Patricia Fara, Pandora’s Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Englightenment (London: Pimlico, 2004).

Notes

• 16 – “Because experimental natural philosophy wa a relatively new activity, men who worked at home not only relied on their womenfolk’s cooperation, but also had to negotiate ways of integrating scientific projects within the daily household routine.”
• 19 – “In contrast, women have not been written out of the history of science: they have never been written in. This neglect is part of the large-scale omission of women from the historical record, but there is no simple way of rectifying the situation. Feminists have chosen several different routes to restore these vanished women to visibility.”
• 20 – “But celebrating people just because they are women suggests that they are bound together by some essential quality of womanhood which transcends the barriers of time and culture.”
• “Too much sympathy for these neglected women can be counterproductive. Emphasising the difficulties faced by intelligent women can convert them into self-sacrificial martyrs. In well-intentioned pastiches of the past, scientific women emerge as cardboard cutouts — the selfless helpmate, the source of inspiration, the dedicated assistant who sacrifices everything for the sake of her man and the cause of science. On the other hand, over-compensation — glorifying women as lone pioneers, as unrecognised geniuses  — also has its drawbacks. Despite having to struggle against huge disadvantages, such arguments run, some women did contribute to scientific progress.”
• 20-21 – “There is no point in distorting women’s importance by exaggerating their activities. Singling women out as geniuses is as misleading as suppressing their existence. Standard caricatures of women — the docile assistant, the doting but ignorant source of inspiration — are certainly demeaning descriptions. But substituting yet another stereotype — the lonely, unappreciated pioneer — gets no nearer to understanding women’s status in science and the lives they led. Making women from the past into brilliant proto-scientists is just creating a female version of solitary male geniuses. More realistic model are needed for both the sexes.”
• 21 – “Trying to squeeze women into conventional stereotypes makes it impossible to reconstruct how they felt about their own lives, what they themselves regarded as their significant achievements. Part of the problem is finding an appropriate style for telling women’s lives.”

• “Old-fashioned biographical conventions force women’s lives to follow male scripts by emphasising publicly acclaimed successes, rather than inner feelings and personal relationships.”

• 22 – “A better way of highlighting the significance of women in science is to tackle conventional history head-on and rewrite it. Science’s history is about far more than equations, instruments and great men — it is about understanding how a huge range of practical as well as scholarly activities became the foundations of our scientific and technological society. Women played vital roles in that transformation.”

• “They rewrote European history, placing the birth of modern society not in the artistic Renaissance, ut in a seventeenth-century Scientific Revolution . . .. For these scientific historians, science meant ideas: they were interested in abstract theories about gravity and the structure of the universe. They divorced science from daily events and world affairs, and studied the scholarly debates between leisured academics and clerics. Concentrating on physics and astronomy, they told science as an epic success story, a triumphant march towards incontrovertible truth led by great heroes such as Galileo, Kepler, and Newton.”
• 24 – “Another problem with heroic histories is that they isolate scientific achievements from the rest of society. As well as intellectual shifts, vast social tranformations were also crucial for establishing the foundations of modern science. Scientific knowledge now dominates popular media as well as educational syllabuses, but this has only happened because teachers, editors, museum curators, translators and illustrators enabled other people to learn about new results and theories. Without them, science would have remained an esoteric scholarly pursuit, reserved for the privileged few. Many of these forgotten people were women.”
• 37 – “Cavendish condemned the ‘strange Conceits’ of men, accusing them of reducing vital nature to a lifeless object of study, ‘a dull, inanimate, senseless and irrational body’.”
• 41-42 – “English Baconianism suited men who aimed to govern. ‘For knowledge itself is power,’ Bacon had declared, a memorable slogan that was often repeated during the following centuries. For the scientific programme that he launched, knowledge meant not only power over nature, but also power over people — including aristocrats exploiting their workers, England ruling her colonies, and men dominating women. . . . The new experimental philosophy at the Royal Society was to be an agent of civilization that would help England to rule over an intellectual empire. And it was also a specifically male enterprise, one that would perpetuate the dominion men enjoyed over women and create an intrinsically masculine form of science.”
• 53-4 – “The foundations of modern science were not built by male geniuses labouring in isolation. One way of thinking about it is to imagine each of these three mend lying at the center of a circle of contacts. Like intersecting ripples on the surface of a pond, their lives interlocked with each other because they had many acquaintances in common. But who is important depends on whose viewpoint you adopt — and each and every one of these acquaintances regarded themselves as sitting at the hub of their own circle. Historians choose which centre to prioritise, which network of contacts to emphasise, which interconnections are too remote to be significant. By concentrating on different links, they can present a different version of the past.”
• 120 – “. . . Jane Dee does not seem herself to have been involved in experimental research. Like many other wives, her existence is generally ignored. Yet John Dee’s livelihood, the new type of scientific career he was forging depended on her cooperation. The integration of science within society, and the upheavals in domestic life that this entailed, only became possible because of these silent partners. So another way of telling John Dee’s story is to place more emphasis on his wife Jane.”
• 149-150 – “Feminists have rewritten Caroline Herschel’s story to underline her independent achievements and the contributions she made towards breaking down prejudice against scientific women. But when does a shift of emphasis become an exaggeration, a distortion? Scientific women have been concealed for so long that it’s very tempting to overstate the case and convert them into unsung heroines. Retelling women’s stories to make them conform with modern ideals is historically insensitive; moreover, it is not very helpful for understanding how the past has led to the present.”
• 235-6 – “Pandora’s Breeches might qualify as one of these compilations, but it has been written with different ends in view. Rather than creating new female heroines, it has undermined conventional views of the past by attacking the very concept of heroism in science. This book has presented new interpretations of scientific men as well as of scientific women. We need to rewrite science’s past by eliminating romanticised tales of lone geniuses and their glorious discoveries. Science is a collaborative project whose successes — and failures — can only be appreciated by understanding how scientific technology has permeated the whole of society. In revised versions of science’s past, women have vital roles to play. Their contributions were often different from men’s, but that does not mean that they were less important.”
• 236 – “Like science itself, historical research is also a cooperative endeavour. Pandora’s Breeches is the collection of one particular author who set up her own criteria to determine who should enter her cabinet and be put on show. She picked an international range of examples who would illustrate various ways in which women have contributed to the growth of science. There are many more stories to be told, many other forgotten scientific workers of the past — men as well as women — waiting to be revealed and reappraised. Anyone who reinterprets the past need never contemplate the collector’s nightmare of a completed set.”