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Exceptional women?
Exceptional women?
Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2023. 'Exceptional Women', https://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/july-2023
The first paper since the beginning of this project 'Exceptional Women in Science Education: Émilie Du Châtelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi' was accepted for publication in the journal Paedagogica Historica: International Journal of the History of Education, in July 2023 and has now been published on-line, open access.
The paper derives from my research with Émilie Du Châtelet's and Maria Gaetana Agnesi's papers and publications, during the first year of my research project.
As already noted in the public seminar around the project in April 2023, the discourse of exceptionality was among the emerging themes of the project and although the paper focuses on Émilie Du Châtelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi only, exceptionality is a theme that applies to all six women mathematicians of the project.
In deconstructing the myth of the exceptional woman, I have juxtaposed it to the philosophical notion of 'the event', the theme of my keynote lecture at the University of Tartu in December, 2022 (see December 2022 newsletter)
The paper derives from my research with Émilie Du Châtelet's and Maria Gaetana Agnesi's papers and publications, during the first year of my research project.
As already noted in the public seminar around the project in April 2023, the discourse of exceptionality was among the emerging themes of the project and although the paper focuses on Émilie Du Châtelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi only, exceptionality is a theme that applies to all six women mathematicians of the project.
In deconstructing the myth of the exceptional woman, I have juxtaposed it to the philosophical notion of 'the event', the theme of my keynote lecture at the University of Tartu in December, 2022 (see December 2022 newsletter)
Although there is a growing body of literature around Du Châtelet and Agnesi, their ‘automathographies’ have not been studied in their interrelation, with the exception of a graduate study in German. (Martini, 2017). Du Châtelet and Agnesi certainly knew of each other, although there is no evidence that they ever met or communicated via correspondence. Du Châtelet’s much celebrated book, Institutions de Physique, first published in 1740, with its second edition translated in Italian in 1743 as Institutioni di fisica, was in the Palazzo Agnesi library in Milan. In commenting on the French Academy of Sciences’ denial to accept women as members, Du Châtelet had written: ‘I myself know that if the laws of the Academy had permitted the admission of Ladies, this would have been achieved by Mademoiselle Agnesi’. (in Benazzoli 1937, 107).
As it has now been established, science education has histories, as well as geographies and scholars in the field have been investigating how scientific knowledge is created and circulated in specific times, places and cultures. (Liningstone 2005) Thus, by focusing on two women, who lived in eighteenth-century Europe, but engaged with philosophy, science, and mathematics within different geographical, social, political and cultural contexts, the paper points to the importance of analysing nuances, differences and erupting events in the complex histories of gender, education and science.
The figure of ‘the exceptional woman’ was important in preparing the grounds not only for defending women’s right to science education, but also accepting that some ‘exceptional women’ could also contribute to the creation and circulation of scientific knowledge through publications and teaching. It is in the context of exceptionality then that both Du Châtelet and Agnesi were educated. Here it is important to acknowledge that there was a significant difference in the educational opportunities for women in France and the Italian states, during the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While women faced hurdles across the board and their education mostly happened within the private domain, it was only in the Italian states that some women were allowed to be connected with formal scientific institutions, such as academies and universities. Moreover, apart from the official academies with rigid structures and controlled access, there was also a different tradition in the informal circulation of knowledge: the conversazioni in the Italian states and the salons in France.
A lot has been written about the salons, as social and intellectual platforms of women’s active involvement in the political and cultural formations of modernity, as well as in their role in the production and dissemination of literary, philosophical and scientific knowledge in France and throughout Europe. (see Goodman 1994) Although both forms of intellectual gatherings, soon surpassed national and ethnic boundaries and became transnational and hybrid formations in the creation and circulation of knowledge, there was also a significant difference between them: while women’s role in the French salons was primarily to be promoters of literary and scientific knowledge, several women in the eighteenth-century Italian conversazioni made original contributions to the creation of knowledge.
As Marta Cavazza has pointed out, this was ‘a unique historical case’ in the diverse histories of the European Enlightenment. (2009, 279). Whatever their form or function however— conversazioni, salons, as well as all sorts of formal, informal, literary and/or scientific academies—such intellectual gatherings had a significant impact on how ideas about women’s education significantly changed during the eighteenth century, in Europe.
The problematic discourse of exceptionality notwithstanding, it goes without saying that both Du Châtelet and Agnesi opened up new pathways in women’s involvement in philosophy, science and mathematics. If not as exceptional women then, how can we make sense of the extraordinary paths of their life and work? What I have argued in the paper is that the philosophical notion of the event becomes a lens through which we can make sense of the process of becoming a woman mathematician and philosopher in eighteenth century Europe, through ruptures and unexpected emergences that are usually surpassed or remained unnoticed and marginalized in linear conceptualizations of the historical process. In taking up the notion of the event from Foucault’s genealogical work, I have further made connections with its ontological underpinnings in Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy.
References
Benazzoli, Cornelia Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Milan: Fratelli Bocca, 1939), 107.
Cavazza, Marta, ‘Between Modesty and Spectacle: Women and Science in Eighteenth Century Italy’. In Italy’s Eighteenth Century: Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, edited by Paula Findlen, Catherine Sama and Wendt Rowarth, 275-302. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 279.
Goodman, Dena The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Livingstone, David N. Putting Science in its Place: Geographies of Scientific Knowledge. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005).
Martini, Carlotta Zwei Frauenleben für die Wissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert: Eine vergleichende Fallstudie zu Émilie Du Châtelet und Maria Gaetana Agnesi [Two Women's Lives for Eighteenth-Century Science: A Comparative Case Study of Émilie Du Châtelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi], Bearbeitet und herausgegeben von Gudrun Wolfschmidt. (Hamburg: tredition Nuncius Hamburgensis; Band 43, 2017).
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