Public Experiments

Patricia Fara, Pandora's Breeches: Women, Science and Power in the Enlighten ment, Pimlico, London, 2004; 274 pp., £12.50. ISBN 1-84413-082-7.

Science Writing by Women, ed. Bernard Lightman, 7 volumes, Thoemmes Press, Bristol, 2004; 2,600 pp., £550. ISBN 1-84371-099-4.

The Collected Works of Mary Somerville, ed. James A. Secord, 9 volumes, Thoemmes Press, Bristol, 2004; 3,200 pp., £750. ISBN 1-84371-088-9.

Commissioned in 1827 by Henry, Lord Brougham, to translate Pierre-Simon Laplace's notoriously complex mathematical treatise Méchanique Céleste for the Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge, Mary Somerville (1780-1872) responded with mixed feelings:

you must be aware that the work in question can never be popularised, since the student must at least know something of the differential and integral calculi, and as a preliminary step I should have to prove various problems in physical mechanics and astronomy. Besides, Laplace never gives diagrams or figures, because they are not necessary to persons versed in the calculus, but they would be indispensable in a work such as you wish me to write. I am afraid I am incapable of such a task: but as you both wish it very much, I shall do my very best upon condition of secrecy, and that if I fail the manuscript shall be put into the fire.

Somerville's cautious reply provokes a number of questions about the position of women in the history of science, their status as 'popularizers' and translators of current trends, and the propriety (or otherwise) of female scientific publication. From a confident assertion of how such a text could be translated for a wider audience to doubts concerning her fitness for the task, Somerville ended with a threat that failure will ensure the manuscript's fiery destruction. As it happened, the Mechanism of the Heavens was judged successful and spared from the flames. Published in 1831 to rapturous acclaim, the text far exceeded the SDUK's remit, as Somerville had predicted from the outset, and was instead installed as a textbook, consulted and understood by only the most brilliant students. Although an autodidact and a woman, Somerville, wrote the Cambridge mathematician William Whewell, put himself and his colleagues, professional scientific 'labourers', to shame.

Yet, at the end of her long life, when she reviewed her achievements, Mary Somerville found herself wanting. In an original passage of her Memoirs, tellingly excised by her daughter Martha for their posthumous publication in 1873, Somerville reflected upon her role as a successful scientific writer:

In the climax of my great success, the approbation of some of the first scientific men of the age and of the public in general I was highly gratified, but much less elated than might have been expected, for although I had recorded in a clear point of view some of the most refined and difficult analytical processes and astronomical discoveries, I was conscious that I had never made a discovery myself, that I had no originality. I have perseverance and intelligence but no genius. That spark from heaven is not granted to the sex, we are of the earth, earthy, whether higher powers may be allotted to us in another state of existence, God knows, original genius in science at least is hopeless in this.

Although Whewell had first mooted the title 'scientist' in print within a review of her second book, On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences in 1834, Somerville excluded herself from the new nomenclature of the increasingly professional scientific world of the late nineteenth century. Pride in the lucidity of her work turned to the sickening realization that she had not achieved her potential. Prevented by her sex from attaining true glory through original discovery, Somerville lamented an existence which, while roaming the heavens in her writings, was in reality tied too firmly to a less celestial sphere.

For, as Somerville acknowledged, the history of women in science is essentially one of frustration coupled with a (largely) dictated or self-imposed...