Writing American Science and Gender

American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of Affiliation. By Nina Baym Rutgers. University Press, 2001

Out of the Dead House: Nineteenth-Century Women Physicians and the Writing of Medicine. By Susan Wells. University of Wisconsin Press, 2001

Conduct Unbecoming a Woman: Medicine on Trial in Turn-of-the-Century Brooklyn. By Regina Morantz-Sanchez. Oxford University Press, 1999

As scholars have shown, modern science has been deeply intertwined from its inception with power structures and discursive habits that equate objectivity, disinterest, and self-management with maleness (as well as with whiteness and wealth). Not surprisingly, some scholars have found tantalizing cracks in the masculine identity of science. In The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins ofModern Science, for example, Londa Schiebinger reminds us that in classical iconography the sciences were personified as women, that a voluptuous Scientia dominated the frontispieces of scientific texts up through the eighteenth century, and that her image lingers today on the backside of the Nobel medals for chemistry and physics. But most agree that in the nineteenth century women lost whatever toehold they might have had in science. Historians of medicine have documented the marginalization of female midwives at the end ofthe eighteenth century with the rise of professional medicine; Thomas Laqueur has described the somaticization of separate spheres ideology; and Schiebinger concludes that in the nineteenth century feminine became a term applied to "a style of scholarship, aset of values, and a way of knowing to be excluded from the new scientific order" (159). In short, whatever might have been the case in earlier eras, in the nineteenth century women were excluded from science.

In three recent studies, Nina Baym, Susan Wells, and Regina Morantz-Sanchez insist on a different reading of women's involvement with science in the nineteenth century. Baym, Wells, and Morantz-Sanchez redefine what counts as science writing and work, and all three make a significant contribution to expanding and deepening the historical record. At the same time, these three studies make it clear that in the nineteenth century no woman could sidestep the troubled relationship between femininity and science. But beyond a common interest in exploring the complex relationship between gender and science in the nineteenth century, Baym, Wells, and Morantz-Sanchez share little. They have distinct views on the efficacy of separate spheres history, and as a result they take very different positions on current debates in gender studies.

As Cathy Davidson has pointed out, as a "retrospective construction" the metaphor of separate spheres has been a powerful tool for scholars even though some now find it ultimately "unconvincing as an explanatory device" (444). The assertion that in the nineteenth century men and women lived, worked, and thought indifferent worlds and that separate spheres rhetoric and ideology fundamentally shaped how gender was understood and experienced has allowed literary historians such as Baym to recover the lives and works of individual women and to make visible women's networks, traditions, and cultures. When first articulated, separate spheres logic allowed scholars who perhaps were themselves marginalized to recover and celebrate nineteenth-century women who had previously been invisible or who had served in the historical record as mere foils for their more famous brothers. Baym has been one of the most important contributors to the work of limning the impact of separate spheres ideology, and in American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of Affiliation, as in her ground-breaking study of nineteenth-century fiction, Woman's Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America, 1820-70 (1978), Baym offers astute historical readings of overlooked and rarely studied women's writing, including Almira Phelps's botany textbooks, Elizabeth Cary Agassiz's writings for and about her husband, Catherine Beecher's domestic-science manuals, and Maria Mitchell's monthly columns for Scientific American. As a literary historian, Baym has always insisted on judging writers, male and female, by their aesthetic achievements even as...