In Our Time - Women and Enlightenment Science

Episode Date: November 4, 2010

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the role played by women in Enlightenment science. During the eighteenth century the opportunities for women to gain a knowledge of science were minimal. Universities and other institutions devoted to research were the preserve of men. Yet many important contributions to the science of the Enlightenment were made by women. These ranged from major breakthroughs like those of the British astronomer Caroline Herschel, the first woman to discover a comet, to important translations of scientific literature such as Emilie du Chatelet's French version of Newton's Principia - and all social classes were involved, from the aristocratic amateur botanists to the women artisans who worked in London's workshops manufacturing scientific instruments. The image above, of Emilie du Chatelet, is attributed to Maurice Quentin de La Tour.WithPatricia Fara Senior Tutor at Clare College, University of CambridgeKaren O'Brien Professor of English at the University of WarwickJudith Hawley Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of LondonProducer: Thomas Morris.

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For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk, forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, in 1762, one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment of the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, The educational women should always be relative to that of men, to please, to be useful to us, to make us love, love and esteem them, to educate us when young, to take care of us when grown up, to advise

and console us, to render our lives easy and agreeable. These are the duties of women at all times and what they should be taught in their infancy. Such dismissive attitudes to female education were widespread in Europe throughout the 17th and 18th century. This was an age which saw the emergence of modern scientific disciplines and a revolution in our understanding of the universe and our place within it. However, despite the disadvantages they feel, faced, a number of women made important contributions to scientific progress in the Enlightenment, in fields including astronomy, chemistry, medicine and botany achievements which hold their place today. With me to discuss the role played by women in Enlightenment Science of Patricia Farah,

senior tutor of Clare College, University of Cambridge, Judith Hawley, Professor of 18th Century Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, and Karen O'Brien, Professor of English at the University of Warwick. Karen O'Brien, let's start off by defining what we mean by the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was a movement of ideas, principally focused in Europe and in North America, which ran roughly from the late 17th century to the end of the 18th century. In Europe and North America.

And it was concerned with the idea of free intellectual inquiry without direct interference from politics or religion. And it drew inspiration from some of the developments in science in the 17th century, developments that were concerned with the application of experimental or inductive methods to phenomena and drawing conclusions about those and then applying those conclusions. And it had, I think, what we could say as a dual focus. One was on the notion of individual rational autonomy and the other was on the focus on the potential for social progress. In relation to rational autonomy, the Enlightenment drew upon the work of Descartes and the idea that the mind was in some way

separate from the body and therefore wasn't constrained by physical attributes and this could be applied in the gender arena to the idea that the mind maybe had no sex and had an equal right of access to the truth also upon the ideas of the philosopher john locke the idea that we learn through our senses about what the world is like and and we construct rational ideas by generalizing you come as a blank slate and you can construct rational generalizations from your experience and then in relation to collective social life, the Enlightenment comes at the end of a period of immense religious conflict and it asks what are the potential sources of civilised social disagreement and agreement? How can we have a public conversation where the validity of arguments rather

than social statuses determine what counts as truth? And then how can we apply those ideas to all kinds of aren't, economics, politics, social development and even the arts? We're talking about a small group of people, aren't we really, in North America, particularly in Europe, in many different countries in Europe. They had a great effect on each other. What effect did they have on what anybody could call the general population?

I think they had a great effect because the Enlightenment was very concerned with its own conditions of mediation, which is to say that part of the Enlightenment was to be interested in the possibilities for print, for publishing encyclopedias and therefore reaching potentially a slightly wider, middle class audience for dissemination.

via societies through institutions and ultimately through processes of professionalisation. So the Enlightenment was concerned with its own implementation and with making practical improvements in everyday life. We're concentrating on the scientific Enlightenment in this programme. They weren't enlightened at all about women, were they? We've just heard from Rousseau. We have heard from Rousseau, but I think it's important to understand that in a way Rousseau is writing against the grain of an emerging orthodoxy, which actually says that educated women are a good idea. There are a lot of right-thinking people, particularly in elite circles, who will make that case. very actively. For many years, people had said that learned women were possible and they had

celebrated learning women since medieval times. But in the 18th century, this becomes associated with the discourse of patriotism. So it's a patriotic boast in many countries to say that we have a number of learned women, women professors, women intellectuals in our culture. Well, a number of women will come to that. There are men, two professors in Europe. Yes, yes. But women writers, women writers, translators. Women writers, translators. Very few. I mean, we're talking about, you're pushing it. I mean, we're talking about very very, very few. I mean, to be, well, we're kind of comfortable about later, about 25 to 10, but it is there. Patricia Farrah, can we just talk about the impact on the intellectual landscape of this scientific enlightenment?

Bringing people that we know quite a lot about, bringing Newton, for instance, and so on. Was this, again, was this a small group foraging away which eventually the pebble in the pond would just slowly ripple out, or did it have a big splash from the beginning? I think it varied in different types of science, taking, specifically the example of Newton, he famously said that he didn't write for little smatterers in mathematics, and he wasn't very interested in spreading his ideas at all. And it was only really after he died that there was a big wave of popularization, and other people interpreted Newton's ideas and spread them to the rest of the population. In terms of other sciences, some of them were very popular, and the big example, obviously, is electricity.

Static electricity was discovered at the beginning of the 18th century, and by the middle of the 18th century, and by the middle of the 18th century, there were shows and performances all over the place and women were paying for electrical performers to come and enliven their parties. And people thought that electricity could be useful. They thought they could use it for medicine, for example. They used to give people massive electric shocks

to cure them of diseases. And I think that's another very, very important characteristic of 18th century science. Firstly, that it was very spectacular, it was entertaining. But secondly, it was. came to be seen to be very useful. And the reason that that's why it's so important is because it initiates an alliance between scientific research, the government and major industries such as the Navy and the Industrial

Revolution that was starting in the north. And this idea of the interlinks between what people were doing in terms of research into the world and how it could benefit ordinary people was absolutely crucial because at this stage the government was not putting money into science and of course as we know now the government's pouring huge amounts of money into science when you talked about electricity it's at a wonderful cusp isn't it because these are entertainment shows it's like the best magician in the world turning up in your stately home as well as doing something useful there was this combination of it being magical and fantastic as well as being useful it was useful but it was also a complete mystery in fact when the first major electric

instrument was discovered, something called the Leyden Jar, which was discovered in Holland, invented in Holland. It completely overturned all the theoretical ideas about electricity and it's an excellent example of how new innovation comes from instruments rather than from people sitting in

their studies with a piece of paper and thinking deeply. Can you tell us about the Leyden jar? The Leyden jar is allegedly, was discovered accidentally when the man who discovered it around Wushenbrook nearly killed himself. It's a glass jar and it has water and it's surrounded by lead. The reason it's important is because you could store static electricity

and you could carry it from one place to another. And Mushanbrook wrote a letter to Paris in which he said, I've discovered this marvellous new invention. Now, whatever you do, you should never repeat it because you might kill yourself. And then he gave very detailed instructions on how to do it. So, of course, within a few weeks, everybody in Paris was doing it. They're dead. Well, some people unfortunately did die.

There was a marvellous account by a man who was a doctor, an English man, and he went over there and he got this terrible shot, and he got an awful headache, and he felt ill for days. So just to make sure that it really worked, he did the same thing to his wife and watched her go through exactly the same experience. So we have this drive, a science-driven drive, really, mainly, well, entirely, almost entirely by man.

where were these innovations taking place? What sort of institutions, what locations? Well, where they weren't taking place was the universities, in England, at any case. The two universities, Oxford and Cambridge. Obviously, someone like Isaac Newton was working at Cambridge, but in terms of things like electricity, that was initiated by the Royal Society,

the experimental group based in London. Someone like Joseph Priestley, for example, very famous for his discovery of the gas we now call oxygen, was working in the north of England. There was an increasing amount of interest in science in the north towards the end of the 18th century. Scientific research basically, mostly took place inside people's homes. And that's one of the very important ways in which women became involved

because they are often cooperated with their husbands, their brothers, their fathers, and although their contributions are often unrecorded, it seems quite clear that when you've got a domestic activity, the women do become involved. And as you said earlier about the laden jar, it was rather thing-driven because there had been a great growth in London, was a world centre of the making of exact instruments, microscopes, telescopes, and people with a bit of money would buy them and take them home

and more than play around with them, use them for studies. Study became a leisure activity. It did, and you just mentioned money. I think it's very easy to forget about that in terms of, changes, scientific changes, because we've all been schooled to think that people study science for the love of knowledge. But of course, particularly in England in the 18th century, where the situation was rather different from the situation in France, in England, unless you happen to be born into a very wealthy family, you had to earn your living. And this was a century in which it became respectable for gentlemen to earn their living through doing scientific research,

through making scientific instruments and selling them. because before that it was really not an acceptable thing for gentlemen to work with their hands. That was something that servants and labourers did. Judith Hawley, what access did women have to this sort of knowledge at that time? Well, there's no mass education, of course, during the 18th century, so plenty of people had no access to education at all. Women's access to education, and specifically to modern scientific developments, depended very much on class and personal circumstances.

It depended on whether you had a father, husband, brother, who was willing to encourage you. And women had a lot of access to new developments if they were born into gentry or noble families. Because most gentlemen had a library. The library might include books, scientific instruments, the type that Patricia has been mentioning. And also collections of things. You talked about the thing-driven nature, things, collections of curiosity and natural history. country houses were also sites of important conversations and debates. A lot of the intellectual activity was not carried on in formal seminars organized by an institution,

but informal arrangements of friends, networks, of patronage and so on. And women often had access to these, often as hosts, hostesses to a nobleman's dinner party. It might be an extended. It wouldn't just be a one-off dinner. Somebody, you know, Hobbs might come and live with you for six months or something like that. And then you'd have a lot of conversations with this person. And then moving down the social scale, you have the daughters of clergymen, who often were quite well-educated in the dissenting tradition, the low church tradition.

Particularly in that tradition. Where both the advancement of women and the advancement of science went along hand in hand. So women were very involved with that. And then if we think lower down the social scale, women working in the trades, in Germany, in the guild tradition in particular, but also in major cities where women were working in brewing, baking, printing. These involve a lot of technical knowledge. Often also the development of new techniques. Sarah Wedgwood was experimenting on things which then could be used in Wedgwood's pottery. Very often widows take over their husband's trades. And we have these names.

still in companies, Verve Clico, I'm sure I've only a firm, close to your own interests and heart. I don't like Champagne. You don't, oh no, what are you missing? I'm not being accused of liking Verklico. The widow Clico took over her husband's firm on her death and aging of life and invented all sorts of fantastic techniques which improved champagne making. So the women are, as it were, infiltrating almost as a byproduct. As part of society, you mentioned elites

and I think in some ways there is a sense that there is only a handful of people. If we think of the history of science in terms of big men, there is only going to be a handful of important figures. But if we think in terms of scientific knowledge as something which is more widely diffused, if we think of the Enlightenment as being a social project where it's not just either big men with big ideas

or spectacles and shows, but a general attempt to approach the problems of society rationally and women are part of society increasingly important as moral and intellectual beings, then this sort of knowledge is much more widely diffused. But on the whole, we're talking about women in the 18th century, later and earlier, coming in through the domestic route. Yes, yes. As you said earlier on, it's fathers, husbands, brothers, inside the home.

And wonderful coincidence that a lot of it did happen inside the home. So there's a congruence there, we can. which fills a gap, which was a glaring gap. Karen O'Brien, let's take one or two individuals. Medicine provides a very good example in Lady Mary Wadley, Montague. Yes, she was an English aristocratic woman of great intellectual brilliance, and she had the good fortune to go with her husband to the Court of the Ottoman Empire in Constantinople in the very early 18th century, where she wrote some dazzling letters about her experiences there,

including her observation that in Turkish society, children were routinely vaccinated, or not vaccinated, inoculated against the smallpox. And she decided to have her own son inoculated while she was out there. Publicly. Publicly. And then she returned to England where there was an outbreak of smallpox. And she eventually took the decision that she would very publicly have her daughter inoculated in the presence of a physician and of a number of professional physicians

from the Royal College of Physicians. So this becomes a kind of public event. And she, I think, in this whole story, is something like a prototype of an Enlightenment scientist, someone who observes something that works, tests it, scales it up because then the whole project of inoculation gets taken up by all her friends. And crucially, it gets taken up by the Princess of Wales, Caroline, who decides to test out the process on six convicted criminals from Newgate and tells them that if they survive. Not her children. Not her children. First of all, she does the criminals. and they survive so they get their pardon, so it works out well for them,

and then Princess Caroline does her own children. And then publicised, I think that's the other part of the Enlightenment project, which is that Lady Mary writes newspaper articles. She explains that the kind of knowledge that she's bringing is somewhat in conflict with the sort of restrictive practices of doctors, and doctors have got to change their ways, and they mustn't treat diseases so harshly, and they must learn from a kind of non-European medicine.

So I think it's another feature of what she does, which is that willingness to engage in what we would call knowledge transfer, to take practices that have been working for centuries outside Europe, in China, India, the Ottoman Empire, and bring them into Western Europe without really understanding the pathology of why these things work. Patricia Farrell, there's been talk of the domestic access, and a good example is the wife of the brilliant French chemist Antoine Lavoisier.

Can you just say a few words about him and then talk about his wife? Well, she, to start with her, is a mind. Marvellous woman because they got married when she was only 13 years old. And the first thing she did was to learn English so that she could translate between England and France, the two main countries where chemical research was taking place. The reason that Lavoisier nowadays is seen quite often as the founder of modern chemistry is he wrote a textbook at the time of the French Revolution, and he was himself guillotined, which was hailed as a revolutionary textbook. and that's the textbook in which he introduced the modern symbols and equations that we're using chemistry now.

He also, and this is important for her, he insisted on very, very accurate measurements made with very beautifully crafted instruments. And there's a marvellous double portrait of them in the Metropolitan in New York, where he is dominating the picture with all his books and his instruments, and she is standing there looking incredibly glamorous. She's obviously spent hours in the beauty parlour. You would have no idea that in reality, we know from pictures that she drew herself, she was working in the laboratory with Lavoisier.

There's drawings of her, sitting, taking measurements, and when you look at his notebooks, they're absolutely full of her handwriting. It's clear that she was, as it were, the laboratory manager. And when you look at his textbooks, there's 12 very, very detailed diagrams in his main book, which shows the instruments in fine details. So wherever you are in the world, you can take Levoisier's book and you can

recreate the instruments and you can repeat his experiments exactly as he did them himself. And it was Marie LeVoisier who did all those drawings and they're all still in existence at Cornell. I'll see if Padilla to look at. Can I ask you two questions? Was, did he acknowledge, first of all, how do you now assess her contribution to his extraordinarily important work and A and B was it in any way acknowledged at the time? She was acknowledged because visitors like Franklin Benjamin Franklin met her and realised how important she was in his work

I think in France as compared with England there was a greater recognition of women's intellectual abilities and there was an acknowledgement that men and women, intellectual men and women often did work in pairs. So it was very much a team effort. She went with him when he used to travel around the country, looking at gunpowder factories, introducing reforms in his farm. She was very much working with him, but she didn't have a university education.

She wasn't formally recognized in his books. But on the other hand, it was rather like French women used to run intellectual salons that men like Diderot or Rousse attended. Intellectual academic women were given far more. tribute, I think, in France than they were in England. But you just said she wasn't. She wasn't what? She wasn't acknowledged in his books.

She wasn't acknowledged in his books, no. But there's no, if you look at the title page, there is no recognition that she was there. But if you read letters and accounts of what other visitors to the family, they do pay tribute to her. And she lived a long time after he did, and she ran a salon of her own where this double portrait was hanging in her. her in the salon and people came every week to discuss the latest scientific research until she was really quite elderly. But would it be true?

Now move on. I'm interested in because the relationship between them does seem to me that she was a sort of fetcher and carrier and he was the real chap who got on with it and yet what you described is something different but that doesn't appear in the book. She was far more important than the fetcher and carrier. I mean she, for example, she translated as we would get if we looked at his books, we would

get no impression that she'd been there at all. And that is... We're relying on observations from visitors which is something different, isn't it? But that is so true of so many of the women. We just have scattered scraps of evidence. Sure. And you have to, you can infer from that. You can see that these women's contributions have all been concealed, but they are there.

Yeah. Julius Hawley had more to come than that, isn't there? Julius Halley, astronomy seems to have been relatively common field. Yes. Why was that? And can you give us a couple of examples? I wonder whether women are associated with astronomy because it's a subject. that depends a great deal on a massive observation. You need hundreds and hundreds of repeated observations

which have to be recorded very, very carefully. And I wonder if women were thought to be suitable for that because they were more used to patients and endurance and possibly also thought to be more skilled at careful observation and record-keeping. But before you go on a more foundation level, telescopes were bought by wealthy people to use at home. Yes.

And at home, you had wives, daughters, sisters and so on. The observatories were on your roof. So they have access to the technology. And astronomy needs more than one person just to do it. So starting from Blair, where we go. So you need a team in order to make and record observations. So the household is often where these things took place. But it does seem as if there were, I can think of two examples of young women

who specifically tried to marry older astronomers in order to have access to a kind of career. Married him for his telescope. Exactly. Elizabetha Havelius was 16, I think, when she married the elderly Havelius. And there's an extraordinary illustration, frontispiece to a book that he produced. Unlike Patricia's example, he clearly acknowledged her help in writing and in print. And also in the illustration, the frontispiece of this book has a picture of this wrinkly old man. with an enormous, not a telescope, but a sextant, a vast sextant, about 10, 15 feet in a sort of fraction of a circle,

and a beautiful woman in sort of floaty silk holding up one end of it. And we know that that's her. It looks like an allegorical image of an elderly magus figure and a kind of adastra sort of feminine abstraction, but we know that she helped him, and we also know that she likes silk clothes, when Edmund Halley came to visit and spent quite a long time in the household working with the two of them, she commissioned him to get some silk dresses for her when he went back to London. And Halley was obviously very glamorous because of the great comet that he had seen, and I can't say discovered, but recorded.

Just tell us a bit more what Elizabeth Havilius and perhaps Margaret Flamstey did. Yes. Yes. Both of these women, Margaret Flamperty, had also married the first Estabreux, the Greenwich Royal, Observatory, also a much younger woman. They both survived their husbands and they both arranged to have compiled and published their most important works. So there's a sense of them continuing their husband's legacy. In the case of Hovellius, she found it very difficult and didn't get, she had support from Leibniz, but didn't manage to build a successful career after it. But the case of Margaret Flamsteed, she got pretty fulsome acknowledgement that she had been instrumental

both in the recording of this information and in the publication. He was the first astronomer royal and a fierce man, a fierce down the river opponent to Newton. And fitting in some ways with your opening quotation from Rousseau, she was quite necessary to soften his rough edges and to negotiate between him and the many complex individuals and structures he had to exist in. But to be bit of danding about it, do we have stuff from those two women you've talked about on paper which says, yes, this was their contribution. We don't have anywhere a kind of a listing with initials by it saying she did this and I did that.

But both Hervilius and I think Flamstey too recorded, certainly Havillius fulsomely acknowledged the contribution his wife made to his researchers during his lifetime. Patricia Fara, we come to Caroline Herschel, whose contribution was celebrated. She was the sister of William Herschel. They both came from Hannah, very broader, which he was talking about her, when she was 22 and she worked with him for the rest of his life and then she went on to do it. Can you tell us something about her and her contribution?

It's a very different story from the ones that Judith was just telling. She was his sister. She came over to England because she really wanted to be an opera singer and he was very musical as well and then he started becoming obsessed with astronomy. So she was forced to give up her operatic career and work with him and she was very much his partner, as Judith said, you need at least two people

to make an observation. And Herschel built the giant telescopes in his garden and she was responsible for superintending all the workers and getting these telescopes. And that's observed by some French persons at the time, isn't it?

That's observed. Her work in the garden Yes, a French visitor came around and there's this very elaborate mechanism where he would sit at the top of the telescope and she would take the recording. There's also So after you take the initial measurement, there's a lot of data processing, in effect, to be done, a lot of recalculating. And presumably while William Herschel was in bed the next day, Caroline Herschel was slogging away, getting all the mathematical calculations completed.

And she compiled massive star catalogues both during Herschel's life and after his life. In a way, collecting observations of the stars is rather like collecting plants. It's a natural history of the heavens. if you like, is what the Herschel brother and sister were engaged in. Can you enumerate her specific contributions? Well, what she's celebrated for is being the first woman to discover a comet. And that's because to keep her quiet, Herschel gave her a very little telescope while he played with his great big telescope.

And she had to systematically sweep back backwards and forwards over the skies. It's called a comet sweeper. And she did observe the first woman's comet. But personally, I don't think that's an incredibly exciting contribution. There's lots and lots of comments than someone would have observed it eventually. Why I think she's far more important is that she worked with him. He's very famous for his work on nebulae, which led to a lot of scientific theories later in the 19th century. And she compiled this star catalogue, which did become used later.

And personally, I think that's a far greater contribution than discovering a comet. Karen O'Brien, there was one university in Europe that did only one, not as far as I know, anyway, did admit women, and that was Bologna. Why was it only Bologna? It's an interesting story because you were talking earlier about how rare a phenomenon this is, and we've been talking a great deal about women's sort of informal and unacknowledged contributions to science, but obviously institutional recognition, institutional position is very important.

Eventually, Caroline Herschel, for example, was admitted to the Royal Astronomical Society, but there had been a long tradition, funnily enough, in the Italian states of allowing women to take degrees, going back to the 17th century. So this is the prelude to my story, and I understand that Rosalind Franklin herself in this country was not allowed to take her degree yet in the 17th century, Italian women did just that.

And in the 1730s, the University of Bologna admitted a physicist called Laura Bassi to be a university teacher. She got a doctorate by examination, and she was admitted to the Bologna Academy of Sampi. sciences and she became for many, many years, a university teacher and she actually published papers on physics, on electromagnetism, she bought a lightning rod, she taught, she conducted experiments. And this was a very unusual phenomenon. It's hard to explain except to say that

the civic authorities, the local cardinal archbishop, who subsequently became Pope, were very interested in raising the prestige of their city. It had once been a great university, they wanted to restore its grandeur. And it's interesting in this period that having a woman, Professor seems to be part of that story. And it worked because Lauerabasi became a feature on the grand tour. People used to come and visit her and marvel at this woman who was not from an aristocratic background, apparently quite modest, had children, her husband,

who managed to conduct a university career. And she had successes. After her, there was another professor who was also a mathematician who published a book on differential calculus. So there was quite a venerable tradition in Italy, and I hope I think it was an inspiration to many women, at least, in the Italian area. Judith Hawley, publication and translation has always been, well, since it's been an important part of scientific innovation.

There was one French caller, Emily Ducatelle, who had a big influence. She was with Voltaire, wasn't she? With Votterre, yes. She was his mistress. I think with Voltaire is probably a better way of putting it than Voltaire's mistress. Because what Vultes' mistress, it implies that she's, you know, his bit of skirt or sort of fancy woman or something. But they worked very much with each other.

Voltaire was her lover. Voltaire was her lover, is it? So we got that, so can we talk about what she did? What she did. She had a house in Ciree, where she took Voltaire in when he was in trouble with the authorities, spent a long time setting it up to that the two of them could work separately. She worked on her own original science, but her most important contribution to the future of science is her translation of Newton's Principia,

this important Latin text, which laid the foundations for the mixed-months. mathematical method for the understanding of gravity and how the world works. Can you tell us in a bit of detail what she did to that? Because it was remarked she didn't just sit down and bash up a translation, did she? That's right. Much bigger enterprise. It's a much bigger enterprise. It's not quite an original work of science, but she is in dialogue with Newton.

She works to translate his often complex mathematical equations into prose or into algebra. she tests a lot of his calculations, checks that he got his sums right. She questioned some of his findings. And another thing that she did, which seems to have been important for a number of women in this period, she tried to synthesise the three competing great strands in intellectual life at this point, the thinking of Descartes, Leibniz, and Newton. And I wonder if there's something about the way women work, which makes them want to find an accommodation of synthesis,

a holistic approach to science, rather than defending their own particular territorial achievement. So in her translation of Newton, she brought in Leibniz, who has Newton's great enemy, and Descartes, who was the great French thinker, and brings about an accommodation of those thinkers. Do you want to take that up? Yes, another excellent example of that would be Mary Somerville,

who was active rather later in the 19th century, and in a way she's the English equivalent of Emily de Chatelle because she translated a very complex book by Laplace. Laplace was the French Newton on celestial mechanics and she translated that in the same way as Emily de Chatterley she not only translated the French into English. She also translated the mathematics into terms that British people could understand because British people at that stage were not so mathematical as French people and it became a textbook in Cambridge University.

But after she'd done that, she went on to write a book called something like the interconnections of the physical sciences. And it's exactly as Judith was saying. It was an attempt to fuse different areas of knowledge and see illicit themes which they had in common. And this became a best-selling textbook. It wasn't just a popular book, although it was popular, but it was a book that Sirius, very well-qualified scientists studied as well. I think that's an excellent example, and I always think of those two as a very interesting pair, one on each side of 1800, doing very complementary activities in the two different countries. We're moving from translation to publication here, Karen O'Brien. Were there popular books of science set out to inform specific female readership at the time?

There were, and it's very interesting in this period because we tend to think of science on the magisterial kind of chalk and blackboard model. But books that popularize science, imagine science as a kind of social conversation between men and women. So in the earlier part of our period, Fontenelle's conversation on the plurality of worlds imagines a man and a woman walking by moonlight, gazing at the stars, and he's explaining the heliocentric Copernican view of the solar system to the woman. And then a book that was very important in terms of popularizing Newtonian ideas on the continent was by an Italian called Algarotti. And it's called Newtonianism for the ladies. And it is a little patronising. He did spend time with Madame de Chatelle and she sort of explained Newtonian physics to him.

But nevertheless, what it is it's done as a dialogue between a cavalier in a marcaza and explains Newton's optics in a very accessible way as a series of experiments that you could repeat in the home and that you could understand how light is divided into, solar light is divided into seven colors and how you could demonstrate that. And this thing... Translated by women, actually. Translated by Elizabeth Carter. That's right.

That's right. Elizabeth Carter is a very important 18th century scholar and she translated Algarotti. But I think also... Afra Ben's translation is very interesting because rather like some of the other women we've mentioned, she actually changes it in the course of the translation. So I think women have a very important mediating role there

Because they so often are translators. And I think they take up this opportunity to popularise science. Jane Marsett right at the end of our period in 1806 publishes her conversations on chemistry. And this becomes a classic work of the 19th century explaining Humphrey Davis chemistry to a very wide audience as a series of conversations between a female teacher and two female pupils.

And we know that the young Michael Faraday read this, and this was part of his kind of transition from a fairly lowly social background into chemistry. So she reached in a very important way, a very wide audience for chemistry, the new science of the later 18th, early 19th centuries. That's fascinating about Faraday, because when I always had the, well, I always, that he went to the Royal Institution and he heard Davey give a lecture and he sent him a brilliant set of notes made during a lecture. He was an apprentice book by and a hibern. So that was how he got his beginning.

But this book he read with his story, yes. Marksitt complained that Davis' lectures were too boring. She didn't really, she said that Davy didn't really bring science a life enough. So her dialogue her conversations do the work of bridging the gap. And Faraday always paid tribute to her, even when he was a very famous scientist. He said it's Jane Masset who set me on this route. So what can you give us some idea of the readership of these books?

I'm not talking about, some idea of who they were reaching and what were the reaction. We've got a wonderful reaction. If you've got Faraday going, I mean, that'll do. I don't need any more readers. A lot of women were writing these rather chatty. conversational books, ostensibly for women. But I think the subtext in a lot of these books as well,

if the science is simple enough for a woman to understand, anybody can understand it. And quite a lot of men and school boys were also reading these books. So I think they had a very varied audience, very large audiences. They were best-selling some of them. Judith Hawley, women were allowed to do, or they did botany.

Can you tell us a little bit about how that worked? Yes. I think women were often in-com. to do botany because of sort of cultural associations between women and flowers are both delicate, fragile, beautiful and so on. So they were encouraged to collect specimens to learn from them and also botany was often very moralising that if you study the workings of a plant, you'll understand the workings of God and it'll teach you to be more patient. It became a more vexed area for women after Carl Linnaeus invented the binomial system of classification,

which is so dependent on, in effect, the sex organs of plants. And Erasmus Darin wrote his wonderful, polymorphously perverse, eroticised loves of the plants. And then a number of teachers of botany said we've really got to take all this dirty stuff out to make it acceptable for women. Rousseau and his elements of botany addressed to a young lady was also concerned that it was rather dangerous women to be running around in the wet, in the wet, grass collecting specimens and possibly catching their death of cold so their skirts get wet. Even to be rambling around the countryside on their own was rather risky.

But still, there are a number of women who wrote popularising works, moralising works. Charlotte Smith, who's I think one of the great scientific poets of the Romantic period, wrote Conversations in Introducing Bosnia where she has a fictional Sunday school outing. Again, it's women educating children, interspersing, poetry and natural history. Another thing, because it worked right across the waterfront. That's the fascinating thing about women sort of pushing at this glass ceiling, pushing wherever they can in their homes, if they can get at the universities they do,

if they can marry people when they're 13, they do. But they collected. And the richest woman in Britain was a great collector. And her collection was to do with the development of the natural sizes, to some extent. Wealthy women is something we haven't talked about yet, but was very, very important because someone like Emily Ducatelais could only do what she did because she had sufficient money. And the Duchess of Portland came from an extremely wealthy family and her parents made the very sensible decision of finding a husband for her who was also rich

and who was also rather boring so it could be guaranteed not to rush off and spend all her money. And she spent 50 years down in that she had a huge estate near Gerard's Cross where she built up a marvellous botanical garden which botanist used to visit from all over Europe. She collected Shell. and she also acted as a patron. So, for example, when Rousseau, I think these are rather nasty remarks that Rousseau was making because she took him in for six months. And she used to go on botanic walks with Rousseau,

and she used to give him plants and money and look after him. So this was another very, very important function of wealthy women was patronage. And she built up this massive collection, and although she had the right husband, her two sons carefully spent all her money for her. And so when she died, there was a sale of all her possessions. And the auction sale took 38 days because her collection was so big. And they needed to do that in order to pay off all the debts that her two sons had done.

Was it gambling that did it for them? One of them was a politician. So you had to pay for all the election campaigns. The other one, I think it was just gambling and drinking and generally having fun. Yeah. Karen O'Brien, so as it progressed in the Enlightenment, would you say that at the end of the reach of it, that women were better placed? Had anything substantially happened in this country?

I think in some ways they had greater access to science because as well as readers, they were part of the audience for science. They could go to lectures at the Royal Institution and they could participate in a wider public culture of science. At the same time, I think that what we're seeing is a shifting of the spaces of science. Botany is something you can do on your restator and your garden, but most science is moving into the lab,

into the hospital, into the university by the early 19th century. and that inevitably has an exclusionary effect on women. Male scientists are professionalising their establishing clear professional criteria for what counts of science, and I think that definitely has the effect of closing doors that were open to the aristocratic and middle-class female amateur. And some of the doors were literally closed. The Royal Society is a prime example of that where when Mary Somerville wrote a paper on sunlight that was published in the philosophical transactions, she wasn't allowed to read it out at the Royal Society. Her husband had to read it out for her.

And the first woman to read a paper at the Royal Society was a physicist called Hertha Ayrton, who won a prize at the Royal Society. She read the paper there. She was nominated for fellowship. And in the end, they decided she couldn't become a fellow because she was married. And she gave this marvellous quotation to a journalist. She said, I think the question of women in science is completely irrelevant. Either a woman is a good scientist or she's not. And I think that's something we should all bear in mind today. Well, thank you very much, Patricia Farah, Judith Hawley and Karen O'Brien. Next week we'll be talking about the Volga Vikings and their exploits in Britain, in Russia and in Baghdad, between the 8th and 11th centuries. Thank you for listening. If you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast, why not try others, such as Thinking Aloud, where Laurie Taylor discusses the latest social science research. To find out more, visit bbc.co.ukh, forward slash radio 4.