Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T01:23:05.719Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

8 - The Philosopher’s Beard: Women and Gender in Science

from Part I - Science and Society

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Londa Schiebinger
Edited by
Roy Porter
Roy Porter
Affiliation:
Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, University College London
HTML view is not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button.

Summary

A woman who . . . engages in debates about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives.

Immanuel Kant, 1764

Kant’s sentiments reiterated those of the great Carl Linnaeus, who taught in his lectures given at the University of Uppsala in the 1740s that “God gave men beards for ornaments and to distinguish them from women.” In the eighteenth century the presence or absence of a beard not only drew a sharp line between men and women but also served to differentiate the varieties of men. Women, black men (to a certain extent), and especially men of the Americas simply lacked that masculine “badge of honor” – the philosopher’s beard. As Europe shifted from an estates society to a presumed democratic order, sexual characteristics took on new meaning in determining who would and who would not do science.

INSTITUTIONAL LANDSCAPES

The new sciences of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were fostered in a landscape – including universities, academies, princely courts, noble networks, and artisanal workshops – that was expansive enough to include a number of women. In the sustained negotiations over gender boundaries in early modern Europe, it was not at all obvious that women would be excluded from science.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 184 - 210
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2003

References

Suckow, Lorenz, Briefe an das schöne Geschlecht über verschiedene Gegenstände aus dem Reiche der Nature (Jena, 1770)Google Scholar
Abir-Am, Pnina and Outram, Dorinda (eds.), Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science 1789–1979 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987)Google Scholar
Adams, J. F. A., “Is Botany a Suitable Study for Young Men?” Science, 9 (1887)Google ScholarPubMed
Albinus, Bernard, Table of the skeleton and muscles of the human body (London, 1749)Google Scholar
Aristotle, , Generation of Animals, trans. Peck, A. L. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953)Google Scholar
Badinter, Elizabeth, Emilie, Emilie: L’Ambition féminine au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1983)Google Scholar
Batsch, August, Botanik für Frauenzimmer (Weimar, 1795)Google Scholar
Biagioli, Mario, “Knowledge, Freedom, and Brotherly Love: Homosociability and the Accademia dei Lincei,” Configurations, 2 (1995).Google Scholar
Bloch, Maurice and Bloch, Jean, “Women and the Dialectics of Nature in Eighteenth-Century French Thought,” in MacCormack, Carol P. and Strathern, Marilyn (eds.), Nature, Culture, and Gender (Cambridge University Press, 1980)Google Scholar
Blumenbach, Johann, The Natural Varieties of Mankind (1795), trans. Bendyshe, Thomas (1865; New York: Bergman, 1969).Google Scholar
Blunt, Wilfred, The Compleat Naturalist: A Life of Linnaeus (London: William Collins, 1971).Google Scholar
Broberg, Gunnar (ed.), Linnaeus: Progress and Prospects in Linnaean Research (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1980)Google Scholar
Broberg, , Homo Sapiens L.: Studier i Carl von Linnés naturuppfattning och människolära (The Swedish History of Science Society, 1975).Google Scholar
Burney, Charles, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1773), ed. Scholes, Percy (London: Oxford University Press, 1959).Google Scholar
Cadden, Joan, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1993)Google Scholar
Cavazza, Marta, “‘Dottrici’ e Lettrici dell’Università de Bologna nel settecento,” Annali di Storia delle Universitá Italiane, 1 (1997).Google Scholar
Ceranski, Beate, “Und Sie Fürchtet sich vor Niemandem”: Die Physikerin Laura Bassi, 1711–1778 (Frankfurt: Campus Verlag, 1996).Google Scholar
Clarke, Edward, Sex in Education: A Fair Chance for Girls (Boston, 1874).Google Scholar
Clegg, Arthur, “Craftsmen and the Origin of Science,” Science and Society, 43 (1979).Google Scholar
Clerselier, Claude, Lettres de Mr. Descartes (Paris, 1724), vol. 1, preface.Google Scholar
Curzon, H., The Universal Library: Or, Compleat Summary of Science (London, 1712), vol. 1.Google Scholar
Cuvier, Georges, “Extrait d’observations faits sur le cadavre d’une femme connue à; Paris et à; Londres sous le nom de Vénus Hottentotte,” Mémoires du muséum d’histoire naturelle, 3 (1817).Google Scholar
Davis, Natalie Zemon, Women on the Margins: Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
de la Barre, François Poullain, De l’Égalité des deux sexes: discours physique et moral (Paris, 1673).Google Scholar
de la Mettrie, Julien Offray, L’Homme plante (Potsdam, 1748).Google Scholar
de Pizan, Christine, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), trans. Richards, Earl Jeffrey (New York: Persea Books, 1982)Google Scholar
Dean-Jones, Lesley, Women’s Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Donnison, Jean, Midwives and Medical Men: A History of Inter-Professional Rivals and Women’s Rights (London: Heinemann, 1977)Google Scholar
Douglas, Aileen, “Popular Science and the Representation of Women: Fontenelle and After,” Eighteenth-Century Life, 28 (1994)Google Scholar
Douthwaite’s, JuliaExotic Women, Literary Heroines and Cultural Strategies in Ancien Regime France (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Easlea, Brian, Witch-Hunting, Magic, and the New Philosophy (Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980).Google Scholar
Fausto-Sterling, Anne, “Gender, Race, and Nation,” in Terry, Jennifer and Urla, Jacqueline (eds.), Deviant Bodies: Critical Perspectives on Difference in Science and Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Fee, Elizabeth, “Nineteenth-Century Craniology: The Study of the Female Skull,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 53 (1979)Google Scholar
Ferguson, James, Easy Introduction to Astronomy for Gentlemen and Ladies (London, 1768)Google Scholar
Fildes, Valerie, Wet Nursing: A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988)Google Scholar
Findlen, Paula, “Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy: The Strategies of Laura Bassi,” Isis, (1993)Google Scholar
Findlen, Paula, “A Forgotten Newtonian: Women and Science in the Italian Provinces,” in Clark, William, Golinski, Jan, and Schaffer, Simon (eds.), The Sciences in Enlightened Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Findlen, Paula, “Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy,” Configurations, 2 (1995).Google Scholar
Fraisse, Geneviève, Reason’s Muse: Sexual Difference and the Birth of Democracy, trans. Todd, Jane Marie (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).Google Scholar
Fromageot, Pierre, Cours d’études des jeunes demoiselles (Paris, 1772–5)Google Scholar
Galen, , On the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, trans. May, Margaret (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1968), vol. 2.Google Scholar
Gelbart, Nina Rattner, “Introduction,” in Fontenelle, Bernard Bovier, Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds, trans. Hargreaves, H. A. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990)Google Scholar
Gelbart, Nina Rattner, The King’s Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).Google Scholar
Gilibert, as “La Nourrice marâtre, ou Dissertation sur les suites funestes du nourrisage mercénaire,” Les Chef-d’oeuvres de Monsieur de Sauvages (Lyon, 1770), vol. 2.Google Scholar
Gillispie, Charles C., Science and Polity in France at the End of the Old Regime (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980)Google Scholar
Gilman, Sander, Sexuality: An Illustrated History (New York: Wiley, 1989)Google Scholar
Goodman, Dena, “Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Feminine and Philosophical Ambitions,” Eighteenth-Century Studies, 22 (1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gould, Stephen Jay, The Panda’s Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), chap. 14.Google Scholar
Grew, Nehemiah, The Anatomy of Plants (London, 1682).Google Scholar
Grove, Richard, Green Imperialism: Colonial Expansion, Tropical Island Edens, and the Origins of Environmentalism: 1600–1860 (Cambridge University Press, 1995).Google Scholar
Grundy, Isobel, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu: Comet of the Enlightenment (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).Google Scholar
Haraway, Donna, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium:FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™ (New York: Routledge, 1997).Google Scholar
Harris, John, Astronomical Dialogues Between a Gentleman and a Lady (London, 1719)Google Scholar
Harth, Erica, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992).Google Scholar
Hull, Gloria, Scott, Patricia Bell, and Smith, Barbara (eds.), All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies (Old Westbury, NY: The Feminist Press, 1982).Google Scholar
Hunt, Lynn, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).Google Scholar
Iltis, Carolyn, “Madame du Châtelet’s Metaphysics and Mechanics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 8 (1977)CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jones, Caroline and Galison, Peter (eds.), Picturing Science, Producing Art (New York: Routledge, 1998).Google Scholar
Jordanova, Ludmilla, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Kaiser, Helmut, Maria Sibylla Merian: Eine Biographie (Dusseldorf: Artemis & Winkler, 1997)Google Scholar
Keller, Evelyn Fox, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).Google Scholar
Kennedy, Hubert, “Maria Gaetana Agnesi,” in Grinstein, Louise and Campbell, Paul (eds.), Women of Mathematics: A Biobibliographic Sourcebook (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987)Google Scholar
Klose, CarlÜber den Einfluβ des Geschlects-Unterschiedes auf Ausbildung und Heilung von Krankheiten (Stendal, 1829).Google Scholar
Koerner, Lisbet (“Women and Utility in Enlightenment Science,” Configurations, 2 (1995).Google Scholar
Kors, Alan, D’Holboch’s Coterie (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976)Google Scholar
Landes, Joan, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar
Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
Leppentin, Christoph, Naturlehre für Frauenzimmer (Hamburg, 1781)Google Scholar
Lindberg, F. (1752), Amoenitates academicae (Erlangen, 1787), in vol. 3.Google Scholar
Linnaeus, Carl, Systema naturae (1735), ed. Engel-Ledeboer, M. S. J. and Engel, H. (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1964).Google Scholar
Linnaeus, , Praeludia sponsaliorum plantarum (1729; reprinted Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1908)Google Scholar
Lloyd, Genevieve, The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lonsdale, Kathleen and Stephenson, Marjory (Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 4 (1946)).Google Scholar
Lougee, Carolyn, Le Paradis des Femmes: Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth Century France (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976)Google Scholar
Maitland, Charles, Mr. Maitland’s Account of Inoculating the Small Pox (London, 1722)Google Scholar
Marland, Hilary (ed.), The Art of Midwifery: Early Modern Midwives in Europe (London: Routledge, 1993)Google Scholar
Mason, Joan, “The Admission of the First Women to the Royal Society of London,” Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, 46 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980)Google Scholar
Merian, Maria Sibylla, Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium (1705), ed. Deckert, Helmut (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1975)Google Scholar
Meyer’s, GeraldThe Scientific Lady in England: 1650–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955).Google Scholar
Moldenhauer, Eva and Michel, Karl ed., Werke, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969–71), vol. 7.Google Scholar
Molière, Jean-Baptiste, Les Femmes savantes (1672), Cordier, Jean (ed.) (Paris, 1959).Google Scholar
Moreau, Edmond Thomas, Quaestio medica: An praeter genitalia sexus inter se discrepent? (Paris, 1750).Google Scholar
Morton, A. G., History of Botanical Science: An Account of the Development of Botany from Ancient Times to the Present Day (New York: Academic Press, 1981).Google Scholar
Moscucci, Ornella, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929 (Cambridge University Press, 1990)Google Scholar
Noble, David, A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science (New York: Knopf, 1992)Google Scholar
Osen, Lynn, Women in Mathematics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974)Google Scholar
Park, Katharine and Nye, Robert, “Destiny Is Anatomy,” The New Republic, February 18, 1991Google Scholar
Pellegrin, Pierre, Aristotle’s Classification of Animals: Biology and the Conceptual Unity of the Aristotelian Corpus, trans. Preus, Anthony (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).Google Scholar
Pfister-Burkhalter, Margarete, Maria Sibylla Merian: Leben und Werk 1647–1717 (Basel: GS-Verlag, 1980)Google Scholar
Pliny, , Natural History, trans. Rackham, H. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), 12Google Scholar
Pycior, Helena, Slack, Nancy, and Abir-Am, Pnina (eds.), Creative Couples in Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996).Google Scholar
Rebiére, Alphonse, Les Femmes dans la science, 2nd ed. (Paris, 1897).Google Scholar
Remy, P., Catalogue d’une Collection de très belles Coquilles, Madrepores, Stalactiques … de Madame Bure (Paris, 1763).Google Scholar
Roger, Jacques, Les Sciences de la vie dans la pensée Française du XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1963)Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jacques, “Sébastien Vaillant: An Outstanding Eighteenth-Century Botanist,” Regnum Vegetabile, 71 (1970).Google Scholar
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Lettre à M d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), Brunel, L. (ed.) (Paris, 1896).Google Scholar
Roussel, Pierre, Système physique et moral de la femme, ou Tableau philosophique de la constitution, de l’état organique, du tempérament, des moeurs, & des fonctions propres au sexe (Paris, 1775).Google Scholar
Rücker, Elisabeth, “Maria Sibylla Merian,” Fränkische Lebensbilder, 1 (1967)Google Scholar
Rücker, , Maria Sibylla Merian (Nuremberg: Germanisches Nationalmuseum, 1967)Google Scholar
Rudolph, Emmanuel, “How It Developed That Botany Was the Science Thought Most Suitable for Victorian Young Ladies,” Children’s Literature, 2 (1973)Google Scholar
Russett, Cynthia, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Schiebinger, Londa, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).Google Scholar
Schiebinger, Londa, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), chaps. 4 and 5.Google Scholar
Shapin, Steven, A Social History of Truth, Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994)Google Scholar
Shteir, Ann, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England 1760–1860 (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 1996).Google Scholar
Smellie, William, “Botany,” Encyclopaedia Britannica (Edinburgh, 1771), vol. 1.Google Scholar
Steinberg, Christian, Naturlehre für Frauenzimmer (Breslau, 1796).Google Scholar
Stepan, Nancy Leys, “Race and Gender: The Role of Analogy in Science,” in Goldberg, David Theo (ed.), Anatomy of Racism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990)Google Scholar
Sutton, Geoffrey, Science for a Polite Society: Gender, Culture, and the Demonstration of Enlightenment (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995), chap. 5.Google Scholar
Terrall, Mary, “Emilie du Châtelet and the Gendering of Science,” History of Science, 33 (1995).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Terrall, Mary, “Gendered Spaces, Gendered Audiences: Inside and Outside the Paris Academy of Sciences,” Configurations, 2 (1995).Google Scholar
Thornton, Robert, A New Illustration of the Sexual System of Carolus von Linnaeus (London, 1799–1807).Google Scholar
von Soemmerring, Samuel Thomas, Über die körperliche Verschiedenheit des Negers vom Europäer (Frankfurt and Mainz, 1989).Google Scholar
Wade, Ira O., Voltaire and Madame du Châtelet: An Essay on the Intellectual Activity at Cirey (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941)Google Scholar
Weber, Jakob, Fragmente von der Physik für Frauenzimmer und Kinder (Tübingen, 1779)Google Scholar
Wettengl, Kurt (ed.), Maria Sibylla Merian, 1647–1717: Artist and Naturalist (Ostfildern: Hatje, 1998).Google Scholar
Wilson, Adrian, The Making of Man Midwifery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995)Google Scholar
Zilsel, Edgar, “The Sociological Roots of Science,” American Journal of Sociology, 47 (1942)CrossRefGoogle Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×