Gender and Boyle's Law of Gases

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. See Alison Wylie et al., “Philosophical Feminism: A Bibliographic Guide to Critiques of Science,” Resources for Feminist Research 19:2 (1990), 2–36; Londa Schiebinger, “The History and Philosophy of Women in Science: A Review Essay,” Signs 12:2 (1987), 305–332, and, more recently, her Has Feminism Changed Science (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1999), esp. Part III. See also Hilary Rose, “Beyond Masculinist Realities: A Feminist Epistemology for the Sciences ,” in Feminist Approaches to Science, ed. Ruth Bleier (New York and Oxford: Pergamon, 1986), 54–76; Carolyn Merchant, “Isis’ Consciousness Raised,” Isis 73:268 (1982), 398–409. 1. NOW WE SEE IT 1. Preface to his story “The Martyrdom of Theodora and Didymus,” in The Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch, vol. V (London: J. & F. Rivington , 1772), 259–260. All future references to The Works of the Honorable Robert Boyle will be to this edition and will be cited in the text as W. 2. Letter from Katherine Ranelagh to Boyle, June 3 (no year given), W, VI, 522; letter from Boyle to Mrs. Hussey, June 6, 1648, W, VI, 236; letter from John Wallis to Boyle, July 17, 1669, W, VI, 458–460; and see W, I, cxxxviii. 3. Letter from Katherine Ranelagh to Boyle, October 12 (no year given), W, VI, 523. 4. Boyle Papers, vol. XXXVII, 159. I thank the president and board of the Royal Society of London, where Boyle’s unpublished manuscripts are located, for permission to quote from this material. Future references will be cited in the text as BP and will include volume and page numbers where available. 5. James R. Jacob, Robert Boyle and the English Revolution: A Study in Social and Intellectual Change (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977), 81. 6. This argument also appears in Boyle’s “The Martyrdom of Theodora and Didymus.” When Theodora’s friend Irene asks Theodora why she won’t marry Didymus, Theodora, whom modern readers have taken to voice Boyle’s sentiments , replies that if she were married, it would be her duty to worry about a near friend’s danger; she would not be content to die because duty and inclination would, she worries, “fasten” her to life. Chastity allows one to serve God “more undistractedly and more entirely” and be “uninterruptedly employed in the direct contemplation and services” of a “sublime object.” She doesn’t see why anyone who doesn’t need to “should enter into a relation that would make those distracting duties necessary” (W, V, 277). 187 7. Letter to a sister in Ireland, December 21, 1649, W, VI, 51; letter from Katherine Ranelagh to Boyle, June 3 (no year given), W, I, 522 and W, I, 248. 8. Evelyn to Boyle, September 29, 1659, W, VI, 401. 9. I am indebted to Shapin and Schaffer for pointing out the importance of modesty in the experimental production of facts. See Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1985), chapter 2. Shapin and Schaffer discern three technologies used by Boyle to produce facts: material technology, including the spaces in which experiments were performed and the machines they were performed on; social technology, ways to determine who was eligible to produce knowledge and to bring about consensus and manage dissensus among those eligible ; and literary technology, texts displaying the new subject of scienti¤c activity and providing for, among other things, the mediate witnessing of his experiments. It is in the last, the literary technology, that we ¤nd Boyle’s construction of the modest man of science. Perhaps because they are not interested in the issue of gender, Shapin and Schaffer never discuss characteristics such as chastity or modesty as gender characteristics . They do not, therefore, mention the interpenetration of gender issues with those of style or, indeed, with any other technical matters constituting seventeenth-century experimental science. 10. Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold Whitmore Jones (Saint Louis: Washington University Studies, 1958), 111. 11. T. J. Pinch, “Theoreticians and the Production of Experimental Anomaly : The Case of Solar Neutrinos,” in The Social Process of Scienti¤c Investigation, ed. Karin D. Knorr, Roger Krohn, and Richard Whitley (Dordrecht and Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1980), 77–106. 12. Pinch, “Theoreticians,” 100, 93–94. Although the scientists whom Pinch interviewed cited Davis’s modesty, others disagree and argue that the theoreticians were impressed not by Davis...