[Gender and Early-Modern Science Cluster] Introduction

[Gender and Early-Modern Science Cluster] Introduction Mary Terrall (bio) No one in the academy today can be unaware of the rising tide of gender studies. History of science has come rather late to paying serious attention to this trend. The following papers were written for a workshop at the William A. Clark Library in Los Angeles in February 1994, exploring the uses of gender analysis specifically for the history of early modern science. In organizing the workshop, I was inspired by Joan Scott’s seminal article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” in which she suggested ways of bringing gender into discussions of power, culture, and politics that seemed to have obvious implications for the study of science. 1 Gender, Scott points out, can serve a legitimizing function because of the ways it is used to signify difference. Gender relations have to do with power differentials, but often in more nuanced ways than simply opposing dominator to oppressed, or included to excluded. If we take Scott’s point that gender has been used to express any number of meanings, we can begin to investigate how science and its practitioners have been defined in gendered terms. Since the pioneering work of Carolyn Merchant and Evelyn Fox Keller, historians attentive to issues of gender in early modern science have taken one of two approaches. 2 Some efforts have been [End Page 135] made to identify contributions by women outside the canon, which has had the salutary effect of shifting definitions of what counts as doing science. The other approach has been to analyze the treatment of women’s bodies and minds as objects of scientific investigation. 3 Londa Schiebinger followed both these lines in her influential book The Mind Has No Sex? 4 Now that a certain amount of groundbreaking work has been done, I think we can cast our nets more widely, looking for evidence of how gendered categories work to define scientific practices as well as ideas. This means looking more generally at the complex meanings and values of gendered terms. As Ludmilla Jordanova has remarked, “Gender is emphatically not another way of talking about women.” 5 If women were largely absent from early modern science, gender was not. Defining the culture and practice of science as the province of men meant manipulating and refining concepts of masculinity and femininity. These concepts could also be used to subvert the status quo. For the historian there remains the tricky problem of how to recover definitions and uses of gender for local contexts. Retrieving gendered meanings from the historical record, especially when they are not transparently about sex, requires interpretation. In old- regime Europe, gender was clearly not the only hierarchy of power operating. Indeed, some historians have argued that difference in this period was marked predominantly by class, and that only with the French Revolution, with its rhetoric of universality, freedom, and equality, did gender become a primary marker of domination and submission. 6 But, however the modes of representing gender difference changed with the Revolution, those markers were certainly at work earlier, along with distinctions of class rank. The following papers examine cases from four institutional and national contexts. All the papers address issues associated with how science was practiced and defined in different settings. Part of this, [End Page 136] of course, concerns who practiced it, or who could practice it, and part concerns how practitioners justified and represented what they were doing. While avoiding the trap of using gender as a totalizing explanation for science, we attempt in various ways to show where and how gender operated in the development of scientific ideas, institutions, and practices. In the course of making knowledge about nature, how did individuals and institutions define their identities? And more particularly, how did gender enter into these definitions? Masculinity turns out to have been a key to scientific identity, not surprisingly, but not always in just the same way. Mario Biagioli shows, for example, that among the Lincei, brotherly love was linked to an ideal of undogmatic and freely acquired knowledge. This ideal required freedom from material constraints and physical distractions, especially the desire for women. In attempting to create this rarefied

Epistemology · Gender history · History of science · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Women in science · Gender Studies · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · Law · Philosophy

• The mind has no sex?

  Londa L Schiebinger, Londa Schiebinger•The mind has no sex?•1993

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• Nature's body

  Londa L Schiebinger, Londa Schiebinger•Nature's body•1993

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• Making Sex

  Thomas Walter Laqueur•Making Sex•1992

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• Gender and the Politics of History

  Joan Wallach Scott•Gender and the Politics of History•1988

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• The Death of Nature

  Open Access•Carolyn Merchant•The death of nature•1998

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• Gender and the historiography of science

  Open Access•Ludmilla Jordanova•The British Journal for the…•1993

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