Pandora's Breeches (04 Edition)

Heroines of the manure bed

Ranging from astronomy in Germany and Poland to botany in Britain, Pandora's Breeches tells the story of women's contribution to science in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When a pair of smouldering breeches stuffed with straw were discovered planted above a lavatory in the House of Commons, causing smoke to billow through the building on May 9, 1792, the motto "Pandora's breeches" was coined (literally, on copper coins rushed into circulation) as a warning against political activism. Pandora's box had become a common image for the French Revolution; to link Pandora to those breeches (though Thomas Paine was the chief suspect) was to suggest something disruptive and unnatural. The idea of a woman wearing trousers was both ridiculous and possible (indeed, by the end of the century rational dress and the bicycle made them an essential part of the new woman's wardrobe).

But Patricia Fara's Pandora's Breeches is not a cry for the restoration of Enlightenment women to the centre of science; instead it questions the notion of a centre, emphasizing the importance of collaboration. In so doing it makes an important intervention in the history of science and scientific endeavour, demonstrating the importance of understanding and accepting historical difference. Making assumptions about the past is a way of losing it, making instead a mirror of present values and beliefs. Historically, women have had much to gain from believing that they were physically and psychologically different from men, and as Aristotelian models of sexual difference gave way to physical criteria -- anatomical differences, hormonal systems -- new rationales developed for maintaining the status quo. Paradoxically, perhaps, before professionalization moved science out of the home and into universities and industrial laboratories, there was more scope for active involvement from women who had no wish to see a radical reorganization of society. By and large, Enlightenment women did not wish to do the same things as men. They had houses to run and, usually, families to tend. Fara's book is, for the most part, the story of publicly unrecognized workers; a world not of masculine genius and heroism, but of quotidian rounds in which women worked alongside men, forming intellectual networks with international scholars, and with each other.

Enlightenment science emerges, for the first time, as a family affair: the story of men and women whose lives were entwined in scientific enterprise. Sisters who waited for their brothers to return from university in the vacations so they could talk about science; wives who assisted their husbands with scientific experiments in the domestic space of the home, and also acted as translators and educators, lab technicians, illustrators and editors. Some women actively sought stimulating alliances: Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, advised women frustrated by their conventional education to marry the right man, as she had: from the privacy of her dining room she was able to participate in the scholarly debate she desired. Others had experimental science thrust on them. Charles Lyell made his wife, Mary, study geology during their engagement; she read and translated German for him, illustrated and edited his books, taught her maid to kill snails for scientific study, and became more expert than him in conchology. In the 1850s, Charles Darwin took over a kitchen shelf as a laboratory, used his children and pets for scientific study and probed the mothers of his extended family for information on their babies. His wife and her friends, also married to scientists, found themselves an unacknowledged editorial team as they read and discussed his work.

Pandora's Breeches reveals the extent to which such scientific giants as Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Herschel, Lavoisier and Linnaeus were dependent on the patronage, support, or intellectual guidance of women whose contribution has been excluded by individualistic models of scientific discovery, with eureka moments -- Newton, the apple and gravity being one perfect demonstration. Fara details the influence of Elizabeth of Bohemia on Descartes -- their discussions formed the basis of his last book, Passions of the Soul. Likewise, Leibniz, whose arguments about space, time and energy foreshadowed the new science of relativity, received sustained patronage and stimulus from her sister Sophie, and Sophie's daughter, Sophie Charlotte. Caroline of Ansbach, England's Princess of Wales from 1714, ensured his salary was paid, secured him a position as court historian, and questioned him repeatedly on his monads. He published their conversations as Theodicy. But the greatest intellectual influence on his life was Anne, Viscountess Conway, whose version of monads he read about in The Principles of the Most Ancient and Modern Philosophy, just as he was developing his own.

Emilie du Chatelet's Foundations of Physic integrated the ideas of Descartes, Leibniz and Newton and led eventually to new physical laws of energy; and her annotated translation of Newton's Principia played a part in toppling Descartes. Caroline Herschel was the devoted assistant of her brother William, who discovered Uranus, sieving horse manure to make smooth beds for telescope mirrors, discovering eight comets, calculating, cataloguing, and becoming the first woman to receive a salary for scientific work, paid fifty pounds a year from the King. Maria Paul Lavoisier illustrated her husband's Elements of Chemistry (1789) with meticulous diagrams, and Priscilla Wakefield's textbooks on botany and natural history inaugurated a new, chatty and personal pedagogic style which placed maternal women in positions of authority, campaigning for the inclusion of women in science but at the same time stressing the value of family stability. Jane Marcet's Conversations on Chemistry (1806) inspired Michael Faraday's pioneering career while he was working as a bookbinder's apprentice, and he remembered her throughout his life as his first teacher.

Nonetheless, in engaging in rational thought and practice, these scientific women transgressed boundaries of decorum, and Fara is careful to note the prejudice they faced. She chooses as the front cover of Pandora's Breeches an early nineteenth-century lithograph, "A lady of scientific habits", a woman made up of books, down to her feet and hands, an inkpot on her head. Likewise, she records Immanuel Kant's remark in his observations on the beautiful and the sublime that a woman who conducted such learned controversies on mechanics "might as well have had a beard", and Voltaire's declaration, of his lover Emilie du Chatelet, that she was a great man whose only fault was being a woman. Moments of misgiving necessarily surface in an account which strives not to impose contemporary values on the past. Fara loses her patience with women who were ensnared by "the conventions of the day", notes that botany, promoting their associations with flowers, was perhaps not the best subject for women, and shows dismay that some intellectual women, such as Mary Somerville, working on her mirror-image project, were forced to work in secret. Even the most empathetic historian cannot, and perhaps should not, lose sight of the present.

Warning against refashioning neglected women as martyrs, Patricia Fara neither overstates nor undervalues their contributions, allowing them to remain embedded in the social and domestic structures and beliefs of their time. Her subjects are so diverse that no single narrative model suffices to tell their story; some are lone scholars, some reluctant wives, others aristocratic, erudite and sociable; and national differences presented different opportunities. But what she brings home is the domestic origins of experimental science: understanding how science started must involve looking at how families accommodated new investigations of the natural world. Pandora's Breeches is vital reading for anyone interested in the rapid growth of Enlightenment science, and the varied ways in which women indisputably affected the course of Western philosophy.

Angelique Richardson is the author of Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational reproduction and the New Woman, 2002. She is now working on a study of Thomas Hardy and biology.

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