"The "Ladies' Diary
Gender, Mathematics, and Civil Society in Early-Eighteenth-Century England
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3924568 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Shelley Costa (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2002 |
| Volume | 17 |
| Pages | 49-73 |
| Publication date | 2002-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Osiris (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0369-7827 • E-ISSN: 1933-8287 |
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1086/649359 |
| OpenAlex | W2029221161 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 7 |
The influential Ladies' Diary, or Woman's Almanack (1704-1840) owed its long affiliation with mathematics to the contributions of an active readership. This article describes how the Ladies' Diary's first correspondents-in addition to maintaining contemporary hierarchies of class and gender-adhered to rules of polite conversation in generating the periodical's scientific content. The Diary's early mathematical dialogue is analyzed in terms of a dualistic conception of civil society, one that encompasses both the activity of a print-based public sphere and the conventions of civility. This dualistic civil society, it is argued, was particularly suited to women's participation, and its degeneration in the second quarter of the eighteenth century served to masculinize the magazine's mathematical forum. The centrality of readers in forming-and in dismantling-the Ladies' Diary's civil society illustrates the danger of relying on top-down models of scientific dissemination in the study of polite science
Audience measurement · Centrality · Civil society · Civility · Conversation · Media studies · Politeness · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Quarter (Canadian coin · Social science · Sociology · Historical and Literary Studies · History · History and Theory of Mathematics · History of Science and Natural History · Law · Mathematics
| Unique citing works | 7 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,29 |
| Citation span | 2002 - 2023 (22) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |