Teaching women's work and thought in undergraduate history of science courses

Abstract

As a rich field of scholarship now demonstrates, from at least the early modern period, women have consistently contributed to natural philosophy, science, and medicine in Europe and the Anglo‐American world. Their participation in these fields, like men's, has been shaped by gendered social and cultural expectations. It has risen and fallen on cyclical waves of effort to exclude them or minimize their contributions. In historical accounts, until recently, women's roles have been neglected or forgotten. Even today, in both scholarly and popular histories, women in science are often presented as surprising rediscoveries. Women are persistently perceived as newcomers in the sciences. Unless women's contributions are consistently integrated into mainstream narratives in the history of science, women could easily become invisible again. To counter this possibility, I first examine the structural factors shaping women's participation in the sciences and their historical visibility from the early modern period through the 19th century. I then suggest ways to include women in undergraduate surveys in the history of European and Anglo‐American science that encourage students to engage with women's ideas and with women as complex, multi‐valent historical actors. I show how we can situate women's contributions in a narrative that invites students to examine the history of science as a history of ideas, people, and practices and to explore history as a resource for understanding the role of scientific knowledge and authority in the present. Though my own examples are limited to the history of science in Europe and the Anglo‐American world from the early modern period, I argue that a similar thematic approach could be explored and implemented in other historical contexts, given appropriate secondary and primary sources.