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American Literature 75.1 (2003) 181-183



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American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of Affiliation. By Nina Baym. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press. 2002. x, 265 pp. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $22.00.

In her latest work, Nina Baym turns her prodigious interpretive talents to nineteenth-century women's relations to science, in particular to the way in which nineteenth-century women wrote about science as a method of establishing a relation to a field that was becoming increasingly masculine in its parameters and self-definition. Baym's focus has produced a volume that covers figures as different as Catherine Beecher, Emily Dickinson, Mary Baker Eddy and Sarah Orne Jewett, all of whom, Baym argues, articulated their particular ideas in terms that established specific affiliative relations to science as an enterprise for women. American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences demonstrates that narratives of women's complete exclusion from the realm of science are faulty, showing instead that female intellectuals, while often arguing for women's innate differences from men, sought to prove a unique relation of women to the scientific enterprise, even as the latter became more and more related to technological advance throughout the nineteenth century.

Early chapters on Almira Phelps, Sarah Hale, Catharine Beecher, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Elizabeth Cary Agassiz cover women who popularized science through print publication and educational reforms. The second half of the book is more eclectic, as Baym first addresses the success of Maria Mitchell (America's first "official" female scientist) and the failure of Emma Willard to attract the approbation of the male scientific establishment, then turns to chapters on Emily Dickinson, the representation of science in women's novels, female physicians, and, finally, the relation of science to spiritualism and other religious developments in the late nineteenth century. The text as a whole is unified by Baym's unaffected and straightforward approach of close reading: she searches out and explicates the particularities of each woman's "affiliation" to science. Baym argues that "their strategies all accepted the reality of sexual difference in the ultimate relation of women to science," in other words, that women's relation to science was inferior to men's relation: "affiliation," she states, "was their way of negotiating this difference" (14). Only Maria Mitchell, she notes, suggests that determining women's scientific capabilities in the absence of equal opportunity is a useless project.

The chapter on Emily Dickinson is an interesting reading of this poet who, as Baym notes, refused publication, distinguishing her from all the other [End Page 181] female intellectuals Baym examines. That distinction notwithstanding, Baym finds Dickinson's poetry not only replete with scientific references, as other scholars have noted, but also in argument against what Baym terms the "Amherst orthodoxy": "[Dickinson] affiliates with science and against religion. . . . Dickinson in her science poetry relentlessly pries apart the synthesis of science and faith to which Amherst College and its satellite institutions . . . were programmatically devoted" (136). Baym finds Dickinson "a profound skeptic whose language unmasks the logical contradictions of orthodoxy" (149). Indeed, science cannot prove anything about religion, despite the "Amherst synthesis" that promoted this connection: "Dickinson concluded against Hitchcock that responsible science could not be put to the work of defending religion" (149).

In her chapter on Catharine Beecher's "domestic ecology," Baym argues that while Beecher "never abandoned the Enlightenment belief that minds are not sexed," she was nevertheless opposed to the classical science curricula developed for elite women's colleges in the nineteenth century on the grounds that such curricula had little relation to women's reality in domestic contexts (61, 58). Thus, Beecher advocated for the applied science curriculum we now know as home economics, as a method of professionalizing homemaking for domestic women. The domestic science curricula were most successful, however, in the large land-grant universities of the Midwest. But the effect of authorizing academic experts on domestic science, and later, the social sciences, was to undermine women's authority as professionals in the home: "the end...

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