Reflections on the History of the Science of Woman

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on the “Nature of the Human Sciences”, Lancaster, 26–29 September 1990. I am grateful to the Nuffield Foundation for supporting my participation in it as well as to its organizer, Dr Roger Smith, and to Dr John Christie and the other participants for their responses. Some of the issues discussed here arise out of my Seduction and civilization: An enlightenment perspective on the role of women in history (forthcoming) as well as from publications listed below. All translations are my own.

This point is admirably well made by Lougee Carolyn C. : “Despite its ubiquity, however, the woman question has not been equally pressing in all ages. At irregular intervals it has appeared with unique intensity at the forefront of Europeans' concerns: In fifth-century Athens, for example, in first-century Rome, in twelfth-century France, in the sixteenth-century querelle des femmes,” Le Paradis des femmes: Women, salons and social stratification in seventeenth-century France (Princeton, 1976), 3.

Hoffman's Paul La Femme dans la pensée des lumières (Paris, 1977) remains one of the most wide ranging and lucid surveys of writings about women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It also contains an excellent bibliography. See also Lougee's Carolyn C. excellent book, Le Paradis des femmes (ref. 2), Margaret J. M. Ezell's The patriarch's wife: Literary evidence and the history of the family (London, 1987), and Landes's Joan B. Women and the public sphere in the age of the French Revolution (London, 1988).

Amongst those who did cast doubt on friendship between women, but thought that friendship between men and women was “the most delicious” of relationships was Madame de Lambert. See “Traité de l'amitié” in Oeuvres de Madame La Marquise de Lambert (Paris, 1774), 106–29.

“Voyez les femmes; elles nous surpassent certainement, et de fort loin, en sensibilité: Quelle comparaison d'elles à nous dans les instants de la passion!” (“Look at women! They clearly surpass us and by much, in sensibility: There is no comparison between them and us in the moment of passion”), Diderot Denis , Paradoxe sur le comédien , in his Oeuvres esthétiques , ed. by Vernière P. (Paris, 1968), 311. Compare, on this subject, Thomas Laqueur, Making sex: Body and gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990).

The ambiguity and self-contradictory nature of Rousseau's opinion on the matter may be gauged from the following description he gave of himself: “En un mot, un protée, un Caméléon, une femme sont des êtres moins changeans que moi”, “Le Persifleur”, in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. by Gagnebin Bernard and Raymond Marcel (4 vols, Paris, 1959), i, 1108.

One who took up this issue in the seventeenth century was the Jesuit Father Pierre Le Moyne in The gallery of heroick women (trans. by Marchioness of Winchester, 1652), discussed in Ezell , The patriarch's wife (ref. 3), 44–45. Catherine II was a living proof in the eighteenth century that a woman could be no more, no less of an “enlightened despot” than a man. For an insightful analysis of perceptions of her, see Alexander's John T. Catherine the Great: Life and legend (Oxford, 1989).

The fertility, longevity and appearance of women throughout the world are running themes in, for instance, the Comte de Buffon's writings. See his De l'Homme, ed. by Duchet Michèle (Paris, 1971).

For instance by Diderot, in Réfutation suivie de l'ouvrage d'Helvétius intitulé L'Homme, in his Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. by Vernière P. (Paris, 1964), 611. Helvétius called her “le Caton de Londres”.

The Baron of Montesquieu's discussion in De l'Esprit des loix (1748) of the impact of climate on social and political institutions and hence also the domestic realm and condition of women was to shape all subsequent writings on the latter, though interest in the comparative status of women throughout the world had long been made manifest in travel literature. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Letters … written during her travels in Europe, Asia, and Africa to persons of distinction, men of letters, &c. in different parts of Europe (1763) in The complete letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu , ed. by Halsband Robert (3 vols, Oxford, 1965), i, 248–465, is but one, though admittedly the most distinguished, example of the awareness of great differences in the condition of women within Europe and beyond it.

See ref. 10.

Ibid.

See ref. 59 below.

See ref. 56 below.

The contribution of women to civilization is one of the central themes of what was her history of this process in De la Littérature considérée dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales , in Oeuvres complètes de Madame la Baronne de Staël-Holstein (3 vols, Paris, 1838), i. See also Fontana's Biancamaria Benjamin Constant and the post-revolutionary mind (London, 1991).

de Laclos Choderlos , “Discours sur la question proposée par l'Académie de Châlons-sur-Marne, quels seraient les meilleurs moyens de perfectionner l'éducation des femmes”, in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. by Allem Maurice (Paris, 1959).

Kames Lord , Sketches of the history of Man (1774), 4th edn (4 vols, Edinburgh, 1788), Sketch VI, “Progress of the Female Sex”.

Robertson William , The history of America (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1777).

Caroline-Stéphanie Félicité Ducrest de Saint-Aubin, comtesse de Genlis (1746–1830), De l'Influence des femmes sur la littérature fran&çaise, comme protectrices des lettres et comme auteurs (Paris, 1811).

de Lescun Marie-Joséphine de Monbart Dame (b. 1750?), Sophie ou de l'éducation des filles (Berlin, 1777).

Thomas Antoine-Léonard (1735–85), Essai sur le caractère, les moeurs et l'esprit des femmes dans les différents siècles (Paris, 1772). References are to vol. iv in his Oeuvres complètes (5 vols, Paris, 1802).

Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre (1737–1814), “Discours sur cette question: Comment l'éducation des femmes pourrait contribuer à rendre les hommes meilleurs” (1777) in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. by Aimé-Martin L. (12 vols, Paris, 1830–31), xii, 121–1811.

See ref. 62 below.

Hamilton Elizabeth (1758–1816), A series of popular essays illustrative of principles essentially connected with the improvement of the understanding, the imagination and the heart (2 vols, Edinburgh, 1813). Idem, Letters addressed to the daughter of a nobleman on the formation of the religious and the moral principle, ed. by Luria Gina (2 vols, London, 1974).

de Fontaine Louise-Marie-Madeleine (1707–63). Mme Dupin employed Rousseau as a secretary for a period and it was she who encouraged him to produce a draft of a history of women. See ref. 59 below.

Clark Alice , Working life of women in the 17th century (London, 1919); Pinchbeck Ivy , Women workers and the Industrial Revolution (London, 1930); Gibson Wendy , Women in seventeenth-century France (London, 1989).

E.g., Warner's Marina Monuments and maiden: The allegory of the female form (New York, 1985); Lazard Madeleine , Images littéraires de la femme à la Renaissance (Paris, 1985); Darmon Pierre , Mythologie de la femme dans l'ancienne France (Paris, 1983).

The review which is given here of various approaches to the topic does not pretend to be comprehensive, nor should it be taken to be dismissive in any way.

Jones Vivien , Women in the eighteenth century: Constructions of femininity (London, 1990). The very high quality of Vivien Jones's and Bridget Hill's (ref. 30 below) anthologies justifies their centrality in the discussion that follows.

Hill Bridget , Eighteenth-century women: An anthology (London, 1984; 1987).

E.g. Hoffman , La Femme (ref. 3); Descarmes Alain , Histoire satirique de la femme à travers les âges (Paris, 1947); Perrot Philippe , Le travails des apparences ou les transformations du corps féminin XVIIe – XIXe siècle (Paris, 1984); Jordanova Ludmilla , Sexual visions, images of gender in science and medicine between the eighteenth and the twentieth centuries (London, 1989); Laqueur , Making sex (ref. 5).

E.g. Griffin Susan , Woman and nature: The roaring inside her (New York, 1978; London, 1984). MacCormack Carols P. and Strathern Marilyn (eds), Nature, culture and gender (Cambridge, 1980). These and others are discussed in my “The Enlightenment debate on women”, History workshop (Autumn 1985), xx, 101–24. Also Lloyd's Genevieve The man and reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western philosophy (London, 1984).

E.g. Elshtain's Jean Bethke Public man, private woman: Women in social and political thought (Princeton, N.J., 1982); Landes's Women and the public sphere (ref. 3).

See, e.g., Michaud's Stéphanie Muse et madonne: Visages de la femme de la Révolution Fran&çaise aux apparitions de Loudres (Paris, 1985). And also its opposite, women and evil: Hoffman Reynolds Hays, The dangerous sex: The myth of feminine evil (London, 1966).

See, for one, my “The Enlightenment” (ref. 32). Also, Elshtain's Jean Bethke “Symmetry and soporifics: A critique of feminist account of gender development”, in Richards Barry (ed.), Capitalism and infancy: Essays on psychoanalysis and politics (London, 1984), 55–91.

See for instance the balanced account given by Nead Lynda in Myths of sexuality: Representations of women in Victorian Britain (London, 1988).

Language was of the greatest interest to the Enlightenment. Its concern with the origins of language had, by and large, an altogether different orientation than that of present feminist and psychoanalytic discussions. For a useful survey of the latter, see Nye Andrea , Feminist theory and the philosophies of Man (London, 1989).

See Porter's Roy “Rape — Does it have a historical meaning?”, in Tomaselli Sylvana and Porter Roy (eds), Rape: An historical and social inquiry (Oxford, 1989).

Saying this, of course, amounts to no more than an exhortation to caution. Nor should it be taken as an argument for the poverty of theory. On the contrary, as is argued in Sections III and IV, part of what is wanting about the retroactive use of conceptual categories which fascinate us is that they fall short of the intellectual ambitions of Enlightenment men and women. Moreover, the work of Michel Foucault, for one, is a clear demonstration that more might be gained (including by his detractors) from casting grand theoretical nets than by less daring scholarship.

See for instance Ludmilla Jordanova's insightful Sexual visions (ref. 31) and “Naturalizing the family: Literature and the bio-medical sciences in the late eighteenth century“, in her Languages of nature: Critical essays on science and literature (London, 1986), 86–116. Ornella Moscucci's The science of woman: Gynaecology and gender in England, 1800–1929 (Cambridge, 1990) is a perfect illustration of the fruitfulness of this approach.

E.g. Schiebinger Londa , The mind has no sex? Women in the origins of modern science (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 1989).

E.g. the works mentioned in refs 40 and 41.

As for instance, The Macmillan dictionary of women's biography, ed. by Uglow Jennifer S. with Frances Hinton (London, 1982); Alic's Margaret Hypathia's heritage: A history of women in science from Antiquity to the late nineteenth century (London, 1986). I have discussed some of the difficulties attending the biographical mode from a feminist's point of view in “Collecting women: The female in scientific biography”, Science as culture, iv (1988), 95–106.

This is a particularly urgent task given the increasing popularity of the view that men have brought us before the ecological Sphynx we are now facing and that women seem to be expected to find the life-saving answer to the riddle it has set us by a rather large and wide ranging number of people.

Though this paper is confined to the Enlightenment, the point holds for other periods.

For studies of the relationship between some of these schools of thought and feminism, see, e.g., Mitchell Juliet , Psychoanalysis and feminism (London, 1974); The future of difference , ed. by Eisenstein Hester and Jardine Alice (Boston, 1980); Taylor Barbara , Eve and the New Jerusalem; Socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century (London, 1983); Weinbaum Batya , The curious courtship of women's liberation and socialism (Boston, 1980); Sargent L. (ed.), Women and revolution: A discussion of the unhappy marriage of Marxism and feminism (Boston, 1981).

“Toujours les deux sexes se suivent de loin en s'imitant, et ils s'élèvent, se renforcent, se corrompent ou s'amolissent ensemble” (“The two sexes always follow each other from afar by imitating one another and they rise, grow in strength, become corrupt or weaken together”), Thomas, Essai (ref. 21), 228.

This issue has aways been alive and certainly did not wither away in the eighteenth century. It had reached its last climax in the late seventeenth century. See Carolyn Lougee's remarks cited in ref. 2; Angenot Marc , Les Champions des femmes: Examen du discours sur la supériorité des femmes 1400–1800 (Montreal, 1977).

Thomas's Essai (ref. 21), for instance, referred, to a wide number of works, including Plutarch's (c.50–c.120 a.d.) The bravery of women; Boccaccio's Concerning women (c.1355); Agrippa's De nobilitate et praecellentia sexus (1529); Bronzini's Cristofle L'Advocat des femmes, ou de leur fidélité et constance. Dialogue du sieur Christofle Bronzini d'Ancôme. Contre les médisans de ce temps. Traduit d'Italien en Fran&çois, par S.D.L . (1622); idem, Nobilissimae virginis Annae Mariae a Schurman dissertatio de ingenio muliebris ad doctrinam et meliore litteras aptitudine (1641); de Bourdeilles Pierre de Brantome's Seigneur Receuil des dames (1665–66); and many anonymous ones, mostly by women. A very rough count gives more than fifty titles, a great many in a period when acknowledgements of any kind were the exception rather than the norm and also given that Thomas himself said he wished to spare his readers the much larger number he could cite (241).

de Ségur Vicomte (1756–1805). His work is cited and discussed below.

de Ségur Vicomte , Les Femmes, leur condition et leur influence dans l'ordre social, chez les différens peuples anciens et modernes (Paris, 1808), i, pp. xi–xii.

ibid., p. xii.

It is interesting to note that this point found a parallel in other fields, most strikingly in that of anatomy. For a discussion of the need which was felt in the eighteenth century for a specifically female anatomy and of female skeleton, see Schiebinger , The mind has no sex? (ref. 41), ch. 7.

Thomas , Essai (ref. 21), 194.

Rousseau , “Discours sur l'origine et les fondemens de l'inégalité parmi les hommes” (1755), in his Oeuvres complètes, ed. by Gagnebin Bernard and Raymond Marcel (4 vols, Paris, 1964), iii, 122.

Diderot's “Sur les femmes” was written as a review of Thomas's Essai for Grimm's Correspondance littéraire (1772). His criticism centred on stylistic matters. See his Oeuvres, ed. by Billy André (Paris, 1951), 949–58.

Rousseau , Oeuvres complètes (ref. 55), iii, 131.

See my “The Enlightenment” (ref. 32).

Rousseau , “Sur les femmes” in Oeuvres complètes (ref. 55), ii, 1254–5. Idem, Le Portefeuille de Mad. D., dame de Chenonceaux. – Publié par le comte Gaston de Villeneuve-Guibert (Paris, 1884). See Cranston Maurice , Jean-Jacques: The early life and work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1712–1754 (London, 1983), 201–8.

See my “The Enlightenment” (ref. 32).

See ref. 10.

For instance, one can with some confidence assume that William Alexander qualified his views on the comparative freedom of women in the light of her Letters, if only because hers was one of the very rare insiders' views into harem life. The history of women from the earliest antiquity, to the present time, giving some accounts of almost every interesting particular concerning that sex, among all nations, ancient and modern (2 vols, London, 1779), esp. i, 79.

Olson Richard , “Feminist critiques of science”, History of science, xxviii (1990), 125–47. This topic is also discussed by Schiebinger, The mind has no sex? (ref. 40), ch. 6. Moreover, she considers not only the emancipatory potential of seventeenth century theories of the mind, including those of Descartes and Locke, but also that of “the new anatomy” (ch. 7). It should be noted, however, that the present line of argument is partly intended as a corrective to the views that the privileged mode of discourse about women was that of the medical sciences and that “[a]fter the 1750s the anatomy and physiology of sexual difference seemed to provide a kind of bedrock upon which to build relations between the sexes. The seemingly superior build of the male body (and mind) was cited more and more often in political documents to justify men's social dominance” (ibid., 216). A similar thesis is upheld by Laqueur in Making sex (ref. 5) when he argues “[s]ometime in the eighteenth century, sex as we know it was invented” (p. 149); that “[w]omen's bodies in their corporeal, scientifically accessible concreteness, in the very nature of their bones, nerves, and, most important, reproductive organs, came to bear an enormous weight of meaning” (p. 150); and that “[a]ll the complex ways in which resemblances among bodies, and between bodies and the cosmos, confirmed a hierarchic world order were reduced to a single plane: Nature. In the world of reductionist explanation, what mattered was the flat, horizontal, immovable foundation of physical fact: Sex” (p. 151). History and anthropology held their own in the battle between disciplines and were central to the science of man and of woman in the eighteenth century. These disciplines afforded the possibility to explore and understand the meaning of the difference between men and women and were taken to show either what was to be done for and by women for their emancipation or how this emancipation would inevitably happen as a result of the progress of mankind. And they were by no means seen (nor indeed were they) as vestigial of pre-modern thought. On the contrary, they were argued to be as new, as scientific, as authoritative, and as modern, as any medical or biological science might have been said to be. It would seem that an unintended, but disturbing, consequence of some of the excellent work undertaken of late in the history of science, medicine, anatomy, physiology, psychiatry and so on, has been to reinforce the view of the history of women as the perennial pathic, the victim, the patient, the object, rather than the subject, of science. If it is true that seen through the eighteenth century and nineteenth century medical gaze, there were more and more reasons to consider woman as condemned by her biology to her subjection in perpetuity, history and anthropology were but two disciplines which in that same period afforded her good cause for hope (as they did the rest of humanity). After all, even the nineteenth century, which seems to be increasingly seen as the triumph of the discourse of nature (and of the medical profession) when it comes to speaking about women, was also the age of Hegel, Marx, and Engels, whose The origin of the family, private property and the state (1884) benefits from being compared to the works discussed in this article; see Benhabib's Seyla “On Hegel, women and irony” and Christine Di Stefano's “Masculine Marx” in Shanley Mary Lyndon and Pateman Carole (eds), Feminist interpretations and political theory (Oxford, 1991), 129–45, 146–63. For a sensitive treatment of the interplay between nineteenth century medicine and the environmentalism of Darwin, a topic which bears on one aspect of this complex issue, see Moscucci Ornella , The science of woman: Gynaecology and gender in England, 1800–1929 (Cambridge, 1990), 23–27.

See de Condorcet Marquis , Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progrès de l'esprit humain (1793) (Paris, 1970). Condorcet, amongst others, is discussed in my Seduction and civilization (ref. 1).

Alexander , The history of women (ref. 62), i, 102–3.

Buffon , op. cit. (ref. 8), 17. See also Duchet Michèle , Anthropologie et histoire au siècle des lumières: Buffon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Helvétius, Diderot (Paris, 1971).

This view would be disputed by a number of historians, not least, Laqueur (ref. 5).

“La femme a toutes les parties de l'homme”, Diderot writes in Le Rêve de d'Alembert, adding only that: “la seule différence qu'il y ait est celle d'une bourse pendante en dehors, ou d'une bourse retournée en dedans; qu'un foetus femelle resemble, à s'y tromper, à un foetus mâle” (“Woman has all the parts of man … the only difference there is is between an outside purse and an inside purse; that a female foetus is mistakable for a male foetus”), Oeuvres (ref. 56), 908–9. A little earlier in the same dialogue, Diderot has Mademoiselle de L'Espinasse venture: “L'homme n'est peut-être que le monstre de la femme, ou la femme le monstre de l'homme” (“man may well be only the monster of woman or woman the monster of man”) (p. 908). The same issue is also explored in his Éléments de physiologie , ed. by Mayer Jean (Paris, 1964). This last passage is noted by Laqueur to qualify his history of the view that women had been thought to have “the same organs as men but in exactly the wrong places”; Diderot is cited as an exception, since he clearly only believes that men and women have the same organs in different places and does not take this to mean that either one of the sexes has these organs in the “wrong place”, Making sex (ref. 5), 26.

Buffon , De l'Homme (ref. 8), 132–3.

This was thought to be true of all women in polished societies, even the poor or labouring women, given that the state of nature was one in which women knew not the least consideration. See Tomaselli's introductory chapter in Rape (ref. 38).

Buffon , De l'Homme (ref. 8), 133.

Meiners C. , History of the female sex, comprising a view of the habits, manners, and influence of women, among all nations, from the earliest ages to the present time; translated from the German of C. Meiners, Conciliar of State to his Britannic Majesty, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Göttingen by Frederic Shoberl (4 vols, London, 1808).

See ref. 24.

Fran&çoise d'Isembourg d'Happoncourt, de Graffigny Madame (1695–1758). The Lettres were first published anonymously in 1747; they were signed subsequently and met with great success.

Edmond and de Goncourt Jules , La Femme au dix-huitième siècle (Paris, 1862; with a preface by Elisabeth Badinter, Paris, 1982).

See for instance, Norbert Elias's The history of manners, vol. i of The civilizing process (Über den Prozess der Zivilisation; Basle, 1939), trans. by Jephcott Edmund (2 vols, Oxford, 1978). Sombart Werner , Luxury and capitalism (Luxus und Kapitalismus; Munich and Leipzig, 1913, 1922; Arbor Ann , 1967). Even works such as Jules Michelet's La Femme (1859; with preface by Thérèse Moreau, Paris, 1981) benefit from being seen within the perspective of this developing science.

Worse still would be to seek to reduce it to a discourse grounded in, and reinforcing, biology, as Laqueur does when considering some aspects of the theory of civilization and women in Laqueur, Making sex (ref. 5), ch.6. For an account of the nineteenth century emphasis on nature as a contrast to, rather than the continuation of, Enlightenment thinking, see, Russett Cynthia Eagle , Sexual science: The Victorian construction of womanhood (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 1–8.