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7 - Women of Natural Knowledge

from Part II - Personae and Sites of Natural Knowledge

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Londa Schiebinger
Edited by
Katharine Park  and
Lorraine Daston
Katharine Park
Affiliation:
Harvard University, Massachusetts
Lorraine Daston
Affiliation:
Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, Berlin
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Summary

“L’esprit n’a point de sexe” (“the mind has no sex”), declared François Poul-lain de la Barre (1647–1723) in 1673 in an effort to level what he considered “the most remarkable of all prejudices”: the inequality of the sexes. An ardent Cartesian, he set out to demonstrate that the mind – distinct from the body – has no sex. New attitudes toward women, such as those voiced by Poullain and others, raised questions about female participation in natural knowledge, itself a novel enterprise struggling for recognition within established hierarchies. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the relation of natural inquiry to church, king, households (grand and humble), princely coffers, and global and local marketplaces was in a state of flux. Important questions remained to be answered about natural knowledge – its ideals and methods, its proper limits, and who should mold them. The looser institutional organization and openings in attitudes allowed women to enter into natural inquiry through a number of informal arrangements and, in some cases, make important contributions to natural knowledge.

At a time when participation in natural inquiry was regulated to a large extent by social standing, men and women seeking to understand nature came primarily from two distinct social groups: learned elites and artisans (see Shapin, Chapter 6, this volume). The humanistic literati mixed in courtly circles, scientific academies, and salons, while skilled craftsmen and craftswomen fashioned telescopes and astrolabes, made maps, and refined techniques for capturing with exactitude the minutest details of natural phenomena. In addition to these two groups, European peasants, fishermen, women who gathered medicinal herbs, and others served as informants to naturalists.

Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge History of Science , pp. 192 - 205
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2006

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