, Cavendish spins her discourse from her own personal life (her ambitions, her readings, her writings, her observations, her thoughts, her experiences). Interestingly enough, she appropriated every genre for this written dialogue between self and experience except the one genre considered most acceptable for such private female discourse — the diary or journal.

In her “Epilogue to the Reader,” Cavendish tells her audience that

Cavendish viewed her mind as composed of various parts, of differing functions, but of equal importance. Sometimes these parts are “Reason” and “Fancy”; at other times, they are “pro” and “con” arguments, “wise” and “dull” thoughts, “unbelieving” satiric or dissenting ideas. Typically, her texts constitute the various “Parts of my Mind” in dispute with one another regarding any possible subject, sometimes reaching consensus, oftentimes not, the dispute occasioned by some sensory or mental stimulus which initially prompted Cavendish to contemplation. Such internal mental debate formed the basis of Cavendish’s scholarship and scientific method. It was an investigative process without closure, and Cavendish would faithfully record on paper the intricacies of the entire process as ideas spawned new ideas and arguments in dialogue with other ideas until, presumably, her mind tired of the subject. Her readers also participated in this exploratory process, suffering mental exhaustion along with her (if not before) — hence, the frequent accusation of “tedium.” In one of her lengthier scientific treatises, the 1668 Grounds of Natural Philosophy, the final section of the text is devoted to a discourse concerning “Restoring-Beds, or Wombs,” similar to “Producing Beds, or Breeding Beds” wherein the “Restoring Actions of Nature” occur. To debate the various issues involved, her mind divides into parts, each part then retiring in turn to

Such democratic discussion, conducted between opposing viewpoints without rancor or aggression, was unusual in a century prone to vitriolic dialogue and accusation concerning scientific issues. Crazy as it seemed to many of her contemporary readers, such internalized dialogue was one of the only alternative methods open to a woman wishing to publicly dispute the issues of the day, but unable to draw a public response. In March of 1664, Henry More writes to Anne Finch:

In May of 1665, he writes again:

It is thus hardly surprising to find that when the “Empress” of the Blazing-World is offered the soul “of a living or a dead Man” to be her scribe and intellectual companion, the spirits of that world inform her that “the most famous modern Writers, as either of Galileo, Gassendus, Des Cartes, Helmont, Hobbes, H. More, &c.” are “fine ingenious Writers, but yet so self-conceited, that they would scorn to be Scribes to a Woman” (89).

When Cavendish chooses to “reject and despise all the Worlds without me, and create a World of my own” (Blazing-World 98), she creates a “Paradise” where a woman engages in open public dialogue with the male members (also her political subjects) of various scientific societies which she, as “Empress,” has created. The subjects of discussion range over such natural phenomena as the sun, moon, stars, planets, air, wind, snow, ice, frost, fire, thunder, lightening, telescopes, microscopes, mathematics, rhetoric, oratory, logic, the ocean, the earth, minerals, vegetables, worms, chemical transmutations, atoms, herbals, dissection, apoplexy, spotted Plague, whether or not animals living in the sea have blood, or respirate and generate like humans, why fresh-water springs are not salty and do not ebb and flow like the ocean, etc., with an added twenty pages of discourse between the “Empress” and a group of “Immaterial Spirits” involving spiritual and religious speculations with highly unorthodox overtones. Throughout it all, however, it is the “Empress” who controls the direction of conversation, avidly pursuing her unique scientific interests within the framework of the question-and-answer flow of communications:

Thus, the “Empress” initiated the questions to which her scientists responded (their responses usually terminating inconclusively in unresolved disputes); the Empress would then arbitrate, ask further questions, perhaps initiate particular experiments, venture opinions and judgments upon the information presented to her, and sometimes reformulate her opinions after receiving further qualifying information from the investigative scientists. Notably, neither the “Empress,” her scientists, nor the “Immaterial Spirits” are ever infallible sources of scientific truth.

In a short essay appended to Cavendish’s Philosophical and Physical Opinions, her husband astutely wrote: “no body knows what is the Cause of any thing, and since they are all but Guessers, not Knowing, it gives every Man room to Think what he lists” (459). Cavendish believed fervidly in the “intellectual democracy” surrounding the “new science,” but she also chafed at what she recognized as her outsider’s status. In the second of her four prefaces to this same text, she states:

But she was denied. This was, after all, an “intellectual democracy” of limited scope, with no interest in exploring alternative visions of a feminist nature. Cavendish was hardly unaware of this. In Letter CXI of her CCXI Sociable Letters she writes to a woman friend:

It was this type of exclusionary logic, limited to binary vision and scientific explanation using the finite equations of X versus NOT X, that Cavendish rebelled against. Its dictatorial powers were relentless and coldly manipulative. In the expert hands of a Joseph Glanvill, such logic, while vanquishing the fairies, could easily turn witches into a “matter of fact.” In a letter written to Cavendish, who believed that old women of the village consorted with poverty and ignorance rather than the devil and familiars, Glanvill argued:

At the same time, Glanvill elsewhere distinguished true natural philosophers as those who “take care to keep themselves within the Bounds of sober Enquiry, and not indulge irregular Sollicitudes about the knowledge of Things, which Providence hath thought fit to conceal from us” (quoted in Jobe 350). Any irregularities in scientific method or findings were then readily accounted for in terms of diabolical influence. Although no one ever accused Cavendish of being the devil’s helpmate, she was accused of atheism, and during her lifetime, she was merely tolerated, on the fringes of scientific activity, in deference to her rank and sex. After her death, her ideas were quickly buried in oblivion once her pen was finally silenced. A woman who challenged her female readers to rebel — even if only in their minds — represented a certain danger:

The end qualifier was not mitigating enough. Free mental play focused on the imaging of alternative worlds (worlds defined primarily by their difference from the known world) is oftentimes an important precursor of more substantive challenges yet to come. In conceiving new orders of being — in the relationships between people and between people and things, and in conceptualizations of social existence (inclusive of physical and material existence) — the maker of visionary worlds acknowledges dissatisfactions with this world and places special emphasis on particular needs and desires which are unfulfilled by an existing social order. At the same time, articulation of alternative realities and explanations may perhaps stimulate a realization that possibly other physical and/or perceptual laws exist in the universe than the ones we have been taught and/or believe in (de Lauretis, 161–163).

Cavendish’s repeated championship of the erratic, unstructured, spontaneous, and unrestrainedly exhuberant pursuit of reason led her, and could possibly lead others, in untenable directions. On the one hand, her refusal to order and restrain either her thought process or her text underlined a basic philosophical difference with the majority of her peers in the world of Restoration science. Cavendish preferred what she termed a “natural rational discourse” (Blazing-World 58) for her investigation of the material world — really nothing more than a raw textual record, an unedited, non-directive, chaotic, labyrinthine exploration of all the ragtaggle paths and byways of experimental thought. Such “rational discourse” was “natural” (versus “artificial”) on two counts. It documented truthfully the process of scientific discovery (not necessarily synonymous with “reason”); and, more important, it provided an accurate representation of the natural order: “there are so many irregular motions in Nature ... ’tis but a folly to think that Art should be able to regulate them” (Blazing-World 59). On the other hand, her technique exhibited an alarming lack of concern with results. Always Cavendish cared more for the means than the end, more for the method and path of travel than for the final destination. In the democratic “pulpit” of her mind, “wayward” thoughts were carelessly indulged, given equal, if not more, say, play, and force than “correct” thoughts. Thus, within her world, “truth” was no longer defined as the “assent” of “reasonable men,” but as the constant interplay of random experiences (either lived, reasoned, or fancied) debated freely among thinking individuals, both male and female. Such feminist philosophizing was in blatant contradiction with the laws of the “new science”; it was thus necessary that it be controlled, redirected, and conducted once again within the established rules of discourse.

Cavendish’s texts, and the intellectual democracy for which she campaigned, were soon eclipsed by Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s Entretiens (translated into English as A Discovery of New Worlds). This was certainly due in part to heavy advertising of the Entretiens within the popular women’s magazines of the day, where publishers and correspondents alike raved and recommended in unison, while the works of Margaret Cavendish went unnoticed. This, in turn, was due to the fact that Fontenelle’s fictional scientific lady, Madam the Marquiese, “stands in direct contrast to the Duchess of Newcastle” (Meyer 17). Indeed, the Marquiese was the model précieuse of French salon society: the noble aristocrat, beautiful, witty, a skilled conversationalist. As early as 1646, François Du Soucy noted that “Paris is now completely filled with ladies, either of the court or outside it, who unite very judiciously and delicately, science with eloquence, the Muses with the graces, and art with nature” (quoted in Lougée 29). A working knowledge of the rudiments of natural philosophy was already an expected accomplishment for the French lady in enacting the role of wife, mother, and arbiter of social behavior.

Fontenelle’s Marquiese was clearly intended as a role model for the female reading public, and the Entretiens served a dual role in initiating a popular audience to the more accessible teachings of Cartesian science, in addition to delineating the acceptable activities and interests of a “she-philosopher.” As defined by Fontenelle, and further elaborated by John Harris and Francesco Algarotti among others, the new popularization literature directed at a female audience attempted to encourage women (as Margaret Cavendish had before them) to develop a curiosity about natural philosophy, applied to every facet of their day-to-day existence — to acquire a habit of thought which informed (and at the same time reformed) their entire lives. Where these popularizers differed from Cavendish was in describing such a habit of thought as private, rather than public, dialogue, in support of the newly-evolving social order, and conducted for the enjoyment of, rather than in open confrontation with, male virtuosi. In the Blazing-World, Cavendish authored a popularization text that was heuristic rather than authoritative. Her text was not structured around a logic of argument; it did not move in linear fashion towards climax or closure; nor did it advocate a particular theory, but rather, a process of scientific inquiry. In contrast, Fontenelle, and later writers employing his text as a model, argued vigorously, under the guise of explanation, in support of a particular scientific theory. Unlike Cavendish, they sought to indoctrinate their readers in the “truths,” rather than methods, of the “new science,” and they employed a series of sophisticated rhetorical strategies to this end. The dialogue form, primarily unstructured and fluid in Cavendish’s Blazing-World, was flushed out into an organizational frame in Fontenelle’s text. With the number of speakers markedly reduced to two, each speaker became more clearly individuated, and in this structured environment of one-to-one, male- female conversation, the woman’s voice was muted in accordance with her new role as pupil rather than mentor. “Fancy,” no longer an integral component of the discourse, became a key technique for relieving the rigors of argumentative logic. Artificially imposed on the conversation by way of apt little quotations from poetry or as complimentary asides passed back and forth between the two speakers, “fancy” was relegated to a literary device. As such, the role played by imagination in the construction of textual “truths” was obscured behind an almost impenetrable surface of technical jargon and deductive logic. In such manner did “truth” become popularized, once again, as the province of self-defined “reasonable men.”

Exchanging the “my Respects” of Margaret Cavendish for teasing tones, and uneasy admonitions, Fontenelle alternately flatters and shames his female audience into an interest in the “new science”:

He asks the Ladies to extend to his text only “the same Attention that they must give the Princess of Cleve, if they would follow the Intrigue, and find out the beauties of it,” and to this end, he envelops popular science education within an experiential context considered “so familiar to the most part of Ladies,” the activities and conversation of stylized love-making. Scientific investigation is thus reduced to romantic patter within a country setting whereby two lovers stroll leisurely along the sands and between neatly-clipped hedgerows in elaborate rose gardens, their gazes of admiration alternating from nature and sky to one another, as filtered by the crowning light of day and the sensual enticements of moonlight. In true Hollywood style, Ambrose Philips would later blatantly attempt to translate such romantic fictions into real life. In a 1718 issue of The Free-Thinker, Philips

And the Free-Thinker promised further romantic nocturnal outings. In a 1719 issue he remarks: “Six years hence we are to have another total eclipse of the sun, as remarkable, and as innocent as the last; at which period, I hope to meet my female pupils at Salisbury; where it will be seen in perfection” (quoted in Meyer 70).

In Fontenelle’s romanticized world of conversational science, the woman assumes a clearly subordinate role in the production of discourse. She is the passive partner in a controlled dialogue, really a reverberating monologue where the enunciation of the male “I” orders and controls her verbal flow by containing within itself both his declaration and her response. Periodically, she protests this manipulation of her thoughts and language (“You shall not impose upon me at this rate”), sometimes reprimanding him for “your false way of arguing” which leads her to assert first one opinion and later its opposite, forcing her to “yield” to the verbal foreplay of “the Lover and Philosopher” as frequently as he desires (72, 70, 138). In controlling the dialogue, the male “I” also controls the scope and extent of the Marquiese’s scientific speculations. “Madam, you know enough,” he proclaims after completing a superficial introduction to Cartesian thought regarding “the World, the Heavens and the Celestial Bodies.” Beyond this she shall not venture, with or without his tutelage:

Thus, the closure of text means also the cessation of thought. Further scientific speculation is impossible without the guiding framework of male conversation, for learning has never extended beyond a few scattered “Ideas” to an informing method. The pupil will never outgrow the teacher.

Aphra Behn, who authored the first English translation of Fontenelle’s Entretiens to be printed in London, appended a feminist “Translator’s Preface” to the work wherein she criticized the character of Fontenelle’s Marquiese, as well as “his wild Fancy” in peopling myriad worlds within the universe:

And Behn wishes that she might (like Cavendish had before her) bring her own feminist perspective to the popularization of the “new science”:

Based on Behn’s prefatory criticisms, one can assume that a text “made my own” would have taught her female audience a method of reason which could be relied upon to distinguish proper from “wild” notions. It is intimated that she would have preferred to teach her women readers a method by which to create their own truths, rather than instructing them to rest content with “truths” defined and delivered by lovers-qua-philosophers. Behn was well aware that Fontenelle’s science was based largely in a series of private fantasies which carried the aura of truth for an audience yielding repeatedly to the rhetorical force of his dialogue. It was not enough to pepper his text with disclaimers:

Truth is thus “natural” rather than rhetorical, revealing itself to the soul of the philosopher-initiate without the need for proof or study. But for those who cannot merely “call it to mind,” those who feel no instant affinity for the universe of the “new science,”<20> truth is indistinguishable from chimera. Trapped within the web of his elaborate discourse, the Marquiese could discern a chimera only after the male “I” mockingly defined it as such. “I entertain you with Visions, both Philosophick and poetical” (59), he declares, enjoying the multiple confusions of the two, his play of wit, her consternation. After she questions one of his frequent changes of mind and mood, he tells her obliquely, “There are certain Moments of believing things” (90) — and it is his undisputed privilege to tell her when, and what.

Fontenelle’s 1686 text was followed by two other texts which further defined the generic protocols of popularization literature directed at women: John Harris’s Astronomical Dialogues of 1719 (with revised editions in 1729 and 1766), and Francesco Algarotti’s 1737 Il Newtonianismo per le Dame (with Elizabeth Carter’s English translation, Sir Isaac Newton’s Philosophy Explain’d For the Use of the Ladies, appearing in 1739, and reissued in 1765). Although both books were heavily indebted to Fontenelle’s conception of the genre, Harris’s text in particular was instrumental in articulating changes and new directions which would result eventually in a spin-off generic type. To a large extent, such changes in generic protocols accomodated changes in the “new science” as a carefully-crafted Newtonian physics overpowered Cartesian ideology. The new popularization literature necessarily incorporated the basic tenets of Newtonian philosophy.

Algarotti’s Newtonianismo further prescribed the subordination of woman to the male scientist-lover and his “savage Philosophy.” In its purest form, this philosophy is made completely inaccessible to control by women; with its secrets locked away in the mathematical formulae and experimental expertise of a new scientific priesthood (with a celibate Isaac Newton at its head), the “new science” remains untouched by the profaning hands of women:

In a degraded, “recivilized” form, however, this philosophy can be taught to “that Sex, which had rather perceive than understand”:

But even such a limited vision of truth is only to be achieved by passage through a degrading initiation rite designed to purify woman and purge her of all vanities and arrogance. Her intellect must learn to submit. “This is a Trial, a Mortification that Des Cartes will make you undergo in your Novitiate of Philosophy” (I:77), the male “I” of the dialogues tells the Marchioness, who is to relinquish all ideas of her own beauty (the “Roses and Lilies” of her complexion) in accepting the Cartesian doctrine of colors. “[Y]ou canot with Honour adopt a System without being willing to admit the Consequences” (I:74), he coldly informs her, after first deliberately exposing her “to the Song of this philosophical Syren,” to “the alluring Pleasures in the luxurious Garden of this Cartesian Enchantress” (I:68). Repeatedly, the Marchioness is so humbled, as she stumbles along the path of revelation, re-experiencing the sin of Eve over and over until she has finally succumbed to the intellectual will of the male “I”: “The first Step to Wisdom is, to cease from Folly, and the first Point of Learning not to be too arrogant, but perceive our own Weakness” (I:204–205). These discursive rites of passage then justify woman’s enforced exclusion from the pinnacles of natural philosophy to a separate, and inferior, sphere of knowledge:

Not surprisingly, the “I”’s desire to control the mind and will of the Marchioness extends fully to the details of her everday existence. As had Fontenelle before him, Algarotti enlisted “the Assistance of the most familiar Objects” (I:vi) to “polish and adorn” the new philosophy for his female readers. At the same time, these “familiar Objects” are to be defamiliarized, stripped of their experiential context and reevaluated from the perspective of the “new science.” Notes the Marchioness with a mixture of vexation and shame: “You may judge ... of my very great Sagacity in philosophical Affairs, when I never observed a Phaenomenon which I every Day carry about me” (II:107). Thus, the Newtonian theory of optics is to inform the Marchioness’s choice of dress:

Even more omniscient, it is to penetrate the privacy of her closet to impinge on the very method by which she artfully “constructs” a public image. Thus, it is to control even her private perception of self and being:

Where Algarotti had avoided “Lines and mathematical Figures” in order not to give “these Discourses too Scientific an Air” (I:v), John Harris before him had introduced the use of such diagrams to a female audience with great success. Boyle Lecturer in 1698, author of various mathematical primers for both women and men, and author/compiler of the Lexicon Technicum, the first popular technical dictionary/encyclopedia in England (specifically composed for use by women in addition to men), John Harris foresaw an important role for educated women of leisure in reforming the “Great Men” of their class. Like Wilkins before him, Harris was intensely interested in harnessing the wasted potential of countless gentlemen in the service of the “new science.” Unlike Wilkins, however, Harris hoped that women, through exercise of their “Empire and Power” over men, would be able to entice them into spending time and money on amateur study and investigation. The scientific lady, with her natural “Curiosity and Love of Knowledge,” thus became the lure, whose magnetic attractions were to pull gentleman lovers in the direction of the “new science”:

Destined to play a more active role in support of the scientific endeavor, the Lady M. of Harris’s Dialogues is more emancipated than either the Marquiese or the Marchioness. She is aware of gender assignments in the vocabulary of the poets and scientists, and more than once broaches the issue with her philosopher-teacher:

She asserts a desire to pursue an independent course of investigation:

And she chafes under the restraints of “the Education of us Women,” “so silly and crampt, that, generally speaking, we are never taught, nor innured to think of any thing out of the common Way, and beyond the Legend of the Nursery: Nothing but our Work, a little Housewifery, and a great deal of Gossiping” (24). Without fear of reprisal she proclaims, “I love to know the Reasons of things as well as any a Man of you all” (145).

Despite her liberated course of study, which encompasses the private perusal of recommended popularization texts (many by Harris himself) coupled with problem-solving exercises and experiments using scientific instruments, Lady M. still regards the male “I” of the dialogues as the uncontested oracle of scientific truths: “you are my Master and Teacher” (20) she tells him. In turn, he does not attempt to dally with or “confound” her ideas, either for purposes of pleasure or torment. Disciplined study leads her directly to accurate observations and ideas of things (“Am I right, Sir, in this Conclusion?”; “Exactly, Madam, said I” (94)). Her capacity for learning is never questioned, but instead receives continuous praise. Subordinated as it is to the duties of housewifery, Lady M.’s study of scientific subjects complements her social and domestic roles:

Above all, her studies encourage a new appreciation of God’s universe and man’s place within it. To learn the precepts of the “new science,” is to learn to give free play to the mind in pursuing religious morals within the laws of physics and nature. Studious contemplation of even a pair of globes will yield significant moralizings:

Such weighty moralizing is yet another habit of thought, easily acquired.

In addition to learning to step outside of herself and draw scientific “Observations” from her daily activities, Lady M. is also taught the rudiments of the discourse to be used in reporting and analyzing such observations. Frequently encouraged by her mentor to author texts of her own (almanacs, for example), Lady M. is instructed in the precise definitions of the new “lexicon technicum.” These definitions are then gradually incorporated within her own natural language base, enveloping her further and further in the perspective of the “new science”:

With Lady M.’s increasing fluency in the discourse of the “new science,” we have reached an important plateau in the development of early popularization literature directed at women. The attempt to rewrite women’s language/life experience within the ordered and controlled framework of scientific discourse had succeeded. Able to transform a “choice of words into a choice of world” (Benamou 74), Margaret Cavendish had defied tradition to recreate the female life experience in the fiery base of a “blazing-star” — for generations, an omen of evil, frequently associated with the upstart “she-philosopher.” For the learned Lady M., such imaginative possibilities did not exist within the realm of her experience:

For the budding “she-philosopher,” science no longer offered the same speculative possibilities.

List of Works Cited >>

NOTES

1. Throughout this paper, I use the rather imprecise phrase, the “new science,” in an attempt to demarcate what is commonly referred to by mid-eighteenth century as the “Philosophica Britannica” from its earlier predecessors in the realm of scientific theory and practice. Grounded in Newtonian physics, the “Philosophica Britannica” was in large part a reaction to and/or refinement of a richly diverse tradition of mental and “mechanick” labors conducted within the expanding arena of European science and technology during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As such, the “Philosophica Britannica” was not a “new science” in the sense of representing a complete and qualitative break with the scientific endeavors of the past. It was, however, a “new science” in the sense of defining a new framework of generalizations and concepts which would direct scientific activities, methodology, and explanation for almost a century. This new consolidating framework, or “paradigm” as defined by Thomas Kuhn, gradually replaced two earlier paradigms (steeped primarily in either an Aristotelian or magical/mystical world view) which had both been under increasing attack throughout the course of the seventeenth century as “ancient” and obsolete because no longer deemed able to provide a satisfying description of the physical world.

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2. Capp, 23. The use of almanacs to popularize the “new science” in seventeenth-century England is well documented by Bernard Capp (in particular, 180–214). He notes that most compilers “combined astrology with the practice of astrological medicine or with branches of practical mathematics, such as teaching, surveying and instrument-making” (51). Astrologers “regarded their subject as a natural not occult science” (184), and during the second half of the seventeenth century, “the social circles of leading scientists and astrologers overlapped constantly” (187). In addition to the usual abundance of medical and agricultural lore and tabular data, the almanacs provided simple proofs that the earth is round and separated from other planets and stars by immense distances; emphasized scientific explanations for such phenomena as comets, eclipses, mock-suns, meteors, the twinkling of the stars, thunder and lightning; and publicized mathematical innovations (e.g., Napier’s work on logarithms). Not only did almanacs describe the latest scientific instruments and the London craftsmen who supplied them, but they helped make this technology accessible to their lower-class readers by providing simple “cutout figures of quadrants and astrolabes, needing only to be threaded and pasted to a board, and accompanied by detailed instructions on their use” (201).

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3. Data concerning readership of the Athenian Mercury and ensuing compilations is provided in Smith (208); separate discussion of the need for a special “Ladies Day” issue on “the first Tuesday in every month” in order to respond to the flood of correspondence from women readers can be found in Smith (194) and Meyer (53). Publication data for the Free-Thinker is discussed in Meyer (65, 70); for the Female Spectator, in Meyer (81–82); and for the Ladies Diary, in Capp (245–247), in Meyer (59–65), and in Smith (197). An interesting comment by the editor of the Ladies Diary in 1718 indicates that a number of women readers were active in submitting answers to the mathematical puzzles in calculus and geometry featured in the journal: “I have seen [women] solve, and am fully convinc’d, their Works in the Ladies Diary are their own Solutions and Compositions. This we may glory in as the Amazons of our Nation; and Foreigners would be amaz’d when I shew them no less than 4 or 5 Hundred several Letters from so many several Women, with Solutions Geometrical, Arithmetical, Algebraical, Astronomical, and Philosophical” (quoted in Reynolds 15). It should be noted that this situation did not continue indefinitely. After 1720, the Ladies Diary was “pretty much” “preempted” by men due to the increasing difficulty of the mathematical problems and foreign-language enigmas, although as late as 1739, mathematical problems were still being addressed to the “Ingenius ladies of the British isle.” The number of women solving these problems was, however, rapidly dwindling (Meyer 60 and 64).

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4. Recent investigations of women’s literacy indicate a growing literacy rate among London women in particular during the later seventeenth century. Summarizes Smith: “the late Stuart period saw a significant growth in the rates of female literacy, particularly in the cities. By the 1690s urban female illiteracy was reduced to 52 percent ±6, ‘while it lingered around eighty percent in the provinces’” (26). It is unlikely that scientific study by way of textual learning ever extended much below bourgeois women of the middle-to-lower social orders during the eighteenth century. The one exception would entail lower-class women employed as domestic servants. The number of such female servants increased markedly during the latter half of the seventeenth century, and the occupation was one which encouraged and stimulated literacy, thus contributing to a growing female audience for writing published during the 1690s and later. (Smith 26) Already in 1655, Hannah Woolley assumed the literacy of this audience when she addressed her The Gentlewoman’s Companion; or A Guide to the Female Sex to “Cook-Maids, Dairy-Maids, Chamber-Maids, and all others that go to the service” (Fraser 67).

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5. In general, I use the terms “feminist” and “feminism” in the same sense as that identified by Goodman and Goodman: “an advocate of women’s interests, not necessarily a proponent of women’s biological, mental, or moral superiority over men; nor, necessarily a claimant of social, economic or political supremacy for women as a class” (394). In those particular cases where I refer to a“ feminist science,” I employ a similar definition to that used by Silvia Bovenschen in describing a feminist aesthetic: “when the specifics of feminine experience and perception determine the form that the work takes, not when some ‘feminine concern’ has merely been tacked onto a traditional form” (131). At the same time, it is important to recognize, as Keller stresses, that for the individual woman scientist, the “feminist” nature of her work is in large part the result of her peripheral status on the fringe of institutionalized science, and not necessarily drawn from a culture of shared female experience: “Given the conditions that have historically prevailed for the entrance of women into science, it is generally not possible to regard [women scientists of the past] as exemplars of a female culture. By necessity, their acculturation has almost always had to be anomalous. Nevertheless, by virtue of the fact that they have not been socialized as men, and have in general been forced to occupy positions peripheral to the dominant scientific culture, their perspectives and contributions to science often bear the marks of their peripheral status. As such, they help illuminate the forces that shape the dominant culture, and, together with their male counterparts on the periphery, help point the way to a less gender-bound science” (Keller, “Commentary” 418).

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6. This point has been argued from various perspectives by a number of feminist scholars (e.g., Easlea, Fausto-Sterling, Fee, Gearhart, Hein, Keller, King, Lowe, Merchant, Rothschild, Zimmerman, etc.). A central thesis of feminist scholarship centers around the contention that inherent within the very epistemology of Western science is “a sexual division of intellectual labor” (Keller, “Commentary” 418). The “objectivist ideal,” which has become the dominant paradigm within the history of Western science, is viewed as predicated upon a subject-object distinction whereby “the active subject (the scientific mind — characteristically male) seeks mastery over the split off and passive object (nature — always female)” (Keller, “Commentary” 416). In direct opposition to a masculinist objectivity — the alienation of “the knower, the transcendent subject, from the known, the transcended object” (Rein 371 ) — is “the status of immanence (as opposed to transcendence) which has been imposed upon [women]” (Hein 374). “[G]enerally, women’s ego is defined as relationally realized and so not wholly separable from its context” (Hein 374). By extension, relational, intuitive, contextual forms of thought are linked to the female and devalued as feminine, in opposition to objectivist, decontextual, masculine thinking which is valorized as scientific. Woman thus becomes “the repository of emotional life, and all the non-rational elements of human experience ... the counterpoint to man’s self-definition as being of pure rationality” (Fee 380). Argues Fee, “The subject/object split legitimizes the logic of domination.” “Women, who have already been defined as natural objects in relation to man, and who have traditionally been viewed as passive, have special reason to question the political power relation expressed in this epistemological distancing” (386).

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7. Autumn Stanley, among others, has begun this arduous task. Resurrecting the preliminary work of a few scholars in the 1920s, she has used that as a starting base for her own research which is slowly producing the pieces for a historical overview of women and technology. Noting that the definition of technology must first change “from what men do to what people do,” Stanley provides an example of what such a radical reconception might mean: “For example, the digging stick would be classed as a simple machine, the first lever; the spindle whorl, the rotary quern, and the potter’s wheel would be credited with the radical breakthrough of introducing continuous rotary motion to human technology; and women’s querns (hand-operated grain mills) would be better known as bearing the world’s first cranks. Herbal and other remedies would no longer be classified as ‘domestic inventions’ when invented by women and as medicines or drugs when invented by men. Cosmetics would be classed as the chemical inventions they are, and built-in, multi-purpose furniture, moveable storage walls or room dividers, and the like would no longer be classed as architectural when invented by a man and as domestic when invented by a woman. The nineteenth century’s inventions inspired by the Dress Reform Movement could be classed not as wearing apparel but as health and medicinal inventions; and food-processing in all its aspects, including cooking, would fall under agriculture” (6). And again: “In prehistory, women’s early achievements in horticulture and agriculture, such as the hoe, the scratch plow, grafting, hand pollination, and early irrigation, would be pointed out. Architecture would grow out of weaving, chemistry out of cooking and perfumery, and metallurgy out of pottery” (6).

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8. Jane Sharp (fl. 1671), in a handbook written for midwives like herself, combined 40 years hands-on experience with medical teachings gleaned from French, Dutch, and Italian texts in an attempt to familiarize her audience with the latest trends in medical theory in the fields of anatomy, obstetrics, and gynecology, and to explain the relevance of medical theory in upgrading the skills and practice of contemporary midwives. The indomitable midwife Elizabeth Cellier (fl. 1680) enlisted her pen in support of midwives and against the powerful Chamberlen family and Royal College of Physicians in the polemics raging at the turn of the century concerning incorporation and licensing of midwives. Her vision of a college for midwives, coupled with a midwives’ guild and a hospital for foundling children, included various schemes (such as childcare payments for midwives engaged as lecturers and students at the college) which would be considered “progressive” today even by twentieth-century standards. (Smith 99–102)

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9. Pupils attending Bathsua Makin’s school during the early Restoration period learned philosophy and mathematics, geography, history, and astronomy, in addition to foreign languages, oratory, and logic. Makin placed a particular emphasis on instruction in names, natures, values, and the use of “Herbs, Shrubs, Trees, Mineral-Juices, Metals and Stones.” (Smith 104) In the spirit of the “new science,” Makin argued that “greater care ought to be had to know things, than to get words” (quoted in Brink 423).

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10. Katherine Ranelagh, Robert Boyle’s influential sister, provides just one example of this: “Her familiarity with the affairs of the Invisible College [precursor of the Royal Society] is shown by the letter of June 1647 which transmitted correspondence from Worsley to Boyle. While as a woman she may have been reticent about formal membership, there are numerous testimonies of her forceful participation in religious, political and philosophical debates among puritan intellectuals. Even as a young woman she was venerated by her family and acquaintances alike. In time her reputation became inseparably linked with that of her brother.... Accordingly her role [in the Invisible College] was much more than that of a patronness and clearing house for correspondence. She would certainly have exerted as much influence as a full member and her numerous associates would have provided a clientele for recruitment.” (Webster 62)

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11. Although Finch’s writings circulated in manuscript form among the Cambridge Platonists, and her theories were propagated by the likes of Francis van Helmont and Leibniz, only one of her works was ever published. Translated into Latin and edited by her friend van Helmont, it was first published posthumously (and anonymously) in Amsterdam; two years later it was retranslated into English and published in London as the work of an (again anonymous) English countess “learned beyond her sex.” Carolyn Merchant has written extensively on Finch and the significance of her scientific thought. Leibniz’s concept of the “monad” is derived from Finch’s work.

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12. In the field of botany, Elizabeth Blackwell made a major contribution in 1739 with the publication of her extensive A Curious Herbal, a work known for its beautiful and accurate illustrations, etched on copper and colored by herself. Her text, containing drawings and medical information on 500 different plants was well received by members of the medical profession and Royal Society, and was later republished in 1757–73 at Nuremberg. In recognition of her important contribution to the field of botany, the Blackwellia race of plants was named after her. However, despite the skill and learning involved in her work, Blackwell considered her text an “artistic” rather than “scientific” achievement, written for the sole purpose of securing her husband’s release from debtor’s prison. The written text accompanying her drawings was mostly copied from Joseph Miller’s Botanicum Officinale, and supplemented by information garnered during interviews with Isaac Rand, Curator of the Botanical Garden at Chelsea. See Reynolds, 185–187 and 435.

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13. Quoted in Reynolds, 166. Touring through England on horseback circa 1685–1703, the remarkable Celia Fiennes recorded her detailed observations in a travelogue (left in publishable form at her death) comprising an astounding assemblage of facts concerning English roads, bridges, markets, dwellings and grounds, churches, food prices and quality, dress, pictures, furniture, manners, customs, pageantry, processions, ceremonials, etc. In her preface “To the Reader,” Fiennes recommends to “the Ladies” such “observation ... within their own compass in each country to which they relate,” claiming that this study will provide subject matter for “conversation” and, more importantly, that it can also be used profitably to “studdy now to be serviceable to their neighbours especially the poor among whome they dwell, which would spare them the uneasye thoughts how to pass away tedious dayes, and tyme would not be a burden” (Reynolds 166). Fiennes’s focus on observation and reportage is, of course, well within the spirit of the “new science” and the Royal Society, but her suggestion that women harness their powers of observation in the service of their community was unique and quite radical in its implications. Notably, Fiennes’s text (Through England on a Side Saddle) was not published until 1888, but her early description of the encroaching tedium and emptiness of the lives of English “Ladies” was to be echoed in published texts throughout the eighteenth century.

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14. The forceps were invented earlier in the mid-1600s by the entrepreneurial Chamberlens, a father-and-son team of physicians, both fellows of the London College of Physicians. The son, Peter, schemed repeatedly (although to no avail) to establish an organization, under his own sponsorship and control, for the training and licensing of midwives.

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15. In his text, Wilkins presents selected teachings from the work of such “moderns” as Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Brahe, Campanella, and Bacon. The issues he chooses for emphasis and discussion (i.e., a “plurality” of worlds, the “agreement and similitude which there is betwixt our earth and the Moone,” etc.) form the beginning of a popularization tautologic which continues well into the next century.

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16. See in particular the opening epistle “To the Reader”: “It is my desire that by the occasion of this discourse, I may raise up some more active spirit to a search after other hidden and unknowne truthes.... Questionlesse there are many secret truths, which the ancients have passed over, that are yet left to make some of our age famous for their discovery. If by this occasion I may provoke any reader to an attempt of this nature, I shall then thinke my selfe happy, and this work successefull” (n. pag.).

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17. Sally Gearhart identifies this as an important component of scientific ideology: “‘To prove,’ in fact, seems to replace ‘to know’ in Western science, thus altering the task of discovery to one of justification, and thus revealing as well a self-serving component of the epistemology. ‘How do I know?’ or ‘What do I know?’ has become ‘How/what can I prove to others?’ for in the service of objectivity only others can replicate and assess.... Around that kernel of scientific justification clusters the host of embarrassing profiteering associations that attach themselves to scientific research and scholarship in a competitive capitalist system ...” (174).

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18. Boyle claims in “The Preface” to his text that in his book, he attempts to “deliver things rather historical than dogmatical,” although “I have added divers new speculative considerations and hints which perhaps may afford no despicable assistance towards the framing of a solid and comprehensive hypothesis” (662–663). These speculations occupy the first two parts of his work, and consistently, are drawn from curious occurrences that frequently beset us in daily life. Thus, Boyle hesitates over the lady who fell and injured her face, resulting in a “distemper of the eyes” for approximately six weeks whereby she saw rainbows and colors where before there were none; he notes the changes of color in velvet when it is stroked against the pile; he questions why waves of color appear suddenly in a field of ripe corn when it is blown by the wind; he comments regarding the changing color of the hair on a dog’s back when its hackles are raised; he contemplates how water, a transparent medium, becomes white when frothy; etc.

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19. In the preface to her text Natures Picture Drawn by Fancies Pencil To the Life, Cavendish writes: “Though some of these Stories be Romancical, I would not be thought to delight in Romances, having never read a whole one in my life; and if I did believe that these Tales should neither benefit the Life, nor please the Mind, more than what I have read in them, did either instruct or satisfie me; or that they could create Amorous thoughts in idle brains, as Romances do, I would never suffer them to be printed, and would make Blots instead of Letters” (n. pag.).

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20. Although many English feminists appeared to revel in the prospects of a boundless universe, the majority of women apparently were awed and alienated by an infinitely expanding world from which they clearly were excluded, as the woman’s “sphere” gradually contracted even further inward within the private space of the home. This general discomfort, on the part of women, with the concept of an infinity of worlds finds frequent reference within the popularization literature directed at a female audience. Fontenelle is no exception, and the following passage shows clearly a recognized difference in male and female responses to one such conceptualization of the “new science”: “But said she, I see the Universe to be so vast, tha t I lose my self, I know not where I am.... This confounds, afflicts, and frightens me. And for my part, said I, it pleases and rejoices me; when I believ’d the Universe to be nothing, but this great Azure Vault of the Heavens, wherein the Stars were placed, as it were so many golden Nails or Studs, the universe seem’d to me too little and strait; I fansied my self to be confin’d and oppress’d: But now when I am perswaded, that this Azure Vault has a greater depth and a vaster Extent, and that ’tis divided into a thousand different Tourbillions or Whirlings, I imagine I am at more Liberty, and breath a freer Air; and the Universe appears to me to be infinitely more Magnificent” (Discovery of New Worlds 133).

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