Experimental Women: Reclaiming Women's Scientific Work in the Long Eighteenth Century.
Sagal, Anna.
2015
-
Abstract: "Experimental Women" argues that the relationship between women and
science in the eighteenth-century has long been misread as one of imitation: both
contemporary and modern observers have assumed that women participated in the major
scientific developments of the age only peripherally - as wives, sisters, and companions of
the great men about whom history texts are written, or as ... read moreaspiring amateurs whose
productions are derivative at best. This project challenges these outdated premises by
focusing on areas of cultural and literary production by women that have not conventionally
been considered part of a unified scientific discourse: utopian fictions, staged plays,
women's periodicals, epistolary narratives, botanical artworks, and natural science
craftwork. By actively engaging with, and often critiquing or subverting methodological
assumptions made by Royal Society scientists - assumptions such as the significance of
technology like microscopes or the authority of organizing systems like Linnaean taxonomy -
the women featured in this project represent a substantial tradition of rarely-recognized
dissenting scientific voices. The project thus traces a distinct, often alternatively
gendered discourse of science that intersected with, complemented, and ultimately reworked
the dominant discourse of scientific progress as outlined by the Royal Society of London.
In rethinking the types of production that can be understood as scientific work through the
intersection of literary studies and history of science, the project seeks to rediscover
ways in which women may have gained access to an intellectual arena long assumed to be
limited.
Thesis (Ph.D.)--Tufts University, 2015.
Submitted to the Dept. of English.
Advisor: Andrea Haslander.
Committee: Kevin Dunn, Carol Flynn, and Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace.
Keywords: Literature, Women's studies, and History of science.read less - ID:
- 2b88qq379
- Component ID:
- tufts:21521
- To Cite:
- TARC Citation Guide EndNote
