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Epistolary entanglements
Epistolary entanglements
Please reference as: Maria Tamboukou. 2024. 'Epistolary Entanglements'://sites.google.com/view/numbersandnarratives/newsletter/july-2024
After two years of working intensely with women mathematicians' letters, talking about them in seminars and conferences, thinking about them and of course including them in my analysis, as well as in the papers that have already emerged from this project, I was very happy to see the paper 'Letters, Gender and Mathematics: a feminist genealogical approach' to be published in the journal Foro de Educación, 22(1) in a special issue on Women’s History of Education and the Archival, Digital, Narrative, Auto/biographical, Affective and Spatial Turns.
My main argument in this paper is that women mathematicians' scientific correspondence is not only a rich archive of their contribution to mathematical sciences, but also of their constitution as subjects in mathematics, science and philosophy, particularly in cases where there are no other textual traces of the self, like autobiographies, memoirs, journals and diaries. While recognizing the significance of mathematical correspondences in solidifying women's contributions to the history of science and mathematics, I have resisted using their letters merely as biographical supplements. Instead, I have emphasized the importance of analyzing them as epistolary narratives, considering the epistemological specificities and implications of this approach.
Mapping epistolary relationships was important in the analysis of all letters. A common denominator in all six cases was that women mathematicians were communicating with men, whether tutors, doctoral supervisors, fellow mathematicians or even family members, lovers and friends, when writing about mathematics. The only exception was the correspondence between Mary Sommerville and Ada Lovelace, as I have shown in the paper ‘Ever yours, mathematically’: women’s letters and the mathematical imagination published last year in Gender and Education. What has also struck me in tracing epistolary relationships among women themselves is for example that Émilie Du Châtelet and Maria Gaetana Agnesi, never communicated with each other, although they knew of each other’s work; Agnesi had Du Châtelet’s book, Foundations of Physics in her library, Du Châtelet had praised Agnesi’s work and they had both become members of the Bologna Academy of Sciences at around the same time, through their connections with Laura Bassi, the first woman to hold a chair in physics in the early modern period.
In the context of such relationships and networks, epistolary education emerged as an important theme in the analysis of these correspondences. Letters filled the gaps of most women’s lack of rigorous mathematics education, as well as their exclusion from universities and formal learned academies. In this context, some of their letters function as educational and pedagogical tools in the circuit of knowledge production and dissemination, but also as flexible spaces of self-definition, as well as spaces of encouragement and disguise, sometimes even bracketing race, class and age differences. Sophie Germain for example, was able to hide her gender identity in her mathematical correspondence first with the professors of the École Polytechnique in Paris and then with the famous German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss, by adopting a male pen name and signing her letters as Monsieur LeBlanc. Moreover, epistolary education between a male tutor and a female student gradually evolved into scientific correspondence, encompassing critical examination, peer review, collaboration, and even scientific disputes and disagreements.
Germain's proof to Gauss theorem, letter dated 27 June 1807
It is finally important to recognize that the personal and scientific components of their correspondence are inseparable and intertwined. This recognition is crucial in tracing the formation of the female self within the context of gender and science. Additionally, it reveals the complexity of these six women's archives and meta-archives, along with the multifaceted discourses and mythologies that have developed around them.
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