As calças de Pandora

Sobre o livro "Pandora's breeches. Women, science and power in the Enlightenment" de Patricia Fara.

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. [...]

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. [...]

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.