If you’ve read George Eliot’s Middlemarch (the Guardian’s recent choice as the best novel in the English language), you will recognize the problem Mr Casaubon faced in trying to write his magnum opus, relying on multiple books in a range of languages. It is no wonder that he never completed his Key to all the Mythologies, and even if Dorothea had been allowed to help him (and had been educated enough to know all the languages which he felt he had to be able to read), it would have been a nightmare of a challenge. Any researcher knows the challenge of (re)finding the right reference or quote to insert into their own work. Yet now, how different life is from Mr Casaubon’s. A few clicks on a computer and the world is (almost) at your fingertips. Many e-books are available to me, at least to read, through my own university library. Many archived papers can be found on JStor, or on the publication’s own pages. Unlike my predecessors, I don’t have to get a ticket to the British Library Reading Room in order to access obscure journals (or, at least, I have never felt the need so far in my life).
Reading a book by an American Catholic priest and Vice President of Notre Dame University, written in 1913 about women in science, reminds me how different access to information was for him. HJ Mozans was the pen name of the Jesuit scholar John Augustine Zahm, 1851-1921. (He also wrote about Darwinism, for which he got censured as a Catholic priest). His book, The Story of Women in Science: From Ancient Greece to the Early 20th Century (also referred to as Woman in Science in the Gutenberg edition) uncovers a wide range of women whose names were previously unfamiliar to me. It is, of course, ‘dated’ and yet it strikes me as far ahead of its time, written before either Oxford or Cambridge – let alone Princeton or Yale – had admitted women fully to degrees. He seems to have been prompted to write it when travelling around Greece, in particular considering the absence of recognition of the site of the ‘salon’ of Aspasia, consort of Pericles in the fifth century BCE. She was a courtesan and not an Athenian and therefore – unlike Athenian matrons – allowed to consort with men and circulate outside the home. This she did with great skill and effect. Contemplating this woman, he
‘began to realize, as never before, that women of intellectual eminence have received too little credit for their contributions to the progress of knowledge, and should have a sympathetic historian of what they have achieved in the domain of learning.’
Hence, over many years, he laboured over this book.
It must have been a startling revelation to those who read it, long before Margaret Rossiter pointed out how women had been systematically excluded from the scientific narrative, and coined the phrase, the Matilda Effect, for the way men appropriated the ideas of women. But how did he uncover the names of all these women when there was no internet? It is a puzzle. Many of them are still names that don’t turn up very often in discussion, and searching the web today often provides scant information about them. I did not previously know, for instance, that abbess Hildegard of Bingen (ca 1098-1179) – whose plainsongs turn up quite regularly on Radio 3 these days – wrote two ‘scientific’ books, one about healing and the aetiology of disease and the other concerning the natural world.
Or, from a much later period, I had never come across the name of Janet (or Jane) Taylor, 1804-1870. She became an expert navigator and astronomer, and was the first to recognize that the Earth was spheroidal, bulging slightly at the equator. This discovery changed how people navigated for the better, and she was able to correct locations at sea and recalibrate instruments. Given the name, I can turn up more information on the web easily enough. But for Mozans/Zahm, how did he manage?
We are spoilt for information these days, but inevitably too often these are not primary sources. That AI summary at the top of a Google search – is it accurate (and of course the answer is often not)? Does it give the original source so that one can check it and expand the information. Again, often not. But how much easier it is for me now, than for a Mozans, or indeed a Casaubon. I could even, although I’ve not attempted this yet, use a translation programme so that I don’t have to learn Greek to find out about Aspasia, nor use my schoolchild French and German to explore more recent learned women, such as Sophie Germain, Emilie du Châtelet or Dorothea Christiane Erxleben.
So, hats off to Mozans. He is impressive, but inevitably a bit dated. He sometimes slips back into the language of those who want women to be merely decorative and good housekeepers, even while he wants to laud these women from the past. For instance, of Nicole-Reine (also Hortense) Lepaute, an astronomer, who worked with Jérôme Lalande and Alexis Clairaut on calculations regarding when Halley’s comet would return, he says
‘it is also gratifying to be assured that her engrossing work in astronomy in no wise caused her to neglect her home duties or to lost that sweetness of character and delicacy of refinement for which she was noted before she entered upon the absorbing and taxing career of astronomical computer.’
Not many female astronomers would like to be remembered for their attention to home duties these days, however much the reality is they are likely to be doing it with more or less input from a partner. The reality is the chores still have to be done, but we – as women – no longer have to do as Mary Somerville said she felt obliged to do:
“I hid my papers as soon as the bell announced a visitor, lest anyone should discover my secret”,
something which would have been close to Jane Austen’s heart too. We – male or female – can do literature searches from the comfort of our own computer. But, as young women have told me too often, they may still get written out of the narrative of a research team’s endeavours, when a male student is allowed to lay claim to a woman’s research – and which historian of science will be able to track that down, by whatever means?
