So finally, to end, a scientific joke. The scene is America in the early 1950s. Scientists from the University of California at Berkeley proudly announce that they have created two new radioactive elements – berkelium and californium, atomic numbers 97 and 98. Why, ask the pundits, did they not label them universitium and offium? Then they could have saved the names californium and berkelium for 99 and 100, the next two elements they are destined to make as science advances.
Even though all the natural elements had been isolated, scientists were continuing to create more and more artificial elements. Like collectors of unusual objects, they could not contemplate the possibility that their collection was complete, that their life’s work – their obsession – was over. They had drawn away the veil and uncovered nature’s secrets, but they did not want the story to end. If they went on striding forwards, then perhaps their triumphant tale of scientific progress could roll on uninterrupted into the future.1
Whether it’s radioactive atoms or rare animals, to collect is to own, to dominate, to tell a particular story about what’s important. Building up a collection gives a sense of power and control because its owner has reorganised the environment. Like scientific detective work, collecting involves searching and classifying. In both, similar problems need to be resolved, similar questions demand to be answered. What is the best way of ordering my discoveries? How can I hunt down an elusive object? Should I keep my colleagues informed, or should I guard my possessions, my knowledge, against my competitors?
An imposing Minerva (Figure 31) dominates the frontispiece of a large eighteenth-century advertising catalogue for expensive cameos and imitation gems designed explicitly to cater for the tastes of wealthy collectors. Her study is cluttered with desirable objects, many of them strange females. The snake-wreathed head of Medusa stares out from her shield, propped up on a decapitated head. Nearby stands the goddess of medicine, identified by the caduceus on the table leg. Even Minerva herself is a rarity, an unusual woman with muscular arms, her breasts squashed flat by her military armour. Holding open the door to her cabinet of curiosities, she entices customers to imagine the delights concealed within. Minerva’s visitors can glimpse some tantalising figures, most prominently a statuette of yet another goddess, the multi-breasted Diana of Ephesus. During the Enlightenment this ancient symbol of fertile nature was a familiar motif, copied from Roman coins and shown on fountains and public monuments. She represented the nurturing mother, a far more common female stereotype than the learned woman.2
Fig. 31 Minerva displays her cabinet collection of women. D. Allan, engraved frontispiece of R. E. Raspe, A Descriptive Catalogue of a General Collection of Ancient and Modern Engraved Gems, Cameos as well as Intaglios, Taken from the Most Celebrated Cabinets in Europe; and Cast in Coloured Pastes, White Enamel, and Sulphur, by James Tassie, Modeller (1791).
This image of Minerva would also be appropriate for written collections of women. No accident that in 1706 Johann Eberti chose the title Open Cabinet of Learned Women for his book of several hundred female biographies. Just as Minerva tempts purchasers with the fine figurines in her cabinet, so Eberti encouraged readers to marvel at his female intellectual curiosities. Over the centuries, biographers have gathered together famous women who have little in common except their sex. Resembling delicate pieces of porcelain protected within a display cabinet, they are arranged alongside one other within the covers of a book. Their major entry qualification is their womanhood rather than their achievements.
Different collectors have different selection strategies. The first set of biographies devoted exclusively to women was by the fourteenth-century Florentine writer Giovanni Boccaccio. Although his Decameron is now far better known, Boccaccio’s Famous Women was a great success, circulating in hand-copied manuscripts as well as printed editions. He collected more than a hundred subjects, many of them mythological heroines such as Minerva. He chose them not for their abilities, but for their reputation. Boccaccio’s book includes outstanding examples of evil women as well as of good ones, because he hoped that their lives would inspire his readers to behave virtuously. His first entry was Eve, the beauty born from Adam’s rib and cursed ‘with a woman’s fickleness . . . foolishly, she thought that she was about to rise to greater heights’.3
Boccaccio inspired the first famous collection of women by a woman – Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies. The daughter of the French king’s favourite mathematical astrologer, Christine de Pizan (1365–c.1430) burned with resentment at being denied the education she craved. One night, she was visited by three allegorical Ladies: Reason, Rectitude and Justice. Why, she asked, have men always treated women so badly? Because, answered Lady Reason, they secretly fear women’s superiority. As proof of women’s capabilities, this spiritual trio helped Christine de Pizan to construct (in her vivid imagination) an ideal city from the finest materials, where women could live together until eternity, honoured for their contributions to civilisation. She lived at a time when military valour and Christian virtue were highly valued, and so Christine de Pizan placed Amazonian warriors and the Virgin Mary inside her female utopia.4
As interest in intellectual women grew, Minerva and Christine de Pizan themselves became biographical collectors’ items, set side by side with other heroines. When Eberti compiled his Open Cabinet, learned women were starting to become renowned for their scientific prowess as well as for their more conventional literary achievements. Well-intentioned men of science began to publish accounts celebrating female accomplishments, such as Lalande’s tribute to women astronomers in the early nineteenth century. Since then, collections devoted to women’s lives in science have appeared in increasing numbers and have expanded in size.5
But do such collections represent a more enlightened attitude? Many objections are summed up by the title of an early twentieth-century classic, reprinted in America as recently as 1991: Woman in Science: with an introductory chapter on women’s long struggle for things of the mind. The author was a Catholic priest writing under the pseudonym H.J. Mozans. By using the singular Woman, he eliminated female individuality and set women apart as something special. His Darwinian subtitle reinforced this notion that women belong almost to a distinct species, like the masculine Minerva or those allegorical goddesses who represented the sciences but were unable to practise them. Encyclopaedias of women’s lives have proliferated during the last few decades, but although they are – like Judy Chicago’s Dinner Party – compiled with egalitarian zeal, they do perpetuate this idea that women should be celebrated separately from men.
Pandora’s Breeches might qualify as one of these compilations, but it has been written with different ends in view. Rather than creating new female heroines, it has undermined conventional views of the past by attacking the very concept of heroism in science. This book has presented new interpretations of scientific men as well as of scientific women. We need to rewrite science’s past by eliminating romanticised tales of lone geniuses and their glorious discoveries. Science is a collaborative project whose successes – and failures – can only be appreciated by understanding how scientific technology has permeated the whole of society. In revised versions of science’s past, women have vital roles to play. Their contributions were often different from men’s, but that does not mean that they were less important.
Like science itself, historical research is also a cooperative endeavour. Pandora’s Breeches is the collection of one particular author who set up her own criteria to determine who should enter her cabinet and be put on show. She picked an international range of examples who would illustrate various ways in which women have contributed to the growth of science. There are many more stories to be told, many other forgotten scientific workers of the past – men as well as women – waiting to be revealed and reappraised. Anyone who reinterprets the past need never contemplate the collector’s nightmare of a completed set.