Writing about Lives in Science: (Auto)Biography, Gender, and Genre 9783737002639, 9783847102632, 9783847002635

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Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities / ACUME 2 Volume 9 Edited by Vita Fortunati, Università di Bologna Elena Agazzi, Università di Bergamo

Scientific Board Andrea Battistini (Università di Bologna), Jean Bessière (Université Paris III Sorbonne Nouvelle), Dino Buzzetti (Università di Bologna), Gilberto Corbellini (Università di Roma »La Sapienza«), Theo D’Haen (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven), Claudio Franceschi (Università di Bologna), Brian Hurwitz (King’s College, London), Moustapha Kassem (Odense Universiteit, Denmark), Tom Kirkwood (University of Newcastle), Ansgar Nünning (Justus Liebig Universität Gießen), Giuliano Pancaldi (Università di Bologna), Manfred Pfister (Freie Universität Berlin), Stefano Poggi (Università di Firenze), Martin Procházka (Univerzita Karlova v Praze), Maeve Rea (Queen’s College, Belfast), Ewa Sikora (Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Warszawa), Paola Spinozzi (Università di Ferrara) Editorial Board Kirsten Dickhaut (Justus Liebig Universität Gießen), Raul Calzoni (Università di Bergamo), Gilberta Golinelli (Università di Bologna), Andrea Grignolio (Università di Bologna), Pierfrancesco Lostia (Università di Bologna)

Paola Govoni / Zelda Alice Franceschi (eds.)

Writing about Lives in Science (Auto)Biography, Gender, and Genre

This book has been published with the support of the Socrates Erasmus program for Thematic Network Projects through grant 227942-CP-1-2006-1-IT-ERASMUS-TN2006-2371/001-001 SO223RETH. This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which might be made of the information contained therein. Questo volume è stato pubblicato con il contributo del programma Socrates Erasmus per i progetti di reti tematiche – 227942-CP-1-2006-1-IT-ERASMUS-TN2006-2371/001-001 SO2-23RETH. Il progetto è stato finanziato con il contributo della Commissione europea. La presente pubblicazione riflette le idee del solo autore e la Commissione europea non può ritenersi responsabile per l’uso che potrebbe essere fatto delle informazioni contenute al suo interno.

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. ISBN 978-3-8471-0263-2 ISBN 978-3-8470-0263-5 (E-Book) © Copyright 2014 by V&R unipress GmbH, D-37079 Goettingen All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover image: Ilse Bing (American, born Germany, 1899 – 1998), Self-Portrait with Mirrors, 1931. Copyright Estate of Ilse Bing. Printing and binding: a Hubert & Co, Göttingen Printed in Germany

Contents

Paola Govoni Crafting Scientific (Auto)Biographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part I Between Biography and Autobiography Evelyn Fox Keller Pot-holes Everywhere: How (not) to Read my Biography of Barbara McClintock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Londa Schiebinger Following the Story : From The Mind Has No Sex? to Gendered Innovations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Georgina Ferry Telling Stories or Making History? Two Lives in X-ray Crystallography

.

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Paula Findlen Listening to the Archives: Searching for the Eighteenth-Century Women of Science . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Part II Shaping Biographies Marta Cavazza The Biographies of Laura Bassi

Massimo Mazzotti Rethinking Scientific Biography : The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117

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Contents

Part III Networking Vita Fortunati Mirror Shards: Conflicting Images between Marie Curie’s Autobiography and her Biographies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 141 Zelda Alice Franceschi Women in the Field: Writing the History. Genealogies and Science in Margaret Mead’s Autobiographical Writings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Paola Govoni The Making of Italo Calvino: Women and Men in the ‘Two Cultures’ Home Laboratory . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Pnina G. Abir-Am Women Scientists of the 1970s: An Ego-Histoire of a Lost Generation . . 223

Afterword Zelda Alice Franceschi On the Margins of the Margins: Awareness and Delay . . . . . . . . . . . 263 Contributors

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 277

Acknowledgments

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279

Name Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 281

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Paola Govoni

Crafting Scientific (Auto)Biographies Study the historian before you begin to study the facts.1 Edward H. Carr It may be difficult for those removed from the mores of the scientific community to understand the enormous reticence with which anyone, especially a woman, would make public his or her personal impressions and experiences […]. To do so is not only considered unprofessional, it jeopardizes one’s professional image of disinterest and objectivity.2 Evelyn Fox Keller

This is a book on women and men’s lives in science, introducing the subject of autobiography regarded as a tool for historians of science. On the latter point, the book restricts itself to calling the attention of historians and science studies scholars3 to the role that the gender of the biographer, and that of his or her biographee, may have in the process of writing a biography. There are very many features in play in the ‘special relation’ established between the biographer and his or her biographee, and they will change according to time and space. Whether the biographee is alive or dead,4 it is a relation between human beings played out among the articulations of a network that is professional and social, as well as personal and biological, as in ‘real’ life. Historians having always been suspicious of autobiography – ‘autobiography by its very nature is […] something of a scandal for the historian’5 – but from the * For his encouragement, for our discussions on lives and on science, a special thank you goes to Giuliano Pancaldi, as always. 1 Edward H. Carr, What is History? (New York: Vintage Books, 1961), p. 26. 2 Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics’, in Working it Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work, ed. by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels (New York: Pantheon, 1977), pp. 71 – 91 (p. 91). 3 The developments in recent decades enable me to use the expressions ‘science studies scholars’ and ‘historians of science, technology and medicine’ as equivalents; at any rate, this is how I use them here. 4 On the experience of writing about living scientists, see Soraya de Chadarevian, ‘Using Interviews to Write the History of Science’, in The Historiography of Contemporary Science and Technology, ed. by Thomas Söderqvist (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Press, 1997), pp. 51 – 70; Nathaniel C. Comfort, ‘When Your Sources Talk Back: Toward a Multimodal Approach to Scientific Biography’, Journal of the History of Biology, 44 (2011), 651 – 69. 5 Jeremy D. Popkin, History, Historians, and Autobiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), p. 11. For ego-histoire and autobiography, essential to begin with are: European Ego-Histoires: Historiography and the Self, 1970 – 2000, ed. by Luisa Passerini and Alexander C.T. Geppert, vol. 3 of Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories (Athens: Nefeli

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1980s, when Pierre Nora challenged some colleagues to engage with what he called ego-histoire,6 the subject has been explored with growing interest.7 Not only have some of the leading historians of the twentieth century engaged with autobiography in relation to the historian’s craft, but also scholars in other sectors have, including economists.8 This apparently does not apply to historians of science, who seem to suffer from a certain uneasiness when faced with biography as a genre. Nevertheless, it is beyond dispute that over the past two decades scientific biography has significantly changed its role in the history of science, technology, and medicine. The need to re-examine the potential and the limits of the biographical genre in the sector of science studies arose in particular from the publication of biographies which showed themselves capable of successfully penetrating the complexity of creative processes and discoveries. In some cases, biography revealed itself well suited to trying out new approaches to the study of science and scientists. Historians of science have moved freely from biography in context to existential biography, and from the biography of scientific objects to metabiography. Thanks also to a not always easy dialogue with professional writers and the emergence of the so-called ‘Sobel effect’, for people working on science, its history and its social relations biography is now a flexible tool, encompassing genres ranging from textual analysis to the in-depth survey of field and laboratory work, from contextual reconstruction to subtle debate over historiography.9 This should lead us to consider that the relations between men

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Publishers, 2001); Economists’ Lives: Biography and Autobiography in the History of Economics, ed. by E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn L. Forget (London: Duke University Press, 2007). See the classic Essais d’ego-histoire: Maurice Agulhon, Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Raoul Girardet, Jacques Le Goff, Michelle Perrot, Ren¦ R¦mond, r¦unis et pr¦sent¦s par Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1987). Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Ego-histoire and Beyond: Contemporary French Historian-Autobiographers’, in the special issue ‘Biography’, French Historical Studies, 19 (1996), 1139 – 167. For a wide-ranging discussion of the subject, and a wealth of biographical references, see Women Medievalists and the Academy, ed. by Jane Chance (Madison: The University of Wisconsin, 2005). I would like to thank Gianna Pomata for referring me to this book, which provides biographical profiles of women medievalists active between the seventeenth century and the present, and which closes with an autobiographical essay by medieval historian Caroline Walker Bynum. In addition to other biographies cited in the course of this book, see: John L. Heilbron, The Dilemmas of an Upright Man: Max Planck as Spokesman for German Science (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1986); Frederic L. Holmes, Hans Krebs: The Formation of a Scientific Life, 1900 – 1933 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Janet E. Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging. Volume 1 (New York: Knopf, 1995), and Ead., Charles Darwin: The Power of Place. Volume 2 (New York: Knopf, 2002); Giuliano Pancaldi, Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Massimo Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Nicolaas A. Rupke, Alexander von Humboldt: A Metabiography (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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and women biographers and men and women biographees may deserve more attention than they have received so far. To provide orientation in such a challenging field, this book offers examples of how autobiography can be functional to science studies, providing examples we may regard as ‘pragmatic’10 for those approaching writing about men and women’s lives in science; examples showing how to overcome or control the risks – and reveal the advantages – offered by the relation between the self narrating and the biographee. The question we will be addressing is: to what extent does my personal, professional, and social experience – including my gender – matter in the image I am conveying of the scientist I’m writing about? We offer food for thought, though no final answer, on this question; a question we suggest should be left open, and in a prominent place, on our desks. Veterans of the so-called science wars, historians of science, and science studies scholars should no longer be afraid of embarrassing issues – ‘considered unprofessional’, as Evelyn Fox Keller recalls in our opening quotation – when making incursions into the ‘personal’ in relation to writing history. With these aims in mind, Pnina G. Abir-Am, Georgina Ferry, Paula Findlen, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Londa Schiebinger have accepted the challenge of writing of their own professional (and also personal) experience, inter-weaving it with reflections on the case studies they have been working on. Together with essays by Vita Fortunati, from literary studies, Zelda A. Franceschi, an anthropologist, and historians of science Marta Cavazza, Paola Govoni, and Massimo Mazzotti, the book presents some of the ways a biographical approach may help us understand, together with lives in science, the science itself. Concluding remarks by Franceschi will offer the perspective of an anthropologist on the use of (auto) biography and (hi)story telling.11 The authors represent different generations, as well as different disciplines. The time span opens with the extraordinary, internationally well-known case of natural philosopher Laura Bassi (1711 – 1778), the first woman to have obtained a tenured professorship of physics in 1732, and concludes with the just as important case of Elizabeth H. Blackburn (1948 – ) and Carol W. Greider (1961 – ), the first women’s team to have won a Nobel Prize in 2009.

10 I am here applying to autobiography the ‘pragmatic’ approach to biography spoken of in Peter Hainsworth and Martin McLaughlin, ‘Introduction’, in Biographies and Autobiographies in Modern Italy: A Festschrift for John Woodhouse, ed. by Peter Hainsworth and Martin McLaughlin (London: Legenda, 2007), pp. 1 – 6. 11 For an interesting point of view on this latter subject, see Helga Nowotny, ‘How to Tell a Story in the Sciences: Settings and Lessons’, in Science, History, and Social Activism: A Tribute to Everett Mendelsohn, ed. by Garland E. Allen and Roy MacLeod (Boston: Kluwer, 2001), pp. 123 – 35.

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I.

Paola Govoni

Positioning Biography and Autobiography within the History of Science

In all research areas the status of the biographical genre was at a low ebb in the 1960s. It was in the following decade that specialist books and articles of scholars in various fields began to examine and evaluate biography as a genre, and the relations between the self doing the research and the self researched began to be explored. As evidence of the new wealth of possibilities offered by biography, and of the novelty of the phenomenon which at once attracted the interest of the lay public, in the 1980s the term ‘life-writing’ became current. By life-writing is meant that universe of narrative forms – both academic and other – which today includes memoirs, journals, letters (including emails), autobiographical fiction and poems, and even auto-ethnicity. It is the concrete character of life histories, where readers’ voyeurism and writers’ exhibitionism merge, which has appealed to both specialists and amateurs, convincing publishers that cultural interests and the market can be reconciled. So, while historians of science have found at least seven different ways of making and using biography,12 scholars in the field of literary studies have described sixty different genres of life narrative.13 In an editorial of Life Writing, a specialized journal founded in 2004, autobiography and biography are recognized as the most popular form of storytelling of our times.14 Scientists themselves have contributed to the debate, not only the anthropologists Franceschi deals with here, but also biologists.15 To give a brief summary of a rich and fascinating international debate covering at least three decades, we may say that biography has earned the status of an analytical tool, without losing the popular characteristics that have made it one of the genres most appreciated by the lay public from as far back as the Victorian age.16 Yet, 12 Thomas Söderqvist, ‘The Seven Sisters: Subgenres of ‘Bioi’ of Contemporary Life Scientists’, Journal of the History of Biology, 44 (2011), 633 – 50. 13 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography : A Guide to Interpreting Personal Narratives, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), see in particular chapter 9 and Appendix A. 14 Mary Besemeres and Maureen Perkins, ‘Editorial’, in Life Writing, 1 (2004), vii-xii (p. vii). 15 See Marianne Horsdal, Telling Lives: Exploring Dimensions of Narratives (Oxon: Routledge, 2012). 16 On this, see for example the aims and activities of the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing, OCLW, and the Arvon Foundation. OCLW, based at Wolfson College, Oxford, ‘provides a natural home for life-writing’, and connected to the Society are scholars – the president is Hermione Lee – and practitioners of life-writing from the University of Oxford and further afield, among whom Georgina Ferry. See https://www.wolfson.ox.ac.uk/clusters/life-writing (for this and the sites that follow, the date of the last access is 9/12/2013). The aim of the Arvon Foundation is ‘to promote the transforming power of writing’ and it is directed at amateurs. See Sally Cline and Carole Angier, The Arvon Book of Life Writing: Writing Biography, Autobiography and Memoir (London: Methuen Drama, 2010). Among the numerous, in-

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while the debates on biography have occasionally involved historians of science through significant interventions,17 the same cannot be said with reference to autobiography or ego-histoire. Academic biographer Lyndall Gordon has written that ‘the real subject of biography is always going to be yourself, some aspect of your personality, some reflection of what’s happening in your life at the time you’re writing the book.’18 Science writer, journalist, and biographer Georgina Ferry in her essay in this book tells of her beginnings as the biographer of Dorothy Hodgkin, the only English woman scientist to have been awarded the Nobel Prize, and who no professional historian of science had ever been interested in before.19 Ferry writes that among the reasons that led her to the undertaking there was also the need at that time to find answers to her own personal issues: how had Hodgkin, at those levels of excellence, managed to combine family, research, and her commitment to social activism? This was only superficially a simple matter, leading her research straightaway into personal, institutional, and social contexts which are the same, if ‘narrated’ differently, as those probed by historians of science. Abir-Am, in her essay here, goes further in the same direction with radical clarity. To Abir-Am, the stories of Ellen Daniell, ‘the first woman to be hired and fired by the department of Molecular Biology at the University of California’, and of Blackburn and Greider, the first woman’s team to share a Nobel Prize, tell of generations of women scholars very close to each other and in part overlapping, though experiencing very different professional outcomes. Their stories ‘are also our story – writes Abir-Am – the story of women historians of science who write about women scientists […] as a way of better understanding not only science in history but also our own generation’s slow teresting observations of professional writers on these subjects, see Michael Holroyd, Works on Paper : The Craft of Biography and Autobiography (London: ABACUS, 2002); ‘Q& A: Georgina Ferry on Writing Biography’, Nature, 463 (2010), 1025 (http://www.nature.com/ nature/journal/v463/n7284/full/4631025a.html). 17 I refer to: Le biografie scientifiche, ed. by Antonello La Vergata, special issue of Intersezioni, 1 (1995); Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, ed. by Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, ed. by Thomas Söderqvist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); ‘Focus: Biography in the History of Science’, ed. by Joan L. Richards, Isis, 97 (2006), 302 – 29; ‘Scientific Biography : A Many Faced Art Form’, ed. by Oren Harman, special issue of Journal of the History of Biology, 44 (2011), 607 – 712. For further bibliography see the essays by Paula Findlen and Massimo Mazzotti in this book. 18 Statement by Lyndall Gordon from a conversation between her and Humphrey Carpenter, ‘Learning about Ourselves: Biography as Autobiography’, in The Art of Literary Biography, ed. by John Batchelor, 1st ed. 1995 (Oxford Scholarship online, 2011, DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198182894.003.0018). 19 Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (London: Granta Publications, 1998, and New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2000).

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move toward gender equality.’ By declaring them, Abir-Am defuses those identifying processes (which apply to both men and women) that typically remain concealed, thus providing the reader with yet another means to grasp the case critically. Of this kind of reflection – although not in relation to gender issues – historians of science have long since been aware. Already in 1970 Arnold Thackray began one of his essays by quoting the much quoted Edward H. Carr – ‘Before you study the historian study his [sic] historical and social environment’ – and replied with a quotation by Alexandre Koyr¦: ‘the historian projects into history the interests and the scale of values of his [sic] own time.’20 And yet I haven’t found that science studies scholars have followed this up by enquiring into the side effects caused by the self of the historian, including his or her gender, nor in relation to his or her biographee’s gender. If gender issues do not remain outside the lab and play a role in the making of science and its institutions, as the literature of the last thirty years has shown,21 they clearly cannot be extraneous to the historian’s craft. The use of masculine pronouns in the specialist literature, as in the case of Carr and Koyr¦, and still today,22 probably does not just derive from consolidated conventions in modern languages. This certainly cannot be the case from the 1960s, with the diffusion of cultural studies and the so called second wave of feminism, and with the entry of women en masse into higher education and (a little less en masse) into the professions and academe. It is no coincidence that the resurgence of biography began in the 1970s, thanks to the debate on autobiography enriched with a new, radical freshness by feminists and by women’s and gender studies scholars. It was in that context of discussions on the interrelations between personal and social that biography began to be thought of as scholarly writing; it was then, after those autobiographical initiatives relating to gender, that the question of how a biography comes into being began to be asked, and how the biographer can capture the essence of a creative mind.23 20 Arnold Thackray, ‘Science: Has its Present Past a Future?’, in Historical and Philosophical Perspectives of Science, ed. by Roger H. Stuewer, Minnesota Archive edition, vol. 5 (University of Minnesota, 1970), pp. 112 – 33 (p. 112). 21 There is by now a wealth of literature on the subject. For classic examples see ahead, notes 46 and 47, and for further bibliography see the essays by Londa Schiebinger, Paula Findlen, Massimo Mazzotti, and Pnina G. Abir-Am in this book. 22 On the subject of biography, see for example Oren Harman, ‘Introduction to the Special Issue Scientific Biography : A Many Faced Art Form’, Journal of the History of Biology, 44 (2011), 607 – 9 (p. 608). 23 On this latter point, see Reading Autobiography, ed. by Smith and Watson, chapter 7. See also Thomas L. Hankins, ‘In Defence of Biography : The Use of Biography in the History of Science’, History of Science, 17 (1979), 1 – 16; Musical Biography : Towards New Paradigms, ed. by Jolanta T. Pekacz (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).

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In 1971, while those debates had really got going, Arnaldo Momigliano (1908 – 1987) published his classic study on biography in ancient Greece. Once again confirming the connections between biography and autobiography, he began thus: ‘When I was young, scholars wrote history, and gentlemen wrote biographies.’24 The elegance of the image should not make us forget that those ‘gentlemen’ were witness to ancient tensions between men and women in the profession of history, in particular in relation to biography. A scholar like Momigliano was of course aware of the contribution of numerous women biographers and historians active in Europe from the nineteenth century. Often as independent scholars, to use the expression current today, many women historians had made important and often recognized contributions, including the history of science.25 This was the situation in Italy, where Momigliano had begun his academic career, and in the United Kingdom, where he moved in 1938 after the introduction of racial laws by the fascist regime. To say nothing of women biographers.26 In fact in that same first page he mentioned – if en passant – Virginia Woolf. When Momigliano ‘was young’ it had been Woolf, of course, who had rethought biography in a new form.27 Professional writer and publisher in polemical opposition to the (male) academic world,28 Woolf had contributed to making an important debate on biography more widely heard. It was a genre she worked in and helped raise to a new level of quality, from the popularizing, eulogistic, and often boring instrument typical of the Victorian age, to the complex one bordering on a variety of genres that we know today. Few writers have demonstrated the profound connection that exists between narrative processes – including the biographical and historiographical – and the autobiographical in the way Woolf did.29 Yet in 1971, on writing about a genre like 24 Arnaldo Momigliano, ‘Introduction: The Ambiguous State of Biography’, in Id., The Development of Greek Biography : Four Lectures, expanded edition (Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 1 (1st ed. 1971). 25 Also for the bibliography on the subject, see Gianna Pomata, ‘Amateurs by Choice: Women and the Pursuit of Independent Scholarship in Twentieth-Century Historical Writing’, in Centaurus, 55 (2013), 1 – 24. This article deals with the cases of HÀl¦ne Metzger and Frances Yates, among others. For the biographical profile of another interesting, professionally successful woman historian of science, see Roy MacLeod, ‘Margaret Mary Gowing, 1921 – 1998’, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy, 11 (2012), 267 – 327. 26 Gender in the Production of History, ed. by Luisa Passerini and Polymeris Voglis (Florence: European University Institute, Working Paper HEC 99/2, 1999); ‘History Women’, ed. by Mary O’Dowd and Ilaria Porciani, special issue of Storia della storiografia, 46 (2004); Maria Pia Casalena, Scritti storici di donne italiane: Bibliografia 1800 – 1945 (Florence: Olschki, 2003). 27 Elena Gualtieri, ‘The Impossible Art: Virginia Woolf on Modern Biography’, Cambridge Quarterly, 29 (2000), 349 – 61. 28 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: The Hogarth Press, 1929). 29 On these subjects, the literature, extremely fascinating as it is, is almost infinite. See at least Estelle C. Jelinek, The Tradition of Women’s Autobiography : From Antiquity to the Present

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biography, Momigliano wrote ‘gentlemen’ when referring to writers of biography, and cited Woolf just once. In the past two decades biography has been sometimes at the centre of important debates in the history of science, and yet when faced with the role of gender in the relationship between biographer and biographee, there remains an uneasiness reminiscent of that of Momigliano.

II.

The Trouble with Biography

In the last thirty years historians and sociologists of science have demonstrated that gender shapes the culture of science just as it shapes any other culture. Keller, Abir-Am and Schiebinger were among the first to address the subject, and did it with different approaches. The dialogue, if sometimes difficult, between different theoretical, sociological, and historiographical approaches to gender studies and to women’s history, in the long term has been a winner. It has led the international community of science studies scholars to a better understanding of how science works.30 But if gender plays a role in what we now call the ‘impureness’ of science,31 it plays a role in its history, including gender history, as well. Recently Jessica Riskin called for a ‘third way’ in the history of science and science studies, following on other interventions that have gone in the same direction in recent years.32 An ‘inclusive’ approach of the variety of views on (Boston: Twayne, 1986). For further bibliography, see Reading Autobiography, ed. by Smith and Watson. 30 I restrict myself to citing the recognition coming from different parts of the community, as for example in Jan Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge: Constructivism and the History of Science (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2005 [1998]), and Companion to the History of Modern Science, ed by. John L. Heilbron (ed. in chief), James Bartholomew, Jim Bennett, Frederic L. Holmes, Rachel Laudan, and Giuliano Pancaldi (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); the Companion makes room for numerous entries, from ‘Gender and Science’, by Londa Schiebinger, to ‘Woman in Science’, by Pnina G. Abir-Am. 31 Steven Shapin, Never Pure: Historical Studies of Science as if it was Produced by People with Bodies, Situated in Time, Space, Culture, and Society, and Struggling for Credibility and Authority (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). 32 Jessica Riskin, ‘Introduction: A Mingled Yarn’, in Nature Engaged: Science in Practice from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. by Mario Biagioli and Jessica Riskin (Palgrave: Macmillan, 2012), pp. 1 – 15. Already on other occasions attention had been called to the possibilities offered by the integration of different perspectives on science and its history. See at least Jed Z. Buchwald and Sylvan S. Schweber, ‘Conclusion’, in Scientific Practice: Theories and Stories of Doing Physics, ed. by Jed Z. Buchwald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 345 – 51; Lorraine Daston, ‘The Coming into Being of Scientific Objects’, in Biographies of Scientific Objects, ed. by Lorraine Daston (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2000), pp. 1 – 14; Pancaldi, Volta, pp. 1 – 6.

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science and its history should involve women’s and gender studies on science more directly. It would seem at this point a matter of urgency to shelve the attitude of those who affirm the importance of gender in the history of science, and then take care not to use it, observing with benevolent condescension those who engage with it. While on the part of those who have gender and/or women’s history in their daily toolkits, a less self-referential use of those same tools is now possible.33 Thinking about (auto)biography may help us to build bridges between different approaches to men and women’s lives in science. Biography could be the lab for trying to achieve a methodological self-awareness sustained by a ‘pragmatic’ autobiography, avoiding self-celebration and self-referential attitudes. Thomas Söderqvist, a historian of science who has focused a great deal on the subject of ‘biography’, has observed that ‘Eulogies for nationalistic or professional purposes have given way to biographies written for gender or ethnic identity political reasons.’34 Everyone knows that the history of science of the last two centuries is riddled with eulogistic biographies of male ‘heroes’ of science written by male historians of science. It must be for this that Söderqvist only gives examples of women authors of biographies of women scientists, in his opinion hagiographic. A slightly irreverent, long-term glance over the history of science may help us understand the ‘embarrassment’ of historians of science over biography and autobiography in relation to gender issues. The exercise of modesty we now feel urgent after casting such a glance is useful to remind us that, up until not many decades ago, scientists recognized themselves as part of a supra-national community (typically of men), which for centuries presented itself as the only one able to produce ‘objective’ knowledge. On their part, historians, sociologists, and philosophers of science, sharing with scientists the cult of science as a ‘special’ endeavor, denied that ‘feelings’ and ‘society’ had a role to play in the practice of science and the making of knowledge. From the 1970s, new generations of historians and science studies scholars have opened up new perspectives. The process has led to practical institutional outcomes: from the precarious status enjoyed by history of science at the time of the ‘founding father’ (George Sarton, it will be remembered, managed to obtain tenure after a struggle when he was fifty-six years old),35 historians of science

33 On the other hand, on the complexity taken on by the concept of gender, so that by now we hear of ‘indeterminacy’, see Joan W. Scott, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Gender’, Lectio Magistralis, VI Congress of the Societ— Italiana delle Storiche (University of Padua, February 14, 2013), as far as I know only published in Italian in Joan W. Scott, Genere, politica, storia, ed. by Ida Fazio (Rome: Viella, 2013), pp. 105 – 127. 34 Söderqvist, ‘The Seven Sisters’, p. 643. 35 Lewis Pyenson, ‘George Sarton, Biography’, at http://www.sartonchair.ugent.be/en/sarton/

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have spread and multiplied in the departments of science, history, sociology, and philosophy worldwide. At the scientific level, they have managed to emerge as interlocutors of colleagues in many research fields, including policy makers and economists.36 The dialogue with scientists themselves, though, has known many ups and downs. Acting occasionally as enterprising descendants of high priests of science like Thomas H. Huxley (1825 – 1895), personalities quite extraordinary for their charisma and social engagement,37 many reformer historians and sociologists of science from the 1970s committed themselves to the undertaking of explaining to scientists themselves what science really is and how it functions. The enterprise gave rise to the well-known ‘science wars’, and at the same time to a ‘civil war’ among the reformers themselves. As with every conflict that deserves the name, the so-called science wars have wreaked havoc, but also created heroes, heroines, and myths, on which the literature is plentiful.38 The generation which conducted the wars seems now affected by a healthy syndrome of the repose of the warrior. The ‘commemorative celebrations’ of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962),39 the ‘founding father’ of a second wave of the history of science, took place in 2012 in this post-war context. Structure, the only book of the history of science ‘that everyone in our field has read’, no doubt deserved the celebrations.40 There is a certain relationship between the degree of maturity

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biography, and Id., The Passion of George Sarton: A Modern Marriage and Its Discipline (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007). For example, when the economists got involved in biography and autobiography, they cited, as a positive example to be followed, for the historians of science, Mary Terrall and her ‘Biography as Cultural History of Science’, Isis, 97 (2006), 306 – 13. See E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn L. Forget, ‘Introduction’, in Economists’ Lives, ed. by E. Roy Weintraub and Evelyn L. Forget, p. 2. Adrian Desmond, Huxley : From Devil’s Discipline to Evolution’s High Priest (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1997). But I shall be referring here, also for further bibliographical references, only to: Mario Biagioli, ‘Introduction’, in The Science Studies Reader, ed. by Mario Biagioli (New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. xi-xvi; Bruno Latour, ‘The Invention of the Science Wars: The Settlement of Socrates and Callicles’, in Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press 1999), pp. 216 – 35; Beyond the Science Wars: The Missing Discourse about Science and Society, ed. by Ullica Segerstr”le (Albany : State University of New York, 2000). There were a great number of interesting meetings, from which we await publications. Among others: at the Center for Philosophy and History of Science of the Boston University, 50 years since Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions (March 23, 2012), and at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Towards a History of the History of Science: 50 years since Structure (October 17 – 20, 2012). Michael D. Gordin and Erika Lorraine Milam, ‘A Repository for More than Anecdote: Fifty Years of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 42 (2012), 276 – 78 (p. 476). Historians of science have explored the relations between commemorations and the history of science. See ‘Commemorative Practices in Science. Hi-

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(institutional and scientific) of a professional group engaged in commemorating a founding ‘father’, and the autobiographical ‘needs’ of its members. So the anniversary of the publication of Structure was also the occasion for the publication of many, brief autobiographical interventions, actually very interesting.41 They were sober incursions into autobiography,42 allowing some intriguing comparisons with similar pieces produced from the 1970s by generations of women scholars, both humanists and scientists.43 A first comparison to emerge, for example, stems from the fact that when women scholars have to face up to their own path of intellectual and professional development, they do not hesitate to go into ‘embarrassing’ questions, at the same time personal and social, like the questions of gender. On the other side, as far as I know, no male science studies scholar has carried out an analysis of what it means to be a male scholar embedded in a society where the language of wars and revolutions, heroes, conquerors, warriors and veterans, controversies and races is the language to which he has been exposed from birth, and like him, before him, his ‘founding fathers’, whether biological or intellectual. In 1983 the reactions to Keller’s biography of McClintock were in the first place a reaction to the use of a term – feeling –, already in the title, and which struck an exposed nerve in relation to those subjects, as Keller recalls in her essay below.44 To many readers, ‘feeling’ evoked a personal and therefore not professional dimension, irrelevant to science. Again in line with that tradition, in the readers who had known McClintock, ‘feeling’ evoked ‘female’ characteristics per

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storical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory’, ed. by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Clark A. Elliott, Osiris, 14 (1999). See the interventions in the special issue of Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 42/5 (2012). From some of these autobiographical reflections we learn that from the 1970s to the 1980s Structure fascinated students more than any other book, to the extent that some were persuaded to abandon what they were doing in favour of history of science, the discipline they decided to cultivate professionally. Mario Biagioli, ‘Productive Illusions: Kuhn’s Structure as a Recruitment Tool’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 42 (2012), 479 – 84 (p. 480); Bruce V. Lewenstein, ‘Finding Kuhn, Finding Myself ’, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, 42 (2012), pp. 538 – 41. Besides, see Abir-Am’s recollections in her essay in this book. Interesting are the autobiographical pages in Bruno Latour, We Have Never been Modern, trans. by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 165 –66. According to Steven Shapin: ‘This special sort of scholarship [history and sociology of science] will be, as it always has been, an act of self-understanding’ (Acknowledgement by Steven Shapin, 2005 Erasmus Price to Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin), see at http://www.erasmusprijs.org/ index.cfm?lang=en& page=2005:+SIMON+SCHAFFER,+STEVEN+SHAPIN. For a study of the various approaches to autobiography by women and men, see Estelle C. Jelinek, ‘Introduction: Women’s Autobiography and the Male Tradition’, in Women’s Autobiography : Essays in Criticism, ed. by Estelle C. Jelinek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), pp. 21 – 38. Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1983).

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se extraneous to the geneticist’s tasks. In many feminists, on the other hand, ‘feeling’ evoked that ‘different’ dimension of science which, according to some, women should take with them into the laboratory. Not one of these was the case with McClintock. In her essay below, Keller recalls, the ‘spirit of McClintock’s own vision (and mine)’ is that of a ‘‘gender-free’ science.’ Thirty years on from the publication of A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock, a book that has become a classic internationally, the present volume renews that challenge for science studies scholars, including feminist scholars: the goal of a gender-free history of science, we believe, is still worth pursuing.

III.

Featuring Diversity

In 1999 at the University of Cambridge a group of women historians, scientists, sociologists, and science writers from fifteen countries gathered to discuss ‘Women in the History of Science: Biography, Autobiography, Tasks, Results, Problems – with Critical Discussion of the (Auto)Biographical Method.’45 The main aim among the numerous scholars was to extend the audience of experts as well as non-experts of the history of women in science. Biography seemed to be the most suitable instrument for this purpose. What has happened since then? Quantitative data can help us understand what has happened in the field over the last fifteen years, compared with the two previous decades. If in the history of science, technology, and medicine database (now available from EBSCO) you search the phrase ‘women and biography’, the system responds with twenty-two titles published in the period 1979 – 1989 (books, articles in journals, and chapters in books). Among the titles of that pioneering decade you find of course milestones such as Keller’s already mentioned A Feeling for the Organism, Uneasy Carriers, co-edited by Abir-Am, and Schiebinger’s The Mind Has No Sex?.46 The lively international debates which followed the publication of those books, and a few others,47 fostered a wealth of biographical research on women’s lives in 45 The meeting was organized by the late Joan Mason for the Women’s Commission of the Division of the History of Science of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science (Newnham College, Cambridge, UK, September 10 – 12, 1999). On the meeting, which unfortunately failed to result in the production of a book, see Paola Govoni, ‘Biography. A Critical Tool to Bridge the History of Science and the History of Women in Science’, Nuncius, 1 (2000), 399 – 409. 46 Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789 – 1979, ed. by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origin of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 47 Among others, see Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie,

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natural philosophy and science. In fact, the search in the EBSCO database for the period 1990 – 1995 gives 100 entries, followed by 174 in the period 1996 – 2001. Yet the period 2002 – 2007 gives eighty-four entries, and 2008 – 2013 only fortyfive (December 9, 2013). This decrease does not depend on a lack of new cases, as the essays by Findlen and by Govoni demonstrate below: from the archives, the forgotten voices of interesting women scholars emerge continuously, both those belonging to the remote past of the Republic of Letters and those of the twentieth century. The decrease in the production of biographies of woman scientists probably indicates a new phase in studies on gender and science, but there is perhaps another factor to take into account. In newspapers, on the internet, or in bookshops, much more can be found on women and science nowadays than in the past. You hardly need to be reminded that, in 1995, journalist Dava Sobel’s Longitude caused an earthquake in the history of science community.48 Science writers like Sobel succeeded in exploiting the most fascinating episodes of the history of science, writing books that sometimes ranked top in the best-sellers’ list. Several of those books were on women in science, such as Ferry’s biography of Hodgkin, Franklin’s by Brenda Maddox,49 or Susan Quinn’s and Barbara Goldsmith’s books on Marie Curie, which Fortunati examines in her essay below. Historians of science, perturbed and at the same time challenged by the phenomenon, opened up a channel of communication with professional science writers.50 Since that dialogue – useful to keep under control the tendency of the sector, mentioned earlier, towards a ‘complex of superiority’ – it has been possible to do a lot to improve communications with scientists and the public, above all with younger readers and Women in Science. Antiquity Through the Nineteenth Century. A Biographical Dictionary with Annotated Bibliography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940 – 1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Creative Couples in the Sciences, ed. by Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, Pnina G. Abir-Am (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996). 48 Dava Sobel, Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time (New York: Walker & Company, 1995). 49 Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (London: HarperCollins, 2002). 50 David P. Miller, ‘The ‘Sobel effect’: The Amazing Tale of How Multitudes of Popular Writers Pinched all the Best Stories in the History of Science and Became Rich and Famous while Historians Languished in Accustomed Poverty and Obscurity, and how this Transformed the World. A Reflection on a Publishing Phenomenon’, Metascience, 2 (2002), 185 – 200; Paola Govoni, ‘Historians of Science and the ‘Sobel Effect’’, Journal of Science Communication, 4 (2005), 1 – 17; Peter Bowler, ‘Presidential Address. Experts and Publishers: Writing Popular Science in early Twentieth-Century Britain, Writing Popular History of Science Now’, British Journal of the History of Science, 39 (2006), 159 – 87; John Gascoigne, ‘‘Getting a Fix’: The Longitude Phenomenon’, Isis, 98 (2007), 769 – 78.

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students. Some historians of science, without giving up any of the tools of their profession, have taken the challenge seriously. Already in 1991 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, with Darwin,51 had written a biography which is by now a classic of the sector, as well as a much translated best seller.52 Desmond and Moore were able to write in that ‘natural language’ which makes a book like theirs, certainly academic, at the same time capable of communicating with nonscholarly readers; and note that one of the strong points of the book was the dialogue between men and women. The ability to use that ‘natural language’ comes more easily when historians succeed in opening up to ‘diversity’, both within historiography and interpretation, and with colleagues from other fields. It was Woolf who showed that once a tradition of women’s writing had been created, professional women writers were at last able to create a language capable of recounting lives: both women and men’s lives. In her opinion this objective could be achieved through literature, not history. Woolf gave the example of Jane Austen,53 the writer who, going against a tradition that for so long had ignored the role of women, was the first to produce that ‘natural language’ that had given her characters, both men and women, a credibility that would resist for two centuries.

IV.

Back to (Auto)Biography

This book divides into three parts. In the first and second part the order is chronological with reference to the publications of the authors; in the third part the chronology is that of the biographees. Some of the principal points emerging in the book are picked up and analyzed from an anthropological perspective in the concluding remarks of Zelda A. Franceschi. The essays in the first part – ‘Between Biography and Autobiography’ – offer a comparison of the professional experience of three writers who have been able to circulate their research on lives in science among a broad public. Evelyn Fox Keller has succeeded in developing a dialogue with colleagues in a variety of disciplines, in the sciences as well as in the humanities, and with an international 51 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin (New York: Warner Books, 1991). 52 In 1995 Moore noted that most of the scientific biographies had been written by scholars for scholars: James Moore, ‘Scrivere la biografia di Darwin’, in Le biografie scientifiche, ed. by La Vergata, p. 131. Moore’s intervention is followed by Giuliano Pancaldi, Osservazioni critiche, ibid., pp. 136 – 38, and by James Moore and Adrian Desmond, Risposta a Pancaldi, ibid., pp. 138 – 39. Also in other disciplines it would seem that at the end of the 1980s biography was usually practiced by people outside academia. See Eric Homberger and John Charmley, ‘Introduction’, in The Troubled Face of Biography, ed. by Eric Homberger and John Charmley (London: Macmillan Press, 1988), pp. ix-xv (p. ix). 53 Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

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lay public. Londa Schiebinger has made a significant contribution to bringing women’s and gender studies to a central place in the interests of the community of scholars and students in the history of science and their institutions, in addition to politics tout court. Georgina Ferry, with her work as biographer, writer for the theater, science journalist, and broadcaster, has succeeded in reaching both scientists and an extensive lay public. Keller reconstructs the reasons that led her to write the biography of geneticist Barbara McClintock (1902 – 1992), published in 1983. She describes the reactions of feminists, scientists, and publishers when the book came out, and how these changed, only a few months later, with the awarding of the Nobel Prize to McClintock. The biographical project concerning McClintock revolved around the concept of human – not women’s – creativity in science, and the book was on women’s rights in science, not on gender and science; but these issues were often not understood by academic readers. In response, Keller wrote a good many articles and letters trying to explain the difference between sex and gender, and trying to explain how ideology can have a hold on us and yet not be absolutely binding. But as often happens with important books, Keller’s book appealed to various kinds of reader who appropriated it to themselves, often twisting, stretching or misinterpreting the intentions of the author : a phenomenon well known to historians of science working on the circulation of knowledge.54 As a matter of fact, it was precisely that dialogue – often antagonistic – between Keller and some of her readers, that nourished a debate encouraging new studies on women, gender, and science. In her essay here Keller, once again, makes her own position clear, and adds something important on the relations between biographer and biographee. She writes: ‘‘Informants’ memories are themselves influenced by their needs, and inevitably so, for, just as we constantly rewrite the stories we read, so too, we constantly rewrite our memories.’ This is especially the case with the dialogue Keller revives here with Nathaniel C. Comfort, the author of another important book on McClintock.55 In Comfort’s opinion Keller was the one who ‘created’ the ‘myth’ of McClintock and, in particular, the myth of a McClintock ‘isolated’ by the community of geneticists. Comfort’s work is based on correspondence and lab notebooks to which Keller had not had access, and enriches the image of the geneticist with new, important features. Writing on McClintock, Comfort did not suffer from – and nor did he take advantage of – the relationship that is established between biographer and biographee, as on the other hand had happened in Keller’s case, basing her book mainly on a first 54 Global Spencerism: The Appropriation of Herbert Spencer, ed. by Bernard V. Lightman (Leiden and Boston: Brill, forthcoming). 55 Nathaniel C. Comfort, The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001).

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person dialogue with the scientist. For the reader, the cases of Keller and Comfort make for an interesting comparison in (auto)biography, and the relations between biographer and biographee in connection with gender. Keller recalls here that her biography ‘was narrated (and recorded) at a particular moment in time.’ We would seem to be justified in asking ourselves whether the (not positive) experiences with the men scientists with whom Keller interacted, first as a Harvard PhD student and later as a scientist, played a role in placing her in harmony with McClintock, who had also gone through not easy experiences; a harmony which led them, together, to work out and develop the concept of science as ‘a place where gender could disappear.’56 Comfort made clear his own awareness of the risks of ‘applying modern understanding to history.’57 Also in his case we may ask ourselves how far, when Comfort was writing on McClintock, he was influenced by a family situation in which a scientist like Carol W. Greider, at that time his wife,58 was in action together with her team of colleagues, among whom Blackburn. As Abir-Am relates in her essay, Greider in 2009 would share with Blackburn the Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology : the high point of a career that had been successful from the start, a career shared with Blackburn, and on the part of both with a profound awareness of gender issues.59 These women microbiologists were able – both for their personal qualities and for the opportunities offered by the context – to work in their lab ‘as if ’ science was ‘a place where gender could disappear.’ Londa Schiebinger in her essay interweaves her own professional experience with the subjects at the center of her research.60 For Schiebinger historians should be ‘public intellectuals’, looking beyond their contribution to historical scholarship. This conviction of hers is reflected in her intellectual production from the time when, as a graduate student, she chose to work on women’s and gender studies, in the 1980s an ‘unknown area’, which seemed the least suitable 56 The autobiographical pages of Keller on her experience at Harvard at the end of the 1950s should be read, when ‘arrogance’ was held by male students of physics to be a founding aspect of professionalism. See Keller, ‘The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics.’ Besides, see Elisabetta Donini, Conversazioni con Evelyn Fox Keller, una scienziata anomala (Milan: elÀuthera, 1991). 57 Comfort, The Tangled Field, p. 271. In addition see Comfort, ‘When Your Sources Talk Back’, where the author brings in questions of sensory physiology, which also play a role when you work on the life and work of a living scientist. 58 Information deduced from the dedication to Comfort’s book. For further reference see the essay by Abir-Am in this book. 59 On the nearly thirty years of collaboration between Blackburn and Greider see, American Association for Cancer Research, Interview with Elizabeth H. Blackburn, PhD, and Carol Greider, PhD, see at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9CkzZm-e2I 60 Schiebinger’s research made significant room for the lives of men and women in natural philosophy since the by now classic: Londa Schiebinger, ‘Maria Winkelmann at the Berlin Academy : A Turning Point for Women in Science’, Isis, 78 (1987), 174 – 200.

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sector to cultivate for a successful career in a prestigious American university. The ‘gamble’ on a research area so challenging from a scientific point of view, and with such politically loaded implications, characterized her historiographical production, her career, and her closest relationships. She recounts here how her personal convictions were transformed or reified over time in institutional activities, both academic and political. To the projects for which she provided the inspiration while she served as Director of the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford, Schiebinger brought her skills and experience as a historian, public intellectual, and one half of a collaborative academic couple. Those experiences have played a role in Schiebinger’s way of writing about men and women natural scientists’ lives. What she offers here is the self portrait of a determined woman, who presents her own life with a political agenda in mind: a model to offer younger women in science, and a reminder that in academe women are still strongly discriminated against. To reach a broader public, especially the young, was one of her goals. In her opinion ‘gender scholars often write in the high and sometimes jargon-ridden language required for advancement within their own profession.’ Avoiding the jargon helps to get beyond discipline boundaries, and extend our knowledge, while at the same time it enables us to reach a wider public. Avoiding the jargon also means trying to go beyond ideologies, including feminist ideologies. The biographies of two crystallographers and Nobel prizewinners, Dorothy Hodgkin (1910 – 1994) and Max Perutz (1914 – 2002), offer an occasion for a comparison of different ways of recounting lives by those who, like Georgina Ferry, deal with scientists, policy makers, and the lay public. In 1994 Ferry wrote her biography of Hodgkin, the only woman scientist to win the Nobel Prize for the United Kingdom, from a ‘simple desire’, as she writes here: to get Hodgkin’s name better known among her own compatriots. Ferry says here that when she began to write about Hodgkin she was unaware that biography was barely acknowledged as a genre by historians of science. It seemed ‘natural’ to her, to explore not only Hodgkin’s scientific career but also how she had achieved scientific success while shouldering family and household responsibilities. Access to Hodgkin’s papers and interviews with friends and colleagues allowed her to place Hodgkin’s life in context: as well as being a top level scientist, with children and the family to attend to, Hodgkin had to cope with a physical frailty that did not prevent her from devoting herself to her passionate commitment to socialism, East-West relations, and world peace. Ferry took a similar multifaceted approach to the life of Max Perutz, another Nobel-prizewinning crystallographer whose story included the experience of emigration from Nazioccupied Europe and the redevelopment of his identity as a British subject. It was Perutz himself who contacted Ferry for his biography, and she tells here of her initial hesitations, also because of the gender of her new biographee. To judge

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from the number of times she was cited, and from the invitations she received to bring her experience as a biographer to specialist conferences, historians of science took seriously Ferry’s approach to writing about men and women’s lives in science. Professional writers, like Ferry, and professional historians, often research in the same areas and make use of the same sources; what differentiates them, obviously, are narrative strategies. If we need ‘new narrative strategies’ to explore what Barry Barnes calls ‘the fine line between [social] status and [internal] state’, as Mazzotti reminds us in his paper, the dialogue between science studies scholars and professional writers like Ferry should not be underestimated. It would seem especially important if we wish to reach scientists and the public with an image of science somewhat less jaded, sweetened, or hero/ heroine worshipping than the one often to be found in popularizing literature. The second part of this book – ‘Shaping Biographies’ – focuses on methodological and historiographical aspects based on specific historical cases related to the Enlightenment. Marta Cavazza, Paula Findlen, and Massimo Mazzotti are recognized experts on the Enlightenment, belonging to different generations. Their objectives are also different when they ‘use’ the lives and work of eighteenth-century Italian women natural philosophers who in some cases are well-known and even of legendary status, in others are brought to light after over two centuries of oblivion. The works of Cavazza, Findlen, and Mazzotti have made use of the biographical genre, as it were, to go beyond it. The life of Laura Bassi, the first woman university teacher in the Western world, was told many times both while she was alive, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In 2011, on the occasion of the three hundredth anniversary of her birth, there were a number of publications and initiatives commemorating her. Bassi’s image in her biographies has changed significantly, both for the variety of sources and the cultural and social transformations of Italian and European society over the last two centuries. To Cavazza, the case of Bassi offers evidence of the ideological construct intrinsic to biography as a literary genre. Although Cavazza has found at least seventy biographical texts on the dottoressa, to her the Bolognese natural philosopher remains a figure in some ways inaccessible to us. The wealth of documentation in fact concerns eighteenth century biographies and portraits and correspondence, besides Bassi’s scientific writings and an abundance of archive material on her public life. Yet, apart from some rare autobiographical hints in her letters and official speeches, sources capable of telling us something about her inner life are very few indeed. Through a comparative study of contemporary and posthumous biographical texts about Bassi, Cavazza proposes to add some new features to the dottoressa image, bringing out diverse, changing gender models. It is a fascinating journey through sources that, for those who will engage with them in the future, will be the basis for a ‘metabiography’ of Bassi.

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Biography is also considered by Paula Findlen to be one of the most powerful genres in the construction of the public image of scientists, allowing us to follow the changes of gender stereotypes from the eighteenth century to the present. But this was not always the case: Findlen relates here that when she first approached Laura Bassi61 she told herself that her goal was not to write a biography. Findlen admits that in the past her own image of biography ‘reflected many of the prejudices of social and cultural historians who considered this genre too heroic, too isolating and idolizing of the individual.’ In the course of time her opinion of biography altered, thanks to her work on so many men and women’s lives in natural philosophy in the last twenty years, and with the historiographical debate on biography enriched by many important interventions. In her essay Findlen goes over the route she took researching on women natural philosophers, experimenters, and mathematicians in eighteenth-century Italy, leading her ‘to reconsider the value of biography.’ The paper is also an opportunity to reflect on sources. To Findlen it is a commonplace to describe the history of women scientists as an act of rediscovery and recuperation. Findlen’s essay asks us to reflect on the importance of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century biographies and encyclopedias, often ignored because not ‘scholarly’ enough or, in the case of Italian fascist publications, politically suspect.62 Taking seriously sources often ignored enabled her to recover the voices of several scholars fallen into oblivion. Among the subjects Findlen discusses there is that of ‘invisibility’, so crucial when one works on women scholars’ lives: they were often not invisible in their own time but have become so afterwards, through a ‘process of selection.’ Both the ‘silence’ created around some people rather than others, and the historical process of ‘selection’, are central to Findlen who recently decided to write a biography of Laura Bassi. In the case of mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718 – 1799), biography is presented by Massimo Mazzotti as offering access to, and new vistas on, a complex phenomenon like the relationship between science and the Catholic faith in the Enlightenment. To Mazzotti, there is still a good deal of ambiguity towards biography as a genre in recent historiography, which can be related primarily to a perceived dichotomy between on the one hand individuals, and on the other the micro and macro settings with which they interact. For Mazzotti, social theory offers the tools to tackle the classic problem of the relationship between action and structure, and he describes the way in which he himself engaged with these questions in his biography of Agnesi. He believes biography 61 Paula Findlen, ‘Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy : The Strategies of Laura Bassi’, Isis, 84 (1993), 441 – 69. 62 On the use of sources, up until the most recent developments, see Paula Findlen, ‘How Google Rediscovered the 19th Century’, The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 22, 2013, at http:// chronicle.com/blogs/conversation/2013/07/22/how-google-rediscovered-the-19th-century/.

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allows us to address both the story of a life, and the theoretical processes that help us understand how cognitive and social structures are constructed and modified. His discussion on how scientific biography has been used is the basis from which he deals with his own case. Biographical narration can be a suitable instrument to explore the moral economy of science, especially when people considered ‘marginal’ like women are chosen. Biography can thus reveal the connections between moral and scientific life, offering new perspectives on little explored issues. Proceeding along these lines and ‘biographing’ Agnesi, Mazzotti shows how biography can be included among the instruments of social studies. His essay on the other hand seems to challenge the category of gender. ‘Gender’ is never mentioned in his biography of Agnesi, whereas here he recognizes its presence in his toolkit, using gender to successfully overcome it. The third part of the volume – ‘Networking’ – is ordered chronologically, from the case of Marie Curie to that of the Blackburn-Greider team, and dealt with from three different academic perspectives: literary criticism, by Vita Fortunati, anthropology, by Zelda A. Franceschi, and the history of science by Paola Govoni and Pnina G. Abir-Am. Vita Fortunati is an expert in nineteenth and twentieth century literature and gender studies. Convinced of the need for a more frequent dialogue between experts in different fields, she has been the inspiration and organizer, with Claudio Franceschi, an immunologist, of a challenging European project, ACUME2 – ‘Interfacing Sciences, Literature, and Humanities.’63 In her paper she concentrates on one of the best known lives in science between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, that of Marie Curie (1867 – 1934). She focuses here on the contradictory aspects of Marie Curie’s personality, lurking beneath her public image, still today presented as a coherent, strong and at the same time reassuring ‘female’ image. But behind these appearances, which Curie herself construed to sustain her research projects, there was a different life, tortured by latent depression, which Fortunati evokes here using as sources Curie’s diary and correspondence. Of the wealth of secondary literature on Curie, Fortunati decides to focus on examples belonging to a variety of narrative genres, to demonstrate how even a literature traditionally considered not ‘academic’, such as fiction, may help to unveil the complexity of a life to a vast public. 63 The project is producing the nine volumes of the series Interfacing Science, Literature, and the Humanities, directed by Elena Agazzi and Vita Fortunati, of which this volume is one. On the collaboration of historians of science, see Representing Light across Arts and Sciences: Theories and Practices, ed. by Elena Agazzi, Enrico Giannetto, and Franco Giudice (2010), and The Case and the Canon: Anomalies, Discontinuities, Metaphors between Science and Literature, ed. by Alessandra Calanchi, Gastone Castellani, Gabriella Morisco, and Giorgio Turchetti (2011). For the other titles, see at http://www.v-r.de/de/seriesdetail-16 – 16/interfacing_science_literature_and_the_humanities-3069/

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The texts she analyzes and compares are two biographies by acclaimed professional writers, Susan Quinn and Barbara Goldsmith, and the biographical novel by Per Olov Enquist. The different images of Curie which emerge, on the one hand, from her autobiography and correspondence, and on the other, from the texts of Quinn, Goldsmith, and Enquist, enable Fortunati to raise issues that are of interest also to historians of science. Fortunati’s paper provides alternative routes to get behind the faÅade that Curie herself presented: the scientist entirely devoted to her research work, the perfect mother of two daughters, the heroine who fought against the prejudices of colleagues and French and international public opinion during the Curie-Langevin case. In her paper, Zelda A. Franceschi applies an anthropological approach to the lives of Ruth Fulton Benedict (1887 – 1948) and Margaret Mead (1901 – 1978). Pupils of Franz Uri Boas (1858 – 1942), Benedict and Mead are considered leading figures of so-called configurationalism, a branch of anthropology operating on the borders between cultural anthropology and psychology. Franceschi puts forward a re-reading of Mead’s writings, her correspondence while involved in fieldwork, her autobiographical and biographical writings, and the correspondence between Benedict and Edward Sapir (1884 – 1939). The essay shows the several objectives Mead pursued through biography and autobiography. In the first place, Mead used them as fieldwork tools. Biography and autobiography, however, were later useful to present her ‘own’ history of anthropology in the twentieth century, as well as for popularizing anthropology for a broader public. Franceschi’s paper shows that among Mead’s aims, she wished to provide a new image of the woman anthropologist through the picture of herself and Benedict, an image of a woman scholar autonomous at the scientific level, and successful professionally. Something similar had been done in the Victorian age by generations of men of science and technologists, working to create a public image of a new social protagonist, the ‘scientist’ and/or the ‘expert’.64 Franceschi tells us how her own interest in biography and autobiography began with her interest in the history of anthropology. Early on, however, she realized that biography and autobiography also offered opportunities for the building of knowledge, especially about the ‘truthfulness’ of ethnographic reports, a subject of great interest also for science studies scholars. The paper by Paola Govoni is about women who disappeared behind the shadow of a famous man, Italo Calvino (1923 – 1985), the internationally celebrated author in whose writings technoscience is often to the fore. The women in question are Calvino’s mother, professional botanist Eva Mameli Calvino (1886 – 1978), her sister in law, professional chemist Anne Mannessier Mameli (1879 – 64 See, among others, Christine MacLeod, Heroes of Invention: Technology, Liberalism and British Identity, 1750 – 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

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1944), and her friends, painter and naturalist Beatrice Duval (1880 – 1973), and writer Olga Resnevic Signorelli (1883 – 1973). Calvino, in the interviews he conceded about his younger years and in several autobiographical writings, never mentioned the considerable role played by those women in his own formation. A role that the archives of those women nevertheless (in particular some of his unpublished letters to Resnevic), testify to being decidedly significant. The aim of the paper is, however, only partly to give back a voice to those women scholars. Their lives and works, together with those of agronomist Mario Calvino (1875 – 1951) and chemist Efisio Mameli (1875 – 1957), Italo’s father and uncle, are useful in Govoni’s view to reconstruct a family and a professional network that together molded the ‘two cultures lab’ where Calvino grew up. By exploring the difficult relationships between Italo Calvino and that little group of men and women in science, art, and the humanities, a better understanding emerges of the myth of the so-called two cultures which Calvino himself, narrator of technoscience, helped to consolidate via his own public image. An archive-based approach is adopted to reconstruct a context which was clearly very different from the one Calvino wished to remember, and which was given mythical status in an extraordinary number of subsequent writings on Calvino. Finally, Pnina G. Abir-Am’s essay offers readers an example of an in-depth exploration of the relationships between biographer and biographee. Abir-Am examines how the process of her historical writing on women scientists changed in response to her encounter with a book by Ellen Daniell, a 1973 PhD in science, Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists. From an initial interest in clarifying the collaboration between Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol W. Greider, a milestone in the history of women in science, Abir-Am shifted to an exploration of these careers as symbols of the generation of women scientists that came of professional age shortly after the equal opportunity legislation of 1972. On that generation of professionals Abir-Am writes: I found ego-histoire to be irresistible in the context of this essay, because there is more to gain from treating the process of doing historical work as a historical subject in its own right than from pretending that an imaginary distance, associated with greater objectivity in the positivist paradigm, separates me and my three subjects. Being members of the generation which first confronted the gender revolution of the 1970s may turn out to be more important than the professional divisions between the three scientists, or between them and me as a historian of science.

In Abir-Am’s hands, personal and professional experiences become data of historical interest. Her study does not follow the work of scientists inside the lab, but does provide an ethno-anthropological examination in observing the lives she is working on, including a sort of auto-ethnicity. In her paper, the personal

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and professional choices of women scientists interrelate also with those of the institutions where they worked or work now; choices projected against the background of the changes in the academic world of research from the 1970s to today. Abir-Am states that her paper in this book ‘is a chapter in a future study of the lost generation of women scientists of the 1970s, [and] focuses on a member of that generation whose experience can be seen as a symbol of the wider phenomenon of gender bias in science.’ Rather than a ‘lost generation’, I would suggest that Daniell and Abir-Am represent a ‘bridge generation’:65 a generation of women scholars who have achieved important professional and cultural results in an otherwise uncertain institutional context. This emerges clearly also from the comparison Abir-Am makes between the circumstances concerning Daniell and those concerning Blackburn and Greider, a comparison useful for a better understanding of the debate on the under-representation of women in science. In Abir-Am’s view, women scientists often failed to recognize the importance of the support of feminist groups and other scholars committed to the battle against discrimination against women in the universities and the labs. Daniell’s story, Abir-Am notes here, ‘revolved around the shattering revelation for her late in 1981 that science, which she believed to be fair and objective, continued to treat men and women differently.’ The ideal of McClintock and Keller of science as a place where gender could disappear returns here in a different guise. Far from being broken by their professional experiences, Daniell and Abir-Am’s commitment testify that that remains an important ideal to aim for, in science as well as in its history. When a project like this comes to an end one is tempted to conclude that writing about a life is as difficult as living a life. Mark Twain, who was certainly not lacking in narrative resources, wrote that ‘Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man [sic] – the biography of the man himself [sic] cannot be written.’66 Even when we seem to be in control of all the tools – historical and 65 For a history of the decades lived through by Abir-Am and Daniell, see the third of a trilogy of great books: Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World Since 1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012). 66 Autobiography of Mark Twain: The Complete and Authoritative Edition, ed. by Harrit Elionor Smith and other editors of the Mark Twain Project, The Complete and Authoritative edition, vol. 1 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 2010), p. 221. The subject of many or few ‘details’ is one of many debated by experts in life writing. For historian of science and biographer John Heilbron, in writing about interesting lives, ‘less is more’, and ‘The biographer does not have to waste time […] in justifying and explaining his or her enterprise.’ John Heilbron, ‘Remarks on the Writing of Biography’, ‘The Life and Work of Linus Pauling (1901– 1994): A Discourse on the Art of Biography’ (February 28-March 2, 1995), video and transcript at http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/ specialcollections/events/1995paulingconference/video-s4 –5-heilbron.html. Hermione Lee, expert in English literature and biographer, holds on the other hand that the more a biography is rich in small details, the happier the reader is. See Hermione Lee, Body Parts: Essays in Life-Writing (London: Chatto & Windus, 2005).

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interpretive – required to write about a man or a woman’s life we know we shall never be able to produce a recipe useful for writing about another’s life. The conclusion to be drawn may be a radical one: when we write, and not just when we write biographies, we are writing about ourselves too. For this reason, to pay some attention to the ‘I’ who writes, and to adopt an amount of skepticism and auto-irony also in connection with our own and our biographee’s gender, is highly recommended. On the other hand, who hasn’t found her/himself in the situation of that character of Italo Calvino’s, a writer experiencing a creative crisis who exclaims angrily : ‘How well I would write if I were not here!’67

67 Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler (New York: Harcourt, 1981), p. 171 (1st orig. ed. 1979).

Part I Between Biography and Autobiography

Evelyn Fox Keller

Pot-holes Everywhere: How (not) to Read my Biography of Barbara McClintock

The story of the public reception of my biography of Barbara McClintock is a saga in itself, one that I divide into three acts: the writing of the book; its reception before the award of a Nobel Prize; and the reframing of that reception after the prize. I write about it here because I think the story may harbor moral, or even historical, lessons. My reference to public includes lay readers, of course, but also readers who identify themselves as feminists and/or as scientists. Indeed, I want especially to focus on the reading of my book by the latter two groups.

I.

Act One: Circa 1977

Act One begins with my initial undertaking: how it came about that I decided to write a biography of McClintock, and what it was I originally thought such a biography might accomplish. I should say at the beginning that my commitment to this project did not come easily : I saw it as a disruption from the work I most wanted to do, namely the project I had just begun on gender and science. In my view, the McClintock story was a complete diversion. While it ought surely tell us something about the history of women in science, it seemed to me to have no obvious relation whatever to the arguments I wanted to make about gender and science. I can date the beginning of this project with my return home one afternoon after seeing a wonderful film about a woman conductor, Antonia Brico. I had found this film to be powerful, moving, indeed inspiring, and I reflected that I had never seen a comparable movie about the struggles and aspirations of a woman scientist (apart, i. e., from the mythical Marie Curie). Nor for that matter could I recall a literary heroine who was a scientist. Why was that, I wondered. Surely the lives of women scientists ought to have as much literary and cinematic potential as those of women conductors, yet they apparently are not seen as such.

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It was a puzzle, but also, somehow, a wrong that needed redressing. And so I was thinking when I opened the door to my apartment and heard the phone ringing. The call was from a man I did not know, someone who had just read the brief account I had recently published of my own experience as a woman graduate student in physics,1 and who had called to suggest that I write something about Barbara McClintock. Putting two and two together, I thought, aha! Now there’s a really good idea. I didn’t know McClintock personally, but I knew about her, and I had seen her from afar. I knew she was very impressive, and also quite intimidating. In fact I’d seen her years before when I was a graduate student, visiting Cold Spring Harbor, and the truth is that she had terrified me. She terrified me because she was a woman so alone. And in her aloneness, she confirmed my worst fears about becoming a woman physicist. At that time I simply didn’t want to know about Barbara McClintock. But now, in my newly informed feminist consciousness, in my new awareness of (and sympathy for) the struggles of women attempting to forge unconventional paths, I found her an ideal figure for someone to write about, and perhaps even to make a film about. That is, for someone who would be more appropriate to the task than I. But perhaps, I mused, I might be able to write up a short interview – possibly for The New Yorker – that would attract the interest of someone appropriate. With that thought in mind, I called a mutual friend, who relayed my interest to McClintock, sending her a copy of my own autobiographical piece (The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics). On the strength of their recommendation, and the article, she agreed to talk to me. The first meeting was evidently some sort of test in which she seated me behind her desk and proceeded with her own interview of me. Apparently I passed, for she then agreed to turn the interviewing role over to me. I spent the rest of the afternoon talking with her and, on the way home, had the thought: My God, I have just encountered – for the first time in my life – a ‘great mind’ in a woman’s body. Let me explain. I had been trained in theoretical physics, and training in theoretical physics might be said to be a training in the appreciation of ‘great minds.’ But all the great minds I read about, or knew about, belonged to men, and it was a shock to me – especially as a feminist – to find that I could not think of a single ‘great mind’ belonging to a woman. Until, i. e., I met Barbara McClintock. This in itself, I thought, is reason enough to write about her. But still, I was conflicted. Most importantly, I did not think her story had anything to do with my arguments about gender and science – arguments, i. e., primarily about the impact of ideologies of masculinity and femininity on the historical production of science. 1 Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics’, in Working it Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About Their Lives and Work, ed. by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels (New York: Pantheon, 1977), pp. 71 – 91.

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I saw McClintock’s story as the story of a maverick woman scientist, with the emphasis on maverick. To be sure, ideologies of masculinity and femininity were part of the story of her deviance as a scientist, but what most interested me was the impact of her outsider status on the acceptance (or lack thereof) of her work. Of course, she wasn’t a total outsider : as Nathan Comfort has rightly emphasized, she was a member of the National Academy, she had been president of the American Genetics Society, and was the recipient of many other kinds of recognition as well. But even so, she remained in a category of her own. Even while she was clearly respected by many, her isolation was both real and undeniable, as was the skepticism with which her most important and most original work was greeted. Put crudely, she was never a member of the club. And even though she may not have aspired to such membership, she suffered acutely from the isolation, and from what she saw as a chronic failure of understanding – often by those she most respected. At the same time, she also took pride in her deviance. She presented herself as a maverick, and wore her eccentricity, all her eccentricities, on her sleeve. She was proud of her difference. And part of my aim in writing this book was to legitimate her right to be as different, as eccentric, as she chose. Or at least to have the same latitude that was available to great male scientists. Certainly, she was no more eccentric than Albert Einstein, yet it was (and still is) my strong impression that women scientists have historically had to be very careful not to appear too deviant. Above all, I wanted to break the equation between different and lesser that I believed (partly on the basis of my own experience) exerted an especially strong stranglehold on women. One might say that I wanted to establish the right of a woman to be a great scientist. But it was a wrenching choice. I regarded the book I wanted to write on gender and science as the most important work of my life – my chance to make a truly original contribution. But I did not think of McClintock’s story as being about gender – it was about women and their right to be different. Furthermore, the initial response of many of my feminist friends was not encouraging. These were the early days of feminist theory, and when they heard me talk about McClintock, the initial response of a number of my friends was, ‘she’s not a feminist, why are you writing about her? She’s just doing everything that male scientists have been doing all along; eschewing the world of intimacy, of intimate relationships, of emotions, she has devoted her entire life to her work, just like men have done.’ But to me, that was just the point: I wanted to establish her right to be as different from the feminine stereotypes as she chose. And I was troubled by the rejection of this as a feminist project by some of my most committed feminist friends. By contrast, the scientists I spoke with did not think of her as either a feminist or a non-feminist; to them, she was just an eccentric. They were clearly respectful, and many regarded her with affection, but what was foremost in their account of her was her eccentricity. She was a maverick, she did all these weird

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things and no one could understand her work. She was certainly very smart, but they did not think of her as a great scientist; her work was, well, inscrutable. You couldn’t read it. I might also mention a third group, the publishers. Initially I had gotten a contract from W. H. Freeman for a special series they were publishing. But while I was writing the book, they changed directors, and the new director was a very close friend of Jim Watson. There’s a quote in that book that is not attributed (describing McClintock as ‘just an old bag that has been hanging around Cold Spring Harbor all these years’), but Watson would have recognized it as his. And when I sent in the manuscript, the new director sat on it for six months, finally sending back a manuscript that was completely marked up – first of all changing the title (‘a feeling for the organism’, a quote from McClintock herself), and then marking with a red pencil to cut out just about everything that had to do with the emotional side of her scientific life – i. e., to what I thought was most interesting about the biography. I rejected the changes and held to my convictions, but they sat on the manuscript for a few more months. Finally they published the book, as I wrote it, albeit in a much smaller edition than was originally planned. In fact, it was sold out two weeks after publication. Three months later, when she got the Nobel Prize, the committee found itself unable to locate any copies. In the two or three months between publication and the awarding of the Nobel Prize, virtually no one read the book either as a feminist manifesto or as an account of a feminine science, neither scientists nor feminists. I had worked hard – and seemingly effectively – to break any suggestion of a possible equation between McClintock and stereotypic female, if only because she herself had so adamantly rejected that stereotype throughout her life. My insistence on the title – ‘A Feeling for the Organism’ – was based not on an acceptance of feeling as a feminine trait but on the rejection of that very idea. Feeling, I insisted, is a human trait, one not limited to women, and I worked hard (perhaps even at times stretching the point) to place her particular style of science, her own emphasis on the importance of a feeling for the organism, in a well established (albeit minority) tradition. Indeed, this was a tradition that was particularly associated with the ‘great minds’ of science. Einstein, for example. I argued, and early readers (especially scientists) seemed to agree, that this is not so much the story of a woman scientist as it is of a creative scientist (see, e. g., the review by Stephen Jay Gould). Indeed, early responses by scientists were indifferent to gender. When I taught the book, students, male and female alike, were enthusiastic, even grateful, offering comments like: ‘You gave me permission to respect my own private vision of science’; ‘I’ve always wanted to do science in this way and I never had the courage.’ In fact, when the book appeared, I was teaching in the Mathematics Department at Northeastern University, and the Chair of my department (a man) came and thanked me for giving him permission to do mathematics the

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way he had always wanted to do it. Of course, not all scientists were equally enthusiastic: some (perhaps especially molecular biologists) were clearly worried about the tacit critique of them for having failed to acknowledge the importance of her work. But those who did like the book read it very much in the spirit of McClintock’s own vision (and mine) of a ‘gender-free’ science. (Feminists readers, as I have already indicated, were less certain – indeed, they seemed to have been altogether less interested.)

II.

Act Two: Feminist Responses after the Nobel Prize

The awarding of a Nobel Prize changed everything. Contrary to good capitalist economic sense, the publishers did not go back to press for six months, but when the book finally did reappear, new readings – both by feminists and by scientists – emerged with remarkable rapidity. The Nobel Prize made McClintock an important figure in the history of science; it made her story something worth fighting for, or fighting over. For example, some feminists who had earlier dismissed McClintock for doing science ‘just like a man’, and had rejected the writing of her story as ‘not a feminist project’, now sought to embrace her as a feminist (or femininist) heroine, and to similarly herald her story as a feminist parable. Some even welcomed the equation between feeling and women, and hence between feeling and feminism, and accordingly to see McClintock herself as an exemplar of a feminist (or feminine) science. At the same time, a new reading appeared among scientists, many of whom now welcomed her as a member of the club, claiming her as one of their own, as a scientist whom they had always appreciated. Several questions arise about both of these new readings. The most important one regarding the feminist rereading is, what is meant by a ‘feminist science’? The term seems to mean different things to different people, but it quickly became evident that, to most readers, a feminist science meant a science that women scientists would ‘naturally’ opt to do. The implication is straightforward: to change science one needs simply to have more women in science. But the notion that there was anything that women would ‘naturally’ do had become exceedingly problematic in feminist theory and indeed very worrisome for many (including me). In my own view, the only way that more women in science might change science would be by disrupting the prevailing ideological association between science and masculinity. More specifically, I found the celebration of McClintock as an exemplar of a feminist science (in this understanding of the term) especially disturbing – first, because it seemed to do violence to her own history, and second, because it reinforced the stereotypes that have for so long worked to confine women in traditional roles.

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McClintock had spent her entire life repudiating feminine stereotypes. For her, science was a place where gender could disappear ; her hope was for a gender neutral science. But the idea of a feminist/feminine science was also politically worrisome. I knew from the history of women in science how very damaging the idea that women would do a different kind of science could be for women scientists in their struggles to be accepted. To some feminists, it may have seemed self-evident that a different kind of science would be a better science, but to most others (and especially to most scientists), different almost always means lesser. Yet gender and gender ideology did seem important to McClintock’s story, and the question remained, in what ways? While writing A Feeling for the Organism, I had sought assiduously to leave my own preoccupations about gender and science out of my account of her biography. That is to say, I tried to write McClintock’s story in a way that was faithful to her own interests, her own aspirations, rather than my own. But turning to my new book, Reflections on Gender and Science, it quickly became evident that I had to address the question of just what relevance, if any, McClintock’s story had to my arguments about the historical role of gender in the formation of science, and I had to do so directly. Was there in fact any relation at all? My initial assumption had been that there was none. But ultimately, some sort of relation became impossible to ignore. Many, if not all, of the features that made McClintock’s style seem so idiosyncratic, so different from mainstream practices of science, are after all typically associated with traditional western ideologies of ‘feminine’: e. g., her insistence on ‘a feeling for the organism’; on the power of identification, of forming a personal relation with the object of study ; on the importance of intuition. So the question loomed: How is it that someone who so adamantly rejected all feminine stereotypes ended up practicing her science in a way that conforms to those stereotypes? I rejected out of hand the suggestion that she might somehow have carried these stereotypes with her body ; stereotypes are not written into genomes. Ideology is powerful, it is constraining, but it is not absolutely binding. Another possible answer – namely, that McClintock continued to inhabit these stereotypes, despite her denial, either as a residue of an early identification with her mother, of her experience as a mother, or by conventional socialization – seemed equally implausible. Indeed, all such psychological interpretations are clearly refuted by the facts of her own biography. I was therefore obliged to find another solution to the conundrum. Here is what I proposed: In a science constructed around the naming of object (nature) as female and the parallel naming of subject (mind) as male, any scientist who happens to be a woman is confronted with a contradiction in terms. This poses a critical problem of identity : any

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scientist who is not a man walks a path bounded on one side by inauthenticity and on the other by subversion. […] Only if she undergoes a radical dis-identification from self can she share masculine pleasure in mastering a nature cast in the image of woman as passive, inert, and blind. Her alternative is to attempt a radical redefinition of terms. Nature must be renamed as not female, or, at least, as not an alienated object. By the same token, the mind, if the female scientist is to have one, must be renamed as not necessarily male, as gender neutral, and accordingly recast with a more inclusive subjectivity […]. This is not to say that the male scientist cannot claim similar redefinition (certainly many have done so) but only that, by contrast to the woman scientist, his identity does not depend on it.2

A subtle argument, to be sure. But one that, at least in my own view, could be clearly distinguished from a characterization of McClintock as an icon of a feminist/feminine science. No author wants to be misread, but I felt a particular obligation – on the one hand to McClintock herself, and on the other hand, to women scientists – to protest. And I did so for years. But to little avail. The argument I presented in Reflections may have satisfied me, but it clearly had no impact either on those feminists who wished to read my biography of McClintock as exemplifying a feminist science, or on the popular accounts that embraced such a reading. What Nathan Comfort has called ‘the McClintock myth’ had taken root, and there seemed nothing I could do about it. But while some found pleasure in the account of McClintock as a feminist scientist, there was another group of readers – namely, women who were actively engaged in supporting the advance of women in science – who clearly did not. Nor did they find my own interpretation of the relevance of gender in this story of any help – indeed, they found my focus on the difference of McClintock’s science offensive in itself. Conflating sex with gender, their reading of my work on gender and science just added fuel to the fire. Particularly enraged were Ann Koblitz and Mary Beth Ruskai, and they were vitriolic in their attacks. Clearly I had touched a very raw nerve, for they read any reference to difference as necessarily implying that women would be less adequate as scientists – an implication they resisted with all their might. I sympathized. But this was not the argument I was trying to make. To the extent that I aspired to a different kind of science, that science would be different by virtue of being gender-free; it would be a science practiced by both men and women in a different (gender-free) ideological context. Clearly these readers did not get it. They could not let go of the equation between feeling and women; they could not see the force of gender ideology on the ways in which both men and women – and science too – were acculturated. 2 Evelyn Fox Keller, Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 174 – 75.

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I kept struggling, trying to correct this misapprehension. One day, I convened a workshop of women scientists in MIT, an all day workshop, where I went over the arguments carefully. And I got an email from one of them saying: ‘That was really interesting, but I still don’t believe that women’s intuition is inscribed in their chromosomes.’ They didn’t get it. It seemed to me that they could not get the fundamental distinction between sex and gender on which the argument rests. You can be a woman, you can be affected by stereotypes, by ideology – everyone is, men and women alike, we are all shaped by that ideology – and our struggles to escape requires attending to the ways in which it works. In the case of science, it requires not only rethinking the nature of men and women, but also re-naming mind and nature. As a woman scientist, I argued, it requires the renaming of all the categories that have traditionally been gendered. What does renaming mind and nature mean? It means re-admitting all those values that had been excluded from science because they were, quote, ‘feminine’. It means reclaiming the values that are feminine, but reclaiming them not as women’s prerogative but as human traits, as human contributions. In response to Koblitz, I published a letter in Science in 1987 in which I tried, once again, to explain: The focus of Reflections on Gender and Science is not, finally, on cultural obstacles facing women in science, but rather on the role that gender stereotypes have played within the actual workings of science. The exclusion of values culturally relegated to the female domain has led to an effective ‘masculinization’ of science – to an unwitting alliance between scientific values and ideals of masculinity embraced by our particular culture. All of our best hopes for science – our very aspirations to objectivity and universality – would argue that such [an] alliance (and exclusion) would be to the detriment not only of women scientists, but of all scientists, and indeed to the detriment of science itself.3

But again, it was of no use; the McClintock story had gotten away from me – I no longer owned it. As one woman biologist at MIT said to me: ‘I know you didn’t claim McClintock as a feminine scientist, but you’re still responsible for the media representation.’

III.

Act Three: The Scientific Community Responds to the Nobel Prize

Although the response of most of the scientists I initially spoke about McClintock with when doing my research was to emphasize her obscurity, the difficulty of understanding her papers, her eccentricity, her mysticism, now – after the Nobel Prize – they said, ‘What do you mean, we didn’t understand McClintock, 3 Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘Women in Science’, Science, 236 (1987), 507.

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we didn’t appreciate McClintock? We always appreciated McClintock, we never doubted her.’ But over the course of time, and in direct response to the media perpetuation of ‘the McClintock myth’ – i. e., to the image of McClintock as an icon of a feminine / feminist scientist –, some began to change their tune. They still insisted she was a maverick, but now, she wasn’t just any old maverick, she was a feminist maverick. And they attributed that interpretation to me. One scientist said to me, ‘Of course this is what you claim, I mean, just look at the title – ‘A Feeling for the Organism’ – without question, this defines her a feminine scientist.’ And another scientist said, ‘Oh, we know she was a feminist maverick, after all, she was a lesbian.’ (Whether or not McClintock was a lesbian is of course a different story altogether, one that I deliberately chose not to go into in the book, and still choose to put to one side). An important milestone in the way in which scientists reread my account of McClintock was the publication of Nathaniel Comfort’s book, The Tangled Field, in 2001.4 Comfort’s explicit aim was ‘to lay the McClintock myth to rest’ – i. e., to supplant my account of McClintock by what he saw as a more objective history. In this effort, he sought not only to refute McClintock’s feminist credentials (the core of the myth), but also, to challenge the claim that both she and her work had been marginalized by her colleagues (another key component of the myth), and, at least to some degree, to question the magnitude of her scientific achievements. As the blurb for the cover of Comfort’s book puts it, McClintock’s work was neither ignored in the 1950s nor wholly accepted two decades later. Nor was McClintock marginalized by scientists; throughout the decades of her alleged rejection, she remained a distinguished figure in her field. Comfort replaces the ‘McClintock myth’ with a new story.

As it happens, the new story is one in which the wisdom of mainstream biology, particularly of molecular biology, is thoroughly vindicated.5 Comfort did not invent this alternate version. It was based on the testimony of a selected set of testimonies by informants interviewed long after the Nobel Prize. In other words, long after the memory of these scientists had itself been transformed by the historical events that in this case shaped not so much McClintock’s actual history as it changed their collective recollections of that history. The differences between the two biographies are of course troubling and we want to see them resolved. But can they be? Can we say which of these accounts is the truer one? 4 Nathaniel C. Comfort, The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2001). 5 In fact, Comfort was prodded to take on this project by Norton Zinder, a molecular biologist who had been nursing a fierce resentment of the success of my account and its implied criticism of molecular biology.

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Probably not. I hope that by now it will be clear that the McClintock story is a commodity that, from the start, was shaped, and reshaped, by the memories of our informants, by the interests of the author (or authors), and the needs of the various kinds of readers. Informants’ memories are themselves influenced by their needs, and inevitably so for, just as we constantly rewrite the stories we read, so too, we constantly rewrite our memories. We do so to accommodate the needs that we bring to those stories and memories. The version of the McClintock story that I wrote was shaped largely by what I heard about it from McClintock, from the testimonies of others that I subsequently solicited, and by the interests I brought to the project. That version too has a historicity : it was narrated (and recorded) at a particular moment in time. Is it closer to the ‘real’ story? Well, I might (and indeed do) think so, but ‘reality’ is a difficult commodity to get one’s hands on. Perhaps the best I can say is that my account is closer to the story as McClintock herself saw it, and as many of the relevant actors saw it at the time of my writing, but Comfort’s account is almost surely closer to the story that most molecular biologists tell themselves (and each other) today.

Londa Schiebinger

Following the Story: From The Mind Has No Sex? to Gendered Innovations

The Mind Has No Sex? was written in the early 1980s when it was imperative to expose the privileged first-born twins of modern science: the myth of the natural body, and the myth of value-neutral knowledge.1 The claim of science to objectivity was the linchpin holding together a system that rendered women’s exclusion from science invisible and made this exclusion appear fair and just. My work over the past thirty years has been devoted to dismantling this self-reinforcing cultural system. Beginning with my doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, I identified three analytically distinct, but interlocking, pieces of the puzzle: the history of women’s participation in science, the structure of scientific institutions, and the gendering of human knowledge. Why women and science in 1980? Why do a dissertation in an unknown area? Six women had entered Harvard’s History graduate program in my field in 1976 and, after two years, I was the only one left. I wondered why. There was little Women’s History, as it was called in those days. The word on the street was that doing a dissertation on women (gender was not yet much of a concept) was professional suicide. I diligently began work on an intellectual biography of Hans Vaihinger and his Philosophie des Als Ob. I won a Fulbright and set off to Europe to collect his papers and immerse myself in neo-Kantianism. After two years of painstaking work (collecting papers from archives and reading everything there was to read), I threw it all away. It was the best thing I ever did. It was getting away from Harvard that allowed me to turn to women. Robert Proctor had tried, since I met him, to make me a feminist and to get me to work on women in science. In Berlin, I heard interesting papers, I met interesting people – and eventually Barbara Duden, who went on to do foundational work in body history. 1 Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). Parts of this autobiography appeared in Londa Schiebinger, Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004).

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It was not clear at first what new topic I would undertake. I was highly trained in intellectual and social history, and philosophy. While in Berlin, I had published a paper on John Locke and David Hume’s attitudes toward women – that was fun! It put my technical training to work, and I decided to do something on intellectual women. In the 1980s, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) hosted a series of lectures on women in science. As I listened, I realized these women scientists told similar stories but offered no social or historical analysis of the source of their problems. Here was where I, the historian, could make a contribution. Clear also was that the extensive literature on the scientific revolution had not systematically treated women. Major theorists exploring the social origins of modern science – Marie Boas Hall, Boris Hessen, Robert Merton, Martha Ornstein, Dorothy Stimson, and Edgar Zilsel – paid little or no attention to women’s participation. Historians studied participation in science from many important vantage points – religious affiliation, class, age, vocation – but ignored entirely questions of gender. Merton, for example, pointed out that 62 percent of the initial membership of the Royal Society was Puritan. He did not, however, explore the implications of the even more striking fact that the early membership of the Royal Society, and indeed of all seventeenth-century academies of science, was 100 percent male. The only female at the Royal Society until 1945 was a skeleton kept, I assume, in a closet. I had little idea of all that as I began the project. My purpose was not to write about women per se (part one, the biographies, was added to The Mind Has No Sex? late in the process). My objective was to understand biological determinism, as it was called in those days. And I did not know where to start. As it turns out, my work throughout the years has begun with a ‘find’ around which I construct a book. I had for some time been working at Harvard’s Countway Library of Medicine looking for examples of biological determinism in eighteenth-century science. In the days before computerized catalogues, I decided the best approach was to make my way methodically through Countway’s card catalogue. I started with the letter ‘a’. One day, a card bearing the inscription Tabula sceleti feminini iuncta descriptione (Table and Description of the Female Skeleton) – noting a publication two pages in length – jumped out at me. It’s the same sort of experience I still have today ; when I am finding really good stuff, the written words are absolutely shouted in my head – it all becomes very loud. Given that the rendering of the female skeleton was by Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring, I had thumbed my way through an entire wall of cards. With Soemmerring’s female in hand, I set out to understand the story she embodied. The skull of this skeleton appears again in Nature’s Body ; Soemmerring, we learn, borrowed it from Johann Blumenbach, who had identified it as the most beautiful of all human skulls and used it as the model for his drawing of the

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‘Caucasian’ skull. Blumenbach coined the term Caucasian in the late eighteenth century, a story I went on to treat in Nature’s Body. My doctoral work is set in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries because that’s where the story was. This period saw the emergence of modern science, the development of modern notions of femininity and masculinity, and the rise of scientific sexism and racism. Science, gender, and race emerged not as disassociated and unencumbered phenomena but as developments that formed each other in decisive ways. Today I suppose one would call my approach Foucauldian (or Schiebingerian), but I was a Hegelian, long interested in how ideas emerge from, return to, and form society. Soemmerring’s skeleton was not alone – a flurry of female skeletons appeared in the mid-eighteenth century. Further, contests emerged over depictions of the skull, as a measure of intelligence, and the pelvis, as a mark of womanliness. Presented as science, these debates were highly political, having to do with women’s role in science and society. Understanding these skeletons required placing them as intellectual and material objects in the history of anatomy. Andreas Vesalius famously portrayed the ‘human’ skeleton in 1543. From his notebooks, we know the skeleton was male. Depictions of female skeletons were missing from modern anatomy for over two-hundred years. But why? Answers required history of the relative privilege of disciplines, institutions, art, science, and society. And it required biography. I was not as interested in individuals as in the social and institutional structures that mediated women’s opportunities. The surprise was that women were prepared and waiting to take their place in modern science at its beginnings. In contemporary jargon, they were in the ‘pipeline’. We find, for example, that some fourteen percent of German astronomers were women – a surprisingly high proportion. Premodern structures – the guilds and noble networks – allowed women in. These became my organizing principles for the biographies in The Mind Has No Sex? And it was the shifting structures of both science and society that came to exclude women. German women working in guild-like sciences – Maria Sibylla Merian and Maria Margaretha Winkelmann – fascinated me. If people read carefully, they will see that I have found a way to include Merian in each of my major books. Winkelmann also intrigued me. Here was a woman who applied to be the astronomer of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin when her husband died in 1710. Despite the great philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’s support she was rejected – surely something that shaped the history of women in science for the next three hundred years. Eventually documents failed, and I could not answer all the questions I had. Had she married Gottfried Kirch – a man thirty years her senior but also the leading astronomer in Germany at the time – to secure what we might anachronistically call a professional role in astronomy?

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If we apply this type of analysis to my own life, what allowed me to become a historian of science? Born and raised in Nebraska, I am the daughter of highschool educated parents – a father who emerged from WWII and became a printer, and an intelligent but frustrated mother trained as a beautician, a vocation she never practiced and declared to hate. A large part of my childhood was spent reading and memorizing the Bible. Consecutive moves finally brought me to the public school system. It was the excellent public school system that allowed me to see worlds beyond my small life. This, coupled with the women’s movement, brought opportunities. There were still barriers, of course – boys in those days studied science and girls humanities – but these were becoming less obstructive. And women were – gradually – becoming professors. In 1973, at the urging of some of my male professors, I flew to Paris, France – the rest is, as they say, history. In my wildest dreams, I never imagined I would become a professor. But I found it was a way never to leave school. No matter how interesting the lives, ultimately I was interested in the system. Nature’s Body continues the saga, going beyond the analysis of scientific misreadings of women’s bodies (those skeletons in the closet of science) to look specifically at the third aspect of my analytic triad; namely, how science is not value-neutral but participates in – and continues to support – human knowledge that is highly gendered. Narrowing my purview to natural history, I focused attention on Carl Linnaeus because his taxonomies were central innovations in eighteenth-century science that had not yet been challenged for how they contributed to naturalizing the role of ‘woman’ in modern culture. As I delved into Linnaeus’s work, I became bemused by the quaint hyperbole surrounding the discovery of plant sexuality – plants celebrating steamy nuptials on softly perfumed pedaled beds. The story itself, of course, is significant because plant sexuality was strongly assimilated to heterosexual models of human affections, even though the majority of the earth’s floral inhabitants are hermaphroditic. But while this all greatly fascinated me, I was more interested to understand how Linnaean taxonomy unconsciously (I assume) recapitulated social hierarchies by setting the taxon defined by the male stamens above that defined by female pistils. Similarly, in the chapter on why mammals are called mammals, in addition to writing the torrid history of the breast in that era, I zeroed in on how notions of gender formed scientific taxonomies, and how these taxonomies buttressed gender roles in science and society. By emphasizing how natural it was for females – both human and nonhuman – to suckle their own children, Linnaeus’s newly coined Mammalia helped to legitimize the restructuring of European society in an age of cultural upheaval and revolution. I developed a deep interest in understanding how these scientific developments participated – in both theory and practice – in the shift in Western Europe

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from early modern monarchical states to modern democratic polities, and the relative positions of science, women, and non-Europeans in these new social orders. With the waning of European corporate society, political theorists from Locke to Jean-Jacques Rousseau came to identify the (mythic) individual endowed with inalienable natural rights as the foundation of the state. The ‘body politic’ no longer centered on the legal fiction of the King’s body – conceived as the corporeal incarnation of a divine and worldly order – but on the collectivity of human bodies, each of whom surrendered a portion of his or her sovereign rights to join together to form a nation. This new order was grounded not in the divine right of kings but in Nature and natural law – as defined by taxonomists, anatomists, and other scientific men. It is here in this final step that women’s exclusion from science became justified by the very science from which they were excluded. It is here that we see the significance of Linnaean and other taxonomies that purported to provide crisp and value-neutral renderings of nature. The natural qualities of plants, animals, and humans – stripped clean of history and culture – were now seen as defining a continuous natural order that stretched seamlessly from nature to culture and back again. A creature’s ‘nature’ was seen as defining its rightful place in that order. Women’s exclusion from science was rendered ‘natural’ and just, something guaranteed by the objectivity of science. Efforts to build ‘just’ societies on natural law led to intense scrutiny of all parts of nature, including diverse renderings of humankind. Meditations on this Enlightenment project form in large part the subject matter of Nature’s Body, especially the chapters on primates and racial classification. As bodies came to be seen as placing individuals within an intellectual, moral, and political order, natural bodies were increasingly scrutinized for marks of difference that might provide clues to that person’s, or class of persons’, place in the natural order. Within this revolutionary liberal framework, an appeal to natural rights could be countered only by proof of natural inequalities. In other words, if social inequalities – the slavery of Africans in the Americas and the continued disenfranchisement of women – were to be justified, scientific evidence had to show that human nature is not uniform but differs according to race and sex. Both The Mind Has No Sex? and Nature’s Body identify ways in which the search for sexual difference intersected that of racial difference and vice versa. It is remarkable, for instance, that a secondary sexual characteristic, such as the lushness (or lack) of a beard, emerged as a trait to sort males into distinct races. It is also remarkable to find lingering notions that women held the power to shape racial characteristics. Head shape, the contours of lips and noses were considered not innately immutable but molded by the manipulative hands of midwives and mothers. In the idiom of Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, women took the homogeneous stuff of humanity and carved from it the peculiarities of national types.

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My purpose in identifying the marks of gender in knowledge systems is to create better science, by which I mean many things. One of those is science that serves well the greatest number of people, including women. Another is science that represents our best approximation of truth in a particular time and place. ‘Truth’ and ‘objectivity’ represent lofty goals that require continuous vigilance to attain. They are not achieved when systematic prejudices go unchallenged. Researchers are best able to approximate truth and objectivity by becoming aware of systematic preconceptions and biases – of which gender has been (and in some quarters continues to be) a powerful one. As I argued in my 1999 Has Feminism Changed Science?, gender analysis (in its myriad aspects) becomes one tool among the many that scientists deploy to better understand the physical universe.2 The goal, as I see it, is not to do away with gender (or sex for that matter), but to understand what they are, and how they are formed and maintained. Gender ideals are one powerful force that has molded science; science has simultaneously been one potent authority giving shape to and certifying gender ideals. Neither stands as an Archimedean point prior to the other in the multi-rhythmic dance of human knowledge and living in the world. I take it to be the point of both the history of science and the history of gender to show that neither science nor transhistorical bodies exist apart from culture. The Mind Has No Sex? and Nature’s Body could have been published as one book; indeed, The Mind Has No Sex? provides the historical context for the specific examples of gender bias detailed in Nature’s Body. The uptake of these two books was surprisingly immediate and international. Both were widely reviewed and translated into numerous languages. And it is gratifying that they continue to be used in classes. The Skeletons in the Closet and Why Mammals are Called Mammals? are some of my most influential works: a highpoint for me was that Stephen Jay Gould highlighted the mammals piece in his regular column for Natural History. Both books also stood in the fast-rising stream of body studies. The Mind Has No Sex? came out one year before Tom Laqueur’s intriguing Making Sex. Meeting Tom in the uncertain mid 1980s was fabulous. As I gave talks about ‘skeletons in the closet’ around the country, some scholars thought perhaps that these females – stripped to their anatomical essences – might just be pornographic. Tom immediately recognized their significance, and we were coming to similar conclusions about the making of the modern body – as he and Catherine Gallagher entitled their 1987 volume.3 2 Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 3 The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. by

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I am sometimes asked what I might change if I were to write The Mind Has No Sex? and Nature’s Body today. Undoubtedly some aspects would change, but the images available for these books were particularly rich. Sapientia (the personification of wisdom) suckling philosophers, charts of breast types, male apes featured with bones in their penises, love ‘attacking’ plants, or colonial allegories of ‘Europe Supported by Africa and America’ – it really does not get better than that. The books could easily have been twice as long because one can rather endlessly multiply the types of examples I chose as paradigmatic. I am perhaps sufficiently established in my career today to divulge something about the process of historical discovery in my work. My approach to what I consider my second important historical discovery hardly conforms to any ‘historical methods’ encountered in graduate training. The discovery that the term Mammalia was coined in the eighteenth century and for deeply cultural and political reasons began as I sat reading one day at the New York Public Library Annex – where I loved working because photocopying eighteenth-century texts was then still allowed. I had gotten out the large and beautiful volumes of Buffon’s Histoire naturelle (a first edition) and was reading along when I noted that Buffon was calling humans ‘quadrupeds’ (quadrupÀdes). I started arguing with the page because I had just had a baby, this was one of my first days out, and (missing my son’s feedings) I did not feel at all like a quadruped but distinctly like a mammal! I went home and asked my companion, Robert Proctor, when the term was coined – and finding it significant that he did not know, I knew I had found another good story. Oddly enough, as it turned out, Linnaeus would not at all have approved of a mammal of my sort ‘abandoning’ her child to a babysitter (armed with a supply of bottled mother’s milk) to study (let alone critique) his work. Plants and Empires allowed me to focus once again on Maria Sibylla Merian – although the protagonist of that book is not a great woman, nor a great man, but a great plant. Until recently, historians, post-colonialists, even historians of science, have rarely recognized the importance of plants to history. Plants seldom figure in the grand narratives of war, peace, or even everyday life in proportion to their actual importance to humans. This book emerged from the confluence of three streams: 1) the intense interest in the ‘voyages of discovery’; 2) the turn toward global history ; and 3) a historical ‘find’. Seeking to bring gender analysis to the very masculine theme of voyaging, I naively began my search for an appropriate topic with the entire world, then stepped back to consider what was practical given my skill set, and, finally, followed the story. Always follow the story. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Walter Laqueur (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1987).

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Merian was a worthy subject for investigation given that she was one of the few, perhaps the only, European woman in all of early modernity to travel solely in pursuit of her science, and not as a wife, daughter, or lover of a naturalist – although Jeanne Baret, the first European woman to circumnavigate the globe in 1776, would also have created a page turner.4 I again began by reading everything. The ‘find’ emerged from a book on what we today would call entomology : The Indians, who are not treated well by their Dutch masters, use the seeds [of this plant] to abort their children, so that their children will not become slaves like they are. The black slaves from Guinea and Angola have demanded to be well treated, threatening to refuse to have children. In fact, they sometimes take their own lives because they are treated so badly, and because they believe they will be born again, free and living in their own land. They told me this themselves.5

In this moving passage from her magnificent 1705 Metamorphosis insectorum Surinamensium, Maria Sibylla Merian recorded how the African slaves and Amerindians in Surinam, a Dutch colony, used the seeds of a plant she identified as the flos pavonis, literally ‘peacock flower’, as an abortifacient. ‘Too much information’, I exclaimed (probably out loud right there in the library), for a book on insects! This book also introduced a new method Robert Proctor and I were developing – agnotology, or the study of culturally-induced ignorances.6 Agnotology refocuses questions about ‘how we know’ to question what we do not know and why not – the idea being that ignorance has a complex political geography and arises out of, and is maintained by, cultural and political struggles. The point is not just that nature is infinitely rich and science invariably selective, but also that what we do not know at any given time or place is shaped by local and global priorities, funding patterns, passion hierarchies, institutional and disciplinary accidents, and much else as well. Plants and Empire unfolds step-by-methodological-step to show how gender relations in Europe and its West Indian colonies influenced what European bioprospectors collected – and failed to collect – as they entered the knowledge-rich traditions of the Caribbean. I identified abortifacients as a body of knowledge as much as a class of drugs that did not circulate freely between the West Indies and Europe. Trade winds of prevailing opinion impeded shiploads of New World abortifacients and knowledge of their use from reaching Europe. 4 Nina Gelbart, author of the fabulous The King’s Midwife: A History and Mystery of Madame du Coudray (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998), is currently preparing a biography of Baret. 5 Maria Sibylla Merian, Metamorphosis insectorum surinamensium (Amsterdam, 1705), commentary to plate no. 45. 6 Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance, ed. by Robert N. Proctor and Londa Schiebinger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

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Agnotology is the only work Robert Proctor and I co-edited. Our work has been a joy in our relationship. We created two lovely and loving sons, and many, many books between us. My work focuses on the eighteenth century, but also on what I call the ‘extreme present’. Historians should, I think, be public intellectuals who go beyond simply writing about history by contributing to making history. My early work emerged from listening to the women scientists at MIT, and I have throughout the years worked directly on current issues, beginning with my review of the field of gender and science for Signs in 1987 and culminating (for the moment) in Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment collaboration between the U.S. and the European Union (see below).7 In 2004, I moved to Stanford University to take up the Directorship of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Having just completed my fourth major book and several more edited volumes, I welcomed this opportunity to collaborate with gender scholars across Stanford’s seven schools – Engineering, Humanities and Science, Medicine, Law, Business, Earth Sciences, and Education – to set priorities in gender research. I devoted two solid and eventful years to raising a substantial endowment for the Institute, which was renamed the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research. Working with donors brought new urgency to connect scholarship to change. With the endowment in place, in addition to start-up monies from the President’s and Vice Provost for Research’s offices, I had an opportunity to undertake research that an individual scholar could not. My team and I turned our attention to the important topic of dual-career academic couples. Being part of an academic couple is an issue that has also defined my own academic career. Robert Proctor, my long-time partner, and I met at Winthrop House at Harvard during our graduate years. When I became an Assistant Professor at the Pennsylvania State University, we strategically put the baby on his back (in the backpack) at the first departmental picnic. He was hired by December. We were lucky that already in the 1980s Penn State realized that investing in dual-career couples is a brilliant way to recruit talent. People happily settled into two jobs in one place are less likely to move – and, eventually, they become expensive to move. Stanford also hired Robert – he’s a great catch – making our move there possible (we would not have commuted). My advice to graduate students: Fall in love with someone who is your academic equal! Of 7 Londa Schiebinger, ‘The History and Philosophy of Women in Science: A Review Essay’, Signs, Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12 (1987), 305 – 32; reprinted in Sex and Scientific Inquiry, ed. by Sandra Harding and Jean F. O’Barr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), pp. 7 – 34. My most recent review of the field will appear as ‘Women and Gender in Science’, in Oxford Encyclopedia of the American History of Science, Medicine, and Technology, ed. by Hugh Slotten (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

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course, we had no idea about any of this when we fell in love. We simply plunged forward in great oblivious naivet¦. The Stanford study, Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know, surveyed 30,000 faculties at thirteen top research universities across the U.S. Universities were chosen to represent the East, West, and Middle of the U.S. – metropolitan areas as well as college towns. It was a massive job. We have data no one else has.8 The first part of the report analyzes demographics – how many academics (hetero or gay) have academic partners, professional partners, working partners, stay-at-home partners? The second part explores values – who followed whom in their joint careers? (That was an interesting one.) And to what extent do academics couple within their own fields? Fully 83 percent of women scientists in academic couples are partnered with another scientist, compared with 54 percent of men scientists – pretty amazing! The third part of the report offers universities policy recommendations – which is the point of the study. I was hired at Stanford to promote work on gender in science, and next up on the agenda was Gendered Innovations. ‘Gendered Innovations’ is a term I coined in 2005 in efforts to shift gender in science studies into a new gear.9 Feminist projects throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s – mine included – had focused on identifying and analyzing examples of bias in science. This was, and continues to be, important. But bias is complicated. It is mostly unconscious and emerges from the well-grooved contours of society. Gendered innovations shift emphasis away from bias and toward a positive research program that employs gender analysis as a resource to stimulate new knowledge and technology. Gendered innovations ‘open’ eyes to new things. In 2009, I initiated the current Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment project at the Clayman Institute. This has turned into a large collaboration between the U.S. and the European Union. The work of the project was carried out in a series of workshops held in Stanford, Berlin, Maastricht, Paris, Spain, Harvard, and Brussels. These workshops brought together technical experts (stem cell researchers, civil and mechanical engineers, computer scientists, etc.) and gender experts to: 1) develop practical methods of sex and gender analysis for science and engineering, and 2) provide case studies (eventually twenty-three) as concrete examples of how sex and gender analysis leads to innovation. 8 Londa Schiebinger, Andrea Davies Henderson, and Shannon K. Gilmartin, Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know (Stanford: Clayman Institute for Gender Research, 2008); see at http://gender.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/DualCareerFinal_0.pdf (for this and the sites that follow, the date of the last access is 9/12/2013). 9 Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering, ed. by Londa Schiebinger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008).

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Analyzing sex and gender prospectively can stimulate new knowledge and technologies. From the start, these analytics act as controls (or filters for bias) providing critical rigor in research, policy, and practice. Gendered Innovations add value to research and engineering by ensuring excellence and quality in outcomes; they add value to society by making research and engineering projects more responsive to social and environmental needs; and they add value to business by developing new ideas, patents, and technology. The goal is to stimulate the creation of gender-responsible science and technology, thereby enhancing the lives of both women and men worldwide. And for the first time, I produced a website and not a book.10 It’s not just that times are changing (which they surely are) but scientists and engineers don’t read in the same way humanists do. Historians pride themselves on their knowledge of languages. For this project, I found that we needed to develop a format and ‘language’ that communicate across disciplinary divides. Gender scholars often write in the high and sometimes jargon-ridden language required for advancement within their own profession. Scientists and engineers won’t wade through this stuff – nor should they. Part of being a public intellectual means meeting people half way. A first version of the Gendered Innovations project launched on November 1, 2011. By November 9 it had been sent by NASA to the White House. July 2013 it was presented at the European Parliament. At the same time that gender research is important, policy is important. In recent years I have worked with the European Union to impact policy.11 Considering where the field of gender and science started in the 1980s, it is amazing and gratifying that the European Commission has prioritized ‘the gender dimension in research and innovation’ in its funding framework, Horizon 2020, that runs for the next seven years.12 Translated, this means that researchers applying to the European Commission will be invited to consider whether, and in what sense, sex and gender are relevant in the objectives and in the methodology of the proposed research, a policy the E.U. has championed since about 2001. Researchers, however, have not been trained in gender analysis (it is not often taught in basic science and engineering curricula). Gendered Innovations was supported in efforts to provide tools for the job. I also had the opportunity to write the conceptual background paper for the 10 The website is globally available: genderedinnovations.stanford.edu, first released November 2011. 11 Londa Schiebinger and Martina Schraudner, ‘Interdisciplinary Approaches to Achieving Gendered Innovations in Science, Medicine, and Engineering’, Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, special issue on Gender in Science, ed. by Elizabeth Pollitzer, 36 (2011), 154 – 67. 12 See the European Commissioner’s foreword in Gendered Innovations: How Gender Analysis Contributes to Research, ed. by Londa Schiebinger and Ineke Klinge (Luxembourg: Publications Office of the European Union, 2013).

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Londa Schiebinger

United Nations’ expert workshop held in Paris in 2010 on Gender, Science, and Technology. In one of the most exciting moments of my career, the United Nations member states passed resolutions calling for : 1) ‘gender-based analysis […] in science and technology’; and 2) the integration of a ‘gender perspective in science and technology curricula.’13 Once this is accomplished worldwide, my work is done. I can die a happy woman.

13 Londa Schiebinger, Gender, Science, and Technology, Conceptual Background Paper for United Nations, Expert Group Meeting, Paris, 2010 at http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/ egm/gst_2010/Schiebinger-BP.1-EGM-ST.pdf; and Londa Schiebinger, Progressing toward Gender-Responsive Science and Technology, Panel 1: Interactive Expert Panel, Emerging Issue: Gender Equality and Sustainable Development, United Nations, February, 2011. UN resolutions can be found at: http://www.un.org/womenwatch/daw/csw/csw55/agreed_conclusions/AC_CSW55_E.pdf

Georgina Ferry

Telling Stories or Making History? Two Lives in X-ray Crystallography

I set out in 1994 to write the biography of the crystallographer Dorothy Hodgkin (1910 – 1994) from a simple desire that her name should be better known among her own compatriots in the United Kingdom.1 My experience was that of a professional science writer : I have no formal training as a historian, and was therefore unaware that biography was barely acknowledged as a genre within the historiography of science.2 I then had a nave belief that anyone of sufficient eminence would inevitably become a biographical subject, in life or shortly after death. Hodgkin was the first (and remains the only) British woman to win a science Nobel Prize (1964). She is also one of only three women (the others are Marie Curie and IrÀne JoliotCurie) to win the prize for chemistry. The year after she received it, she was admitted to the Order of Merit, Britain’s highest honour and in the gift of the Queen: she was the second woman ever to be admitted after Florence Nightingale (1820 – 1910) in 1907. The honour, which is held by only twenty-four people at any one time, placed her in the company of scholars such as Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1870) and Isaiah Berlin (1909 – 1997); musicians such as Benjamin Britten (1913 – 1976) and Yehudi Menuhin (1916 – 1999); and actors such as John Gielgud (1904 – 2000) and Laurence Olivier (1907 – 1989). Yet when I began to think of writing about her, around the time of her death in 1994, I discovered that, unlike these, she was almost unknown except by those who had a background in chemistry, molecular biology or history of science. A biography, I thought, would provide the ideal opportunity to raise her profile. At the same time, I believed that I could use her personal history to introduce nonscience specialists to the incredible advances in molecular biology that took place during the twentieth century. Hodgkin was a pioneer in applying the 1 Georgina Ferry, Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (London: Granta Publications, 1998 and New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2000). 2 Telling Lives in Science. Essays on Scientific Biography, ed. by Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, ed. by Thomas Söderqvist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007).

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technique of X-ray crystallography to biological molecules, successfully solving the three-dimensional structures of penicillin, vitamin B12 and insulin. Today these same techniques, though with massive advances in technology, are being used to work out the structures of the thousands of human proteins revealed through the Human Genome Project, and which are fundamental to the design of rational treatments for many conditions including diabetes and cancer. I was attracted by the idea of exploring not only Hodgkin’s career but also how she had achieved scientific success as a woman with family and household responsibilities.

I.

Dorothy Hodgkin’s Life and Work

Hodgkin was one of four daughters of John Crowfoot, who at the time of her birth was an officer in the education service in Egypt, and his wife Molly. The Crowfoots subsequently became prominent as archaeologists, specialising in the Middle East: although she had no formal higher education, Molly Crowfoot became a world authority on traditional weaving techniques and ancient textiles. They were liberal in their political outlook, and ardent supporters of international harmony : Molly Crowfoot took Dorothy to listen to a debate at the League of Nations in Geneva when she was just fourteen, and it left her with a powerful sense of the value of dialogue as a route to avoiding conflict. Dorothy attended a mixed, state-funded secondary school where science was not normally taught to girls. However, having discovered chemistry through growing crystals in the small class she attended as a ten-year-old, she insisted on studying this ‘boys’ subject’ rather than needlework. Her evident aptitude took her to study chemistry at Somerville College, an all-women college of Oxford University, in 1928. She was therefore among the first generation of women able to graduate from Oxford, which awarded degrees to women only from 1920. Subsequently she studied for her PhD at Cambridge under the charismatic Communist physicist John Desmond Bernal (1901 – 1971), whose lab welcomed men and women equally, before returning to Somerville as its first science fellow. She married a fellow socialist, the historian Thomas Lionel Hodgkin (1910 – 1982), who encouraged her to continue with her career ; her college granted her maternity leave for each of her three children, another first for Oxford University. As she herself recognised, she was able to succeed in her chosen field partly because she was in right at the beginning, and for the first couple of decades of her career there was very little competition anywhere in the world. As a graduate student she was the first, with her supervisor Bernal, to publish an X-ray diffraction image of a protein (the digestive enzyme pepsin). The fact that a protein

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gave consistent diffraction images was the first evidence that protein chains were folded into defined three-dimensional shapes, shapes that would undoubtedly hold the key to their functions in the body. Almost as soon as she had set up her own lab in Oxford, she published a second protein image, that of insulin. A solution to any protein structure would have to wait until the advent of high-speed computers, but in the meantime Hodgkin went on to solve the structure of penicillin – at the time the subject of controversy among chemists – and vitamin B12, the anti-pernicious anaemia factor. At all times her achievements were recognised at the highest level. Sir Lawrence Bragg (1890 – 1971), who had won the 1915 Nobel Prize for discovering that X-ray diffraction could be used to solve molecular structures, described her B12 result as ‘breaking the sound barrier’ in the field. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society at the age of only thirty-six, in 1947, just two years after the election of the first women in 1945. She was disappointed not to be the first to solve a protein structure, but with insulin she had picked a particularly difficult one. Working in Cambridge, her friend and fellow ex-student of Bernal’s, Max Ferdinand Perutz (1914 – 2002), solved the structure of haemoglobin while his colleague John Kendrew (1917 – 1997) solved myoglobin in the late 1950s, for which they won the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1962. Hodgkin thought she had been passed over, after several previous nominations, but Perutz nominated her again and she won the prize in 1964. Five years later, at the head of a large team of young assistants, she finally solved the insulin structure. Throughout Hodgkin’s life, but particularly after gaining the global recognition that went with the prize, she spoke and acted in accordance with her strongly held but softly articulated political views. A passionate left-wing idealist, she admired the regimes of the Communist Soviet Union and China, and was apparently blind to the abuses that occurred under them. She had taught Margaret Thatcher (1925 – 2013), who studied chemistry at Somerville, and visited the Prime Minister on more than one occasion to argue for d¦tente with the Russians. She travelled indefatigably, particularly to China, where she encouraged research groups also working on the structure of insulin all through the Cultural Revolution and eventually engineered their re-acceptance into the international crystallographic community. She bitterly opposed American aggression in Vietnam and Cambodia, and personally visited North Vietnam to encourage villagers defending themselves from air attack. She opposed nuclear warfare, and in 1971 became the President of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, which holds meetings between scientists of East and West in an effort to provide a scientific basis for disarmament. All these facts about her life do not really answer the question of how she did it. She had unique personal qualities, but also many opportunities. I have written

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about the factors that enable exceptional women scientists to succeed elsewhere.3 In Hodgkin’s case I would place a high value on the esteem for intellectual accomplishments shared by both her parents, which led her mother in particular to encourage her passion for chemistry from an early age. Other key factors are the egalitarian outlook of the hotbed of socialism that was the Cambridge crystallography laboratory, and the far-sightedness of the all-female Somerville College in creating a post for her (a major financial commitment for this poorly-endowed institution), and making it possible for her to continue working through the births of three children. Finally, as mentioned above, the newness of the subject created an opportunity to achieve recognition very early in her career.

II.

The Biographical Process

Access to Hodgkin’s meticulously archived papers,4 and interviews with friends and colleagues, allowed me to place her research in its social context. The embryonic field of protein structure analysis grew through close friendships and personal contacts, and each success represented the work of a dozen or more individuals: a clear contradiction of the prevalent myth of scientists as ‘lone geniuses’. I was also able to document Hodgkin’s physical frailty (she suffered from rheumatoid arthritis from an early age), her passionate commitment to socialism, East-West relations and world peace, and even her love of detective novels and old hymns (though she was not herself a believer). Her unorthodox marriage – her husband frequently worked away from home, eventually taking a full-time post in Ghana for six years – meant that she wrote a huge number of letters, most of which survive and provide insights that might seem trivial but which are essential to building a rounded picture of her life. Children’s illnesses, troubles with servants, political commentary – all appear alongside her hopes and fears for her research in her almost daily correspondence. Through writing this book I inadvertently took on a new identity as an author, having worked happily for fifteen years under the title of science writer or science journalist. To my surprise I also found myself admitted into the circle of scholars specialising in the history of science. Within a year of the book’s publication I received an invitation to participate in the 1999 conference on 3 Georgina Ferry, ‘The Exception and the Rule: Women and the Royal Society 1945 – 2010’, Notes & Records of the Royal Society, 64 (2010), S163-S72. 4 Hodgkin Papers, NCUACS 47.3.94, vols 1, 2 and Supplementary Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford.

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Women in the History of Science, organised at Newnham College at Cambridge.5 It was there that I first began to understand that for historians of science, biography was a troubled and troubling genre, rather than simply a good way to raise the profile of forgotten scientists and to make their science accessible to a general readership. I have to admit that I have not myself worried very much about whether or not biography is a valid way to approach history of science. Though I may use the tools of the scholar (not very well at first – I admit that the references in my Hodgkin biography were less conscientiously compiled than they should have been, and the index rather perfunctory), I see my task as storytelling rather than breaking new academic ground. I care a great deal about factual accuracy, but in selecting what to include and what to exclude, my choices are driven by the desire to produce a narrative that is accessible to the general reader and which produces a nuanced view of the subject. I am interested in my biographical subjects’ intellectual contributions only in so far as it made them figures of influence and esteem: I am far more interested in the personal qualities that led to their achievements, and the social and cultural environment that either fostered or impeded their progress. Of course, I am also interested in why Hodgkin, for example, was so passionately interested in the structures of biological molecules that she persevered with apparently intractable problems for so long. In the case of insulin, thirty-five years passed between her first successful X-ray photograph and her eventual solution of the structure.

III.

Max Perutz

While I continue to defend the historical validity of focusing on an individual, I believe that it is possible to avoid the worst excesses of hagiography or anecdotalism. I have since taken a similar multi-faceted approach to the life of Max Perutz, another Nobel-prizewinning crystallographer whose story included the experience of emigration from Nazi-occupied Europe, wartime internment as an ‘enemy alien’, and the redevelopment of his identity as a British subject.6 Perutz was in some ways an ideal subject for me to tackle, not least because he was another protein crystallographer, and I already knew most of the historical and scientific background to his work through my research for the Hodgkin biography. However, while I chose Hodgkin as a subject, Perutz chose me as an 5 The Conference was organized by the Women’s Commission of the Division of the History of Science of the International Union of the History and Philosophy of Science. See Paola Govoni’s introductory essay to this volume. 6 Georgina Ferry, Max Perutz and the Secret of Life (London: Chatto & Windus, 2007).

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author, and this did give me reason to hesitate. While she had told colleagues she was ‘wary of attempts on [her] life’, he clearly cared about posterity. Had he been able to oversee the writing of the book, I should have felt compromised in my independence as an author. I admit I also initially found the idea of working on a male subject less interesting, having seen the gender aspect of my work on Hodgkin as a central theme. However, Perutz did not approach me about the biographical project until he was terminally ill, and as I had other projects to complete, I did not in the event begin work on the book until almost a year after his death. My initial research put to rest my doubts about writing on a male subject, as I found depths of complexity in his personality and circumstances that provided plenty of narrative opportunities. Perutz worked all his life on haemoglobin, the ‘breathing molecule’ that makes blood red. Not only did he solve its structure, but he discovered how it works as a molecular machine to transport oxygen to the tissues, how evolution has modified its structure for the specialised lifestyles of species such as geese and crocodiles, and how even small mutations in the gene that carries the haemoglobin code can lead to ailments such as sickle cell disease and thalassaemia. He founded the laboratory in Cambridge where James Watson and Francis Crick (1916 – 2004) discovered the double helix of DNA, and today this same lab can count thirteen Nobel Prize winners among its former staff. Perutz was suspicious of political extremes, but was an ardent campaigner in humanitarian causes including disarmament and world health. He wrote with a direct and engaging style that won him many admirers in his retirement as he became a regular contributor to the New York Review of Books and other popular publications. While Perutz led me to believe that I would not have access to a wealth of personal material such as had made the Hodgkin biography so vivid, his daughter discovered after his death that his wife had cached bundles of his letters all over the house. Furthermore he was a very prolific correspondent, and searching the archives of his colleagues proved highly productive. Finally, while Hodgkin wrote very little autobiographical material, Perutz loved to write about his personal experiences, scientific and otherwise. His account of his wartime internment as an enemy alien, published in the New Yorker in 1985,7 is a modern classic, and he wrote many other popular articles about his arrival in the United Kingdom in 1936 as a research student and about the founding of his Cambridge laboratory. The biography provided an opportunity to compare his own storytelling with other perspectives that came to light through original materials. It is interesting 7 Max Perutz, ‘That was the War : Enemy Alien’, New Yorker, August 12 (1985), 35 – 54.

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that Perutz’s efforts to control the narrative of his life through his publications, and even through inviting me to write his biography, betrayed aspects of his personality that he probably would not have wanted to see analysed. In one instance, writing about his battles to get his ideas about haemoglobin accepted, he gave fictitious names to all his ‘enemies’ without comment or explanation, thereby preventing any right of reply. While he warmly acknowledged the support of his wife Gisela – their marriage lasted almost sixty years – he seems not to have recognised that this woman of exceptional intelligence and empathy had quietly shelved her own intellectual ambitions in order to ‘provide the ground on which [his] work grew and flourished’.8 Hodgkin, in contrast, set great store by her scientific publications, which are models of clarity, but otherwise seemed unconcerned about how posterity would represent her.

IV.

The Reception of Scientific Biography

I believed – and still do – that these life stories can play a valuable role in giving science a human face, and in generating wider understanding of its methods and social relations. Scientific biography faces many obstacles, however. Only recently, as I found myself invited to participate in academic discussions on the history of science, did I discover that a focus on individuals has long been frowned upon as a valid means of exploring science’s past. Today this view is undergoing something of a reassessment, and I leave it to those better qualified than I to reach a resolution. Scientists themselves have cast doubt on the value of biography, arguing that individuals are incidental to the ‘forward march’ of scientific knowledge. They are especially suspicious of writing that explores the personality and social relations of scientists as well as their intellectual journey (though they are often happy to gossip in private). Young scientists are trained for years without ever learning anything of their predecessors other than the names on their papers. Finally – and this is a concern that perhaps affects professional writers rather more than those who pursue biography in an academic context – the bookselling trade in Britain and the U.S. has become a very difficult environment in which to produce books on people who are relatively unknown. Unless they deal with ‘big names’ such as Darwin and Einstein, scientific biographies (and indeed serious biographies of any kind) are struggling to find publishers and markets beyond their own specialist areas. (Even in 1995, when markets were more buoyant, my Hodgkin book was rejected by six publishers before Granta accepted it. After publication it was shortlisted for two biography prizes.) The vogue is for the 8 Ferry, Max Perutz, p. 85.

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celebrity memoir, almost invariably ghost-written, that will sell in hundreds of thousands. My own biographies have been gratifyingly well received by reviewers in both the British national press and the specialist scientific press, but sold in numbers that trade publishers today regard as too modest to risk further books of this type. Their judgement, though painful to me, is undoubtedly sound. Judging from the letters I receive from readers, my audience, far from being the ‘interested laypeople’ that I set out to address, is almost entirely drawn from within science, medicine, and history of science. To reach a broader audience, one has to find new ways to smuggle science past the book trade’s gatekeepers. A brilliant example of this is Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder.9 Holmes is a leading literary biographer of the Romantic period. In his 2008 book he shows how a flowering of British science at the end of the eighteenth century, involving particularly the astronomer William Herschel and the chemist Humphry Davy, inspired Romantic writers including Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley.

V.

Science on Stage

A small number of very successful plays have addressed scientific lives in recent years. The best-known is probably Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen (1998), which plays with the historical uncertainties of the meeting that took place between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941. Others include Hugh Whitemore’s Breaking the Code (1986) about Alan Turing, and the Complicit¦ company’s A Disappearing Number (2007) about the mathematicians Godfrey Harold Hardy and Srinivasa Ramanujan. On a smaller scale, but no less powerful, is Jane Cox’s The Longing to Understand (2001), a one-woman show about the Nobel-prizewinning geneticist Barbara McClintock. It was a performance of this play (translated into Italian by Andrea Grignolio) at the Bologna conference in July 2009 that started me thinking about using theatre to find new audiences for Dorothy Hodgkin’s life and work. The opportunity arose to present a performance in Oxford in May 2010, when the Oxford University Museum of Natural History (where Hodgkin had her first laboratory) would be celebrating the centenary of her birth. As a novice playwright I decided not to put words into her mouth, but to use extracts from her own letters and articles to form the script. This process involved even more stringent selection criteria than I had adopted for the book: a forty-minute 9 Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder : How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, (London: Harper Press, 2008).

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script needs about 6,000 words, as opposed to 120,000 for the biography. I decided to focus on the intense period between 1940 and 1945, when Hodgkin was working on the solution of penicillin, with flashbacks to her childhood and early education, and forward to the Nobel Prize ceremony. The play includes intensely personal passages about Hodgkin’s love life, marriage, children and her response to living under wartime conditions. On what now seems a miraculous timescale, the script was written, a professional director (Abbey Wright) and actress (Miranda Cook) recruited, and Hidden Glory : Dorothy Hodgkin in Her Own Words received its first performance on 10 May 2010. I was keen that the expertise of theatre professionals should be allowed to guide the final product: the most obvious way in which this happened was that the projected images that I had originally intended as rather literal illustrations of people and science became much more impressionistic, conveying Hodgkin’s moods and imagination. Following an enthusiastic reception in Oxford, we subsequently toured the play to Manchester, Bristol, Cambridge, Otley and York. Post-show discussions have been enthusiastic, with several audience members moved to tears by Miranda Cook’s portrayal of Hodgkin’s unique combination of determination, humanity, and fragility. The play was revived in November 2012 for a single performance at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, generously funded by the Sex in Science programme of that institute and the European Bioinformatics Institute. The performance was professionally filmed and edited into a DVD, which has since been shown at events such as the Bragg centenary in Leeds and the 2013 European Crystallography Meeting. For me the process of creating a theatre piece was a revelation, a dynamic collaboration quite unlike the solitary process of writing a book. The intense engagement of the audiences has also been inspiring. I am certainly encouraged to think about using theatre again in future to explore the human dimensions of scientific practice.

VI.

Conclusion

At a time when science and technology play an ever-more significant role in human civilisation, both in posing new problems and offering solutions, it seems obvious that policymakers and the public at large should have some understanding of how scientific discoveries and technological advances come about. Through harnessing our natural curiosity about the lives of others, biography can help to achieve this end. How to find markets for scientific biography, in a world in which most scientists are all but invisible, is a challenge that writers and historians must address together.

Part II Shaping Biographies

Marta Cavazza

*

The Biographies of Laura Bassi

Three centuries have passed since Laura Bassi’s birth (October 29, 1711). The University of Bologna, where Bassi taught experimental physics for decades, sponsored a rich program of events from September to November 2011 to celebrate her centennial. The variety of ways in which the university chose to commemorate this eighteenth-century female philosopher was unique. These events confirm and enrich the panorama of the ‘commemorative practices in science’ as described by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Clark A. Elliott, the editors of the 1999 Osiris volume on this subject. In his preface to the volume, Charles S. Maier calls a commemoration ‘an act of collective memory’ in which history and memory should ‘intertwine and nourish each other.’1 Abir-Am explains in her introduction that the three sections of the volume correspond to the three kinds of ‘commemorative objects’ connected to the history of science: ‘great minds’ (men and, in very few cases, women); institutions; and theories, disciplines, techniques or instruments. Only the final category is ‘unique to science’. Science, in the other categories, is only one element in the larger cultural, social, or political context.2 The only essay of the collection devoted to the celebration of a woman (Cl¦mence Royer, the French translator of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species) reinforces Abir-Am’s opinion that, when the commemorated ‘great mind’ is not a hero but a ‘heroine’, the social component (in this case gender) is regarded as ‘a key political attribute’, overshadowing the scientific aspects of the event.3 * I would like to express my gratitude to Paula Findlen and Paola Govoni for the stimuli they have provided in years of conversazioni about the topics this volume deals with, and for comments on the initial draft of this paper. 1 Charles Maier, ‘Preface’, in Commemorative Practices in Science: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory, ed. by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Clark A. Elliott, Osiris, 14 (1999), IX – XII (p. IX). 2 Pnina G. Abir-Am, ‘Introduction’, in Commemorative Practices, ed. by Ead. and Elliott, 1 – 33 (pp. 2 – 3). 3 Ibid., p. 9; the reference is to Joy Harvey, ‘A Focal Point for Feminism, Politics, and Science in

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In this respect Laura Bassi’s case is of great relevance. Gender stereotypes and discrimination shaped not only the construction of her career, but also the collective memory of her persona and intellectual achievements. In the two decades preceding the third centennial commemoration, her life, work, and social context were thoughtfully explored by a handful of international scholars. Thanks to their well-documented essays, our historical knowledge regarding various components of her identity is much more concrete than before. Historians have focused their attention both on her role in the nascent Italian and European eighteenth-century scientific community, and on the rupture that her professional and private biography represented in the history of gender roles and identities.4 Several commemorative events occurred in the fall of 2011, including an exhibition on Laura Bassi and other learned women of eighteenthcentury Bologna, the presentation of an illustrated children’s book, and a documentary film on her life.5 All of these events aimed at disseminating an updated and historically grounded image of the ancient heroine of the city and University of Bologna. In this expanded image of Bassi, all the unusual, indeed unprecedented components of her identity – her role as an university scholar and teacher as well as that of wife and mother – came together without appearing contradictory. Other academic initiatives included a conference on the increased presence of women teachers in schools and universities, compared with the still significant gender gap (especially in Italy) for access to funds and career advancement6. Events such as these signal the persistent weight of the gendered social and political aspect of the commemoration of women scientists in the history of science. France: The Cl¦mence Royer Centennial Celebration of 1930’, in Commemorative Practices, ed. by Abir-Am and Elliott, 86 – 101. 4 For the most recent scholarship on Laura Maria Caterina Bassi (Bologna, 1711 – 1778), see the Appendix to this paper. 5 Laura Bassi e le altre filosofesse di Bologna, exhibition curated by Marta Cavazza and promoted by the University of Bologna and the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio/Genus Bononiae – Musei nella citt—, September 29 – November 13, 2011. For more information on this exhibition, see at http://www.genusbononiae.it/index.php?pag=72& ins=494 (for this and the sites that follow, the date of the last access is 9/12/2013); Laura Bassi: Minerva bolognese, ed. by Marta Franceschini (text), Alessandro Battara (images), and Marta Cavazza (scientific contribution) (Bologna: Bononia University press, 2011); Laura Bassi, una vita straordinaria: o de l’aurata luce settemplice, a documentary movie carried out thanks to public and private contributors, directed by Enza Negroni, produced by Valeria Consolo, with Francesca Mazza, scientific consultant Marta Cavazza, text collaboration by Marta Franceschini, music by Tiziano Popoli (Bologna: Proposta video, 2011). 6 The International conference Donne docenti: L’eredit— di Laura Bassi (October 28 – 29, 2011), promoted by the Centre for Gender and Education Studies (CSGE) took place in the Aula Magna of the former Faculty of Education of the University of Bologna. See Eredi di Laura Bassi: Docenti e ricercatrici in Italia tra et— moderna e presente, ed. by Marta Cavazza, Paola Govoni, and Tiziana Pironi (Milan: FrancoAngeli, forthcoming 2014).

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The contemporary trend to describe Bassi as a fully three-dimensional figure, and product of a particular social and gender context, is an eloquent sign of contemporary attitudes towards, and public consciousness of, the long history of the battle for gender equality. This approach is markedly different from the difficulties biographers from the previous three centuries had in reconciling the various aspects of her persona, from the brilliant scientist to model wife and mother. In my opinion, this aspect of the construction of Bassi’s public image and history has not yet been explored, and it is worthy of further attention. In few other cases, in fact, have gender stereotypes and the politics of knowledge so profoundly shaped the collective memory of a ‘great mind.’

I.

Towards a Laura Bassi Metabiography?

Laura Maria Caterina Bassi occupies a special place in the history of women, science, and the university. In 1732 she was the first woman to obtain a salaried position as university teacher, after being awarded a degree in philosophy, a recognition up until that time conceded only to one other young female scholar, the Venetian Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646 – 1684).7 Bassi was likewise the first woman to create an actual intellectual and professional career. By adopting a clear-headed strategy based on an authority achieved through her scientific abilities, and on an effective network of relationships, she overcame the limits that the Bologna authorities had imposed on her teaching because of her sex. And finally, last but not least, Bassi rebelled against the widespread conviction that the married state was incompatible with female scholarship. She married Giuseppe Veratti, a physician and her university colleague, becoming perhaps the first wife to have to reconcile the requirements of her private life (home, husband and children) with those of a demanding public life. This second category included her experimental research (in her home laboratory and at the Institute of Science), daily lessons in the school of experimental physics conducted in her house (in addition to rare lessons at the Archiginnasio, the University center), attendance of activities at the Academy of Sciences, discussions in her literary salon, reception of foreign visitors, a very active 7 On Cornaro Piscopia, see Lodovico Maschietto, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia (1646 – 1684), prima donna laureata nel mondo (Padua: Antenore, 1978); Patricia H. Labalme, ‘Women’s Roles in Early Modern Venice: An Exceptional Case,’ in Beyond Their Sex: Learned Women of the European Past, ed. by Patricia H. Labalme (New York and London: New York University Press, 1984), pp. 129 – 52; Paul Kristeller, ‘Learned Women of Early Modern Italy,’ in Beyond Their Sex, ed. by Labalme, pp. 91 – 116; Clelia Pighetti, Il vuoto e la quiete. Scienza e mistica nel ‘600: Elena Cornaro e Carlo Rinaldini (Milan: Franco Angeli, 2005).

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scientific correspondence, and finally the duties of her representative role as the meraviglia (wonder) of learned Bologna. The solemn ceremonies, academic titles, and honors with which the civil and ecclesiastic authorities of Bologna recognized and rewarded her exceptional intellectual abilities and erudition in 1732 made an enormous impression not only on Bologna and Italy, but on the whole of Europe, especially German speaking Europe.8 From the start, the great interest in the Bologna dottoressa generated numerous portraits, as well as a series of writings about her that I shall call biographical, insofar as they aim at representing her persona, the story of her formation and her achievements.9 This interest in Laura Bassi’s life has continued right up to the present day. Assembling a bibliography, I have found at least seventy biographical texts, written from Bassi’s era to the present; surely others will emerge with further research.10 Only a few are biographies in the literal sense of the word, but they all share the aim to provide an interpretation of her persona as a woman and a scientist, beyond mere information concerning her life and studies. The image of Bassi proposed by these writings was inevitably influenced by the evolution of ideas regarding gender and science in the period between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries, which renders them precious historical documents. The eighteenth-century biographical narrations, mostly based on direct knowledge or first hand accounts, are especially significant because they make up the primary sources for the writing of the later centuries. Except for the case of Antonio Garelli’s biography (1885), which was based on new documents (letters addressed to Bassi), nineteenth-century biographical profiles mainly drew upon eighteenth-century writings.11 In the less academic ones, the information is often inaccurate. An ideological use of her persona, as a model Christian wife and mother, is particularly evident. In the beginning of the twentieth century, Giovanni Battista Comelli, a descendant of Bassi’s on his mother’s side, offers us a more complex portrait, thanks to documents preserved by the family.12 For the rest, third-hand accounts prevail, in texts addressed to a wide public, which highlights the fact that she corresponded to a female ideal for 8 See, for instance, ‘Nova literaria’ (referred to July 1732), in Nova Acta Eruditorum (Lipsiae, 1732), 341 – 44; Anonymous, ‘Extract d’une lettre de 29 Juillet 1733’, in BibliothÀque Italique ou Histoire litt¦raire d’Italie (G¦nÀve, 1733), tome XVI, 314 – 15. 9 On Bassi’s portraits, see Pietro Cazzani, ‘Iconografia di Laura Bassi’, in Studi e inediti per il primo centenario dell’Istituto Magistrale “Laura Bassi” (Bologna: Tipografia STEB, 1960), pp. 43 – 52. 10 See the complete list in the Appendix to this paper. 11 Antonio Garelli, ‘Biografia’, in Lettere inedite alla celebre Laura Bassi scritte da illustri italiani e stranieri con biografia (Bologna: Tipografia Cenerelli, 1885), pp. 11 – 39. 12 Giovanni Battista Comelli, ‘Laura Bassi e il suo primo trionfo’, Studi e memorie dell’Universit— di Bologna, 3 (1912), 3 – 60.

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both positivist and Catholic writers: an exemplary wife and mother in spite of, one could say, her role as university teacher and her commitment to natural philosophy. In the two decades of the fascist regime these aspects are further strengthened. I have yet to come across any biographies written by women influenced by the lively wave of feminism of the early twentieth century, but I imagine they exist.13 After 1960 the number of available documents increases. Elio Melli published some of Laura Bassi’s correspondence, making a very important, yet poorly exploited, source accessible to the public.14 Raffaella Tomasi organized the relevant documents in the Archiginnasio Library that came from various donors. More recently, Patrizia Busi united the Bassi and the Veratti family documents in a single special collection.15 Scholars, the majority of them women, who have focused on Laura Bassi from the end of the 1980s onwards, have thoroughly explored this documentation, as well as materials concerning the history of the university and the Institute of Science preserved in Bologna’s State Archive and in the Bologna Academy of Sciences’ Archive. What has made the most significant impact, however, is that new questions have been asked of the old texts. The eighties and nineties were marked by the influence of feminism and the emergence of women’s and gender studies. In the 1990s some very well researched articles, and a book, were published which proposed a new reading of Bassi’s life, making a definite break with traditional readings. Gabriella Berti Logan expresses her focus in the title of her article, emphasizing Bassi’s ‘desire to contribute’ to teaching.16 Logan describes Bassi’s long struggle to overcome the limitations the Bologna Senate placed on her teaching activities, as well as her efforts to establish equal rights and duties with her male colleagues. In Beate Ceranski’s book the title again stresses the courage and determination of the young Bassi. It reports, in German, the opinion of one of Bassi’s contemporary admirers: ‘Sie fürchtet sich vor niemanden’ (She is afraid of no one). If we remember that one of the motifs 13 For more resources on Bassi in the fascist period, see Paula Findlen’s contribution to this volume. 14 ‘Epistolario di Laura Bassi Verati. Edizione critica, introduzione e note’, ed. by Elio Melli, in Studi e inediti, pp. 55 – 187. 15 Raffaella Tomasi, ‘Documenti riguardanti Laura Bassi conservati presso l’Archiginnasio’, L’Archiginnasio, 57 (1962), 319 – 24; Patrizia Busi, ‘Il fondo speciale “Laura Bassi e famiglia Veratti” nelle raccolte manoscritte della Biblioteca dell’Archiginnasio: Note e inventario’, L’Archiginnasio, 906 (2001), 255 – 326. A digital version of the Bassi and Veratti Archive is now available online at http://bassiveratti.stanford.edu, a result of the collaboration between the Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio di Bologna [BCAB hereafter] and the Stanford University Libraries. 16 Gabriella Berti Logan, ‘The Desire to Contribute: An Eighteenth Century Italian Woman of Science’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994), 785 – 812.

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repeated obsessively in eighteenth century biographies was the praise for her ‘modesty’ and humility, we realize at once what a radical change in perspective this biographer takes. Ceranski’s well-contextualized and wide ranging reconstruction analyzes Bassi’s few academic dissertations that have come down to us through the ages. She describes the markedly Newtonian themes and methods of Bassi’s research in mechanics and electrical physics, relating them to the best work of the leading members of the Italian scientific community, which always showed her the greatest respect and admiration.17 In some of my recent articles I have explored the often contradictory reception of the first woman to enter the world of universities and academies as an officially recognized university teacher and philosopher (and not as a patron or aristocratic amateur). My interest in the role played by some male figures in the construction of Bassi as a public figure is apparent even in my earliest contributions to the study of Bassi. I am referring especially to her teacher Gaetano Tacconi, the cardinal and then pope Prospero Lambertini, and the members of the Bologna senate. The dottoressa was presented to the European public as a living allegory of the learned Bologna, as Felsina Minerva, as the ‘marvel of her sex’, who augmented the fame and prestige of the city. Precisely because her case was so exceptional, it did not cast any doubts on existing gender relationships and the exclusion of women from culture and power. The events of 1732, which we celebrate today as milestones in the affirmation of new female roles, were in reality the product of a solidly patriarchal society, however great the ferment of change it was undergoing.18 Paula Findlen must take credit for having started the new wave of studies on eighteenth-century Italian learned women. In her first article on Bassi, published in 1993, she wrote about Bassi’s ‘career’ and the ‘strategies’ she had used to enter into the Bolognese scientific community. Yet, she also inserted both Bassi’s ‘career’ and ‘strategies’ within the framework of the values, hierarchies, and relationships typical of the aristocratic society of the Ancien R¦gime, in which, for example, there was a tightly knit network of patronage at work.19 From a historical perspective, what made Bassi’s case such a radical break 17 Beate Ceranski, ‘Und sie fürchtet sich vor niemanden’. Über die Physikerin Laura Bassi (1711 – 1778) (Frankfurt and NewYork: Campus, 1996), in particular chapters 5 and 6 (pp. 131 – 200). For modesty as the feminine virtue par excellence, see Marta Cavazza, ‘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, ed. by Paula Findlen, Catherine Sama, and Wendy Roworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 275 – 302. 18 Besides the titles cited in n. 5, I would like to indicate Marta Cavazza, ‘Minerva e Pigmalione: Carriere femminili nell’Italia del Settecento’, The Italianist, 17 (1997), 5 – 17. 19 The reference is to Paula Findlen, ‘Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy : The Strategies of Laura Bassi’, Isis, 84 (1993), 441 – 69.

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with the normal praxis of the existing power structure was the fact that precisely the honors the powers-that-be had conceded her, ended up creating the conditions for an actual female career. This career was constructed, at least from a certain point on, by the initiative and determination of a woman who far from being the instrument of other people’s designs, became a protagonist on her own. Nonetheless, in a society founded on a rigid dichotomy of gender roles and on a precise regulation of female behavior, the sudden emergence of a woman philosopher onto the university and academy scene, even if she was promoted by the highest representatives of religious and political power, created a paradoxical and contradictory message. This contradiction has also been acutely explored by Findlen, who in 2003 focused on the difficulties Bolognese society experienced in relating to a philosopher with a female body. The evidence she provides is drawn from episodes, letters, and satirical poems that show the sense of unease in many, and the subterranean rebellion of others, faced with the ‘scandal’ of a woman doctor and professor.20 As we have seen, the most recent accounts of Laura Bassi’s life look at her experience, more or less explicitly, in the context of the dynamics of gender relationships in eighteenth century Italy. The scene is a lively one, characterized by a rapid evolution in social behavior. From the separation of the sexes, and the exaltation of female seclusion (ritiratezza) prevalent in the previous century, we pass to fashionable mixed conversazione. Sermons on the duty of obedience as the founding virtue of wives, and on female ignorance as the guarantee of their other basic virtue, modesty, give way to a pervasive debate on how far women are suitable for education, and on the advantages and risks for the family and social order of educating women. The proportion of women in the reading public increased, not just reading novels, but also publications on natural philosophy. Women showed a passionate interest in experiments, especially those involving electricity. As is well known, the first person in Italy to recognize this trend was Francesco Algarotti in his Newtonianismo per le dame, published in 1737 and destined to become one of the great literary successes of the century.21 In the 20 See Paula Findlen, ‘The Scientist’s Body : The Nature of a Woman Philosopher in Enlightenment Italy’, in The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe, ed. by Lorraine Daston and Gianna Pomata (Berlin: BWV-Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2003), pp. 211 – 36. 21 Francesco Algarotti, Il Newtonianismo per le dame: Dialoghi sopra la luce e i colori (Naples [but Milan], 1737). On Algarotti and on the conflicting evaluations of historians about the role of his bestseller in the changing of traditional ideas about the female mind’s ability to understand the most abstract and profound scientific ideas, especially those founded on mathematics, see Massimo Mazzotti, ‘Newton for Ladies: Gentility, Gender, and Radical Culture’, British Journal for the History of Science, 37 (2004), 119 – 46; Paula Findlen, ‘Newtonianism for Ladies: Science in the Mirror of Enlightenment Society’ (forthcoming); Marta Cavazza, ‘Women readers of Newton’, in The Reception of Isaac Newton in Europe, ed. by Scott Mandelbrote and Helmut Pulte (forthcoming).

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varied and disconcerting panorama of gender identities and relationships in eighteenth-century Italy (as it may have appeared to the astonished gaze of travelers from northern Europe on their Grand Tour), the prominent cases of the Milanese Maria Gaetana Agnesi and the Bolognese Laura Bassi offer unique possibilities for exploring the formation of new kinds of female intellectual subjects. Adolescents who became famous for their philosophical and scientific culture, and who were considered exceptional because of their sex, were transformed into an unforgettable spectacle for educated travelers passing through Italy from northern Europe. But they were also young women who uneasily lived the contradiction between the ideal of female modesty and seclusion they had assimilated from their upbringing, and the continuous exposure of their person to the public through the transformation of their knowledge into spectacle. Finally, they were women who as adults reacted to this situation in different ways, constructing novel gender identities for themselves. As we know, Bassi became a scientist, public lecturer, and mother of a family ; Agnesi enjoyed great success, first as an authoritative philosopher and mathematician, and later a dedicated and rational organizer of assistance for indigent women and children.22 In Bassi’s case, because of the scarce direct autobiographical evidence regarding the evolution of her ideas on gender identities and roles, I have looked for evidence in contemporary biographies, especially those issued by her family and her circle of immediate acquaintances. This wasn’t an easy task, owing to the difficulty in distinguishing how much in the descriptions of feelings, relations, and moral qualities attributed to the young scholar reflected her actual character, and how much belonged more generically to the construction of an image of both the new enlightened woman and the traditional female. The constructed image of Bassi was exceptional, and yet it did not seek to undermine the gender roles of the age. Reading these texts I became convinced that this aspect is especially significant, and I began to consider the usefulness of a comparative study of Bassi’s biographies. When historical literature focuses primarily on the gendered characteristics of its subjects, these histories become important documents in the history of ideas regarding gender. The case of the physicist Bassi, in particular, may serve as a useful litmus test to verify the persistence of stereotypes of women and science, or to examine the transformation of ideas about the subject over time. Bassi’s case provides a fairly unique opportunity to compare a large number of biographical writings from a variety of historical

22 For a broader development of this analysis, see Cavazza. ‘Between Modesty and Spectacle’, in particular pp. 293 – 302; On Agnesi’s life and work, see Massimo Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007), as well as his contribution to this volume.

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periods. A study of this kind could become the starting point for a really extensive project, to which many authors could contribute. Postponing this ambitious project to a possible future, I shall limit myself here to briefly taking into consideration just a few of Bassi’s eighteenth-century biographies. There are a score of texts, which can be divided into three groups: ten go back to 1732 and the following decade; four appeared in Bassi’s mature years, when she was no longer just a rare phenomenon, but a recognized academic authority (1743 – 1777); six are obituaries and eulogies of 1778 or not long afterwards. I especially focus on texts in the first category since they are also important resources for later biographies and, to this end, function as archetypes. Three come from her family : the draft of a biographical manuscript, most likely written by her husband Giuseppe Veratti; the pages of a diary from the Veratti family, kept by her brother-in-law Ferdinando Veratti; and finally the preface to one of the collections of poems published in 1732 in honor of the dottoressa Bassi, signed by the priest Don Lorenzo Stegani, her cousin and first teacher.23 Another biographical manuscript besides the ones indicated above, dated 1732, bears the signature of a woman, Elisabetta Macchiavelli.24 A woman biographer of a woman. It would have been really interesting if it were true. In actual fact, this document in Latin regarding the achievements of the ‘doctor of philosophy’ Laura Bassi is almost certainly the work of her brother, Alessandro Macchiavelli. The problem was that this lawyer – passionately interested in Bologna’s history, and specifically an advocate for the veracity of the historical presence of women teachers in the medieval university – was already well known by that time as the fabricator of historical falsehoods and for his habit of using his siblings’ names to disguise his authorship. The book published in 1722, Bitisia Gozzadina, seu de mulierum doctoratu (Bitisia Gozzadina, or on the woman’s doctorate), under the name of his brother Carlo Antonio, was later attributed to Alessandro.25 In it, on the basis of a false document he himself 23 Ferdinando Veratti, Memorie della famiglia Veratti di Bologna, 1726 – 1788, in BCAB, Fondo Laura Bassi e famiglia Veratti, cart. 5.3, 136 p.; on Bassi, see in particular pp. 99 – 107, and 130 – 36 (written by Bassi’s son, Giovanni Veratti); [Giuseppe Veratti], Memorie su Laura Bassi, BCAB, Fondo Laura Bassi e famiglia Veratti, cart. 6.1, 4, cc. 4 – 10 fasc. 1d, reproduced in the appendix of Ceranski, ‘Und sie fürchtet sich vor niemandem’, pp. 271 – 72; Lorenzo Stegani, ‘Alla dottissima ed eruditissima giovane signora Laura M. C. Bassi,’ in Rime in lode della Signora L.M.C.Bassi […] prendendo la laurea dottorale in Filosofia (Bologna: Stamperia L. dalla Volpe, 1732), pp. 1 – 3. 24 Elisabetta Macchiavelli [Alessandro Macchiavelli?], De rebus praeclarae gestis a clarissima philosophiae doctore Laura Maria Cattarina Bassi, cive bononiensi Mariae Elisabeth Macchiavelli […] narratio. Sabati 17 maii anno salutis 1732, BCAB, Ms. 3912. 25 Carlo Antonio Macchiavelli [Alessandro Macchiavelli], Bitisia Gozzadina, seu de mulierum doctoratu (Bononiae: Blanchus, 1722).

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created, he argued the existence of historical precedents in the Middle Ages at the University of Bologna for degrees and lectureships for women. The story of the Macchiavelli family is an intriguing one: I have already written something on it, but I would like to explore it further, especially to understand what Elisabetta’s role was within it. I very much doubt she was illiterate, as the authoritative eighteenth-century biographer, Giovanni Fantuzzi, goes so far as to affirm. For instance, various impressive engravings illustrating her brother’s books are signed by her.26 At any rate, the manuscript on Bassi signed by Elisabetta opens with a preface that asserts that the Bologna tradition of honoring female knowledge goes back to the Etruscans, a thesis dear to her brother Alessandro. A very detailed account follows of the education of the young Laura, including the ceremonies that in 1732 revealed her talent to the public as a ‘prodigy’ hidden up until that time.27 The document deserves a closer, more careful examination, also to verify how many later biographies are indebted to this work. Another interesting group of writings regarding the first phase of Bassi’s public life document the impact her career had in German speaking areas of Europe. The first is a long report on the case published in the July 1732 issue of the Nova Acta Eruditorum, the prestigious literary journal of Leipzig. The source is undoubtedly a Bolognese correspondent, but we don’t know his name.28 We then have the letter of the celebrated astronomer Eustachio Manfredi, published in Italian with a German translation, in a numismatics journal published in Nuremberg. This journal dedicated an entire issue in February 1737 to the silver medal in honor of Bassi made in Bologna in 1732.29 Finally we have the long eulogy of Bassi with a portrait, which Johan Jacob Brucker inserted in his Pinacotheca Scriptorum, published in Augsburg in 1741. In the incipit we should note that Bassi is presented first as the wife of Doctor Giuseppe Veratti, and then via her academic qualifications (Philosophiae Doctrix, Collegii Lectrix publica, Instituti Scientiarum Socia). Brucker uses as his sources the above mentioned report in the Acta Eruditorum, and the information supplied to him by Gian

26 Marta Cavazza, ‘Nuove identit— di genere e falsi storici: Un progetto di ricerca raccontato a un amico’, in Un bazar di storie: A Giuseppe Olmi per il sessantesimo compleanno, ed. by Claudia Pancino and Renato Mazzolini (Trento: Universit— degli Studi di Trento, 2006), pp. 105 – 12; Ead.,‘Macchiavelli, Alessandro’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, (Rome: Istituto dell’Enciclopedia Italiana, 2006), vol. 67, pp. 24 – 28; Giovanni Fantuzzi, Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi, (1786), vol. 5, p. 100. 27 Macchiavelli, De rebus praeclarae gestis. 28 ‘Nova literaria’, 341 – 44. 29 Eustachio Manfredi, Letter, 5 February 1737, in Johann David Köhler, Der Wöchentlichen Historischen Münz-Belustigung (9 Stück, Nürnberg, 1737), 69 – 72, BCAB, Fondo Laura Bassi e famiglia Veratti, VII, 6.

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Ludovico Bianconi, a Bolognese physician resident in Augsburg as personal doctor to the bishop and prince.30 More evidence of interest in the events in Bologna beyond the Alps can be found in the BibliothÀque Italique, a Geneva journal founded by Louis Bourguet, which in 1733 published a lengthy extract of a letter in French dated July 1733, written by an unknown traveler on his Grand Tour, possibly an Englishman. The lively portrait of the young dottoressa is especially interesting because, as well as the usual information on her studies and the honors conferred on her, it provides a description of her physical appearance (the only one that has come down to us) and tells us of the subjects that came up in the private philosophical conversation the author had with Bassi. Perhaps because he was unfamiliar with the social context of the learned young woman, the author of the letter appears to be interested only in the progress of her studies and in no way worried about the risk this virile activity could represent for the observance of her female duties.31 From this point of view, the anonymous traveler was an exception. Other biographical profiles share the tendency to combine – in their image of the female philosopher – features normally considered irreconcilable, either because their union was not allowed by social conventions or because they were considered non-existent in nature. We must remember that only ten years earlier at the University of Bologna the College of Jurisprudence had refused to confer a law degree on the young aristocrat Maria Vittoria Delfini Dosi, on the basis (among other arguments) that a ‘woman doctor’ was a contradiction in terms.32 Faced with the decision of civic and ecclesiastical authorities to legitimize the Bassi phenomenon, an attempt was made to reconcile the irreconcilable. They wished to make acceptable a woman who was not only learned, but a doctor and public lecturer. In the hands of critics, Bassi risked appearing as a fantastic and monstrous being, a hermaphrodite, a chimera or a medieval hircocervus. Her biographers tried to place the young Bassi back into the gender categories and the hierarchical framework of values proper to the social context of the time, joining the exaltation of her intellectual abilities with the virtues held to be essential for a woman, especially a non aristocratic woman like her. They wanted to convince and reassure the reader that Bassi’s female nature was not in doubt, 30 Johann Jacob Brucker, ‘Laura Maria Catharina Bassia Bononiensis, Io. Iosephi Verati, Med. D. et P. P. conjux, Philosophiae Doctrix, collegii Lectrix publica, Instituti Scientiarum Socia’, in Id., Pinacotheca Scriptorum nostra aetate Literis illustrium […], Deca I, Augustae Vindelicorum, apud Jo. Jac. Haidium, 1741, 5 p. not numbered. 31 ‘Extrait d’une lettre du 29 Juillet 1733’, in BibliothÀque Italique ou Histoire litt¦raire d’Italie, Tome XVI (— G¦nÀve, 1733), 314 – 15. 32 On Delfini Dosi, see Lucia Toschi Traversi, ‘Verso l’inserimento delle donne nel mondo accademico’, in Alma Mater Studiorum: La presenza femminile, pp. 15 – 37, in particular pp. 23 – 29.

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but also underscore the fact that the features and prerogatives of gender were unchanged.33 Let’s have a look at some of these rhetorical strategies.

II.

Rhetorical Strategies

Above all, biographies stressed the exceptional nature of Laura Bassi’s case. They insisted on the ‘miracle’ of a young woman endowed with intelligence, a desire for knowledge, memory, a precision in her use of language, sharpness, and extraordinary erudition. They declared that they had never witnessed such rare talents and abilities, even among other learned women. Terms like ‘miracle’, ‘marvel of her sex’, and ‘monster of intelligence’ were frequently used. The second strategy, stranger to our eyes, consisted of reassuring readers that the adolescent Bassi, while satisfying her overwhelming thirst for knowledge, did not neglect her domestic duties; on the contrary, they insisted that the hours she devoted to study were those ‘left over’ from them. This theme reappeared in her obituary, and appears obsessively and repetitively in writings of the first period. One could understand why her husband Veratti, in his biographical draft, notes with satisfaction that her ‘prudent parents’ – after realizing she was so naturally talented and having persuaded themselves it was a good idea to have her educated – did not neglect to instruct her in all the jobs and skills suitable to ‘a wellborn, respectable woman’, responsibilities that in her life she had ‘never neglected, excellently succeeding in all of them’.34 Less obviously, this theme plays a major role in the Latin relation dedicated to Bassi’s degree in the issue of July 1732 of the Nova Acta Eruditorum of Leipzig, where almost excessive praise of her intelligence, memory, eloquence, learning, and vast knowledge, sits side by side with the reassurance of her attention to the usual domestic housework sexui suo propriis (proper for her gender).35 Brucker’s long enthusiastic chapter devoted to Bassi in his Pinacotheca Scriptorum also returns to this theme while expressing some dissent from prevailing opinion. He writes that the young Laura had been instructed in the 33 On the bewilderment provoked in the Bolognese social set by the appearance of a female philosophy professor, see Findlen, ‘The Scientist’s Body’. A non Bolognese but Neapolitan case that was almost contemporary of a learned woman’s biography which is centred on the incompatibility between the female body and a life devoted to intellectual research is Giambattista Vico, Orazione in morte di donn’Angela Cimmino (see Marta Cavazza, ‘Dalle biblioteche dei dotti alle tolette delle dame: La conversazione filosofica e scientifica nell’Italia dei Lumi’, I castelli di Yale – Quaderni di filosofia, 12 (2012), 87 – 102, issue devoted to the topic ‘La conversazione: Un tema fra storia, arte e filosofia dal Medioevo al Settecento’). 34 [Giuseppe Veratti], Memorie su Laura Bassi; Ceranski, ‘Und sie fürchtet sich vor niemandem’, pp. 271 – 72. 35 ‘Nova literaria’, 341.

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domestic arts, as is indispensable for women, ‘according to the custom of the century’. Brucker, however, adds that the young lady had found in books meliora alimenta (better nutrition) for her spirit. As already mentioned, both the Acta Eruditorum and Brucker were informed by Bolognese sources. In this respect, the famous Manfredi did not differ from these informants. In fact in the letter to the Nuremberg numismatic journal, the astronomer, while waxing lyrical about Bassi’s culture and sharp wits, did not neglect to offer the usual reassurances regarding her skill and steadfastness in fulfilling her domestic duties. Such attributes were evidently considered guarantees of her female nature, otherwise placed at risk by mathematical and philosophical studies.36 In writings after her marriage in 1738, and even more in those of the following two centuries, this theme broadened to include a discussion of her management of her home and especially her Christian virtues of wife and mother. The number of her children became a centerpiece of this discussion. For her most important contemporary biographer, Giovanni Fantuzzi, they were twelve, despite the fact that parish registers documenting newborns only mention eight. Possibly the other four were stillborn, since they don’t appear in the list of baptisms.37 Interestingly no biographer of this era questioned the most striking fact of the Bassi-Veratti marriage, namely, the fact that it was an equal relationship. In an age in which a wife’s duty to obey her husband was unquestioned, this was quite unusual. In the Veratti-Bassi marriage, any potential imbalance was to the wife’s advantage; she was not only more famous and had more important personal relationships, but was also the higher income producer.38 A third allied theme, deploying a similar rhetoric, regards the young Bassi’s stated ‘reluctance’ and ‘repugnance’ at the idea of exposing her knowledge to the public. This topos is closely linked to the exaltation of Bassi’s ‘singular modesty’. ‘Modesty’, a chiefly female virtue, was an effective counterweight to the ‘virile’ virtues of an intellectual and scholar capable of victoriously engaging in philosophical discussions with authoritative interlocutors. The insistence on Bassi’s modesty was necessary, above all, to smother the criticisms, if not scandal, for what today we would call the media exploitation of her celebrity. Manfredi declared that the young girl from the beginning ‘had been forced, to make an 36 Brucker, Laura Maria Catharina Bassia Bononiensis; Manfredi, Letter, 5 February 1737. 37 Giovanni Fantuzzi, ‘Bassi Laura Maria Catterina’, in Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi, II (Bologna: Stamperia di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 1781), p. 388. On the denial of baptism and the giving of a Christian burial to the babies born dead in Catholic theological conceptions and canon law, still in the eighteenth century, see Adriano Prosperi, Dare l’anima: Storia di un infanticidio (Turin: Einaudi, 2005), pp. 150 – 217. 38 On the debates regarding a wife’s duty of obedience in eighteenth-century Italy, Luciano Guerci, La sposa obbediente: Donna e matrimonio nella discussione dell’Italia del Settecento (Turin: Tirrenia, 1988) is still unavoidable; on the unusual husband and wife relationship of Bassi and Veratti, see Cavazza, ‘Laura Bassi and Giuseppe Veratti’.

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almost continual spectacle of herself to the city’, in public and private discussions with ‘learned citizens or foreigners’, observing that such behavior was in conflict with her own indole vereconda (modest disposition). The consequent frequenting of mixed company, at the academies and in the conversazioni, was in clear conflict with her ritiratezza (seclusion) as well as with modesty. Despite the emergence of freer and less inhibited customs, such virtues continued to represent ideal female behavior in the eighteenth century, particularly in the privileged environment to which Bassi belonged. In her case, since the authorization to teach came from above, it was impossible to suggest that she should behave in the way that many philosophers and moralists recommended to educated women, i. e. to conceal their knowledge as far as possible, so as not to appear saputelle (know-it-alls) or filosofesse (female philosophers ridiculed by the satirical poets). Such advice was designed to prevent learned women from embarrassing their more ignorant husbands, or impeding their quest for a spouse if they were still unmarried. As I have written elsewhere, even in the enlightened world of eighteenth-century Italy, the concealment of one’s own knowledge became the new female virtue imposed on learned women. ‘Modesty was a corrective for a level of culture which exceeded that normally held by women or, worse still, which exceeded even that of men; modesty offered reassurance that knowledge would not be used to demand a less subordinate role or even a public role; modesty was a guarantee that a cultured woman was still a woman’.39 I use this quotation from my own work to provisionally conclude a discourse that should be organized in a more complex fashion, and to reiterate that my reading of eighteenth-century biographies of Laura Bassi aims to insert these historical documents into the broader framework of the renegotiation of gender roles that was taking place in the eighteenth century in Italy and Europe, a renegotiation made necessary by the contemporary transformation of female identities. A perusal of these biographies can contribute to studying in greater depth the discursive strategies adopted in public and private discourse in eighteenth-century Italy with the explicit goal of minimizing and controlling change. Women’s greater access to culture did indeed pose a risk to gender hierarchies and the distribution of power in the family, and hence the order of society.40 Crafting the life of Laura Bassi became one way of managing this problem. It would be even more interesting to expand the scope of this research to 39 Cavazza, ‘Between Modesty and Spectacle’, p. 289. 40 A broad and meaningful step in this direction appears to be Paula Findlen’s contribution to this volume. In her essay, she presents writings on Laura Bassi uncovered during more than two decades of research and reflects upon the image they offer a historian regarding the different cultural and gender stereotypes within the various periods in which were written.

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include nineteenth and twentieth-century biographical writings. Expanding my project in this direction would shift its focus from immediate narratives of these events written by those who knew Bassi personally or experienced aspects of her world, including its social norms and cultural values, to those of later centuries when myths and images of Bassi that were shaped by new and contemporary gender stereotypes gradually replaced direct memories. Towards the end of the nineteenth century the Veratti heirs donated important documents regarding Bassi and her husband, permitting them to be archived in Bologna’s Archiginnasio Library. This aided the historical reconstruction of their story. However, this new documentation had little impact on her public image until the late twentieth century. Early twentienth-century biographies continued to be heavily influenced by previous dictionary entries and her biographies in collections dedicated to famous Bolognese and Italian women.41 The first two centennials of her birth, 1811 and 1911, did not, it seems, give rise to celebrations or historical reconsiderations of her persona. This could be convincingly explained by the absence, in the early nineteenth century, and the limited use in the early twentieth century, of the fashion of celebrating the centennials of scientists, writers, and artists. It was still rare to call upon them as symbols of national excellence, and to renew the collective memory by examining documents, reprinting works, or organizing exhibitions. In Bassi’s case, we have had to wait until her third centennial for this to happen. The large number of publications that have come out in recent decades on the relationship between gender and science certainly paved the way for these events in 2011. Such works have not only highlighted the significance of Bassi but allowed us to know a great deal more about other Italian women who made important contributions to science in the eighteenth century. It is very likely that in the next few years similar events may spotlight at least two other women of note. 2014 is the third centennial of anatomist Anna Morandi’s birth, and 2019 will provide us with the same benchmark for mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi. Historians have worked extensively on the lives and work of these women, and they are now the subject of ample academic debate.42 Another step remains to be taken, however, regarding the memory of Morandi and Agnesi. We need to share with a wider public the history of these two female ‘great minds’, who not only provided important contributions to their respective disciplines of anatomy and mathe41 See the list in the Appendix; one exception was Giovanni Battista Comelli, Laura Bassi e il suo primo trionfo. 42 Besides the quoted Mazzotti’s works, on Agnesi see Paula Findlen, ‘Calculations of Faith: Mathematics, Philosophy, and Sanctity in Eighteenth-Century Italy (New Work on Maria Gaetana Agnesi)’, Historia mathematica, 38 (2011), 248 – 91; on Morandi, see Rebecca Messbarger, The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011).

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matics, but also personified previously unimaginable female identities. Much like the case of the recent celebration of Laura Bassi, their centennials could offer new and welcome opportunities to celebrate and examine the lives of women in science.43

III.

Appendix: Laura Bassi’s Biographies

Elisabetta Macchiavelli [Alessandro Macchiavelli?], De rebus praeclarae gestis a clarissima philosophiae doctore Laura Maria Cattarina Bassi, cive bononiensi Mariae Elisabeth Macchiavelli […] narratio. Sabati 17 maii anno salutis 1732, Biblioteca Comunale Archiginnasio Bologna (BCAB), Ms. 3912. Lorenzo Stegani, ‘Alla dottissima ed eruditissima giovane signora Laura M. C. Bassi’, in Rime in lode della Signora L.M.C. Bassi […] prendendo la laurea dottorale in Filosofia (Bologna: Stamperia L. dalla Volpe, 1732), pp. 1 – 3. ‘Nova literaria’ (referred to July 1732), in Nova Acta Eruditorum Lipsiensium (Lipsiae, 1732), 341 – 44. Anonymous, ‘Extract d’une lettre de 29 Juillet 1733’, in BibliothÀque Italique ou Histoire litt¦raire d’Italie, tome XVI (G¦nÀve, 1733), 314 – 15. Eustachio Manfredi, ‘Letter’, 5 February 1737, in Johann David Köhler, Der Wöchentlichen Historischen Münz-Belustigung, 9 Stück, 27 February 1737, 69 – 72. Ferdinando Veratti, Memorie della famiglia Veratti in Bologna, Ms, BCAB, Fondo Laura Bassi e famiglia Veratti, cart. 5.3, 136 p (on Bassi, see in particular pp. 100 – 08). [Giuseppe Veratti?], Memorie su Laura Bassi, BCAB, Fondo Laura Bassi e famiglia Veratti, cart. 6.1, 4, cc. 4 – 10 fasc. 1, reproduced in the appendix of Beate Ceranski, “Und sie fürchtet sich vor niemandem.” Die Physikerin Laura Bassi (1771 – 1778) (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1996), pp. 271 – 72. Giovanni Niccolý Bandiera, Trattato degli studi delle donne, 2 vols (Verona: F. Pitteri, 1741), 1, pp. 147 – 48. Johann Jacob Brucker, ‘Laura Maria Catharina Bassia Bononiensis, Io. Iosephi Verati, Med. D. et P. P. conjux, Philosophiae Doctrix, collegii Lectrix publica, Instituti Scientiarum Socia’, in Id., Pinacotheca Scriptorum nostra aetate Literis illustrium […], Deca I, Augustae Vindelicorum, apud Jo. Jac. Haidium, 1741, in folio, last 5 pp., not numbered, with portrait, drawn by Litter and engraved by I. Iac. Haid. Marc’Antonio Franconi, ‘Elogio di Laura Maria Caterina Bassi’, first entry of the catalogue Donne celebri che vivono, inserted in his translation of Benedetto Gerolamo Feijoo, Teatro critico universale per disinganno del Pubblico su i comuni errori (Rome, 1744). The volume is missing, but the text of the praise of Bassi is reported as appendix to the anonymous handwritten transcript (1763) of Le gesta d’alcune Donne Letterate Bolognesi, obtained from the book of Francesco A. Della Chiesa, Teatro delle Donne Letterate (Mondov‡, 1670), BCAB, Mss. Gozzadini, 87, 17, pp. 11 – 17.

43 On the importance and meaning of the ‘commemorative practices’ in science, see notes 1 – 3.

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‘Laura Bassi. Sua vita’, in Ritratti e vite degli uomini pi¾ celebri degli Stati Estensi (Modena, 1749), pp. 52 – 53. Giovanni Mazzuchelli, entry ‘Bassi (Laura Maria Caterina)’, in Gli scrittori d’Italia (Brescia: G. Bossini, 1758), 2, part I, pp. 527 – 29. Notizia della avvenuta morte di Laura Bassi, copia degli Avvisi di Bologna, February 25, 1778, BCAB, Fondo Laura Bassi e famiglia Veratti, 6.1,10. Ignazio Odoardi, ‘Elogio’, in Pubblica accademia di lettere avutasi nel Collegio Montalto dagli alunni del medesimo la sera delli 5 giugno 1778 in lode della defunta loro precettrice Laura Bassi, 15 pp. (BCAB, ms. B 2727). Giovanni Fantuzzi, Elogio di Laura Maria Catterina Bassi (Bologna: Stamperia di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 1778). Id., ‘Bassi Laura Maria Catterina’, in Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi, 9 vols (Bologna: Stamperia di S. Tommaso d’Aquino, 1781 – 1794), 2 (1781), pp. 384 – 91. Girolamo Tiraboschi, entry ‘Laura Bassi’, in Biblioteca modenese (Modena, 1781), 1, pp. 180 – 81. Antonio Magnani, Elogio di Laura Bassi Bolognese (Venice: Stamperia Palese, 1806) Ambrigio Levati, entry ‘Bassi, Laura Maria Caterina’, in Dizionario biografico cronologico diviso per classi degli uomini illustri, classe V, Donne illustri, 3 vols (Milan: Niccolý Bettoni, 1821), 1, pp. 119 – 20. C. Canonici Fachini, Prospetto biografico delle donne italiane rinomate in letteratura. Dal secolo XIV fino a’ giorni nostri. Con una risposta a Lady Morgan riguardante alcune accuse da lei date alle donne italiane nella sua opera ‘L’Italie’ (Venice: Tipografia di Alvisopoli, 1824), pp. 172 – 73. Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci, ‘Vita di Laura Bassi’, in Strenna femminile italiana (Milan: Tipografia Guglielmini, 1835). Anonymous, ‘Vita di Laura Bassi’, in Vite e ritratti di XXX illustri bolognesi (Bologna: Tipografia Zannoli, 1835), pp. 51 – 5, with portrait. Laura Junot d’Abrantes, Vite e ritratti delle donne celebri d’ogni paese, 5 vols (Milan: Ubicini e Stella, 1836 – 1839), 3, pp. 113 – 20. Giambatista Baseggio, entry ‘Bassi (Laura Maria Caterina)’, in Emilio de Tipaldo, Biografie degli Italiani illustri […] del sec. XVIII e de’ contemporanei (Venice: Tipografia di Alvisopoli, 1840), 7, pp. 190 – 93. Michelangelo Gualandi, ‘Medaglia e ricordi dell’antico reggimento in lode di Laura Bassi’, in Almanacco Statistico Bolognese per l’Anno 1842, dedicato alle Donne Gentili, 13 (1842), 65 – 75, with portrait. Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci, ‘Laura Bassi Veratti’, in Carolina Bonafede, Cenni biografici e ritratti d’insigni donne bolognesi (Bologna: Tipografia Sassi, 1845), pp. 173 – 83. Johann Christian Poggendorff, Biographich-literarisches Handwortebuch zur Geschichte der exacten wissenchaften, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1863; reprint, Amsterdam 1970), 1, col. 113; new edn by Nabu Press, 2010. Francesco Berlan, Le fanciulle celebri e la fanciullezza delle donne illustri d’Italia antiche e moderne (Milan: Giacomo Agnelli, 1865), pp. 316 – 17. Agostino Verona, Le donne illustri d’Italia (Milan: F. Colombo, 1866), p. 77. Alberto Mario, Teste e figure (Padua: Fratelli Salmin, 1877), pp. 54 – 61. Ernesto Masi, ‘Laura Bassi e il Voltaire’, in Id., Studi e ritratti (Bologna: Nicola Zanichelli, 1881), pp. 157 – 71.

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Antonio Garelli, ‘Biografia’, in Lettere inedite alla celebre Laura Bassi scritte da illustri italiani e stranieri con biografia (Bologna: Tipografia Cenerelli, 1885), pp. 11 – 39. Alphonse RebiÀre, Les femmes dans la science (Paris: Librairie Nony & C., 1897), pp. 28 – 31. Emma Tettoni, ‘Le scienziate italiane’, in La donna italiana descritta da scrittrici italiane in una serie di conferenze tenute all’Esposizione Beatrice in Firenze (Florence: G. Cirelli, 1890), pp. 263 – 88. Giovanni Battista Comelli, ‘Laura Bassi e il suo primo trionfo’, in Studi e memorie per la storia dell’universit— di Bologna, 3 (1912), 3 – 60, with portrait. Ada Borsi, Una gloria bolognese del secolo XVIII (Laura Bassi) (Bologna: Tipografia Cuppini, 1915). Eugenio Comba, entry ‘Laura Bassi’, in Id., Donne illustri italiane, edn revised by Luisa Steiner (Turin: Paravia, 1935), pp. 76 – 77. Eroine, ispiratrici e donne di eccezione, ed. by Francesco Orestano, series VII of Enciclopedia biografica e bibliografica italiana, ed. by Almerico Ribera (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1940), p. 39, with portrait. Poetesse e scrittrici, ed. by Maria Mandini Buti, series VI of Enciclopedia Biografica e bibliografica ‘italiana’, ed. by Almerico Ribera (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Italiano,1941), pp. 68 – 72, with portrait. Pietro Cazzani, ‘Iconografia di Laura Bassi’, in Studi e inediti per il primo centenario dell’Istituto magistrale ‘Laura Bassi’, ed. by Pietro Cazzani (Bologna: Steb, 1960), pp. 43 – 52, with portraits. Epistolario di Laura Bassi Verati, critical edn, introduction and notes by Elio Melli, in Studi e inediti per il primo centenario dell’Istituto magistrale ‘Laura Bassi’, ed. by Pietro Cazzani (Bologna: Steb, 1960), pp. 53 – 187. Anonymous, entry ‘Bassi Veratti, Laura’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (1965), 7, pp. 145 – 47. Luisa Caterina Cavazzuti, Nuovi testi sull’attivit— scientifica e filosofica di Laura Bassi (Master’s thesis, Faculty of Magistero, University of Bologna, 1964 – 1965). Gabriella Razzini Zucchi, ‘Laura Bassi’, ed. by FILDIS [Federazione Italiana Laureate e Diplomate Istituti Superiori] (Bologna: Marino Cantelli, 1987), pp. 11 – 13. Elio Melli, ‘Laura Bassi Verati: Ridiscussioni e nuovi spunti’, in Alma Mater studiorum. La presenza femminile dal XVIII al XX secolo. Ricerche sul rapporto donne/cultura universitaria nell’Ateneo bolognese (Bologna: CLUEB, 1988), pp. 71 – 80. Marta Cavazza, ‘Riflessi letterari dell’opera di Newton: Algarotti, Manfredi e Laura Bassi’, in Radici, significato, retaggio dell’opera newtoniana, ed. by Gino Tarozzi and Monique Van Vloten (Bologna: Societ— Italiana di Fisica, 1989), pp. 352 – 66. Marta Cavazza, Settecento inquieto: Alle origini dell’Istituto delle scienze di Bologna (Bologna: il Mulino, 1990), pp. 237 – 56. Alberto Elena, ‘‘In lode della filosofessa di Bologna’: An Introduction to Laura Bassi’, Isis, 82 (1991), 510 – 18. Paula Findlen, ‘Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy. The Strategies of Laura Bassi’, Isis, 84 (1993), 441 – 69. Gabriella Berti Logan, ‘The Desire to Contribute: An Eighteenth Italian Woman of Science’, American Historical Review, 99 (1994), 785 – 812.

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Beate Ceranski, ‘Il carteggio tra Giovanni Bianchi e Laura Bassi, 1733 – 1745’, Nuncius, 9 (1994), 207 – 31. Marta Cavazza, ‘Laura Bassi e il suo gabinetto di fisica sperimentale: Realt— e mito’, Nuncius, 10 (1995), 715 – 53. Paula Findlen, ‘Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy’, Configurations, 3 (1995), 167 – 206. Beate Ceranski, ‘Und Sie fürchtet sich vor niemanden’. Die Physikerin Laura Bassi (1711 – 1778) (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1996). Marta Cavazza, ‘Dottrici’ e lettrici dell’Universit— di Bologna nel Settecento, Annali di storia delle universit— italiane, 1 (1997), 109 – 25. Marta Cavazza, ‘Minerva e Pigmalione: Carriere femminili nell’Italia del Settecento’, The Italianist, 17 (1997), 5 – 17. Gary L. Cheatham, ‘Laura Bassi (1711 – 1778)’, in Notable Women in the Physical Sciences: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. by Benjamin F. Shearer and Barbara S. Shearer (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), pp. 4 – 8. Gabriella Berti Logan, Italian Women in Science from the Renaissance to the Nineteenth Century (PhD Thesis, University of Ottawa, 1998). Marta Cavazza, ‘Laura Bassi ‘maestra’ di Spallanzani’, in Il cerchio della vita: Materiali di ricerca del Centro studi Lazzaro Spallanzani di Scandiano sulla storia della scienza del Settecento, ed. by Walter Bernardi and Paola Manzini (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 1999), pp. 185 – 202. Ead., ‘Laura Bassi’, in Un mondo di donne: Trecento ritratti celebri, ed. by Luise F. Push and Susanne Gretter, Italian edn ed. by Maria Gregorio (Milan: Pratiche editrice, 2003), p. 32. Ead., ‘Bologna, 1732: The Birth of a Filosofessa, Introduction to Laura Bassi’, in Miscellanea, ed. by Marta Cavazza and Paola Bertucci (International Centre for the History of Universities and Science (CIS), University of Bologna, Bologna Science Classics Online, 2003, at http://www.cis.unibo.it/cis13b/bsco3/intro_opera.asp?id_opera=31). Paula Findlen, ‘The Scientist’s Body : The Nature of a Woman Philosopher in Enlightenment Italy’, in The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe, ed. by Lorraine Daston and Gianna Pomata (Berlin: BWV-Berliner Wissenschafts Verlag, 2003), pp. 211 – 36. Marta Cavazza, ‘Una donna nella Repubblica degli scienziati’, in Scienza a due voci, ed. by Raffaella Simili (Florence: Leo S. Olschki Editore, 2006), pp. 61 – 85. Beate Ceranski, ‘Laura Bassi’, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. by Noretta Koertge (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 2008), 19, pp. 202 – 04. Bartomeu Pou i Puigserver (Povius), S.J., Bassis. A Laura Caterina Bassi, ed. by Alexandre Font Jaume (Palma, Mallorca: Lleonard Muntaner, 2009). Marta Cavazza, ‘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, ed. by Paula Findlen, Catherine Sama, and Wendy Roworth (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 275 – 302. Marta Cavazza, ‘Laura Bassi and Giuseppe Veratti: An Electric Couple during the Enlightenment’, Contributions to Science, 5 (2009), 115 – 28. Marta Franceschini and Marta Cavazza, Laura Bassi Minerva Bolognese, with ills by Alessandro Battara (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2011). Marta Cavazza, ‘Il laboratorio di Casa Bassi Veratti’, in Laura Bassi: Emblema e primato

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nella scienza del Settecento, ed. by Luisa Cifarelli and Raffaella Simili (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2012), pp. 103 – 52 and 217 – 22. Paula Findlen, ‘Tra uomini: Laura Bassi all’Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna (1732 – 1778)’, in Laura Bassi: Emblema e primato, ed. by Luisa Cifarelli and Raffaella Simili (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2012), pp. 71 – 88 and 189 – 206. Ead., ‘La Maestra di Bologna: Laura Bassi, una donna del Settecento in cattedra’, in Eredi di Laura Bassi: Docenti e ricercatrici in Italia tra et— moderna e presente, ed. by Marta Cavazza, Paola Govoni, and Tiziana Pironi (Milan: FrancoAngeli, forthcoming 2014). Marta Cavazza, ‘Laura Bassi’ in Il contributo italiano alla storia del pensiero, Ottava Appendice. Scienze, ed. by Antonio Clericuzio and Saverio Ricci (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 2013), pp. 376 – 79. Monique Frize, Laura Bassi and Science in 18th Century Europe: The Extraordinary Life and Role of Italy’s Pioneering Female Professor (Heidelberg, NewYork, Dordrecht, and London: Springer, 2013). Ronald K. Smeltzer, ‘Laura Bassi (1711-1778)’, in Extraordinary Women in Science & Medicine: Four Centuries of Achievements, ed. by Ronald K. Smeltzer, Robert J Ruben and Paulette Rose (New York: The Grolier Club, 2013), pp. 37-41.

*

Paula Findlen

Listening to the Archives: Searching for the Eighteenth-Century Women of Science

More than twenty years ago, in the midst of completing a project on an entirely different subject, I began to consider how to expand the possibilities for writing a history of women in early modern science. The mid-1980s were an exciting moment for the genesis of this field. Margaret Rossiter’s first volume on Women Scientists in America had appeared, demonstrating the possibilities of studying several generations of women who contributed to a critical period in the professionalization of modern science and the entry of women into higher education in the United States. Evelyn Fox Keller’s insightful biography of Barbara McClintock had demonstrated the potential for a creatively researched and wellconceptualized life of a singularly interesting woman scientist to raise important questions about the relationship between gender and knowledge; her subsequent collection of essays, Reflections on Gender and Science, further explored the significance of this new approach to the history of women in science as a history of gender.1 Just as the history of women in modern science drew inspiration from more general developments in the history of women and gender, the history of women in early modern science was a direct beneficiary of the in-depth archival research of historians such as Natalie Zemon Davis and her contemporaries, who * Many thanks to Paola Govoni for encouraging me to write this essay and for her comments on the initial draft, to my colleague Londa Schiebinger for our mutual interest in early modern women, and to the community of Settecentisti – especially Paola Bertucci, Marta Cavazza, Beate Ceranski, Massimo Mazzotti, Franco Minonzio, Rebecca Messbarger, Gianna Pomata, and the late Gabriella Berti Logan – who have enriched my understanding of the Italian filosofesse over the years. The research for this project was supported by grants from the American Philosophical Society, ACLS, Guggenheim, and residential grants at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences and the Stanford Humanities Center. 1 Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Strategies and Struggles to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1983); and Ead., Reflections on Gender and Science (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). See also Joan Scott, ‘Gender : A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 1053 – 75.

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truly opened up the possibilities for studying early modern women in the 1970s and 1980s.2 Their methodologically exciting experiments in how to assemble evidence and construct historical narratives played an important role in my own understanding of how to advance the project of writing history by asking different questions of the archives. Since the 1990s ‘The Other Voice’ series, published first by the University of Chicago Press and more recently by the University of Toronto Press, has greatly expanded our understanding of the scholarly and cultural pursuits of early modern women by providing readers with accessible critical editions and translations of a wide variety of early modern women’s writing, so eloquently analyzed in the work of literary scholars such as Virginia Cox.3 In light of these developments a reconsideration of the Scientific Revolution from the perspective of gender seemed inevitable. Carolyn Merchant’s articles on Anne Conway and Êmilie du Ch–telet paved the way for her provocative and original book about The Death of Nature.4 While key elements of her argument – most notably her suggestion that women natural philosophers were disinclined to support a mechanistic world view – engendered a lively debate about the relationship between gender and knowledge, and have largely been rejected as a generalization about women’s participation in early modern science, Merchant nonetheless drew attention to the importance of identifying women who were key intellectual contributors to the evolution of science in the age of Boyle and Newton. Within a few years, Londa Schiebinger, Erica Harth, Lisa Sarasohn, Sarah Hutton, and Ester Ehrman expanded the list with studies of such figures as the German astronomer Maria Winckelmann and artist-naturalist Maria Sibylla Merian, the fascinatingly philosophical Elisabeth of Bohemia, the English nat2 For an interesting reflection on the role of archives in writing women’s history, see Caroline P. Murphy, ‘Cherchez la femme: Finding Renaissance Women’s Lives in Italian Archives’, Historically Speaking, 10 – 5 (2009), 23 – 4. A good synthesis of recent work on early modern women can be found in Margaret King, Women of the Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Women and Society in Early Modern Europe, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 3 Virginia Cox, Women’s Writing in Italy, 1400 – 1650 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Ead., The Prodigious Muse: Women’s Writing in Counter-Reformation Italy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011). See also Diana Robin, Publishing Women: Salons, the Presses, and the Counter-Reformation in Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007). 4 Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980). See also her publications as Carolyn Iltis, ‘Madame du Ch–telet’s Metaphysics and Mechanics’, Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 8 (1977), 29 – 48; Ead. ‘The Vitalism of Anne Conway : Its Impact on Leibniz’s Concept of the Monad’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 17 (1979), 255 – 69. For a reassessment of the implications of Merchant’s thesis for understanding early modern science, see Katharine Park, ‘Women, Gender, and Utopia: The Death of Nature and the Historiography of Early Modern Science’, Isis, 97 (2006), 487 – 95.

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ural philosophers Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway, and the French Newtonian Êmilie du Ch–telet.5 Schiebinger’s research would subsequently produce a series of books on women, gender, and early modern science – which she discusses in her contribution to this volume – while Sarasohn’s project helped to spawn an industry of scholarship on Cavendish.6 Subsequent work on Italian woman natural philosophers such as the mathematician Maria Gaetana Agnesi, the experimental physicist Laura Bassi, and most recently the artistanatomist Anna Morandi Manzolini contributed to the growing bibliography of well-documented and diverse case studies.7 This reflection brings me back to my own excursion into the subject. During my graduate student years I had been following the emergence of this literature 5 Londa Schiebinger, ‘Maria Winckelmann at the Berlin Academy of Sciences: A Turning Point for the History of Women in Science’, Isis, 78 (1987), 174 – 200; Lisa Sarasohn, ‘A Science Turned Upside Down: Feminism and the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 47 (1984), 299 – 307. 6 Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989); Ead., Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993); Ead., Plants and Empires: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Sarah Hutton, Anne Conway: AWoman Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Lisa Sarasohn, The Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish: Reason and Fancy in the Scientific Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010); Ester Ehrmann, Mme du Ch–telet: Scientist, Philosopher and Feminist of the Enlightenment (Leamington Spa: Berg, 1986); Judith P. Zinsser, La Dame d’Esprit: A Biography of the Marquise Du Ch–telet (New York: Viking, 2006). See also The Correspondence between Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia and Ren¦ Descartes, ed. and trans. by Lisa Shapiro (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007); Êmilie du Ch–telet, Selected Philosophical and Scientific Writings, ed. by Judith P. Zinnser and trans. by Isabelle Bour and Judith P. Zinsser (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 7 On Agnesi, the most recent studies include Ulrike Klens, Mathematikerinnen im 18. Jahrhundert: Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Gabrielle-Êmilie DuChatelet, Sophie Germain: Fallstudien zur Wechselwirkung von Wissenschaft und Philosophie im Zeitalter der Aufkla¨ rung (Pfaffenweiler : Centaurus, 1994); Franco Minonzio, Chiarezza e metodo: L’indagine scientifica di Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Milan: Lampi di Stampa, 2006 [2001]); Maria Gaetana Agnesi et al., The Contest for Knowledge: Debates about Women’s Education in Eighteenth-Century Italy, ed. and trans. by Rebecca Messbarger and Paula Findlen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Massimo Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007); Antonella Cupillari, A Biography of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, an Eighteenth-Century Woman Mathematician. With Translations of Some of Her Work from Italian into English (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007); Paula Findlen, ‘Calculations of Faith: Mathematics, Philosophy, and Sanctity in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Recent Work on Maria Gaetana Agnesi)’, Historia mathematica, 38 (2010), 248 – 91. On Morandi Manzolini, see especially Anna Morandi Manzolini, una donna fra arte e scienza, ed. by Miriam Foccaccia (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2008), and Rebecca Messbarger, The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

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with great interest. The reprinting of Father John Augustine Zahm’s pioneering study of Women in Science (published under his favorite pseudonym H.W. Mozans) and the publication of Margaret Alic’s Hypatia’s Heritage provided me with a broad, if unreflective narrative of the history of women in science since antiquity, yielding more episodes to add to the growing list of examples of women who deserved to be studied. Among them were a number of eighteenthcentury Italian women whose contributions to mathematics, physics, and medicine intrigued me. ‘For a thousand years the doors of the Italian universities have been open to women, as well as to men’, proclaimed Zahm. Really? He produced a substantial list of names of learned and scientific women associated with Bologna, including the three mentioned above.8 I was a historian of Italian science, though not of the eighteenth century which seemed to be the period in which most of these women had flourished after the late medieval examples associated with Salerno, Bologna, and Padua. I began to wonder what kind of research was being done on them.

I.

Between the Archive and the Encyclopedia

There is often a kind of serendipity about research that makes it hard to recapture the alchemy by which questions become projects. Nonetheless one signal episode stands out in my mind in the spring of 1988. I was sitting in one of those slightly uncomfortable wooden chairs in the reading room of the Biblioteca Universitaria in Bologna beneath the antique portraits of the university’s most famous professors. I was waiting for the appearance of a sixteenthcentury manuscript. Waiting, I have long believed, is the very essence of archival research because in the pause between reading documents, one actually thinks, talks with the archivists, and returns to the catalogues. Immersed in the world of the Renaissance naturalist Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522 – 1605) and his contemporaries, I had utterly forgotten about the history of women in science. Or so I thought. Later my decision to collect the fragmentary evidence on Aldrovandi’s second wife, Francesca Fontana, became the basis of an article about gender and knowledge in the early modern scientific household.9 A year in the archives had convinced me that Bologna was an interesting location from which to write the 8 H. J. Mozans [Father John Augustine Zahm], Women in Science: With an Introductory Chapter on Women’s Long Struggle for Things of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974 [1913]), pp. 79 and 298. See also Margaret Alic, Hypatia’s Heritage: A History of Women in Science from Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986). 9 Paula Findlen, ‘Masculine Prerogatives: Gender, Space and Knowledge in the Early Modern Museum’, in The Architecture of Science, ed. by Peter Galison and Emily Thompson (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 29 – 57.

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history of science. I was at the conclusion of my first project using the Bolognese archives and beginning to wonder what else they might contain. The manuscript still hadn’t arrived. I found myself vaguely thinking of that handful of rather fustian books on women in science – probably Zahm’s which was filled with materials on Catholic women, many of whom were Italian. Hadn’t they mentioned one or two women from Bologna? The first name that I recalled was ‘Laura Bassi’. I began to rummage through the manuscript catalogues to see if anything might emerge. By the end of the day I was immersed in a contemporary account of the public ceremonies during which Bassi received her doctoral degree in philosophy on May 12, 1732. No detail was spared of this early modern ritual, including the gifts of an ermine cape, graduate’s ring, and, more unusually, a silver crown of laurels to anoint as Bologna’s Minerva.10 As a historian on the verge of receiving a doctorate, I found the obsessive recounting of every minute detail of how to graduate a woman, eighteenth-century style, utterly fascinating. I began to consider how the ordinary milestones that mark one’s education were extraordinary in a different age, and perhaps worth understanding. My initial archival encounter with the physicist Bassi (1711 – 1778) happened to coincide with the nine hundredth anniversary of the founding of the University of Bologna. Walking to the university every day, I discovered new publications on its history in the windows of the bookstores lining via Zamboni. One day I noticed an entire volume concerned exclusively with the long history of the university’s female students and professors. It introduced me to a local scholarship on Bassi that I previously had not known and generated the names of other women – the honorary mathematics professor Agnesi, the astronomical calculators Teresa and Maddalena Manfredi, the lecturer in wax anatomy Morandi Manzolini, the professor of obstetrics Maria Dalle Donne and her friendship with the classicist Clotilde Tambroni, and Cristina Roccati, who studied at Bologna because of Bassi and taught experimental physics in the Venetian town of Rovigo – who deserved further study.11 At this point, I knew that there was a rich institutional history to rediscover that was more than the history of a single woman but the history of women of science across the eighteenth century. My pause in the midst of another project has led me to spend twenty years intermittently researching the contributions of Bassi and her contemporaries. It has led me to understand the world of eighteenth-century science from the 10 BUB, ms. 212 (116), n. 23, cc. 94 – 95 (Descrizione della funzione avutasi nell’addottoramento della Sig.a Laura Caterina Bassi, 12 May 1732). 11 Alma mater studiorum. La presenza femminile dal XVIII al XX secolo (Bologna: CLUEB, 1988). See especially Elio Melli, ‘Laura Bassi Verati: ridiscussioni e nuovi spunti’, ibid., pp. 71 – 9.

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perspective of the woman who inhabited its center as well as many others who lived anywhere from the middle to the margins. The discovery of a random manuscript precipitated a search for more materials that now fill boxes and boxes of my scholarly papers at home. From the start, I told myself that my goal was not to write a biography of Bassi. My image of biography at the time reflected many of the prejudices of social and cultural historians who considered this genre too heroic, too isolating and idolizing of the individual.12 I have subsequently revisited this issue while putting the finishing touches on a culminating project from this research which will indeed have Bassi as the centerpiece. This essay is primarily a reflection on the various stages of my research on women natural philosophers, experimenters, and mathematicians in eighteenthcentury Italy, and how they have led me to reconsider the value of biography. Given the fascinating details of Bassi’s life – university graduate and professor, Newtonian natural philosopher, wife of the physician and electrical experimenter Giuseppe Veratti, teacher of some of the most important Italian scientists of the next generation, correspondent of many leading experimental philosophers, and icon of the Grand Tour – I understood from the start that a biography of Bassi should be written. When Alberto Elena’s essay on Bassi’s life appeared in 1991, I told myself that she had finally gotten the kind of entry she had not received in the Dictionary of Scientific Biography (the recent revision of this important publication has remedied this defect, I am happy to report, with an article by Beate Ceranski, and there are now numerous other biographical dictionaries and online resources which includ the basic details of Bassi’s life and work).13 For this reason, I wrote my first essay on Bassi not as a pure biography but as a case study of an eighteenth-century scientific career, fully mindful of the burgeoning literature on patronage and early modern science in the 1980s.14 While completing this essay, I began what has now amounted to almost two decades of scholarly collaboration and friendship with Marta Cavazza, having greatly admired her initial publications on Bassi, since she was the first to offer a fascinating reading of Francesco Algarotti’s poetic apotheosis of Bassi as a signal 12 See the essays by Mary Terrall, Theodore M. Porter, and Mary Jo Nye in the forum on scientific biography in Isis, 97 (2006), 306 – 29; and Mott Greene, ‘Writing Scientific Biography’, Isis, 40 (2007), 727 – 59. 13 Alberto Elena, ‘ “In lode della filosofessa di Bologna”: An Introduction to Laura Bassi’, Isis, 82 (1991), 510 – 18. See Beate Ceranski, ‘Laura Bassi’, in the Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography, ed. by Noretta Koertge (New York: Charles Scribners & Sons, 2008), 19, pp. 202 – 4. 14 Paula Findlen, ‘Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy : The Strategies of Laura Bassi (1711 – 1778)’, Isis, 83 (1993), 441 – 69; Ead., ‘The Scientist’s Body : The Nature of a Woman Philosopher in Enlightenment Italy’, in The Faces of Nature in Enlightenment Europe, ed. by Gianna Pomata and Lorraine Daston (Berlin: BWV-Berliner Wissenschafs-Verlag, 2003), pp. 211 – 36.

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event in the development of Newtonianism in Italy.15 I also had the pleasure of meeting Gabriella Berti Logan, whose own article on Bassi became part of her splendidly researched and comprehensive dissertation on the history of Italian women in science through the nineteenth century. Subsequently I encountered Beate Ceranski in Bologna, when she was beginning her dissertation on Bassi at the encouragement of her mentor, Andreas Kleinert, who had written an early article comparing Bassi and Agnesi. Once again I encouraged someone else to write the full biography of Bassi that she richly deserved.16 My desire to write something other than a biography stemmed from my interest in understanding Bassi’s exceptionality better by studying the society from which she emerged as well as the world she helped to create. I did not want to begin by narrowing my project to a single example of a woman pursuing scientific knowledge. I wanted to understand to what extent she was part of broader developments in the relations between gender and knowledge in the eighteenth century, and in the scientific culture of the Enlightenment. What were the preconditions to Bassi’s degree and professorship at the University of Bologna? What was her own experience of her world? Did she inspire others to think that more women should pursue a public scholarly career or express their interest in science in other ways? My goal was to place Bassi at the center of this historical conversation. I subsequently came to see this research project as a history of successive generations of men and women pursuing knowledge together in the age of Newtonian science. The question I quickly confronted was how to develop this narrative. It was relatively easy to find the women affiliated with institutions such as the University of Bologna and the Bologna Academy of Sciences (Accademia dell’Isti15 Marta Cavazza, Settecento inquieto. Alle origini dell’Istituto delle Scienze di Bologna (Bologna: il Mulino, 1990), pp. 237 – 56; Ead., ‘Laura Bassi e il suo gabinetto di fisica sperimentale: realt— e mito’, Nuncius, 10 (1995), 715 – 53; Ead., ‘Laura Bassi, ‘maestra’ di Spallanzani’, in Il cerchio della vita, ed. by Walter Bernardi and Paola Manzini (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1999), pp. 185 – 202; Ead., ‘Una donna nella repubblica degli scienziati: Laura Bassi e i suoi colleghi’, in Scienza a due voci, ed. by Raffaella Simili (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2006), pp. 61 – 85; and Ead., ‘Between Modesty and Spectacle: Women and Science in EighteenthCentury Italy’, in Italy’s Eighteenth Century : Gender and Culture in the Age of the Grand Tour, ed. by Paula Findlen, Wendy Roworth, and Catherine Sama (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), pp. 275 – 302. 16 Gabriella Berti Logan, ‘The Desire to Contribute: An Eighteenth-Century Italian Woman of Science’, The American Historical Review, 99 (1994), 785 – 812; Ead., Italian Women in Science from the Renaissance to the Nineteenth Century (PhD diss., University of Ottawa, 1999); Beate Ceranski, “Und sie fürchtet sich vor niemanden”. Über die Physikerin Laura Bassi (1711 – 1778) (Frankfur-New York: Campus Verlag, 1996); Andreas Kleinert, ‘Maria Gaetana Agnesi und Laura Bassi. Zwei italienische gelehrte Frauen im 18. Jahrhundert’, in Frauen in den exakten Naturwissenschaften, ed. by Willi Schmidt and Christoph J. Scriba (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1990), pp. 71 – 85.

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tuto delle Scienze di Bologna). In many instances, there was some sort of official record to confirm aspects of the history. But I did not want to restrict this project to a history of women in the universities and academies though I understood the unique presence of women in Italy’s learned institutions to be a central component of my research. A casual conversation with one of the many well-informed archivists in the Biblioteca Universitaria led me in an entirely different direction which was, in retrospect, essential to the next stage of this project. When I expressed my desire to find other women besides Bassi, the mathematician Agnesi, the anatomist Morandi, and the obstetrician Dalle Donne, he suggested that the most interesting resource might be a fascist encyclopedia of women. He led me to the reference room in which it resided. For the next few days I pored over a series of books with delightfully over-the-top titles such as Eroine, ispiratrici e donne di eccezione (Heroines, Inspiring Women, and Exceptional Women), and the more prosaic Poetesse e scrittrici (Women Poets and Writers).17 Vibrant and heroic stories of the triumphant accomplishments of Italian women through the ages filled each volume. I could have put down these volumes, and part of me kept saying that I should because the information inside them was probably unreliable. But this singular publication had more information about a wide variety of women than virtually anything else I had read. Many of the women I have subsequently studied – including Mariangela Ardinghelli, Giuseppa Eleonora Barbapiccola, Clelia Grillo Borromeo, Benedetta Clotilde Lunelli, Maria Elena Lusignani, Faustina Pignatelli, and Diamante Medaglia Faini – first appeared before my eyes in the pages of this popular reference work. In the first volume I learned that Ardinghelli (1731 – 1825) was an electrical experimenter in Naples who had translated Stephen Hales into Italian and that Grillo Borromeo founded a scientific academy in Milan with the Paduan physician Antonio Vallisneri; in the second, I discovered that Medaglia Faini was a Brescian poet living in Salý who had given up poetry around age forty to study mathematics and written a treatise, Degli studi convenienti alle donne (An Oration on Which Studies are Fitting for Women).18 Each entry was a trail to 17 Francesco Orestano, Eroine, ispiratrici e donne d’eccezione (Milan: Istituto Editoriale Nazionale, 1940); and Poetesse e scrittrici, ed. by Maria Bandini Buti, 2 vols (Rome: Istituto Editoriale Italiano, 1941). Both are part of a series entitled Enciclopedia biografica e bibliografica italiana, ed. by Almerigo Ribera. 18 Preliminary research on Ardinghelli resulted in Paula Findlen, ‘Translating the New Science: Women and the Circulation of Knowledge in Enlightenment Italy’, Configurations, 2 (1995), 167 – 206; for a far richer account of her life and work, see Paola Bertucci, ‘The In/Visible Woman: Mariangela Ardinghelli and the Circulation of Natural Knowledge between Paris and Naples in the Eighteenth Century’, Isis 104 (2013): 226 – 49. A warm thank you to Paola Bertucci for sharing her draft of this article. On Medaglia Faini, see Rebecca Messbarger, The Century of Women: Representations of Women in Eighteenth-Century Italy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002); Paula Findlen, ‘Becoming a Scientist: Gender and Knowledge

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follow since none of them were mentioned in the official histories of women in science because they emerged from other kinds of sources. In a certain sense, I owe this aspect of my project to Mussolini’s Italy. The desire to create the ideal fascist woman inspired efforts to repackage the many histories of Italian women written before this era into a grand heroic narrative of female virtue from which to construct their encounter with destiny in the twentieth century. In this respect, women did not exactly disappear from the fascist public sphere but as their position in society evolved so too did the understanding of the purpose of women’s history.19 Reading these fascist encyclopedias exposed me to a seemingly infinite bibliography of books on Italian women written between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth century, most of them even less scholarly and reliable than this 1940 – 1941 publication. Initially these other encyclopedias played no role in my research. I discovered Giulio Natali’s survey of the role of women in eighteenthcentury Italy in a chapter of his survey of the eighteenth century ; this kind of synthetic history transformed the information I had gleaned from brief vignettes into something more closely resembling a narrative of the visibility of learned and scientific women in the age of Enlightenment, a subject I would come to understand much better when I encountered Luciano Guerci’s more comprehensive and analytical histories of debates about women’s education and marriage in eighteenth-century Italy written in the late 1980s.20 A list of original sources began to emerge that led me to many archives and libraries beyond Bologna while I continued to mine the institutional records of the city in which this project originated. These trips produced a rich vein of documents – I don’t think I will ever forget my first experience of the archive of the Accademia dei Concordi of Rovigo which houses numerous documents on the physicist Roccati, including two catalogues of her family library and a thousand pages of physics lectures, the first glimpse of Grillo Borromeo’s detailed correspondence with Vallisneri about their project to create the Accademia Clelia de’ Vigilanti, or the pleasure of reading the physician Giovanni Bianchi’s papers in the Biblioteca Gambalunga in Rimini, including his lively correspondence with women of science.21 in Eighteenth-Century Italy’, Science in Context, 16 (2003), 59 – 87; Messbarger and Findlen, The Contest for Knowledge. My more recent contributions to the literature on Grillo Borromeo are discussed in n. 23. 19 Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922 – 1945 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992). 20 Giulio Natali, Il Settecento, 3rd ed. (Milan: Francesco Vallardi, 1929), pp. 132 – 90; Luciano Guerci, La discussione sulla donna nell’Italia del Settecento (Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1987); Id., La sposa obbediente: Donna e matrimonio nella discussione dell’Italia del Settecento (Turin: Tirrenia Stampatori, 1988). 21 On Roccati, see Paula Findlen, ‘A Forgotten Newtonian: Women and Science in the Italian

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Gradually my research took me further and further away from its starting point. I realized that many cities had one or more scientific women who were often the subject of a local biographical literature, who became members of academies far less famous and more transitory than the Bologna Academy, and who had publications by or about them that were invisible in modern library databases but frequently emerged from those handwritten catalogues of earlier centuries. The more I researched the men who supported, admired, and collaborated with these scientific women – Francesco Algarotti, author of the bestselling and risqu¦ Newtonianism for Ladies (1737); mathematics, philosophy, and physics tutors of women such as Gaetano Tacconi, Francesco Maria Zanotti, Nicola de Martino, Giovanni Bianchi, Ramiro Rampinelli, and Giambattista Suardi; Bassi’s male students including Lazzaro Spallanzani, Felice Fontana, and Leopoldo Marc’Antonio Caldani; and of course that great patron of many eighteenth-century women, Benedict XIV – the more I began to see my research as an exploration not only of women’s lives but of their relations with men.22 None of these women could have pursued science, let alone have been institutionally recognized for their accomplishments, without men supportive of the idea of women of science. I could not have discovered the roles played by the least visible women of science – for instance, Grillo Borromeo’s ambitious program to renovate science in Milan, or the roles played by the aristocratic Cartesian Laura Bentivoglio Davia and Elisabetta Ercolani Ratta, the great patron of Francesco Maria Zanotti and Algarotti, in Bassi’s Bologna – without reading deeply into the archives of male scientists.23 In order to reconstruct the community that made Provinces’, in The Sciences in Enlightenment Europe, ed. by William Clark, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), pp. 313 – 49; Maria Laura Soppelsa and Eva Viani, ‘Dal newtonianismo per le dame al newtonianismo delle dame: Cristina Roccati una ‘savante’ del Settecento Veneto’, in Donne, filosofia e cultura nel Seicento, ed. by Pina Totaro (Rome: Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, 1999), pp. 211 – 40. On Bianchi, see Clorinda Donato, ‘Public and Private Negotiations of Gender in EighteenthCentury England and Italy : Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and the Case of Catterina Vizzani’, British Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, 29 (2008), 169 – 89; Paula Findlen, ‘The Anatomy of a Lesbian: Medicine, Pornography, and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Italy’, in Italy’s Eighteenth Century, ed. by Paula Findlen, Wendy Roworth, and Catherine Sama, pp. 216 – 50. 22 On the question of women’s history as a history of relations between the sexes, see Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women’s History in Transition: The European Case’, Feminist Studies, 3 (1976), 83 – 103, esp. pp. 89 – 90. 23 On Bentivoglio Davia, see Paula Findlen, ‘Women on the Verge of Science: Aristocratic Women and Science in Early Eighteenth-Century Italy’, in Women, Equality and Enlightenment, ed. by Sarah Knott and Barbara Taylor (London: Palgrave Press, 2005), pp. 265 – 87. On Grillo Borromeo, see Giuliana Parabiago, ‘Clelia Borromeo del Grillo’, Correnti, 1 (1998), 36 – 60; Anna M. Serralunga Bardazza, Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese: Vicende private e pubbliche virt¾ di una celebre nobildonna nell’Italia del Settecento (Biella: Eventi & Progetti Editore, 2005); Paula Findlen, ‘Founding a Scientific Academy : Gender, Patronage, and

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women of science possible in eighteenth-century Italy, I had to explore the phenomenon of the filosofesse from their perspective. The picture that emerged confirmed my instincts that there were many different ways to identify women’s participation in science. Each new avenue of research produced material for another article on different aspects of women’s involvement in science. I decided to deal with some of the most interesting episodes separately at first, not only to understand them on their own terms but also because I was not yet sure to what degree there was a direct connection between different generations of women pursuing science across the eighteenth century. Yet I was convinced that it was a diffuse phenomenon in which the city of Bologna played a singularly visible role. Eventually, I did return to that list of popular encyclopedias. After a few years of satisfying my seemingly bottomless archival cravings, I began thinking about the relationship between myth and biography. This next phase of my research was stimulated by my growing fascination with the problems of documenting the place of women in the Italian universities as part of the background to understanding Bassi’s public role in the scientific culture and institutions of her city, between 1732 and 1778. There was so much confusing information on her predecessors, those imaginary women graduates and professors of the medieval and early Renaissance universities. Did any of them actually exist? Had they taught or studied? The more I researched these questions, the more confusing the answers became. It was a very ambiguous history. Part of the way through this research, I had a moment of clarity. I decided to stop worrying about whether anything I read was true, or could necessarily be construed as evidence of the tangible activities of these women. Instead, I began to ask myself which materials would be useful for the reconstruction of a myth since this was the history I could write. At that point, the long list of books celebrating the lives and accomplishments of Italian women became my guide. I have since read as many of them as I could find simply to see which women they talked about, and the kinds of biographies that emerged. I have also tried to consider the function of such books for their readers in order to better understand a long and fascinating genre of writing collective biographies of women

Knowledge in Early Eighteenth-Century Milan’, Republics of Letters, 1 (2009), available at http://rofl.stanford.edu/node/33 (for this and the sites that follow, the date of the last access is 9/12/2013); Clelia Grillo Borromeo Arese, ed. by Andrea Spiriti and Dario Generali (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 2011). My forthcoming study of the making of Algarotti’s Newtonianismo per le dame (1737) and Cheryl Smeall’s forthcoming book on Algarotti based on her dissertation, How to Become a Renowned Writer: Francesco Algarotti (1712 – 1764) and the Uses of Networking in Eighteenth-Century Europe (PhD diss., McGill University, 2011), will discuss Elisabetta Ercolani Ratta in some detail.

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that traces its origins to Giovanni Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus (On Famous Women).24 Let us begin with Ambrogio Levati’s otherwise undistinguished Dizionario biografico cronologico diviso per classi degli uomini illustri (Biographical and Chronological Dictionary, Divided by Classes of Famous Men, 1821). Embedded in this multi-volume dictionary of famous men is a volume devoted to ‘illustrious women’. It contains excellent information on the fabled Bitisia Gozzadini (1209 – 1261), frequently invoked by Bassi’s admirers as Bologna’s first woman graduate and professor and an expert in the subject of canon law. It also explained the connections between this thirteenth-century story and the spirited defense of her ‘female doctorate’ in 1722 by the lawyer Alessandro Macchiavelli (1693 – 1766), under his brother Carlo Antonio’s name, after the College of Jurisprudence refused to grant Maria Vittoria Delfini Dosi a law degree, citing the lack of evidence supporting the longstanding belief that Gozzadini had been a graduate and professor. Levati carefully examined the sources of Macchiavelli’s argument and concluded that the ‘very ancient calendar’ cited as the most authoritative institutional record of Gozzadini’s role in the university was ‘so dubious’ that historians of the medieval Studium refused to cite it.25 Writing in 1890, Emma Tettoni explained to her readers that ‘critical history entirely negates the existence of this woman.’ She agreed with Levati’s judgment about the problems of evidence, while offering the following caveat: ‘tradition even more than legend needs a subtle trace of truth from which to weave its fantastic cloth.’26 To my knowledge, Tettoni was the first author since Macchiavelli – that passionate defender of women’s right to education and forger of eighteenth-century university documents – to raise the problem of basing one’s opinion about the reality of any of these medieval women on their absence from institutional documents. Gozzadini, and other medieval women frequently mentioned by Bolognese chroniclers and heirs to Boccaccio’s tradition of writing about famous women, belonged to a period in which the university did not keep regular records of its professors and graduates, because it was not yet an 24 Pamela Joseph Benson, The Invention of the Renaissance Woman: The Challenge of Female Independence in the Literature and Thought of Italy and England (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); Stephen Kolsky, The Ghost of Boccaccio: Writings on Famous Women in Renaissance Italy (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005); and Sarah Gwyneth Ross, The Birth of Feminism: Woman as Intellect in Renaissance Italy and England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 25 Ambrogio Levati, Dizionario biografico cronologico diviso per classi degli uomini illustri, Classe V: Donne illustri (Milan: Nicolý Bettoni, 1821), 2, p. 89. See Carlo Antonio Macchiavelli [Alessandro Macchiavelli], Bitisia Gozzadina, seu de mulierum doctoratu (Bononiae: Blanchus, 1722). 26 Emma Tettoni, ‘Le scienziate’, in La donna italiana descritta da scrittrici italiane (1890), p. 271.

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institution in any modern sense.27 Thus, my early encounters with nineteenthcentury encyclopedias of famous women reminded me that not every biographical dictionary was either popular or uncritical. Imbedded within them were all sorts of interesting debates about the nature of historical evidence. To be sure, the majority of these works were not especially scholarly. Yet to differing degrees, they all depended on historical materials to construct a collective portrait of Italian women through the ages, even before Italian unification in 1861 made the virtues of ‘Italian’ women an overtly patriotic subject. Many of these nineteenth-century works were written by women with the specific goal of encouraging girls and their parents to take pride in female accomplishments. In such publications Gozzadini’s reality could not be questioned but had to be proudly affirmed. For Ginevra Canonici Fachini, whose Prospetto biografico delle donne italiane rinomate in letteratura (Biographical Overview of Italian Women Renowned in Letters, 1824) appeared shortly after Levati’s large reference work, Gozzadini established a precedent that explained the subsequent history of Novella and Bettina d’Andrea (daughters of the famed canon lawyer Giovanni d’Andrea who reputedly taught respectively in Bologna and Padua in the early fourteenth century), Maddalena Buonsignori, and Dorotea Bocchi who allegedly was paid 100 scudi to teach philosophy in early fifteenth-century Bologna. Canonici Fachini made Christine de Pisan’s Book of the City of Ladies her guide, as well as the kind of retrospective histories of the medieval university produced in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which sometimes wrote these women into the history of the universities.28 Examining books such as the anonymous Galleria di giovanette illustri italiane (Gallery of Illustrious Young Italian Women, 1841), Pietro Leopoldo Ferri’s Biblioteca femminile italiana (The Italian Woman’s Library, 1842), Agostino Verona’s Le donne illustri d’Italia (Illustrious Women of Italy, 1864), Francesco Berlan’s Le fanciulle celebri e la fanciullezza delle donne illustri d’Italia (Famous Girls and the Girlhood of Illustrious Italian Women, 1865), Eduardo Magliani’s Storia letteraria delle donne italiane (Scholarly History of Italian Women, 1885), the multi-authored La donna italiana descritta da scrit27 See Tettoni’s excellent discussion of the d’Andrea sisters, Novella and Bettina, and Maddalena Bonsignori in La donna italiana, p. 272. For a modern debunking of the myth of the d’Andrea sisters teaching in Bologna and Padua, see Guido Rossi, ‘Contributi alla biografia del canonista Giovanni d’Andrea: L’insegnamento di Novella e Bettina, sue figlie, ed i presunti responsa di Milancia, sua moglie’, Rivista trimestale di diritto e procedura civile, 11 (1957), 1451 – 502; reprinted in Guido Rossi, Studi di storia giuridica medievale (Milan: GiuffrÀ, 1997), pp. 389 – 456. Thanks to Robert Fredona for providing me with this reference. 28 Canonici Fachini, Prospetto biografico delle donne italiane rinomate in letteratura (Venice: Alvisopoli, 1824), pp. 73 – 5. On this kind of institutional history, see the example of Jacopo Facciolati, Fasti Gymnasii Patavini (Padua, 1757), Part I, pp. xxxv-vi, who cites Macchiavelli, Bitisia Gozzadina.

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trici italiane (The Italian Woman Described by Italian Women Writers, 1890), and Carlo Villani’s Stelle femminili (Female Stars, 1915), a diversity of arguments for collective biography emerged that helped me to understand better the purpose of the fascist encyclopedias that first led me to explore this kind of publication. The eighteenth-century women of science were always there. In some instances, the goal was simply to collect them. ‘No one before me thought of, or took up the task of editing a national female library’, wrote Count Ferri in 1842.29 In many instances, however, they became moral exemplars of the possibilities of virtuous learning. As Massimo Mazzotti discusses in his essay in this volume, Agnesi provided an excellent example of this kind of model Catholic woman who became terribly proficient in science in service of her faith. Marta Cavazza also examines in detail the process by which writing the biography of Bassi became a preoccupation of generations of male and female writers devoted to maintaining her posthumous reputation as an inspiring and beloved maestra who exemplified the virtuous combination of science, maternal devotion, and great acts of charity.30 These biographies made Italian women of science into models of piety, modesty, and learning who contributed to the betterment of society without threatening the social order. Other biographies had quite different goals that revealed a more explicit social agenda behind this reading for the ‘new’ women of modern Italy. Berlan recommended his Le fanciulle celebri (Famous Girls) to all Italian mothers. His conversations on exemplary girls included an imaginary dialogue between the author and an unnamed male scientist in which they systematically discussed all the Italian women of science from the Middle Ages until the Risorgimento. When he introduced the example of Ardinghelli, Berlan remarked, ‘I like this woman who, so to speak, played with lightning and taught other women not to be afraid of electricity, and to make it useful to science and life. In the telegraph offices where women workers are preferred to men, Ardinghelli ought to have a bust or something commemorative.’31 His sympathetic male scientist could not resist adding that the quantity of marble needed to honor ‘all the women who signal in the sciences’ would be enormous.32 In this exchange we see new reasons for writing about women of science, namely the way in which nineteenth-century 29 Pietro Leopoldo Ferri, Biblioteca femminile italiana raccolta, posseduta e descritta dal Conte Pietro Leopoldo Ferri padovano (Padua: Tipografia Crescenzi, 1842), n.p. 30 See Marta Cavazza’s contribution to this volume. 31 Francesco Berlan, Le fanciulle celebri e la fanciullezza delle donne illustri d’Italia (Milan: Giacomo Agnelli, 1865), p. 320. 32 Paola Bertucci, Viaggio nel paese delle meraviglie: Scienza e curiosit— nell’Italia del Settecento (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2007); and Marta Cavazza, ‘Laura Bassi and Giuseppe Veratti: An Electric Couple during the Enlightenment’, Contributions to Science, 5 (2009), 115 – 28.

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technologies created a society of female technicians who might take pleasure in knowing more about those ‘electric women’ of the Enlightenment, Ardinghelli and Bassi. Or in the case of that fearless and unrelenting proponent of women’s rights, the Neapolitan jurist, socialist, and journalist Salvatore Morelli, the accomplishments of that ‘great thinker Laura Bassi’ served as a clarion call to give nineteenth-century Italian women the liberty and authority that British, Northern European, and American women already enjoyed.33 Tettoni offered a more personal perspective on the reasons to write about women of science when she recalled her own experience of learning about Agnesi and Bassi in her school lessons ‘as models to young Italian girls.’34 She fondly remembered a children’s book containing colored portraits of these two famous women of science. In such recollections we see the seeds of a project of recuperation in which the writing of women’s lives became a critical and socially engaged history whose goal was to assess different versions of the past while insisting, with great prescience, that no single kind of evidence could capture the entire fabric of historical memory. Tettoni was a worthy successor to the midnineteenth century historian of Bolognese women Carolina Bonafede. Bonafede’s Cenni biografici e ritratti d’insigni donne bolognesi (Biographical Gleanings and Portraits of Distinguished Bolognese Women, 1845), completed three years after the death of the obstetrician and professor Maria Dalle Donne, was ‘collected from the most accredited historians’ for young Bolognese girls who wished to known about their famous forebears.35 Her biography of Dalle Donne established the template from which she wrote about centuries of women in her city. Bonafede’s Dalle Donne was someone who defied expectations, not to make a spectacle of her learning, but to render it useful for humanity. She was an obstetrician, a teacher of other women, deeply learned in classical languages and modern science, but ready to convey her knowledge in the most accessible Italian and of course Bolognese, to the benefit of the midwives and every man, woman, and child born in this city. Dalle Donne was the culmination of a tradition that began with Gozzadini and flourished during the late Middle Ages, enjoyed a revival in the eighteenth century with Bassi and Morandi Manzolini, and reached its apex at the dawn of the nineteenth century when Dalle Donne became the next Laura Bassi for her contemporaries. Bonafede concluded her account of Bolognese women with Caterina Franceschi Ferrucci’s biography of Bassi. A noted Latinist, moderate patriot, and woman of letters, Franceschi Ferrucci spent five years in Bologna in the 1830s 33 Salvatore Morelli, La donna e la scienza, o la soluzione del problema sociale, ed. by Virgilio Esteval, 3rd ed. (Naples: Societ— Tipografico-Editrice, 1869 [1861]), p. 58. 34 Tettoni, ‘Le scienziate’, in La donna italiana, p. 278. 35 Carolina Bonafede, Cenni biografici e ritratti d’insigni donne bolognesi (Bologna: Sassi, 1845), frontispiece and p. 172.

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and would publish Della educazione morale della donna italiana (The Moral Education of the Italian Woman, 1847) and many other works on women’s education following the appearance of Bonafede’s book.36 For Franceschi Ferrucci, Bassi exemplified not only the personal virtues of a woman of science, but the social good of rewarding women of talent and learning. She infused her account of Bassi’s life with a commentary on the utility of female learning as a means of upholding moral values. For Franceschi Ferrucci, Bassi’s ability to combine scientific success, personal modesty, and family life made her truly an example to all women, much more than the virtuous but childless Dalle Donne. ‘It seems to me that we should propose Laura’s life as an example to valorous women’, she concluded, ‘so that in searching to follow her incorruptible customs and working diligently to equal her talent in the noble arts, they can bring utility to civil company and adorn our nation with new glory.’37 In such comments lies an agenda which made the early modern woman of science a precursor to the modern Catholic woman in society.

II.

The Biographer’s Subjectivity

Reading through these encyclopedias of women, I did not discover an objective reconstruction of the life of a scientist but, then, this was not what I was looking for. Instead, I have used this literature to trace a shifting canon of historical memory in order to watch these women of science appear and reappear but never really disappear. I have also considered the way in which these brief encyclopedia entries create a composite biography whose unreliability is part of the historical record. Far too often it is not what we actually know but what we want to know that often matters – the nature of this particular genre of biographical writing makes the role of desire apparent. To resist this subjectivity is to ignore something fundamental about historical memory. Finally, I have discovered that the encyclopedia can nonetheless be a place for carefully documented historical inquiry that does indeed advance the goal of a historically objective reconstruction of an often murky past. Sometimes the anecdotes of popular biographies that seem unverifiable are indeed details we need to know, even if we cannot know them to the same degree as something we find in a source more grounded in the lived experience of a given moment. The existence or non-existence of Gozzadini is a case in point. The inability to know her – or any of the other women mentioned as being affiliated with the University 36 Gilda Chiari Allegretti, L’educazione nazionale nella vita e negli scritti di Caterina Franceschi-Ferrucci con documenti inediti (Florence: Le Monnier, 1932). 37 Caterina Ferrucci, ‘Laura Bassi Veratti’, in Bonafede, Cenni biografici, p. 183.

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of Bologna before the era of Laura Bassi – produced a historical conundrum for advocates of women’s education in the eighteenth century. Was she actually a precedent, or a figment of their imagination? The problem of reconstructing Gozzadini’s life from the historical record contrasts with her appearance in virtually every Italian encyclopedia of women where many details of her life, as it was imagined, were fleshed out. In 1722 Macchiavelli simply invented the documentation he needed to give her an institutional presence. A decade later, while writing the history of the small town of San Giovanni in Persiceto, just north of Bologna, he decided to create a biography of Alessandra Giuliani, the young woman reputed to have assisted the great anatomy professor Mondino de’ Liuzzi in his dissections of the human body, citing his discovery of a manuscript entitled Frammenti storici persicetani (Persicetan Historical Fragments) by Ranieri d’Arpinello dalla Foglia.38 The culmination of this work was his unpublished manuscript, Delle donne bolognesi (On Bolognese Women, 1741), that offered the perfect amalgam of fact and fiction in establishing the ubiquity of learned women in his native city. Of course Macchiavelli cited the book on Gozzadini he attributed to his brother Carlo Antonio, leading Giovanni Fantuzzi (1718 – 1799), the great chronicler of learned Bologna in the late eighteenth century who acquired this manuscript, to write tersely in the margins that the history of Gozzadini was nothing more than a ‘lively invention of the lawyer Macchiavelli.’39 Yet one did not need to make women’s history one of the great acts of scholarly forgery to make the past visible.40 Even Macchiavelli understood this, since his biographies of contemporary Bolognese women of science, Bassi and Bentivoglio Davia, were based on what he knew rather than what he wished to know. There were also different choices to be made in bringing early figures such as Gozzadini to life. Bonafede meticulously scoured the standard histories of Bologna such as Cherubino Ghirardacci’s Della historia di Bologna (History of Bologna, 1596 – 1657), Antonio Masini’s Bologna perlustrata (Bologna Explored, 38 Alessandro Macchiavelli, Effemeridi sacro-civili perpetue bolognesi (Bologna, 1739), pp. 60 – 62. See also Giovanni Forni, Persiceto e San Giovanni in Persiceto (Bologna: Forni, 1968 [1921]), p. 136 and 403; and Sabrina Veneziani, ‘Alessandra Giuliani, ¿un falso autor?’, in Mujeres, espacio y poder, ed. by Mercedes Arriaga Flûrez et al. (Seville: Arcibel Editores, 2006), pp. 732 – 40. The best biography of Macchiavelli is by Marta Cavazza, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/alessandro-macchiavelli_(Dizionario-Biografico)/ 39 Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio, Bologna [hereafter BCAB], B.1331, f. 8v (Alessandro Machiavelli, Delle donne bolognesi, 1741). See also Marta Cavazza, ‘‘Dottrici’ e lettrici dell’Universit— di Bologna nel Settecento’, Annali di storia delle Universit— italiane, 1 (1997), 109 – 26. 40 On this subject, see Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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1616), Pompeo Scipione Dolfi’s Cronologia delle famiglie nobili di Bologna (Chronology of the Noble Families of Bologna, 1670), Pellegrino Antonio Orlandi’s Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi e dell’opere loro stampate e manoscritte (Accounts of Bolognese Writers and Their Printed and Manuscript Works, 1714), while also reviewing some of the early modern encyclopedias of women such as Pietro Paolo Ribera’s Le Glorie immortali de’ trionfi, et heroiche imprese d’ottocento quarantacinque donne illustri […] (Immortal Glory of the Triumphs and Heroic Deeds of 845 Women […], 1609), to construct a detailed and welldocumented genealogy of learned Bolognese women.41 The result is a trail that we can indeed follow into the conflicting and often contradictory evidence in which the limits of institutional records confront the strengths of historical memory. After two decades of research, I have become equally fascinated with the motivations and methods of the biographers who have provided me with so much material from which to reconstruct the meaning of women of science in earlier centuries. Macchiavelli offers an especially compelling case study. His dual love affair with learned women and scholarly forgery made him the person most capable of transforming a sketchy medieval history into a legitimate precedent for the reinvention of this past. Bassi, Agnesi, Morandi, Roccati, Tambroni, Dalle Donne, and a handful of early nineteenth-century women who studied medicine and pharmacy at the University of Bologna, owed these opportunities, in part, to a scurrilous local historian who never gave up on his version of the past.42 Anton Francesco Ghiselli (1670 – 1730), the most important local historian of Bologna in the early eighteenth century, was also convinced of the existence of his university’s tradition of admitting women.43 Unlike his younger contemporary Macchiavelli, he saw no reason to resort to forgery, citing the evidence of local chronicles and histories, and encyclopedias of women to prove his point. The ongoing project of updating the collective encyclopedia of women helped 41 Bonafede, Cenni biografici, p. 166. On Renaissance traditions of writing about Bologna’s learned women, see Caroline P. Murphy, ‘‘In Praise of the Ladies of Bologna’: The Image and Identity of the Sixteenth-Century Bolognese Female Patriciate’, Renaissance Studies, 13 (1999), 440 – 54. 42 On the transformation of this eighteenth-century tradition in the early nineteenth century, see Gabriella Berti Logan, ‘Women and the Practice and Teaching of Medicine in Bologna in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 77 (2003), 506 – 35. 43 Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna, ms. 770, XV, cc. 387 – 396 (Anton Francesco Ghiselli, Memorie antiche manoscritte di Bologna): ‘In questo Studio non solo vi sono sempre stati famosi Lettori Bolognesi, ma ancora Donne pure Bolognesi di celeberimmo Ingegno […]’. A transcription of this passage can be found in Alessandro Simile, Gerolamo Cardano lettore e medico a Bologna (Bologna: Azzoguidi, 1969) which does not specify the exact page within these numbers where this discussion of women can be found.

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to establish a tradition in which to understand the re-emergence of the woman of science and her unique institutional role in the city of Bologna. In February 1763, one Bolognese reader of Francesco Agostino della Chiesa’s Theatro delle donne letterate (Theater of Learned Women, 1620), decided to create an encyclopedia of Bolognese women. He or she excerpted all the relevant passages from this earlier publication and combined it with other information of local interest, including the fact that Christine de Pisan had a Bolognese father. The anonymous chronicler of the city’s women then picked up the recent Italian translation of Benito Feijoo’s Teatro cr†tico universal (1726 – 1739) to bring Le gesta d’alcune donne letterate bolognesi (Deeds of Some Bolognese Learned Women) up to the present day by copying Feijoo’s entry on Bassi.44 This simple gesture of combining material from different encyclopedias across two centuries helps us to understand the background to Carolina Bonafede’s publication in the early nineteenth century. The emergence of scientific women in the eighteenth century led readers of earlier encyclopedias of female accomplishments to want to make new publications of this kind. In doing so, they continued the process of expanding the encyclopedia that began in the Renaissance with vernacular translations of Boccaccio’s De claris mulieribus. Any reader of the 1596 edition of the Libro di M. Giovanni Boccaccio delle donne illustri (Giovanni Boccaccio’s Book of Illustrious Women) understood that Boccaccio’s sixteenth-century editors (Giuseppe Betusi in 1515 and Francesco Serdonati in 1596) deployed their own knowledge of medieval and Renaissance women to update the encyclopedia of women. They paid special attention to the women graduates and professors of Bologna, and more recent examples such as the Venetian humanist Cassandra Fedele, whose orations before the Venetian Senate and the University of Padua were well remembered, making her into yet another woman philosopher who was a virtual professor.45 We also need to listen to discussions of absences in the making of encyclopedias. What is missing? The reader’s awareness of these absences becomes part of the process of understanding the utility of an encyclopedia that can never be comprehensive but acts as a stimulus to the historical imagination. An especially interesting example of this process can be found in the November 1769 issue of Europa letteraria (Learned Europe) in which the Venetian journalist Elisabetta 44 BCAB, Gozz. 87, n. 17 (Le geste d’alcune Donne Letterate Bolognesi estratte dal Libro intitolato Theatro delle Donne Letterate, 19 February 1763). 45 Giovanni Boccaccio, Libro di M. Giovanni Boccaccio delle donne illustri. Tradotto di latino in volgare per M. Giuseppe Betusi, con una giunta fatta dal medesimo, d’altre donne famose. E un’altra nuova giunta fatta per M. Francesco Serdonati, d’altre donne illustri antiche e moderne (Florence, 1596), pp. 390 – 93 (Betusi’s entry on Fedele), pp. 544 – 46, 567 – 69, and 578 (Serdonati’s entries on Gozzadini, Giovanna Bianchetti, Bettina Calderini, and Dorotea Bucca). See Kolsky, The Ghost of Boccaccio.

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Caminer Turra published a lengthy review of Jean FranÅois de la Croix’s Dictionnaire historique portatif des femmes c¦lÀbres (Portable Historical Dictionary of Famous Women, 1769). Initially, Caminer wrote her review because she felt that an earlier reviewer had not taken the book seriously enough to discuss the full import of its contents. As she paged through this French guide to famous women, Caminer took pride in the fact that there were ‘a great many Italian women’ in this dictionary.46 However, the more she considered the dictionary as a whole, the more critical she became. Caminer criticized de la Croix for saying too much about courtesans and other scandalous women, to the detriment of the virtuous women whose honor was besmirched by inhabiting the pages of the same book. Most importantly, she found his knowledge of women of her own time to be woefully incomplete. Why had de la Croix neglected to write about Agnesi and Bassi? How could he be unaware of the important publications of the Venetian poet Luisa Bergalli Gozzi, and so many others? Caminer used her review to discuss the entries the French encyclopedist should have written on Italian women, encouraging him to address this problem in subsequent editions. We do not know if de la Croix saw her review, but the revised edition of 1788 included a Supplement discussing the unique place of women in the University of Bologna from Gozzadini to Bassi.47 Caminer must have been pleased, if she read it, since she had a clear sense of the value of such an encyclopedia, considering the simple enumeration of virtues and the cumulative effect of its contents to be the strengths of this genre. ‘Women might find satisfaction in seeing themselves to be equally as good in everything as men’, Caminer Turra observed in a moment of reflection.48 She, perhaps better than any participant in the eighteenth-century project of creating new encyclopedias of women, articulated the purpose of this publication.

III.

Observing the Biographer at Work

In the most recent phase of my research I have had the rare opportunity to observe an early modern biographer at work. In the mid-eighteenth century the Brescian aristocrat, librarian, and man of letters Giammaria Mazzuchelli (1707 – 1765) conceived of a vastly ambitious project to write a biographical dictionary of Italian men and women of letters up to the present day, Gli scrittori d’Italia (1753 – 1763) (Italian Writers). Mazzuchelli made it to the end of the letter B 46 [Elisabetta Caminer], ‘Dictionnaire Historique ec. Dizionario storico portatile delle donne celebri (Paris, 1769)’, in Europa letteraria tome 2, part 1 (November 1769), p. 91. See pp. 90 – 4 for a discussion of eighteenth-century Italian women who should be included in this volume. 47 Jean-FranÅois de la Croix, Dictionnaire portative des femmes c¦lÀbres (Paris, 1788), 1, p. 767. 48 Caminer, ‘Dictionnaire Historique’, p. 80.

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before poor health, compounded by sorrow over his wife’s death, put an end to his herculean labors.49 Today we can consult six hefty printed volumes covering writers whose last names fall under the first two letters of the alphabet. We can also sift through his manuscripts in the Vatican Library where one can review Mazzuchelli’s drafts of his entries, materials for entries that were never published, and his wide network of correspondents who assisted him in collecting information for these biographical and bibliographical entries. I discovered the value of Mazzuchelli’s printed volumes early in my research because they had entries on Agnesi, Ardinghelli, and Bassi (fate located the epicenter of my project at the beginning of the alphabet!). But it was only when a Roman colleague, Maria Pia Donato, told me about Mazzuchelli’s manuscripts that I realized his efforts to write early modern lives could become part of my project. What exactly did I find? While Macchiavelli was inventing documents in Bologna, Mazzuchelli was patiently and meticulously building up a profile for every Italian writer worthy of a place in his dictionary. Let us begin with his entry on Agnesi. In the draft version Mazzuchelli excerpted copies of letters that important mathematicians and physicists had written in praise of her mathematics textbook, Instituzioni analitiche (Analytical Institutions, 1748). None of these letters were published, yet Mazzuchelli knew about them and understood their importance to writing an account of her life. He included a copy of the published review of Agnesi’s book by the Paris Academy of Sciences. Reading his notes, we can see that Mazzuchelli contacted her directly, making his biography all the more precious, since it is a version of her life as she and her father wanted it to appear in print.50 Mazzuchelli was also in regular correspondence with the Milanese poet Carlo Antonio Tanzi (1710 – 1768). After writing an initial version of his life of Agnesi, he was eager for additional details. At the end of 1748 or the beginning of 1749, he sent Tanzi a draft copy, soliciting feedback. Tanzi presented it on Mazzuchelli’s behalf to Agnesi and her father Don Pietro, along with a request to get copies of Agnesi’s publications. During the next year they began to assemble materials for a more comprehensive biography.51 To complete the portrait of Agnesi’s intellectual development, they discussed her youthful oration on women’s edu49 Enrico Narducci, Intorno alla vita del Conte Giammaria Mazzuchelli e alla collezione de’ suoi manoscritti ora posseduta dalla Biblioteca Vaticana (Rome: Tipografia delle Scienze Matematiche e Fisiche, 1867). 50 Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana (hereafter BAV), Vat. Lat. 9281 (Giammaria Mazzuchelli, Memorie per servire alla vita de’ letterati viventi in quest’anno 1754, o di fresco passati a miglior vita), n. XXXIII, cc. 367r-v (draft of her life) and 368r – 369v (letters praising her book). 51 The majority of information contained in these paragraphs can be found in Tanzi’s letters to Mazzuchelli, which date from 25 February 1749 to 7 October 1750; BAV, Vat. Lat. 10012, Part II, cc. 391r, 393r – 396r, 403r, 432r, and 435r.

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cation, her parents, and her teachers. The centerpiece of Mazzuchelli’s biography, however, was his understanding of the significance of her two-volume textbook on analytic geometry and differential calculus. Mazzuchelli read reviews of the book in Italian journals such as the Novelle letterarie (Learned News) of Florence, but it was the foreign praise of her work that made its reception an international event. Early in 1750 Tanzi acquired a copy of the Paris Academy’s judgment of her book. Mazzuchelli sent Tanzi additional questions, reminding his friend that he needed a copy of the Instituzioni analitiche. Tanzi responded by confirming that Agnesi’s Greek was excellent and assuring Mazzuchelli of Don Pietro’s promise to send the book.52 In April 1750 a copy of the Instituzioni analitiche was delivered by courier to Brescia. The biography was well underway. The warm summer months produced new honors that demanded important revisions of Agnesi’s biography. ‘Signor Don Pietro Agnesi let me know that his daughter has been made public lecturer in Bologna’, Tanzi informed Mazzuchelli in August 1750.53 A flurry of correspondence ensued now that Agnesi’s life had become even more extraordinary. Within a month, Tanzi acquired copies of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga’s letter informing Agnesi of her election to an honorary professorship in mathematics by the Senate of Bologna in his capacity as the papal secretary of state. During a visit to Agnesi’s home Tanzi also inspected the regal crown Benedict XIV had given her in commemoration of her appointment in order to describe it to his colleague in Brescia. In October 1750 he supplied Mazzuchelli with the final embellishment of Agnesi’s updated biography : a copy of the letter Benedict XIV had written to the Milanese mathematician in response to her expression of gratitude for the honors bestowed upon her. This letter was widely read and circulated throughout Europe, making it the pinnacle of a good life of one of the most famous women of science in the eighteenth century. When Mazzuchelli published his life of Agnesi in the first volume of Gli scrittori d’Italia, he warmly acknowledged the invaluable role of his Milanese correspondent in the construction of this biography. ‘I confess that I am indebted to the most learned Carlantonio Tanzi of Milan who […], with uncommon courtesy and in a long series of letters, communicated to me the majority of the information about this illustrious woman of letters, honor of her native land no less than of all of Italy.’54 Without Tanzi’s devotion to writing a life of Agnesi, she would have an intriguing but incomplete entry in Mazzuchelli’s 52 BAV, Vat. Lat. 9281, c. 369r (Carlo Antonio Tanzi to Giammaria Mazzuchelli, Milan, 8 February 1750). 53 BAV, Vat. Lat. 10012, Part II, c. 391r (Tanzi to Mazzuchelli, Milan, 5 August 1750). 54 Giammaria Mazzuchelli, Gli scrittori d’Italia (Brescia, 1753), 1, part 1, p. 198.

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dictionary. Reading the unpublished materials related to this life allows us to see, at a minute level, the process by which a woman of science who was at the height of her reputation in 1750 became the subject of a contemporary biography. By contrast, the Neapolitan experimenter and translator Ardinghelli was virtually unknown when Mazzuchelli published her life in the second volume of Gli scrittori d’Italia in 1753. Mazzuchelli may have first heard about her when he read the review of her 1750 Italian translation of Stephen Hales’ Haemastaticks (1733) in the Novelle letterarie in 1751. His research on Agnesi had alerted him to the importance of including women of science in the dictionary. Yet Ardinghelli’s reputation was primarily confined to a restricted circle of Neapolitan scholars and foreigners who attended the academy associated with the Prince of Tarsia’s library, which opened to the public in 1747, and participated in the electrical experiments performed by Ardighelli’s tutor Giovanni Maria Della Torre as curator of the prince’s physics cabinet. Abb¦ Nollet’s great admiration for Ardinghelli as an experimenter, correspondent, and scientific translator would not become widely known until the publication of his Lettres sur l’¦lectricit¦ (1753), the year her biography appeared.55 How did Mazzuchelli approach the biography of this young Neapolitan woman who had only begun to demonstrate her scientific abilities in print? Mazzuchelli began the project with an open-ended letter to Neapolitan scholars requesting ‘news about the most famous young girl.’ In January 1753, as Gli scrittori d’Italia was going to press, he received a lengthy reply from a Sienese abb¦ and poet based in Naples named Paolo Quintilio Castellucci, who wrote a letter to Father Biagio Bagni of the Canons Regular of San Salvatore, requesting that it be forwarded to Brescia. This single letter provided Mazzuchelli with the majority of information for his life of the twenty-two year old Ardinghelli. Castellucci informed Mazzuchelli that he knew Ardinghelli quite well as a regular participant in her conversazione and an ‘admirer of her moral and intellectual abilities.’ He provided a frank and poignant assessment of her circumstances that was, in its original form, full of details that even her biographer chose not to print. In the printed version Mazzuchelli highlighted the importance of the Ardinghelli family’s illustrious and noble Florentine lineage. It partly explained her natural inclination for learning and literature. Yet this intellectual genealogy obscured the difficult personal and financial circumstances of this neglected cadet branch of the Ardinghelli family discussed at length by Castellucci in the original letter. Mariangela was an only child of elderly parents, having lost her brother. The family lived as best they could on their modest holdings whose value he estimated at about 5000 scudi, ‘with no other personal profit, from 55 Bertucci, ‘The In/Visible Woman’.

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which one sees the tight circumstances in which this young lady finds herself on her father’s income.’ Castellucci did not understand why the wealthy Ardinghelli of L’Aquila neglected these poor but deserving relatives in the main city of the Regno. He invited Mazzuchelli to contemplate ‘the unhappy state of this young girl, alone with her two aging parents without any support from a patron, abandoned in every possible way to Providence.’56 None of this information made it into the published biography.57 Yet it is invaluable material for a modern historian who wants to understand Ardinghelli as a woman of science who needed to earn a living. She was indeed a worthy precursor to the signaling women operating the telegraphs in nineteenth-century Italy. Mazzuchelli was far more attentive to reproducing Castellucci’s account of Ardinghelli’s education, though he omitted the fascinating detail that it had been mother Caterina Piccillo, ‘a very shrewd and wise woman’, who had especially encouraged her education, making sure that Ardinghelli had formal instruction when she discovered her daughter’s talent for learning.58 Mazzuchelli traced her development into a youthful experimenter who talked about electricity in Latin before audiences in the Prince of Tarsia’s library, wrote graceful and elegant Tuscan poetry, had an excellent command of French and English, and parlayed these skills into a nascent career as a scientific translator whose abilities were sought after by leading English and French experimenters hoping to see their work reach an Italian audience. In the early 1750s Ardinghelli’s correspondence with Nollet and Hales was known to some people. Her reputation as the Italian woman of science most admired in Paris and London would be even more widely publicized when her biography appeared in 1753. Mazzuchelli advertised the imminent appearance of Nollet’s Lettres sur l’¦lectricit¦ whose first letter was dedicated to her – according to Castellucci, she received a copy in December 1752, so this was very fresh news when he wrote his letter.59 Mazzuchelli’s brief notice regarding Ardinghelli’s current project of translating Hales’ Vegetable Staticks (1727) into Italian received further elaboration in Castellucci’s letter. Hales had been so appreciative of her first translation of his work that he sent her copies of all of his books in English, encouraging her to make the translation of the Vegetable Staticks her next project. Castellucci remarked that she was in search of financing to cover the costs of publication. The translation appeared in 1756.60 Mazzuchelli’s creative rewriting of Castellucci’s detailed response to his in56 BAV, Vat. Lat. 9281, n. LXXX – LXXXI, c. 506r (Paolo Quintilio Castellucci to Biagio Bagni, Naples, 22 January 1753). 57 Giammaria Mazzuchelli, Gli scrittori d’Italia (Brescia, 1753), 1, part 2, pp. 979 – 80. 58 BAV, Vat. Lat. 9281, n. LXXX – LXXXI, c. 506r. 59 BAV, Vat. Lat. 9281, n. LXXX – LXXXI, c. 506v 60 Stephen Hales, Statica de’ vegetabili, ed analisi dell’aria (Naples: Raimondi, 1756).

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quiry about Ardinghelli is a fine example of how personal experience became the basis for a public account of a life. The Brescian biographer considered elements of Castellucci’s physiognomy of a woman of science – her serious, melancholic, and moderate temperament, her habit of saying little but saying it precisely and clearly, her disdain for frivolous entertainment and girlish pleasures, her tendency to remain at home, her modesty, and her stoic endurance of stomach ailments, headaches, and other bodily ills – to be worth printing. Yet he omitted some of the most delightful personal details that pleased her Sienese admirer. ‘She is rather short but thin, well made and especially well proportioned in body. Her face is a bit plump, with lively sparkling black eyes even though her eyesight is a little weak, and her color is presently a bit pale because of her continuous stomach troubles but when she is healthy her vivid complexion has a fine vermillion tint. Here is what I can tell you about this heroine of science and morals that you can communicate to Signor Count Mazzuchelli.’61 In this exchange we see the way in which the desire to write contemporary women into eighteenth-century dictionaries and encyclopedias inspired the men in proximity to these women to regard them in a new light. Already locally famous, they were now worthy of biography and therefore objects of intense interest whose lives deserved careful scrutiny. In the case of Ardinghelli’s sympathetic biographer Castellucci, his compassion for her straightened circumstances and his personal admiration for how she handled these difficulties surpassed the boundaries of compiling ingredients for writing a good life. His frank assessment of Ardinghelli went far beyond what Mazzuchelli required, which is why this letter was carefully edited and rewritten. In this regard, the process by which Mazzuchelli wrote the life of Ardinghelli stood in marked contrast to his experience assembling the materials on Agnesi. She was the eldest daughter of an immensely wealthy and ambitious silk merchant who used his considerable financial resources to ennoble his family and ensure her fame. Every detail of her life made public was carefully managed by her supporters in Milan. This brings me to Mazzuchelli’s biography of Bassi. Since so many details of her life were already a matter of public record, Mazzuchelli did not need to solicit much new material. He relied heavily on this paper trail of information, creating a dense thicket of footnotes that are still a useful guide to Bassi’s public reputation among her contemporaries. Mazzuchelli consulted descriptions of the details of Bassi’s accomplishments in local publications beginning with the books of commemorative poetry printed during the celebrations for her degree in 1732, the publications of Bolognese academies, histories of Bologna, and even the lives of other Bolognese natural philosophers such as Giampietro Zanotti’s 61 BAV, Vat. Lat. 9281, n. LXXX – LXXXI, c. 507v.

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Vita di Eustachio Manfredi. He examined one or two books dedicated to Bassi, and the works of other scholars who praised her in print. Mazzuchelli also found material on Bassi in the most recent treatises on women’s education and, yes, those encyclopedias of women in which she played an exemplary role: Giovan Niccolý Bandiera’s controversial Trattato degli studi delle donne (Treatise on Women’s Studies, 1740), and Abb¦ Franconi’s Elogio d’alcune donne celebri (Praise of Some Famous Women), which he appended to his 1744 translation of Feijoo’s Teatro critico universal. Mazzuchelli completed his research by collecting news about Bassi from major journals such as the Florentine Novelle letterarie and the Geneva-based BibliothÀque Italique (though curiously not the Acta eruditorum of Leipzig). His most important source, however, was Johann Jacob Brucker’s Pinacotheca scriptorum nostra aetate litteris illustrium (1741 – 1755). Bassi was the only Italian woman of science featured in Brucker’s portrait of the European-wide Republic of Letters, taking her place next to the French Newtonian Êmilie du Ch–telet and her learned German counterparts. Brucker’s assessment of Bassi as a member of a select pantheon of European women cemented her international reputation. Without a doubt, Bassi belonged in an entirely different category than Agnesi and Ardinghelli. By the time Mazzuchelli published her life in 1758, she was already ‘a very distinguished living woman of letters’, the first woman admitted to the Bologna Academy of Sciences and a member of numerous other learned academies.62 She had taught natural philosophy at the University of Bologna for twenty-five years, and conducted a school of experimental physics in her home since 1749. Mazzuchelli did not innumerate the many distinguished foreigners who visited and corresponded with Bassi, either because this fact was so well known, or because his lack of direct information about her correspondence made it difficult for him to describe this aspect of her reputation in detail. Like the majority of Bassi’s biographers, Mazzuchelli explained her lack of publications as an expression of her innate modesty. He pointed the reader to a handful of sonnets, while lamenting his inability to find a published version of her epic poem on the War of Austrian Succession. Mazzuchelli concluded his life of Bassi by encouraging readers eager for a published account of her experiments to consult the second volume of the Commentarii of the Bologna Academy of Sciences, where Francesco Maria Zanotti described her experiments on the compression of air, and the recent publication of the fourth volume of the Commentarii in 1757, in which Bassi’s articles on hydrostatics and mechanics appeared. Mazzuchelli’s notes for Bassi’s biography also demonstrate how he edited the original version he wrote in 1754, before her two scientific publications had 62 Giammaria Mazzuchelli, Gli scrittori d’Italia (Brescia, 1758), 2, part 1, p. 527.

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appeared. They do not illuminate how he collected his information since his folder labeled Notizie di Laura Bassi Veratti imperfettissime (Very Imperfect News of Laura Bassi Veratti) is, alas, simply empty.63 Once again, this was a life written in several stages. Further reading of Mazzuchelli’s papers may reveal a crucial correspondent who critiqued this early draft and helped him burnish the final version for publication. Yet I am inclined to think that he largely wrote about Bassi from what he found in print, since he omitted a number of otherwise crucial details that were widely known, including the restrictions placed upon her public teaching by the Senate of Bologna and the role Benedict XIV played in her career as a woman of letters, both as Archbishop of Bologna and later as pope. These are the kind of details that would absorb Bassi’s most important biographer Giovanni Fantuzzi, who composed her life at its end, enriching his 1778 account with material culled from local archives, family papers, local memory, and his own personal recollection of what it had meant to be a citizen of the city that produced the most famous Italian woman of science of his century.64 He would rewrite this life for his Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi (1781 – 1794), creating a precious record of Bolognese scholarship from the Middle Ages through the eighteenth century that is an indispensable work of reference for anyone studying the intellectual life of this city. Unlike the young and impoverished Ardinghelli, Bassi did not need to cultivate invisibility.65 Nor was her reputation evolving rapidly in the public eye as Mazzuchelli composed his bibliography, in contrast to Agnesi who became ever more famous as he revised the details of her life. Instead, Bassi was a wellestablished professor and academician. Pieces of her life could be found scattered across the learned publications of eighteenth-century Italy, indeed throughout Britain and Europe. It is a curious fact that Mazzuchelli did not notice that another of Nollet’s letters on electricity published in 1753 was dedicated to Bassi as an expression of his respect for her teaching of experimental physics and especially electricity.66 Mazzuchelli probably had not 63 BAV, Vat. Lat. 9283, n. XXXVIII (Mazzuchelli, Memorie letterarie viventi, 1754), cc. 153r-v ; and BAV, Vat. Lat. 9278, n. 15 (Notizie di Laura Bassi Veratti imperfettisime). 64 Giovanni Fantuzzi, Elogio di Laura Catterina Bassi Veratti (Bologna, 1778); and Id., Notizie degli scrittori bolognesi (Bologna, 1781), 1, pp. 384 – 91. On Fantuzzi, see Sandra Saccone, ‘Giovanni Fantuzzi e il fondo ‘Affari d’acque’ nella Biblioteca Comunale dell’Archiginnasio’, L’Archiginnasio, 77 (1982), 383 – 92; Alfeo Giacomelli, ‘Giovanni Fantuzzi’, in Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani, http://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/giovanni-fantuzzi_(Dizionario_Biografico)/. Fantuzzi’s papers at the BCAB, not yet catalogued, contain draft materials towards his Notizie, making it possible for a researcher who has the patience to go through these many boxes to understand how he wrote the life of Laura Bassi, something I will eventually hope to do in further research. 65 Bertucci, ‘The In/Visible Woman’. 66 Jean Antoine Nollet, Lettres sur l’¦lectricit¦ (Paris: Guerin & Delatour, 1753).

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seen the book but only heard about it from Castellucci in Naples. After all, why would this admirer of the young Neapolitan woman mention that she competed with Bassi for Nollet’s affection? Mazzuchelli’s manuscripts offer an unusual opportunity to understand the writing of women’s lives in eighteenth-century Italy.67 They have given me a far more precise understanding of how and why certain women of science emerged into visibility while others simply disappeared from view. Since Mazzuchelli did not complete his dictionary, we do not know if he planned to include other women of science in his pantheon of worthies. Did he deliberately exclude figures such as Laura Bentivoglio Davia, Elisabetta Ercolani Ratta, Clelia Grillo Borromeo, Anna Morandi Manzolini, Faustina Pignatelli, and Cristina Roccati? There is no entry for Bentivoglio, the bella cartesiana of Bologna, nor have I discovered (so far) any materials that suggest he was preparing a life of these other women. The most curious absence is Grillo Borromeo who was celebrated in print by so many important men of science and letters, and whose scientific academy was widely discussed by a previous generation.68 The only trace of her in his manuscripts belongs to the notes of Mazzuchelli’s secretary Giambattista Rodella who continued his project after the count’s death in 1765. A single folio records the publication of Francesco Baraggia’s oration dedicated to Countess Grillo Borromeo in 1775.69 There is no life to accompany it. What can we conclude from these absences, when juxtaposed to the presence of Agnesi, Ardinghelli, and Bassi in Gli scrittori d’Italia? Since it is virtually impossible to think that he was unaware of their existence, we must conclude that these other Italian women of science did not meet Mazzuchelli’s criteria of inclusion. They were not invisible in their own time but rendered invisible through the process of selection. The biographies of Agnesi and Bassi would grow incrementally in the next century and a half, and even Ardinghelli would find an occasional biographer in the nineteenth century. The silence surrounding these other women has been the centerpiece of my research since we cannot understand the visible center of how the woman of science emerged in the eighteenth century without exploring all of these other genealogies that do not become the subject of biography but belong to a very different kind of history. 67 It would also be interesting to do a similar analysis of the creation of Bartolommeo Gamba’s collection of women’s letters and other papers, as part of his large and important autograph collection (Raccolta Gamba) now in the Biblioteca Civica of Bassano del Grappa. The Bassano printer, bibliophile, and writer Gamba (1766 – 1841) was the author of numerous works, including Alcuni ritratti di donne illustri delle province veneziane (Venice: Alvisopoli, 1826). 68 See n. 23. 69 BAV, Vat. Lat. 9278, c. 196v. Francesco Baraggia, Orazioni sacre del molto reverendo sacerdote Francesco Baraggia Milanese (Milan, 1775).

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After many years of research, I finally decided to write a biography of Bassi with these questions in mind. Borrowing a phrase from a book on an entirely different subject – Duccio Balestracci’s creative reconstruction of peasant lives in the fifteenth-century Tuscan countryside – I consider this approach to be an ‘eccentric biography.’70 Balestracci’s vision of an eccentric biography is fundamentally the reconstruction of a life that we can only approach indirectly. I have used Bassi in this sense to reconstruct other lives within the arc of her life that might not otherwise be visible. But I also see the value of eccentric biography as a way of de-centering a subject that, in other instances, is highly visible to such a degree that it would be very easy to see only the singularity of this one life. An eccentric biography should offer a vision of the world from a specific vantage point while never losing sight of the larger story worth telling. I have been observing the eighteenth-century women of science – the debates about them, their desire to be educated, their successes and failures, and ultimately their sense of what it meant to pursue science in an age that had fallen in love with the idea of science – with Bassi’s perspective on the entire phenomenon in mind, after having spent enough time with all of them to feel reasonably well informed about her reaction to the phenomenon of the Italian filosofesse as a fascinating cultural by-product of her world. This decision has led me to consider more explicitly the question of how several generations of men and women developed the idea of the woman of science, responded to criticisms as the idea became a reality, and eventually rejected this project as a vestige of the Ancien R¦gime of science in the early nineteenth century. Ultimately, in the hands of the biographers this reality, in turn, became the basis for making myths about women of science and eventually for writing their history.71

70 Duccio Balestracci, The Renaissance in the Fields: Family Memoirs of a Fifteenth-Century Tuscan Peasant, trans. by Paolo Squatriti and Betsy Merideth (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), p. xix. 71 For an excellent example of this process, see the entries on Italian women in a mid-nineteenth century American encyclopedia: Sarah Josepha Hale, Woman’s Record; Sketches of All Distinguished Women, from “The Beginning” till A. D. 1850, Arranged in Four Eras (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1853). Sarah Josepha Buell Hale (1788 – 1879) was a New England novelist, poet, essayist, and journalist. She wrote ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’, edited Godey’s Lady’s Book for a half century, and advocated successfully for making Thanksgiving a national holiday, among her many and varied accomplishments. Hale was a strong advocate for women’s education while firmly insisting on the middle-class virtues of the separation of the sexes and a Christian model of female decorum; in this respect she is a fascinating counterpart to a number of the Italian women writers I have discussed earlier in this essay whose works she had evidently read along with original sources in many languages that allowed her to create one of the most impressive and comprehensive histories of women since antiquity ever published; see Nina Baym, ‘Onward Christian Woman: Sarah J. Hale’s History of the World’, New England Quarterly, 63 (1990), 249 – 70.

Massimo Mazzotti

Rethinking Scientific Biography: The Enlightenment of Maria Gaetana Agnesi

Some of the most interesting works in the recent history of science have explored the ways in which value is attached to scientific practices and, more generally, is embedded in forms of scientific life.1 Reconstructing the relationship between knowledge and the virtues of people – as it is articulated in specific historical situations – has indeed proved to be a fruitful strategy for addressing more general questions about the ways in which knowledge is made, and made authoritative. In this essay, I offer a brief overview of the historical development of scientific biography as a genre; I then argue that, when handled appropriately, the biographical narrative is especially suited to the exploration of the moral economies of science.2 More specifically, I propose that the reconstruction of the lives of figures traditionally considered marginal for the history of early modern science – women, for example – can reveal interesting connections between scientific and moral life, thus opening up new vistas on distant scientific worlds. Scientific biography, in other words, is not just a fully legitimate pursuit for the historian of science, it can also be an effective instrument for the social studies of science. In order to illustrate this point, I refer primarily to my experience as a biographer of Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718 – 1799) whose life I tried elsewhere to illuminate. This experience resulted in a significant transformation of my own understanding of the scientific Enlightenment in Continental Europe during the first half of the eighteenth century.3 I then argue against the perception of biography as necessarily focusing on individuals rather than social worlds, and

1 See, for example: Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007); and Steven Shapin, The Scientific Life: A Moral History of a Late Modern Vocation (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008). 2 Edward Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the 18th Century’, Past & Present, 50 (1971), 76 – 136; Lorraine Daston, ‘The Moral Economy of Science’, Osiris, 10 (1995), 2 – 24. 3 Massimo Mazzotti, The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).

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conclude with some remarks on the theoretical challenges that await biographers.

I.

Scientific Biography as a Genre

While extremely successful as a genre for the general audience, biography has so far enjoyed mixed fortunes among professional historians. It has often been remarked that there is a veritable gulf between the goals and methods of professional biographers and those of academic researchers, and that biography enjoys a comparatively low status within the genres of scholarly production.4 Biographers, for example, can talk lightheartedly about identity, personality, and their quest for truth, while pondering how best to produce the definitive biography of a certain individual. After the various turns of the late twentieth century, such statements cannot but be very problematic for the academic researcher, founded as they are on the acritical acceptance of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the ‘postulat du sens de l’existence’.5 And it is not just a matter of academics versus the outside world, or even of postmodernist sensibilities. After all, isn’t the discovery of the radical and irredeemable discontinuity of reality the very core of the modernist novel? In many quarters, the self-proclaimed key task of professional biographers – to treat a life as a story, as a meaningful sequence of events – has long been regarded as nothing more than a rhetorical illusion.6 In the understated words of two authors who have reflected importantly on these matters: ‘professional biographers ask questions about biography that fit uneasily with the concerns of the modern academic community.’7 Scientific biography, in particular, is emblematic of the ambiguous status of this genre in the academic world. In this field one can best observe the chasm between biographers and historians, as well as its significant historical variations. Early modern authors tended to frame the development of mathematics, medicine, and natural philosophy according to classical models such as Dio4 See, for example: Leon Edel, ‘Biography and the Science of Man’, in New Directions in Biography, ed. by Anthony Friedson (Manoa: University Press of Hawaii, 1981), pp. 1 – 11; and Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo, ‘Introduction’, Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography, ed. by Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 1 – 4. On the feminine associations of biography as a reason for its comparatively low status in academia, see Paola Govoni, ‘Biography : A Critical Tool to Bridge the History of Science and the History of Women in Science’, Nuncius, 15 (2000), 399 – 409. 5 Pierre Bourdieu, ‘L’illusion biographique’, Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 62 – 63 (1986), 69 – 72. 6 On this point, see Alain Robbe-Grillet, Le miroir qui revient (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1984), p. 208. 7 Shortland and Yeo, ‘Introduction’, p. 3.

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genes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers. This approach, exemplified by Bernardino Baldi’s Cronica de matematici, published posthumously in 1707, was widely adopted in histories of the advancement of learning.8 It is only in the mid-eighteenth century, with the rise of Enlightenment historiography, that an alternative approach became visible. It was based on the belief that the advancement of human knowledge should not be understood primarily in terms of individual contributions, but rather as the expression of the progressive liberation of the human mind from the yoke of tradition and error. Jean Etienne Montucla’s Histoire des math¦matiques (1758) is a case in point, as it shifts the emphasis from the lives of the protagonists to the rational progress of the discipline.9 On the one hand, the lives of the great heroes and martyrs of modern science proved functional to the construction of a meaningful genealogy of the modern world. On the other, the image of the progress of human reason as a series of necessary stages gained unprecedented popularity. The tension between these two approaches characterizes most historical reconstructions of the development of the sciences from the age of the Encyclop¦die throughout the Victorian era. This tension is already clear in the pioneering series of biographical essays written by Paolo Frisi in the 1770s, especially those on Galileo Galilei and Isaac Newton.10 These carefully crafted lives are, at once, a celebration of exceptional individuals – who are effectively transmuted into icons of modern science – and the reconstruction of the process of emancipation of the human mind from religious obscurantism and cultural backwardness. For Frisi, a Barnabite priest and a convinced reformer, the Jesuits were to be held responsible for the repression of the Galilean school, and were also the promoters of a domestication of science to theological dogma that was the real cause of the decline of Italian science.11 While Galileo was the true father and martyr of the Enlightenment, Newton’s life and career exemplified an alternative way in which the relationship between philosophers and society could be arranged. Galileo had begun the 8 Bernardino Baldi, Cronica de matematici, overo epitome dell’istoria delle vite loro (Urbino: Monticelli, 1707); see also Peter Burke, ‘Reflections on the Origins of Cultural History’, in Interpretation and Cultural History, ed. by Joan Pittock and Andrew Wear (New York: San Martin’s Press, 1991), pp. 153 – 74. On the biographical tradition of the lives of the philosophers, see Liba Taub, ‘Presenting a ‘Life’ as a Guide to the Living: Ancient Accounts of the Life of Pythagoras’, in The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, ed. by Thomas Söderqvist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 17 – 36. 9 Jean Etienne Montucla, Histoire des math¦matiques, dans laquelle on rend compte de leurs progrÀs depuis leur origine jusqu’— nos jours; o¾ l’on expose le tableau & le d¦veloppement des principales d¦couvertes, les contestations qu’elles ont fait na†tre, & les principaux traits de la vie des math¦maticiens les plus c¦lebres, 2 vols (Paris: Jombert, 1758). 10 Paolo Frisi, Elogio del Galileo (Milan: Agnelli, 1775); Paolo Frisi, Elogio del Cavaliere Isacco Newton (Milan: n.p., 1778). 11 Frisi, Elogio del Galileo, pp. 93 – 4.

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‘revolution of the sciences’, Frisi wrote, but it was Newton who had given them their definitive shape, thus becoming ‘the idol of a free, enlightened, and powerful nation’.12 In these essays Frisi insisted on two sets of connections. First, the connection between the moral and epistemic virtues of the two great men which exemplified the ideal virtues of the modern philosopher of nature. Thus Galileo and Newton, emblematically joined by the fateful date of 1642, were ‘free’, ‘active’ and ‘patient’ philosophers as well as ‘affable’, ‘modest’ and ‘generous’ individuals. They did not engage in the exploration of the natural world guided by pride, self-interest, or a passion for speculation, but because they were interested in ‘useful truths’ and ‘in those cases where abstract knowledge can benefit society’.13 Frisi insisted also on the different pace of scientific progress within different political and economic systems. He took Newton’s magnificent funeral in London as the visible emblem of the relation between a ‘free nation’ and its disinterested philosophers: those honors were reciprocated by the ‘absolute [military and political] superiority’ guaranteed to Britain by ‘Newton’s discoveries’.14 That is how, in Hapsburg-controlled Milan, the lives of scientific heroes could be deployed to foster the advancement of the sciences in a context of administrative, economic, and religious reforms inspired by British liberalism.15 In later decades, authors like Auguste Comte and William Whewell refined new models of the development of science based on historical stages. In these models, informed by some version of the idealistic belief in a spirit of the age, discoveries owe less to individual genius and more to method and specific historical and spiritual conditions. For many science historians of the positivist era though, it remained all too natural to organize their materials in the framework of the great men’s contributions to the advancement of science. The spate of celebratory and highly idealized biographies of the great men of science of the early twentieth century marks the high point of this tradition.16 Much of the later historiographical debate revolved precisely around the critique of this approach, and of its theoretical underpinnings. In essence, the new images of 12 13 14 15

Frisi, Elogio del Galileo, p. 134. Ibid., pp. 131 – 34. Frisi, Newton, p. 13. On the ‘exemplary lives’ of natural philosophers in early modern culture, see Stephen Gaukroger, ‘Biography as a Route to Understanding Early Modern Natural Philosophy’, in Söderqvist, The History and Poetics, pp. 37 – 49. 16 See, for example: Robert Murray, Science and Scientists in the Nineteenth Century (London: Sheldon Press, 1925); Joseph Mayer, The Seven Seals of Science: An Account of the Unfoldment of Orderly Knowledge & Its Influence on Human Affairs (New York: The Century Company, 1927); Philipp Lenard, Große Naturforscher: eine Geschichte der Naturforschung in Lebensbeschreibungen (München: Lehmann, 1929); and Eric Bell, Men of Mathematics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1937).

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science that came to dominate the intellectual landscape of the mid-twentieth century made it very hard to carve out a theoretical and methodological space for biography. In this context, the narrative of the ‘great men’ rapidly lost its appeal among professional historians of science: the eclipse of biography as a legitimate genre was swift and apparently irremediable. For one thing, the neopositivist separation of the world of logic and perception from that of life and social experience turned scientific biographies into a marginal and cognitively irrelevant literary category. One might expect that those historians of science that inclined towards a social history inspired by the French school of the Annales would engage more seriously with the biographical genre. But this was not the case, as they focused their attention primarily on structures, institutions, and long dur¦e phenomena, rather than on individual experience. Once again, although for different reasons, the experience of individuals was deemed irrelevant to the reconstruction and understanding of scientific change. The fortune of scientific biography did not improve much even in the 1960s and 1970s, when the historiography of science became receptive to new ways of doing social history that emphasized interpretation and microanalysis. Interestingly, one can find in much of this new social history of science – and even more so in the history of medicine – a mistrust of biography that is as profound as that manifested within contemporary rationalist philosophy of science.17 In 1979, when Thomas Hankins wrote his well-known essay in defense of scientific biography, his was still a rather isolated voice, amidst a generalized hostility towards the genre. ‘[S]cientific biography does not enjoy a very good reputation these days,’ he noted.18 Hankins argued passionately for the usefulness of biography as a literary genre for the history of science. Not just of any biography though, but of a biography that integrates as much as possible what he calls the ‘personality’ of the subject and their scientific work. The biographer should try to bring together the many dimensions of the subject’s life, and show the ways in which they are connected to each other. Hankins put forward some interesting programmatic considerations, such as the three ‘necessary attributes’ for the kind of scientific biography that he is advocating. First, it must engage seriously with the scientific content, and not just with colorful anecdotes and the question of personality – as was typical of nineteenth-century biographies. Second, it should delineate the ‘intellectual make-up’ of the subject, i. e. to integrate the different dimensions of their life ‘into a single coherent picture’. Third, it should be ‘readable’: the author should convey enough information 17 On the fall of the ‘medical hero’, see Beth Linker, ‘Resuscitating the ‘Great Doctor’: The Career of Biography in Medical History’, in Söderqvist, The History and Poetics, pp. 221 – 39. 18 Thomas L. Hankins, ‘In Defense of Biography : The Use of Biography in the History of Science’, History of Science, 17 (1979), 1 – 16 (p. 2).

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about the relevant science without departing too dramatically from the subjects and their surroundings. A balance that is remarkably difficult to strike, and the reader is presented with some illustrious examples of unsuccessful attempts to get it right.19 Following Hankins’ groundbreaking contribution, there has been a definite return of interest in scientific biography, and various authors have been striving towards a reinterpretation and a re-legitimation of the genre in the academic landscape of the late twentieth century. The nineties have indeed seen the beginning of a sophisticated debate on the nature and the role of biography in professional history of science, and the publication of works like Telling Lives in Science: Essays on Scientific Biography (1996), a collection of essays edited by Michael Shortland and Richard Yeo. Since then, the topic has maintained a good visibility within the historiography of science, as shown by a 2006 focus section devoted to biography in Isis, and a collection edited by Thomas Söderqvist, significantly entitled The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography (2007), which gathers contributions from a 2002 conference.20 This new wave of studies has fostered a reflection on the history of the genre, and on its possible meanings in the context of a history of science that has been profoundly reshaped by the theoretical agenda and methodological insights of the new sociology of science of the 1970s and early 1980s. Many of the contributors to this debate have suggested – from different methodological perspectives – that biography should return to the toolkit of the professional historian of science. Quite simply, it should be seen as yet another legitimate technique for the study of scientific practice. After Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), and while micro-historical case-studies fill up the professional journals of history of science and medicine, it seems indeed curious to argue that biographical reconstructions are invariably ill-suited to pursue the aims of the social and cultural history of science.21 Today historians of science would hardly feel that they have to justify themselves for writing a biography. However, the genre is still surrounded by a persistent ambiguity. This unease can be related first of all to the perception of a dichotomy between the ‘biographical’ and the ‘social’, between individual experience on the one hand, and the world of norms and institutions on the other. Even Hankins, in his 1979 apology, pointed out that biography ‘is unsuitable for studying the social and institutional organization of science’.22 On the contrary, my own project on Agnesi originated from the conviction that I could use her life 19 Ibid., pp. 7 – 11. 20 Telling Lives in Science, ed. by Shortland and Yeo; ‘Focus: Biography in the History of Science’, Isis, 97 (2006), 302 – 29; The History and Poetics, ed. by Söderqvist. 21 Simon Schaffer and Steven Shapin, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 22 Hankins, ‘In Defense of Biography’, p. 11.

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story as a probe to explore the world of Catholic Enlightenment, and to delineate its little known social and cultural contours. In particular, I was interested in reconstructing the connections between Catholic Enlightenment and the practices of natural philosophy and mathematics. Another set of questions had to do with the gendering of science and mathematics, and the historical conditions that would make it possible for a woman of the first half of the eighteenth century to establish herself as a credible mathematician. Here my project ran against another couple of obstacles identified by Hankins. First, he suggested that biographies should be about the protagonists of the history of science. Background characters and marginal individuals (the ‘little man’, in Hankins’ words) will always have a hard time finding their way into biography. Second, and quite crucially for my project, ‘certain fields of science are especially difficult for the biographer, the most difficult of all being mathematics’. Writing the scientific biography of a mathematician is ‘devilishly difficult’ because this science ‘seems to have a life unto itself ’, it is ‘independent’ from the cultural context, except for those cases in which it intersects physics and philosophy. Inevitably, and here Hankins is certainly correct, ‘biographies in this field tend to be very technical, or very personal and anecdotal’.23

II.

The Enigma of Agnesi

Maria Gaetana Agnesi was the first woman to publish a book of mathematics in her own name, a treatise of algebra and calculus entitled Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della giovent¾ italiana (Analytical Institutions for the Use of Italian Youth). The book appeared in two elegant volumes in Milan, then a duchy under Austrian rule, in 1748. Previously, Agnesi had published Propositiones Philosophicae (1738), roughly the equivalent of the theses philosophicae that male students would publish and defend at the end of their cursus studiorum in contemporary colleges.24 Her name had also appeared on the title page of a Latin oration published in 1727 which contained a resolute defense of the right of women to study the fine arts and the ‘sublime sciences’.25 It is unlikely that Agnesi, then nine years old, wrote this text. We know, however, that she declaimed it from memory for an audience of family friends in the summer of 1727, 23 Ibid., pp. 11 – 2. 24 Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Propositiones philosophicae qua crebris disputationibus domi habitus coram clarissimis viris explicabat extempore, et ab objectis vindicabat Maria Cajetana de Agnesiis mediolanensis (Milan: Malatesta, 1738). 25 Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Oratio qua ostenditur : artium liberalium studia a femineo sexu neutiquam abhorrere habita a Maria de Agnesis rethoricae operam dante anno aetatis suae nono nondum exacto, die 18. Augusti 1727 (Milan: Malatesta, [1727]).

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in the garden of her family palazzo. She will make a similar point, though much more concisely, in her introduction to the Instituzioni. In these pages, significantly dedicated to Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, Agnesi called for all women to contribute ‘to the glory of their sex’ through the practice of the arts, the sciences, and indeed of politics.26 The Instituzioni, which was conceived as a textbook for ‘Italian youth’, did not assume any previous knowledge of algebra on the part of the student, and was among the very first attempts to provide an extensive and accessible introduction to what was still a set of rather esoteric mathematical techniques. The book was well received, and it was translated into French and English.27 Shortly after its publication, Agnesi, who was already a member of some academies, was offered the chance to lecture on mathematics at the University of Bologna. Later in the eighteenth century, Joseph Louis Lagrange would mention the Instituzioni as an important part of his training, and would recommend the second volume as a good introduction to calculus.28 Thanks to this publication, the name of Agnesi entered the history of mathematics – even though only as marginalia. Her contemporaries had experienced Agnesi as a fascinating and slightly unsettling prodigy who inhabited a precarious space between masculine skills, such as the ability to defend philosophical positions in public disputations, and feminine virtues, such as her modesty and ritiratezza (seclusion). For later historians however, she would simply be a historical curiosity whose name would be mentioned in association with the Instituzioni, together with a little, mostly incorrect, biographical information. When her main book appeared, leading Italian and French mathematicians praised Agnesi’s style as clear and effective, but her historiographical fortune declined rapidly towards the end of the century, and never quite recovered.29 What seems to have been fatal is, above all, the fact that no original discoveries were associated with her name, only the alleged first description of an interesting but rather useless curve. It should be noted that, due to a somewhat revealing mistranslation, this curve was referred to as ‘the witch of Agnesi’.30 Agnesi’s perceived lack of originality was given an authoritative and would-be definitive seal of approval by Gino Loria in 1901. In that year Loria, a prominent historian 26 Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Instituzioni analitiche ad uso della giovent¾ italiana, 2 vols (Milan: Regia Ducal Corte, 1748), quote from the unpaged introduction. 27 A partial French translation of the Instituzioni appeared as Trait¦s ¦l¦mentaires de calcul diff¦rentiel et the calcul int¦gral (Paris: Jombert 1775). It was translated into English as Analytical Institutions (London: Taylor and Wilks, 1801). 28 See Lagrange’s lectures, published in Maria Teresa Borgato, ‘Giuseppe Luigi Lagrange: Principi di Analisi Sublime’, Bollettino di storia delle scienze matematiche, 7 (1987), 45 – 200 (esp. pp. 154, 177, and 187). 29 On the reception of the Instituzioni, see Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 120 – 22. 30 Ibid., pp. 116 – 17, and especially the references given in footnote n. 30.

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of mathematics, delivered a lecture in which he argued for the essential incapacity of the female mind to produce original knowledge in logic and mathematics.31 In an intellectual landscape in which the epistemological divide between the context of discovery and that of justification was sharp and unbridgeable, Loria’s claim was tantamount to banning women from any serious mathematical research, and hence from the history of mathematics. Nineteenth and twentieth-century historians did refer to Agnesi as a heroine of the Enlightenment, but always bearing in mind the necessary limitations of her gender, and therefore of her technical and conceptual accomplishments. Indeed, the belief that the practice of mathematics is essentially gendered is not as distant as some of us might like to think. One should just remember that, in 2005, Larry Summers, then president of Harvard University, speculated that behind the gender gap in top science and engineering jobs there might be ‘issues of intrinsic aptitude’.32 Mathematics, however, is not the only context in which Agnesi’s name has been meaningful. By the time of her death, in 1799, she was already being celebrated as a champion of the Catholic faith, and indeed of the Catholic reaction.33 Her devotion, and extraordinary commitment to charity work, were well known in the city of Milan and, in the nineteenth century, they were described in numerous apologetic pamphlets and short biographies that circulated throughout the Italian peninsula. Her commitment took visible institutional forms, as when, in 1771, she became the first director of the female section of the Pio Albergo Trivulzio, a new charitable institution opened in Milan to assist the city’s poor and invalid.34 This was just one of the ways in which she collaborated with the local ecclesiastical authorities, other interesting examples being her teaching in primary schools attached to Milanese parishes, and her activity as an advisor to the Archbishop of Milan on delicate theological matters. Moreover, among her unpublished papers one can find a few theological and devotional texts. The most remarkable is a large fragment of a manuscript in her own hand, entitled Mystic Heaven, a sort of guide to contemplative practices leading to the ‘transforming union’ with God.35 Biographers of Agnesi have found it particularly problematic to reconcile 31 Gino Loria, ‘Donne in matematica’, in Id., Scritti, conferenze, discorsi sulla storia delle matematiche (Padua: Milani, 1937), pp. 447 – 66. 32 Lawrence H. Summers, ‘Remarks at NBER conference on diversifying the science and engineering workforce’, January 14, 2005, see at http://www.harvard.edu/president/speeches/summers_2005/nber.php (last retrieved 9/12/2013). On the episode, see Pnina G. AbirAm’s paper in this book. 33 See, for example, Benvenuto Robbio di San Raffaele, Disgrazie di Donna Urania, ovvero degli studi femminili (Parma: Regal Palazzo, 1793), pp. 122 – 31. 34 Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 147 – 49; see note n.11 for the relevant archival sources. 35 Ibid., pp. 74 – 7 and 87 – 92.

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what they perceived as two radically divergent dimensions of her personality. They saw, on the one hand, a resolute defender of the rights of women and an enthusiastic practitioner of the new science of Galileo and Newton. On the other, a devout churchgoer and a champion of the Catholic Church. Emblematic of this tendency to polarize her life is the belief, duly reported by the Dictionary of Scientific Biography, that after the publication of the Instituzioni she wore the habit of the Augustinian nuns, also known as the ‘blue nuns’. In fact, Agnesi never entered any religious order, nor did she cut completely her relations with family and friends, as has often been assumed. It is understandable that, in the age of revolutions first, and then in the context of the so-called ‘warfare of science and religion’, historians would struggle to make sense of the scant and apparently contradictory traces of her life. So much so that it became handy to label Agnesi a ‘psychological enigma’.36 Agnesi’s historiographical fortune did not improve much in the twentieth century as she continued to be portrayed either as a proto-feminist or a quasisaint of the Church with the variant, in 1939, of Agnesi as the ideal fascist woman.37 Incidentally, one should not be surprised to discover that biographies of Agnesi have been put to all kinds of uses. The same thing happened to her more illustrious male colleagues, starting with Galileo and Newton. Rather than being a distinctive weakness of biography as a genre, this should be simply seen as a manifestation of the fact that inevitably we write about the past as an expression of present concerns. In biographies these concerns are often more apparent than in other genres; this makes them conducive to the reflection on one’s own situatedness as author, and on its implications. The famous remarks of Richard Westfall on his experience as a biographer of Newton are extremely instructive in this respect, as he reflects precisely on the way in which his ideals and expectations shaped his historical narrative. It is not coincidental that historians who have engaged in biographical writing, often admiring or loathing their subjects, are more likely to end up engaging in similar exercises in reflexivity.38 But let us return to the biographies of Agnesi. These texts continued to rehash a very limited amount of information, mostly anecdotal, derived from a first biography published by a family friend in 1799.39 None of the later biographers seems to have looked carefully at the Instituzioni, or leafed through her manuscript papers, now at the Biblioteca Ambrosiana in Milan. One remarkable exception is the biography by Luisa Anzoletti (1901), an intellectual and poet 36 Luisa Anzoletti, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Milan: Cogliati, 1901), p. 340. 37 Cornelia Benazzoli, Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Milan: Bocca, 1939). 38 See Mary Jo Nye’s insightful remarks on her own experience in ‘Scientific Biography : History of Science by Another Means?’, Isis, 97 (2006), 322 – 29 (esp. p. 328). 39 Antonio Frisi, Elogio storico di Donna Maria Gaetana Agnesi (Milan: Galeazzi, 1799).

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who was at the time a prominent figure within the Catholic movement for female emancipation.40 Her specific social and cultural position created the conditions for the emergence of an image of Agnesi that escaped the usual dichotomy of the scienziata santa (saintly scientist). For Anzoletti, Agnesi’s staunch support for female education and participation in the worlds of art and science were not in contrast with her sincere devotion and charitable work, quite the contrary. Agnesi’s socially engaged religiosity was indeed a model to which Catholic feminists of the early twentieth-century could look for guidance and inspiration. Anzoletti’s biography contains the first – and for a long time only – description of Agnesi’s manuscripts, including the theological papers, which had attracted no attention whatsoever up to that point. Anzoletti was thus able to move beyond the usual stereotype, and provide a view of Agnesi’s life that goes a long way in the direction of Hankins’s ‘integrated’ biography. On the form and contents of her scientific work, however, Anzoletti deferred to the unflattering judgment of historians of mathematics such as Loria. In 1989 Clifford Truesdell published the most in-depth study of Agnesi’s scientific work to date, which also contained some interesting addenda such as a reconstruction of the story of the ‘witch of Agnesi’, and of the origins of its bizarre name.41 This study, however, was still informed by concerns about historical priority, and by what one could call the ‘historical curiosity’ model. We keep talking about Agnesi, Truesdell concluded, simply because she was a woman engaged in mathematics at a time when this activity was, and would continue to be for a long time, entirely dominated by men. But there is nothing in her work that justifies special attention. In fact, Truesdell’s judgment on the Instituzioni is in clear continuity with Loria’s remarks; for him too it is a mere work of popularization that lacks originality, and therefore historical interest. It is remarkable that no historian of mathematics has ever given much thought to the reasons why a wealthy and devout young lady like Agnesi should decide to spend a few years of her life working on a tract of calculus. If from our point of view this might look like a reasonable thing to do, it certainly was an eccentric choice to make in 1740s Milan. Apart from the obvious gender issues, no one in the duchy had shown any interest in this kind of mathematics, and there was no need for a textbook as no one was even planning to teach it. For a talented woman in Agnesi’s position it would have been much more obvious to engage in cultural practices like poetry or music, which would have allowed her to enter a well defined, legitimated system of recognition and rewards within the 40 Anzoletti, Maria Gaetana Agnesi. 41 Clifford Truesdell, ‘Maria Gaetana Agnesi’, Archive for the History of Exact Sciences, 40 (1989), 113 – 42; Id., ‘Corrections and Additions for Maria Gaetana Agnesi’, Archive for the History of Exact Sciences, 43 (1992), 385 – 86.

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network of the Milanese conversazioni. I began following the traces of Agnesi driven by this and other related questions. I was not interested in badly-formed questions of priority, or in the misleading task of assigning her a place in the canon of western mathematical rationality. My interest lay rather in the exploration of the ways in which knowledge is made and made authoritative under specific historical circumstances. I was interested in credibility, the credibility of knowledge and people. How could Agnesi establish herself as a credible mathematician in the mid-eighteenth century, when women were routinely banned from scientific academies, universities, and indeed from formal higher education? Which factors had made it possible for her to gain a status that was routinely out of reach for women? And why would a talented woman like her devote herself to mathematics, rather than poetry, music, the fine arts, or even natural history – i. e. areas in which the presence of women would be less problematic, and that intersected salon life in a more obvious way? What was her own understanding of the meaning of doing mathematics? First of all, one should notice that the banning of women from early modern scientific institutions was less systematic than is usually assumed, at least in some Italian cities. That a few talented women could negotiate their way through academies and universities in eighteenth-century Italy has indeed been demonstrated in the exemplary works of Marta Cavazza and Paula Findlen. Cavazza has explored with particular attention the Bolognese context and its institutional complexities, reconstructing networks of patronage that could support women, offering them resources that were unparalleled in other European settings. Building on these pioneering studies, Findlen has skillfully reconstructed the career and patronage network of Laura Bassi, the most famous learned woman, or filosofessa, from Bologna. Bassi was awarded a university degree in 1732, and she taught for many years experimental physics at the local university. Findlen has also been studying a number of cases of eighteenth-century learned women from other Italian cities and provincial settings, thus tracing the contours of a phenomenon that was much more significant than previously believed.42 With respect to these studies, to which mine is obviously indebted, the case of Agnesi added an inescapable religious dimension, and the presence of the 42 Marta Cavazza, ‘Laura Bassi e il suo gabinetto di fisica sperimentale: Realt— e mito’, Nuncius, 10 (1995), 715 – 53; Ead., ‘Dottrici e lettrici dell’universit— di Bologna nel Settecento’, Annali di storia delle universit— italiane, 1 (1997), 109 – 26; Ead., ‘Les femmes — l’acad¦mie: Le cas de Bologne’, in Acad¦mies et soci¦t¦s savants en Europe, 1650 – 1800, ed. by Daniel-Odon Hurel and G¦rard Laudin (Paris: Champion, 2000), pp. 161 – 75. Paula Findlen, ‘Science as a Career in Enlightenment Italy’, Isis, 84 (1993), 441 – 69; Ead., ‘A Forgotten Newtonian: Women and Science in the Italian Provinces’, in The Sciences in Enlightened Europe, ed. by William Clarke, Jan Golinski, and Simon Schaffer (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999), pp. 313 – 49.

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profoundly gendered practice of mathematics. It also invited the reconstruction of the little known early eighteenth-century Milanese social and cultural setting, and of its relations to both Vienna – the capital – and the ecclesiastical authorities in Rome. In other words, it invited an evocation of the ‘world’ of Agnesi, hence the centrality of this term in the title of the book that ensued: The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God. To understand the unusual social trajectory of Agnesi, her science, and her existential choices, was indeed conditional to understanding her world. At the same time, following Agnesi’s moves through the web of social life was an effective way to map the set of social and cultural resources that she could rely upon, as well as the normative systems that framed her actions. My efforts to enlighten Agnesi, in other words, would also be efforts to rediscover the Enlightenment of Agnesi. In this perspective, the biographical approach appeared to me the best way to achieve my key goals. Granted, mine was to be in many ways a peculiar kind of biographical narrative. For example, I was not interested in trying to cover the various periods of Agnesi’s life with the same attention, and I decided not to stick to a strict chronological order. Rather, I focused on a few key moments, due both to documentary limitations and my perception of their overall significance. Also, I did not navigate at a constant analytical level, which is typical of most biographies, but I kept changing the scale of analysis within every chapter, moving ‘upwards’ from some minute aspects of the life of Agnesi and her family – an object, a building, a prayer, a letter, a conversation – to the power structures of Milanese society and the way they were connected to transnational systems. This way of proceeding, which is inspired by the lessons of Italian micro-history and Michel Foucault’s ‘microphysics of power’, can serve multiple purposes. In this way, for example, I was able to construct the thread of Agnesi’s life by weaving it effectively into the texture of Milanese social life. Conversely, by linking the material objects, gestures, and words that surrounded Agnesi to large social and cognitive formations, I was able to observe the ways in which these formations entered the concrete experience of my historical actors. In particular, this way of proceeding was functional to the exploration of the relationship between science and religion as it was understood and experienced by Agnesi and her acquaintances. In Hankins’s parlance, it would be Agnesi’s own concrete experience that would guide my attempt to integrate the allegedly inconsistent dimensions of her life. This integration, I believed, should not be realized through the imposition of some ready-made historiographical model. I was not trying, say, to replace the ‘warfare thesis’ with some sort of given-forgranted harmony. In fact, unlike Hankins, I am not even convinced that the outcome of such reconstructions should be necessarily an integrated, coherent ‘whole’, where everything has to make sense as in a perfect mechanism. That cultures are best not understood as self-contained and coherent wholes is indeed

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one of the most profound lessons of late twentieth-century anthropology. I thus focused on specific moments of Agnesi’s life, her family, and her closest acquaintances, turning these episodes into privileged sites for the exploration of the concrete relationship between epistemological values and moral values in a closely scrutinized historical situation. The experience of historical actors, rather than the theoretical formulations of eighteenth-century thinkers, would guide my exploration. In fact, I ended up dealing extensively with the writings of Ludovico Muratori (1672 – 1750) and other theologians and philosophers, but always in dialogue – and often in tension – with Agnesi’s concrete experience, and her own understanding of their arguments.

III.

Mysticism and Logic

What does it mean to use the life of a historical actor as a site for the study of the concrete relationship between science and religion? An example will clarify my way of proceeding. As I was trying to understand why Agnesi should choose to embark on such an unlikely task as writing a textbook of calculus, I began looking at the specific technical features of her book. My expectation was that the very style and content of the book could provide me with precious indications about Agnesi’s intentions and goals. The book presents indeed some distinctive features when compared to contemporary productions, both in style and content. For one thing, it looks like a hybrid of different mathematical traditions, namely the Leibnizian-Bernoullian and the Newtonian. Roughly speaking, it is written in Leibnizian algebraic notation, but the thinking behind it seems always genuinely geometrical, as was proper in the Newtonian tradition. It is not a coincidence that the Instituzioni would attract the interest of some British scholars at the turn of the nineteenth century, at a time of bitter disputes about the respective merits of the two competing approaches.43 Agnesi’s geometrical inclination, which was definitely running against the main trends of continental mathematics, is confirmed by other features of the book. For example, she leaves out everything that has to do with the possible applications of calculus to describe physical phenomena and solve problems in the experimental sciences. A choice that seems to have puzzled contemporary specialists as well as twentieth-century historians of science such as Truesdell, who commented: ‘while learning calculus, she does not wish to study rational 43 Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 116 – 17. On Newtonian calculus, see Niccolý Guicciardini, The Development of Newtonian Calculus in Britain, 1700 – 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

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mechanics as well!’.44 One should not think that Agnesi ignored the many ways in which calculus was being deployed in those years, from celestial mechanics to hydrodynamics, and which were indeed driving the development of new mathematical concepts and techniques. As emerges from her correspondence and manuscript papers, she was well aware of what she was leaving out. ‘The [curves] that depend on the knowledge of physics I left aside on purpose’, she wrote to a well-known mathematician, ‘for, as Your Excellency has seen, I did not want to get involved with physical matters. I left aside all those problems that depend upon them, in order to avoid going beyond pure analysis, and its application to geometry.’45 These words point to what is indeed one of the most intriguing features of the book, namely its exclusive focus on what Agnesi perceived as ‘pure mathematics’. She was interested in practicing and teaching those parts of mathematics that are the most distant from the empirical world, and whose certainty is grounded solely on the intellectual perception of geometrical truths, rather than on empirical findings, or the manipulation of algebraic algorithms – which for Agnesi is a blind, mechanical operation. Her open references to the works of the now forgotten Charles Reyneau (1656 – 1728) and the Oratorian mathematical school that had gathered around Nicolas Malebranche are further signs of her inclinations, as is the list of mathematical books in her personal library. To sum up, Agnesi seems to have been primarily interested in mathematics as an intellectual exercise, at a time when the great majority of mathematicians were actually driven by the amazing versatility of the new algebraic methods in capturing features of the empirical world. This choice had significant implications, not only at the level of style, but also for the logical structure of the book, and for the way in which she treated some key arguments, like the nature of infinitesimals.46 In order to provide an historical interpretation for the distinctive features of Agnesi’s mathematics, browsing through the books on her shelves was necessary, but not sufficient. I decided to follow her around in her daily routines as well. For this purpose I used letters and archival documents that described the possessions of the Agnesi family, including things they owned and spaces in which they lived – and the way they used them. What stood out in these patterns was not only the unusual conversazione in which Pietro Agnesi staged with great care the performances of his gifted daughters – Maria Teresa was a respected harpsichordist and composer – but also the interaction of the family with spe-

44 Quote from Truesdell, Agnesi, p. 133. See also Mazzotti, Agnesi, p. 117. 45 Letter to Jacopo Riccati dated October 1, 1746, in Maria Soppelsa, ‘Jacopo Riccati – Maria Gaetana Agnesi: carteggio 1745 – 1751’, Annali dell’Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza di Firenze, 10 (1985), 117 – 59 (p. 128). 46 Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 105 – 23.

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cific religious institutions and spiritual traditions.47 The association with the Theatine priests of the nearby church of San Antonio was particularly strong, and was crucial in shaping the religious experience of the Agnesi, and of Maria Gaetana in particular. Her devotion was ascetic, profoundly anti-baroque, and oriented towards the ‘century’ – i. e. the world, rather than the safer spaces of the church, the cloister, and the family houses. Agnesi divided her time between charity work, which increased significantly after the publication of the book, prayer, and meditation. Since her childhood she had been practicing the austere form of spirituality fostered in texts such as The Spiritual Combat by the Theatine Lorenzo Scupoli, a counter-reformist bestseller that would accompany Agnesi for the rest of her life.48 In its direct, unsophisticated style, The Spiritual Combat portrays the human being as the battleground of opposite forces: the self-destructive senses and passions, and the well-trained intellect, which can guide the will to achieve a worthy spiritual life. Self-control is key in this form of devotion, hence the emphasis on exercises designed to train the intellect and the will against the deception of the passions and the senses. Agnesi spent long hours immersed in meditation, at home and in front of an altar on the right side of the church of San Antonio. There she contemplated the representations of objects related to the passion of Christ, such as the column, the ropes, and the nails, as a means to enter into meditation on the holy mysteries. These material objects facilitated Agnesi’s participation in Christ’s suffering, her imitation of his pure love, up to the final self-annihilation in the divinity, that particular state that she would refer to as ‘mystical marriage’, or ‘transforming union’. Agnesi described her own ascetic techniques in The Mystic Heaven, where she guides the reader through various contemplative stages, up to the mystical marriage and the contemplation of the Holy Trinity. In this process everything seems to acquire its real meaning, and reveal its true value. The successful contemplation and the Christomorphic transformation require the cooperation (Agnesi says ‘conspiracy’) of both sensibility and rationality, will and intellect. ‘While the human mind contemplates in marvel [the virtues of Christ]’, she wrote, ‘the heart imitates them with love’. In this perspective the intellectual dimension, although not valuable per se, is a necessary component of the spiritual experience of the believer. In fact, the soul is brought to the first mystic heaven by ‘the gifts of intellect and wisdom’.49 Agnesi is consciously adhering to a tradition in which the intellect is described as ‘the eye of the soul’: it must be strengthened through exercise, and must be kept ‘lucid and clear’ in order to contribute to self-control, 47 On the functioning of the Agnesi conversazione and the meaning of Maria Gaetana’s performances, see Ibid., pp. 1 – 21. 48 [Lorenzo Scupoli], Combattimento spirituale, ordinato da un servo di Dio (Venice: appresso i Gioliti, 1589). 49 Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 90 – 1 (p. 91).

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prayer, and concentration. Only a clear intellect can guide the will to a fulfilling spiritual life. Clear intellect means an intellect freed from the pollution of the earthly appetites: only such an intellect can see things as they really are. Negligence and idleness are not just despicable, they are the most dangerous vices, as they ‘infect’ the will, and ‘blind’ the intellect. To keep one’s intellect lucid and clear through constant training is therefore an essential duty for the believer.50 The uses of a well-trained intellect are described by Agnesi in The Mystic Heaven, where she deploys ascetic techniques to meditate on the passion of Christ. But the same techniques could be deployed to control feelings and imagination in every moment of one’s life. One key element of these practices of self-discipline is the capacity of ‘attention’. This was understood as the ability to concentrate for a prolonged period of time, while directing the searchlight of the intellect towards a single object, in order to both inspect its structure and transcend its materiality, moving from the thing as we perceive it to its more profound meanings and associations. Thus, for example, through attention one can move from the contemplation of the cross and the nails to that of the mysteries of the passion of Christ. This is the same ability, Agnesi believed, that makes the natural philosopher fully aware of the power of God by separating the material thing – say the complex eye of an insect – from its spiritual meaning, and elevating the mind to the contemplation of its creator. ‘Attention’ is a theme that appears often in both devotional and epistemological texts around 1700, and it plays a central role, for example, in the philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche. Agnesi does not show much interest in Malebranche’s metaphysics, but she is definitely interested in the ways he tries to connect intellectual activity and spiritual values through hybrid concepts like attention. For Malebranche, attention is not simply the ‘occasional cause’ of our knowledge, it is a ‘natural prayer’ as well. For his disciple Reyneau, the ‘speculative truths’ of mathematics, those that are ‘far from the senses’ are the ones that have the highest spiritual value precisely because they refine our capacity of attention.51 When Agnesi is writing her book, the Oratorian tradition was all but discredited in the eyes of leading European mathematicians. It was not only their Cartesian assumptions that looked outdated, but also their attempt to integrate traditional metaphysical concerns into modern science. Agnesi was able to drop the heavy apparatus of Malebranche’s metaphysics, and the cumbersome style of an author like Reyneau, while rescuing their fundamental goal of investing key aspects of modern science with spiritual value. In her subtle and understated way – exemplary 50 Ibid., pp. 36 – 7 (p. 37). 51 Ibid., pp. 118 – 19. On Reyneau, see also Jean Charles Juhel, ‘Le role de proportions dans l’evolution de l’ecriture alg¦brique au XVIIÀme siÀcle’, Sciences et techniques en perspective, 8 (1984 – 1985), 57 – 162 (pp. 114 – 15).

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incarnation of the feminine virtue of modesty – Agnesi produced an introduction to the most advanced mathematics of her age that was also, to those who shared her religious form of life, a training ground for ‘attention’, a most valuable ascetic ability. Agnesi was convinced that mathematics, and geometry in particular, held a unique epistemological status, due to the certainty of its propositions, and the ‘evidentness’ of its truths which are apprehended solely through intellectual intuition. For her, calculus was the most sophisticated kind of geometry to date, the one that would require the highest level of concentration to master – indeed of ‘attention’. Training young students in this discipline meant therefore to equip them with an ability that will be key to their understanding of the world, as well as to their spiritual life. Geometry gives us ‘the skill to control the imagination’, Malebranche had written in a similar vein, ‘and a controlled imagination sustains the mind’s perception and attention’.52 I soon realized that the mental state of ‘attention’ was also at the center of much of the production of the antibaroque painter Giuseppe Antonio Petrini (circa 1677 – 1755). While Agnesi was working on her book, Petrini was translating the climate of religious reformism that pervaded Milan and the surrounding region in pictorial form. His style is decidedly distant from contemporary decorative rococo, and his choice of themes is equally peculiar. Above all, he seems interested in portraying saints and natural philosophers, capturing them in that particular state of absorption that Agnesi considered to be a prerequisite for the exercise of attention and, therefore, for the acquisition of both true knowledge and divine enlightenment.53 The reconstruction of the complex meaning of ‘attention’ provides an illustration of my overall strategy. In order to reconstruct Agnesi’s religious culture I followed her gestures and mental exercises from the family prie-Dieu, through the parish churches and Sunday schools of the neighborhood, up to Vienna and Rome. In order to do this I relied on the correspondence networks of the Republic of Letters, but also on other aspects of her material and visual culture. Thus, for example, I reconstructed the establishment of new devotions, such as that of San Gaetano, that linked the Agnesi to the imperial court via the mediation of the Theatine congregation. Or, to give another example, I have let the Agnesi’s Arcadian taste in the fine arts and decoration, and the careful assemblage of paintings on the walls of their city house, guide me towards a new moral and aesthetic discourse that informed their collection, which was shared by the Archbishop of Milan, and found support in certain sectors of the Roman Curia. In conclusion, ‘attention’ as understood and experienced by Agnesi was part 52 Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 429. 53 Mazzotti, Agnesi, pp. 85 – 7.

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of a constellation of practices and values that crossed the boundaries of devotion, theology, natural philosophy, and mathematics. These practices and values, more than any abstract set of principles, came to constitute the spiritual and scientific life of my early eighteenth-century actors. In my study, I decided to use the term ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ to refer to this loosely defined cultural formation and its social referents.54 More and more, the theme of ‘attention’ appeared to me as just one aspect of a broader set of practices for the disciplining of the intellect and the imagination that are at the core of Catholic Enlightenment. This cultural movement, which expressed the priorities and aspirations of a significant portion of the European Catholic elites during the first half of the eighteenth century, has been thus far ignored by the history of science. At the cost, I believe, of seriously limiting our understanding of the contemporary mathematics and natural philosophy.

IV.

Conclusion

It is now time to return to biography, and to draw some conclusions. In the previous pages, I have tried to give an idea of the ways in which I used the biographical approach in my book on Agnesi. I moved from the recognition that the rigidly dualistic narrative – life and science – that characterized most biographies of the past, especially in mathematics, needs to be abandoned. But what should replace it? Rather than integrating the various dimensions of Agnesi’s life under some superior point of view or unifying principle, I have tried to understand how the interaction between these dimensions was perceived by Agnesi herself. In particular, I have shown how – in her experience – certain boundaries that would appear obvious and rigid to later commentators (between religious and scientific practices, for example) were rather fluid. The point for me was not to argue that there exists a relationship between science and religion in some abstract sense, but to show empirically the way in which actors like Agnesi constructed and used this relationship. A biographical approach and good old archive-based family history have also been key to my understanding of the functioning of the Agnesi conversazione, and of the network of alliances and resources, material and symbolic, that supported the career and credibility of this talented woman. Overall, I believe that the persisting doubts about the status of scientific biography and the perception of a divide between the study of individual experience and ‘the social’ are singularly unjustified, for both practical and the54 For a historiographical assessment of the notion of ‘Catholic Enlightenment’, and my use of this term, see Ibid., pp. 38 – 43.

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oretical reasons. Practically, one could simply refer to the spate of excellent casestudies that have been produced in the last couple of decades, where microanalysis and the focus on individuals are deployed to reveal the essential features of historically given systems of power and distributions of knowledge. The studies of patronage systems in science are a good case in point.55 This wave of scholarship is underpinned by theoretical insights derived from the new social sciences of the 1960s, and in particular from micro-sociology and other interpretive trends that have profoundly redefined the meaning and scope of ‘the social’. This transformation has concerned primarily our understanding of the long-debated relationship between structure and action, and of the very notion of agency. This rethinking of the social has gone a long way in bridging of the distance between individual action and social structures. The emergence of a performative understanding of social structures, for example, has made it possible to explore social institutions and normative systems through the experiences of individuals. That is because we now tend to think of structures as embedded in these experiences; they do not exist independently and outside of them. In this perspective, biography is not an obstacle to the social and cultural study of science, but rather one of the most effective ways to explore how cognitive and social structures are constructed, sustained, and modified. That biography can be turned into an effective tool for cultural historians has already been shown by a number of recent studies, such as the fine biographies by Mary Terrall (Pierre Louis Maupertuis), Ted Porter (Karl Pearson), and Giuliano Pancaldi (Alessandro Volta).56 In her contribution to the debate on the status of scientific biography, Terrall states that she ’wanted to write the story of his [Maupertuis’] career as a story of the meaning and practice of science in this period’, while Porter insists on biography as a way of historicizing the category of ‘scientist’, and to recapture ‘the ways that scientists found meaning in the world and attached moral value to their work’. As for Pancaldi, his biographical narrative is turned into an effective instrument to engage with a notion of ‘scientific life’ that is now vastly richer than it ever was.57 While for these authors biography is above all a means to explore the social and cultural dimensions of the making of scientific knowledge, others empha55 Emblematic, in this respect, is Mario Biagioli, Galileo Courtier: The Practice of Science in the Age of Absolutism (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1993). 56 Mary Terrall, The Man Who Flattened the Earth: Maupertuis and the Sciences in the Enlightenment (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2002); Giuliano Pancaldi, Volta: Science and Culture in the Age of Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); Theodore Porter, Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). 57 Mary Terrall, ‘Biography as Cultural History of Science’, Isis, 97 (2006), 306 – 13 (p. 308); Theodore Porter, ‘Is the Life of the Scientist a Scientific Unit?’, Isis, 97 (2006), 314 – 21 (p. 316).

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size that this genre gives us the opportunity to engage with the ‘freely acting’ individual scientist who struggles for self-assertion vis-—-vis the existing sociopolitical conditions and cultural constraints. It is the case of Thomas Söderqvist, who is concerned primarily with the ‘existential conditions’ of the scientist, which he describes as irreducible to historical and social factors. He believes that this move does not imply a return to the ‘myth of personal coherence’, and to Bourdieu’s ‘illusion biographique’. Rather, he argues for an ‘open biography’ that, using an array of narrative techniques, does not conflate individuality with an essential character, or personality.58 Although it remains unclear how this could be achieved in practice, I think that Söderqvist’s argument has the merit of directing the debate towards the question of agency, how we should understand it, and how it should enter our historical narratives. In fact, I believe that one of the key challenges for historians and social scientists in the near future will be precisely that of constructing biographies that keep together the discourse of individual responsibility with the rejection of individual agency as some kind of mysterious metaphysical power. In other words, I believe that one should aim for narratives in which the everyday discourse of human beings operating as free agents acting voluntarily coexists with the awareness of them being mutually accountable and dependent creatures, and with the pervasiveness of collective action in social life. We need new words and new narrative strategies to best explore what Barry Barnes calls ‘the fine line between [social] status and [internal] state.’59

58 Thomas Söderqvist, ‘Existential Project and Existential Choice in Science: Science Biography as an Edifying Genre’, in Telling Lives in Science, ed. by Shortland and Yeo, pp. 45 – 84. On James Clifford’s ‘myth of personal coherence’, see reference on p. 14. 59 Barry Barnes, Understanding Agency : Social Theory and Responsible Action (London: Sage, 2000), p. 143.

Part III Networking

Vita Fortunati

Mirror Shards: Conflicting Images between Marie Curie’s Autobiography and her Biographies

My contribution aims at showing the contradictory aspects of Marie Curie’s personality, aspects lurking beneath the scientist’s public image: an image that she herself was able to construct with great adroitness, in order to obtain funds for her research. This essay will focus not only on recent biographies of her,1 but also on her autobiography and her letters. I will also take into account Per Olov Enquist’s biographical novel, Boken om Blanche och Marie (2004).2 The study of autobiographical and biographical material shows how Curie dramatically, even schizophrenically, experienced her dual situation as woman and scientist, her double role as a mother and wife, and as a scientist dedicated to her research. This double role in early twentieth century Paris could not be performed comfortably, because, although on the verge of modernity, Parisian society was still tied to the nineteenth century morality that expected women to be faithfully devoted to their husbands, to the exclusion of anything else. I divide my essay into three parts: in the first I outline why biography as a literary genre has been revalued by literary criticism over the last three decades of the twentieth century. In the second, I examine Susan Quinn’s and Barbara Goldsmith’s biographies of Marie Curie, to demonstrate how they managed to highlight the scientist’s complex personality, and the difficulties and hostility she had to face in a scientific male milieu. In the last part I briefly examine Per Olov Enquist’s biographical novel Boken om Blanche och Marie.

1 Susan Quinn, Marie Curie: A Life (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995); Barbara Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius: The Inner World of Marie Curie (New York & London: W.W. Norton & Co., 2005). 2 Per Olov Enquist, The Story of Blanche and Marie, trans. from the Swedish by Tiina Nunnally (London: Vintage Books, 2007).

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Biographies, Biographers, and Biographees

I shall begin with a few brief autobiographical remarks that may be helpful for an understanding of the different development of biography as a literary genre in literary studies and in the history of medicine and science. When I embarked upon my scientific career in the field of English literature in Italy in the late 1960s, literary criticism, dominated by structuralism, considered biography a non-scientific, amateur critical methodology ; and though ‘popular’ in England, where it still enjoyed a flourishing tradition, there too the school of Leavis, and many Marxist and independent critics, held that knowledge of an author’s life was not important for the understanding of a literary work. Structuralist criticism itself concentrated on the formal features of literary works, and considered them as possessing an autonomous life, as it were. The only exception to all this was literary criticism which borrowed its critical tools from psychoanalysis. Only later, by the late 1980s, had biography started to be studied as a distinctive genre, and considered as a useful instrument in the interpretation of the literary text. This revaluation of biography was helped by interest in this genre within women’s and gender studies.3 This prejudice also occurs in the history of medicine and science, which has long neglected scientific biography. Thomas Söderqvist, in a volume comprising a series of essays, pointed out that while for some time now biography has been studied seriously and thoroughly in literary studies, only recently has scientific biography become of interest. Other biographical genres, particularly literary biography (and to some extent art biography) have been the topic of quite a few studies, both historical and formal literary, some of which have been rather sophisticated from a theoretical and methodological point of view, to the extent that biography, including autobiography, is now a respected topic in literary studies. But not scientific biography – yet.4

This is a paradoxical condition, since on the one hand scientific biography has always had a strong impact on the public, and has been useful in popularizing science, while on the other there has been a lack of recognition on the part of 3 Feminism and Autobiography : Texts, Theories, Methods, ed. by Tess Cosslett, Celia Lury, and Penny Summerfield (London: Routledge and Kegan, 2000); there is also an interesting essay by Linda Anderson, ‘Autobiography and the Feminist Subject’, in The Cambridge Companion to Feminist Literary Theory, ed. by Ellen Rooney (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 119 – 35; Vita Fortunati, ‘Memory as a Complex Act in Women’s Autobiographies: Four Case Studies’, in Women Narrating Their Lives and Actions, ed. by Renata Jambresˇic´ and Sandra Prlenda (Zagreb: Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Research, 2013). 4 Thomas Söderqvist, ‘Introduction: A New Look at the Genre of Scientific Biography’, in The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, ed. by Thomas Söderqvist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 1 – 15 (p. 4).

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historians of science of the usefulness of this genre as a tool for research. Despite the fact that, as David Amigoni states,5 historians of science are still divided on this issue, in the last few years an interest in this genre has been noted, especially when considering the historical and political context in which scientists operated. This is particularly important in those historical periods characterized by political tension and dictatorial regimes. Despite the recognition of scientific biographies having been, as we have seen, much slower compared to literary ones, women’s and gender studies have contributed positively to this reappraisal.6 There have been many studies that have tried to highlight the importance of women in the development of science and how difficult it was for them to achieve prominent positions. This interest in the female presence in the sciences goes hand in hand with the study of the difficulties that female scientists experienced in a strongly hierarchical world, characterised by the prejudices male scientists held against women practicing science. For this reason, biographies of women scientists may have an important pedagogical function in the education of girls, to introduce them to the world of science and research.7 In studying the construction of the myth of the scientist, male or female, in biographies and autobiographies it is important to keep in mind the difference between genres such as biography, autobiography, letters, and diaries: similar genres, yet with internal differences, both in form, and in representational strategies, underpinned by the different intentions of their authors. This is a point that must be made in the case of Marie Curie, for instance, since she herself wrote an autobiography, as well as diaries and letters. Biography in the last thirty years has been at the centre of an interesting debate, involving both literary criticism and professional writers. Literary historiography, which had dismissed biography as an interpretative tool, has made a comeback, also thanks to New Historicism8 which has reintroduced the issue of the intentionality of the author, the relationship between art and life, and the 5 David Amigoni, Review of The History and Poetics of Scientific Biography, ed. by Söderqvist, see at http://www.bsls.ac.uk/reviews/general-and-theory/thomas-soderqvist-ed-the-historyand-poetics-of-scientific-biography/ (for this and the site that follows, the date of the last access is 9/12/2013). 6 See, on this, Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999). 7 Paola Govoni, ‘Biography : A Critical Tool to Bridge the History of Science and the History of Women in Science’, Nuncius, 1 (2000), 399 – 409. See also Elisabetta Donini, La nube e il limite. Donne, scienza, percorsi nel tempo (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1990); Pensare un mondo con le donne: Saperi femminili nella scienza, nella societ— e nella letteratura, ed. by Franca Cleis and Osvalda Varini-Ferrari (Bellinzona: Centro didattico cantonale, 2001). 8 On this see Vita Fortunati, ‘Utopia e biografia: Le ragioni di un confronto’, in Vite di utopia, ed. by Vita Fortunati and Paola Spinozzi (Ravenna: Longo, 2000), pp. 9 – 18.

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importance of the historical context. In the 1960s the critical scene in Italy was dominated by structuralism and formalism which, being mainly focused on the literariness of the text, deleted the question of the subjectivity of the writer and of the biographer. It was up to well-known biographers Leon Edel and Richard Ellmann,9 two emblematic examples of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of historical criticism, to recast biography as an important hermeneutical tool to understand, through the works of the authors, the personality of the biographees. According to them, biography as a genre is always a journey on which the biographer leads the reader, in order to investigate the personality of the biographee, which is never a given, but which is constructed by the biographer. Such a revaluation of biography as a genre does not reiterate a romantic conception of the author, nor a deterministic notion of the relationship between text and context, but rather stresses the idea that the author is no longer a unique and a-historical subject, the keeper and depositary of textual truth. The author is a subject who is part of a cultural community, interpreting a system of codes, and thus she/he is located at the crossing point of various epochal epistemes.10 Biography is a hybrid genre, located between the two poles of fiction and reality, between history and its fictional representation. Biographers claim the right to choose from the plethora of facts and anecdotes at their disposal those they deem indispensable to characterize the personality of their biographees. It is this very process of careful selection that makes the border between biography and autobiography so extremely thin, since: any biography makes an inevitable selection from biographical details, we cannot separate biography from autobiography, which is the story of a life written by the man who is living it.11

In this sense, biography becomes a sort of oblique, disguised autobiography of the biographer him/herself, because the choices and the omissions of the biographer reveal not only her/his intentions, but also unknown and hidden aspects of her/his personality. Biography is an ambiguous genre, because the relationship between biographer and biographee is always ambivalent, located between the two poles of love and veneration for the biographee and, at the same time, a desire for detachment and the anxiety of her/his influence. A dual tension, then, of love and hate; of 9 Richard Ellmann, James Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), pp. VII – XI (1st ed. 1959); Leon Edel, Writing Lives: Principia Biographica (New York and London: Norton & Company, 1984). 10 Fabio Cleto, ‘Biografia, ideologia, autorit— interpretativa (con un caso esemplare)’, Textus, 6 (1993), 179 – 220. 11 Andrea Battistini, Lo specchio di Dedalo: Autobiografia e biografia (Bologna: il Mulino, 1990), chapter 5, ‘Il super ego dei generi letterari’, pp. 163 – 96.

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cannibalism and vampirism on the one hand, and, on the other, of fascination and desire for identity. Massimo Romano, in his essay, ‘La maschera e il vampiro’ (The Mask and the Vampire), puts it like this: ‘Every biographer is […] something of a vampire, and sucks from the biographee’s blood those globules necessary for her/his own nutrition.’12 The devouring relationship the biographer builds with the object of her/his narration can acquire voyeuristic features, since like a voyeur, the biographer is possessed by an obsessive will to see, to penetrate the hidden recesses of the life and the psyche of the object of her/his research. At the same time, she/he cannot avoid establishing an empathic relation with the biographee, since they must cohabit for a very long space of time. The paradox of biography consists in that, as Arnaldo Momigliano rightly points out, ‘it must always give partem pro toto; it must always achieve completeness by selectiveness.’13 Thus the impossibility of being exhaustive is an objective, intrinsic fact of any biography, even in those of the canonical historical biographical tradition, accumulating data and facts. The empathy between biographer and biographee, which Leon Edel defines by the psychoanalytical term ‘transference’, becomes the very core of the ‘biographical adventure.’14 The biographer’s involvement in the biographee’s life is essential to the success of a biography, because every author retrieves a part of her/himself in the subject whose life she/he chooses to ‘narrate’. The use of anecdotes is significant, those seemingly irrelevant details, such as marginal episodes and unimportant daily happenings, which make every human life unique, special, and which also are set there to amuse and awaken the reader’s curiosity. Even from this perspective, biography, as Ernestina Pellegrini reminds us, ‘is a hybrid creature, part historical and part fictional.’15 And it is through the anecdote, sometimes invented by the biographer, that ‘fact’, as Virginia Woolf used to say, becomes ‘creative’: facts manipulated by the biographer are creatively reshaped and transformed, in order to suggest and evoke atmospheres and emotions.16

12 Massimo Romano, ‘La maschera e il vampiro’, Sigma, 17 (1984), 36 – 45. 13 Arnaldo Momigliano, The Development of Greek Biography : Four Lectures, expanded edition (Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 11 (1st ed. 1971). 14 According to Leon Edel, Lytton Strachey was the first to use Freud constructively in his biographies, even though his interest was of an ‘amateurish and second hand nature’ (see Edel, Writing Lives, pp. 24 – 5). 15 Ernestina Pellegrini, ‘Le biografie mostruose di Francesco Domenico Guerrazzi’, in Scrivere le vite: Aspetti della biografia letteraria, ed. by Vanni Bramanti and Maria Grazia Pensa (Milan: Guerini Studio, 1996), pp. 15 – 35. 16 See Virginia Woolf ’s two essays: ‘The Art of Biography’, The Atlantic Monthly, 163/ 4 (1939), 506 – 10, and Granite and the Rainbow (London: Hogarth Press, 1958).

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The Case of Marie Curie

In her introduction Barbara Goldsmith wonders why Marie has been and still is an icon, and will remain, even in the future, an inspiration for women in science. She exemplifies what President FranÅois Mitterrand said in his speech on the occasion of her official burial in the Pantheon, on April 20, 2005: Today’s ceremony is a deliberate outreach on our part, from the Panth¦on, to the first lady of our honoured history. It is thus another symbol that captures the attention of our nation and the exemplary struggle of a woman who decided to impose her abilities in a society where abilities, intellectual exploration and public responsibility were reserved for men.17

After this public ceremony Goldsmith notes: ‘Madame Curie was now an icon for ages and an inspiration to women who saw in her the fulfillment of their own dreams and aspirations, however vague. I was among them.’18 The reader can see here the biographer aims to establish a relationship of empathy with her subject, but she also intends to search for what might be hidden behind Marie Curie’s public image: ‘But behind this image there was a real woman. It was this person I wished to pursue.’19 Similarly Susan Quinn in her introduction reveals to her readers the reasons why she decided to write Marie Curie’s biography : My reasons for undertaking a biography of Marie Curie were as much of our time as Eve Curie’s were of hers. I wanted to peel back the layers of myth and idealization which had grown up around Marie Curie’s story since her daughter told it over fifty years ago. I have looked for evidence that Marie Curie was not just a singular, exceptional woman (though she was indeed that) but also a woman who experienced the same difficulties as other women with strong opinions and ambitions. That meant exploring more carefully the barriers to women that surrounded her in Poland and in France. It also meant looking more closely at her defeats and humiliations at the hands of the Academy of Sciences as well as the proper bourgeoisie and the outrageous right-wing press.20

It may be inferred, from their introductions, that the aim of these two biographies was not just to investigate Marie Curie’s personality, but also to understand how her public iconicity was construed. Susan Quinn states that Marie Curie came from a family in which the writing out of family chronicles was a kind of political act, a way of preserving that precious Polish heritage that the Russian oppressor had tried in every way to erase. This family inheritance only partly explains the motivations that drove Marie to write her husband Pierre Curie’s 17 18 19 20

Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius, pp. 14 – 15. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 18. Quinn, Marie Curie, p. 14.

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biography and her own autobiography.21 Despite her personal statement of the hesitations and perplexities in deciding to write her autobiography, there is no doubt that the operation she carried out was highly skilful. In fact, she set down the outline, the leading lines that her daughter Eve followed in the biography she dedicated to her right after her death. In the first chapter of the Autobiographical Notes Marie Curie states: However, I could not conceive my biography as a complete expression of personal feelings or a detailed description of all the incidents I would remember. Many of our feelings change with the years, and, when faded away may seem altogether strange; incidents lose their momentary interest and may be remembered as if they have occurred to some other person.22

Immediately afterwards she explains her conviction that in the life of every individual there are some dominant ideas, some strong feelings that explain the characteristics of his/her personality. With these two statements Marie Curie justifies her selection regarding the facts of her life: a choice that contributes to produce a heroic, mythical, and romantic image of her scientific endeavour. In this sense, it can be said that her autobiography constitutes a fully conscious process of ‘self fashioning’: an act that was extremely useful in procuring funds for her research. Her emphasis on the difficulties she had to face as a scientist, to carry out her experiments, was not only of use in gaining her admiration and sympathy from the public at large, but also donations from philanthropic organisations and the government. Thus, for example, in her autobiography, to stress the distressing conditions in which she spent her period of intense study at the Sorbonne, she highlights this detail: The room I lived in was a garret, very cold in winter, for it was insufficiently heated by a small stove which often lacked coal. During a particularly rigorous winter, it was not unusual for the water to freeze in the basin in the night; to be able to sleep I was obliged to pile all my clothes on the bedcovers.23

The period in which she and Pierre Curie carried out their experiments in a lab that was, to all intents and purposes a poorly aired, badly floored cellar, is called by Marie herself the heroic period of their existence: an exciting period in which they all but forgot the surrounding world, engrossed and absorbed by their obsession for this mysterious element: 21 About the reasons driving her to write her husband’s biography, Marie Curie evokes a ‘religion of memory’, an act of love she carried out after his tragic and premature death. 22 Marie Curie, Pierre Curie, with the ‘Autobiographical Notes of Marie Curie’, trans. by Charlotte and Vernon Kellog, with an introduction by Mrs. William Brown Meloney (New York: Dover Publication, 1923), p. 77. 23 Ibid., p. 84.

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Yet it was in this miserable old shed that we passed the best and happiest years of our life, devoting our entire days to our work. Often I had to prepare our lunch in the shed, so as not to interrupt some particularly important operations. Sometimes I had to spend a whole day mixing a boiling mass with a heavy iron rod nearly as large as myself […]. But I shall never be able to express the joy of the untroubled quietness of this atmosphere of research and the excitement of actual progress, with the confident hope of still better results.24

In the same way, the tale of their night walks to go and see the bottles containing their mysterious element is charged with romantic and mythical connotations: One of our joys was to go into our workroom at night; we then perceived on all sides the feebly luminous silhouettes of the bottles and capsules containing our products. It was really a lovely sight and always new to us. The glowing tubes looked like faint, fairy lights.25

Thus, the photographic apparatus that Marie Curie included in her autobiography, and which would also be used, with further additions, in the later biographies, contributed to mold the visual image of the scientist, recorded in the various phases of her life: first as a child with her Polish parents and her sisters Bronia and Helena, then as an attractive young girl, in tightly corseted dresses, already with a melancholic, sad look in her eyes, a look that seems to gaze towards the infinite beyond the lens and that would become a constant feature of the countless photos publicized by the media. Later, after her marriage, together with Pierre in cycling clothes; in the Rue Lhomond laboratory while carrying out experiments; Marie seen gazing, fascinated, at a test tube containing the mysterious liquid; Marie amongst other scientists, the only woman; Marie with her daughters, during her trip to America. According to Quinn, after her mother’s death, her daughter Eve wrote her book to play down the scandal and humiliation Marie had suffered over her love affair with her colleague Paul Langevin. It is a biography in which the reader perceives the strong emotional involvement of the biographer towards the biographee. In her brief introduction she states that she has kept to the facts, and had not added anything, no ornamentation whatsoever. ‘It would have been a crime to add the slightest ornament to this story, so like a myth.’26 This is a biography written with love and commitment, by a daughter who, despite the differences between herself and her mother,27 loved her deeply. This biography 24 Ibid., p. 186. 25 Ibid., p. 92. 26 Eve Curie, Madame Curie, trans. by Vincent Sheean (London and Toronto: Heinemann, 1938) p. IX. 27 In Eve’s biography there are many notations on the tensions she felt towards her mother and sister. Having an artistic temperament, Eve loved music and the arts. Marie accepted this choice of hers when she realized her daughter had talent. However, she considered the latter’s

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contributed to the strengthening of the mythical portrayal of Marie as a woman of great nobility, exceptionally devoted to her work, shy, and not fame-seeking. In her introduction Eve states: I hope that the reader may constantly feel, across the ephemeral movement of one existence, what in Marie Curie was even more rare than her work or her life: the immovable structure of a character ; the stubborn effort of an intelligence, the free immolation of a being that could give all and take nothing, could even receive nothing; and above all the quality of a soul in which neither fame nor adversity could change the exceptional purity.28

This is a compelling text in which the various phases of Marie’s life are told in a novel-like style which, in its search for accuracy, does not avoid using precise documentation and sources, such as the letters Marie wrote to her beloved Polish family, in particular to her sister Bronia, telling her about work and family life, along with excerpts from newspaper articles commenting on the couple’s discoveries (L’¦cho de Paris or La Petite R¦publique). The book was a great success, and reinforced the icon of the heroic female scientist, which became a model even for Italian girls, as writer Dacia Maraini explains: I remember hearing about her for the first time at school. The teacher described her to us as a dogged worker, a genius of science, a woman totally dedicated to experimenting, without ever alluding to her private life, almost as if it were quintessentially absent […]. In short, a conventional view of Marie Curie that at the time we accepted as plausible. She had to be and was a model for us young female students, but an idealised, abstract and distant model.29

There was no room in this image for a woman with a complex personality, with contradictions, capable of explosive passion and tenderness when she loved. It is not by chance that the episode of love between Curie and Langevin, which occurred four years after Pierre Curie’s death and which unleashed a huge scandal-mongering campaign, is dismissed by her daughter Eve in just a few sentences: Malice burst upon her in a sudden squall and attempted to annihilate her. A perfidious campaign was set going in Paris against this woman of forty-four, fragile, worn out by crushing toil, alone and without defence.30

In Quinn’s and Goldsmith’s biographies, instead, this episode is analysed and undergoes an in-depth scrutiny, framing it both in its historical context and attention to dress and make-up frivolous. See Quinn, Marie Curie, chapter 19 and Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius, p. 152. 28 Ibid., p. VI. 29 Dacia Maraini, ‘Postfazione’, in Per Olov Enquist, Il libro di Blanche e Marie, trans. by Katia De Marco (Milano: Iperborea, 2004), p. 245. 30 Curie, Madame Curie, p. 272.

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from a gender point of view. Quinn links the public echoes of this episode with the reaction of the scientific establishment to the acceptance of a woman in the Academy of Science, of which her deceased husband Pierre had been a member. The two biographies underline how Marie was supported by British suffragettes, especially by Hertha Ayrton, and also by French feminists. Susan Quinn analyses articles in magazines of the time to comment on this episode. She reconstructs the nationalistic and xenophobic atmosphere in France during the first decade of the twentieth century, noting that it was no coincidence that this affair was closely linked to the Dreyfus case. This scandal is contextual to the Belle Êpoque: an era where extramarital affairs were accepted, especially in the case of men, provided they remained private. The right wing, nationalistic press pounced on Marie Curie accusing her of being a woman who wrecked families, a foreigner, scorning the sacred principles of family life. In this sense it is interesting to examine the contrasting images of the two women the right wing press created: on the one hand, Jeanne Langevin, in tears, as modest as her sex required her to be, on the other, Marie Curie, portrayed as a woman immersed in typically masculine pursuits, books, labs, and glory, while the fact that she was also mother of two children was never mentioned. Through the letters Curie wrote Langevin in this period, her determination never to go back on the choices she had made, despite the suffering and difficulties, is clearly discernible. The testimonies of her friends, especially that of Marguerite Borel,31 agree that Marie Curie endured this painful period with great courage and continued, despite the stress brought upon by the gutter press and the blackmail on the part of Paul’s wife, Jeanne and her family, to work and bring up her two daughters, IrÀne and Eve, both intellectually and physically. Marie Curie wrote a letter to the newspapers that were slandering her, defending her private life and the right to be happy and to love, stating the important principle of distinguishing her private sphere from her work and profession. For her determination and especially for the respect she had for her own person, she was accused of being a feminist in the precise historical moment when feminists were extremely determined to claim their rights. On November 7, 1910, while the scandal was in full swing, Marie Curie was awarded the Nobel Prize for her contribution to chemistry, in particular for having discovered radium and polonium. French newspapers did not report this important piece of news, what was reported was that Paul Langevin’s wife had filed an appeal for separation and custody of her children. The story became more and more sensational and started to worry some of the Swedish academicians who had voted for Curie. Although she had been counselled not to go to receive the Prize 31 A version of this episode of Marie Curie’s life is in Marguerite Borel (pseudonym Camille Marbo), A travers deux siÀcles 1883 – 1967 (Paris: Editions Bernard Grasset, 1968).

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by Svante Arrhenius himself, one of the members of the Academy who had supported her nomination to the Nobel, she firmly answered she would go to Stockholm to collect the prize, with her daughter IrÀne: The action which you advise would appear to be a grave error on my part. In fact the prize has been awarded for the discovery of Radium and Polonium. I believe that there is no connection between my scientific work and the facts of private life […]. I cannot accept the idea in principle that the appreciation of the value of scientific work should be influenced by libel and slander concerning private life. I am convinced that this opinion is shared by many people. I am very saddened that you are not yourself of this opinion.32

Pierre Curie’s brother, during the scandal, supported Marie, showing how their family was a sort of community, with shared values and ideals: ideals that were not only scientific, but also social. The Curie family shared with Marie the important idea that to further the progress of humanity it was not only necessary to improve the life of individuals, but also that everyone should take responsibility for the realisation of such socialist ideals. Marie Curie’s behaviour during the scandal reveals a woman who, despite the pain and misery she suffered, showed a steadfast capacity to stay true to her principles. Not so Paul Langevin, who proved to be much more insecure and fragile. This is also the assessment that emerges from Quinn’s pages, especially in the conclusion to chapter 14, where the biographer ironically states: By 1914, according to his son Andr¦, Paul and Jeanne Langevin were back together. Later on, with his wife’s acquiescence, Langevin had another mistress. But this time he chose a woman of the acceptable kind: she was an anonymous secretary.33

The working hypothesis of the two biographies is that Marie Curie was a woman who could experience joy but also endure great pain; an interpretation which contradicts Einstein’s judgment of Curie’s character : ‘poor when it comes to the art of joy and pain.’34 For Quinn and Goldsmith, Marie Curie was heroic, but at the same time, deeply human. The two biographers analyse at length the diary Marie Curie kept for about a year after her husband’s tragic death. She had written: I want to tell you that I do not like the sun and the flowers anymore, looking at them makes me suffer. I feel better in dark weather, like on the day of your death, and if I do not feel hatred toward the fine weather it is because my children need it. I spend all my days at the laboratory, that is all I can do. I am better there than anywhere else […]. I 32 Quinn, Marie Curie, p. 328. 33 Ibid., p. 331. The same opinion is also held by Sylvie Coyaud, ‘L’anno torrido di Marie Curie’, Il Sole-24ore, May 1, 2011, see at http://www.ilsole24ore.com/art/cultura/2011 – 05 – 01/ lanno-torrido-marie-curie-082144.shtml?uuid=Aac1HRTD. 34 Quinn, Marie Curie, p. 15.

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endure life, but I believe that never again I will be able to enjoy it […] because I don’t have a gay or serene soul by nature and I leaned on the sweet serenity of Pierre and the source is gone.35

Barbara Goldsmith affirms: A few days after Pierre’s death, Marie began a diary that she kept for almost a year, in which she recorded her deeply felt emotions so different from the impassive face she presented to the world. The very few scholars who are permitted to read this diary come away knowing the unvarnished Marie Curie, not the icon she had become, but as a complicated, passionate, tenacious, direct, melancholy woman.36

Here are two Maries, on the one hand the straightforward woman, on the other the complicated, passionate, stubborn, and melancholy one. Goldsmith underlines how she lived out her dual condition, in the double bind entailed by being a woman and a scientist, two roles that in early twentieth-century France could not cohabit harmoniously, but on the contrary, were lived out dramatically, almost schizophrenically. Goldsmith notes the difference in tone between her private and her lab diary, in order to highlight the complexity of her personality, having to switch from moments of intense, gruelling work to moments of depression and ‘psychic retirement’. For example in order to stress her strength of character she notes this detail: On September 12, 1897, Pierre’s father, Dr. EugÀne Curie, delivered her of a six-pound baby girl. He noted that Marie did not cry out during the birth process but simply clenched her teeth and got on with it.37

This is a useful stratagem to show Curie’s strength of character. Another interesting detail regards the meticulousness Marie Curie showed both in observing and recording her experiments, and in registering daily events in her family life. Goldsmith states that after her daughter’s birth, Marie Curie started another journal in which she noted, with scientific accuracy, how IrÀne was growing ‘She recorded such facts as IrÀne’s head size, the particular of nursing, the baby’s ability to grasp an object.’38 A recently published collection of letters Marie Curie exchanged with her daughters IrÀne and Eve, from 1905 to her death,39 highlights how she combined being a great scientist and at the same time a loving mother, interested in the minute details of her two beloved daughters’ day to day life. Marie, who would 35 36 37 38 39

Ibid., pp. 142 and 242. Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius, p. 136. Ibid., p. 69. Ivi. Marie Curie et ses filles: Lettres, ed. by H¦lÀne Langevin-Joliot (Paris Cedex: Pygmalion, 2011). Physicist H¦lÀne Langevin-Joliot is Irene’s daughter, whom her mother called ‘le petite diable’.

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spend long hours in the lab to carry out experiments requiring precision and great concentration, would also find the time to carry out her treasured daughters’ schooling, correct their homework, teach IrÀne maths and encourage both of them to read. It has been said that Marie threw herself into managing her family and schooling her daughters with the same passion and the same ‘obsession’ she had in furthering her scientific projects. In fact, in her letters she did not limit herself to their intellectual education, but also to their physical wellbeing: for this she would recommend sea bathing, long walks, and bicycle rides during their vacations. As Goldsmith notes, these rules were established by Marie against custom, because upper and middle class conventions encouraged women, since they were still considered the ‘weaker sex’, to learn household management and not to aim at a higher education, let alone physical exercise.40 Marie, although obliged by work and weak health41 to be gone long periods, never forgot her job as a mother. When, for example, she found herself in London for work, she sent an affectionate letter to her daughter IrÀne on her sixteenth birthday : J’espÀre que tu recevras cette lettre le jour mÞme de tes seize ans ainsi que tu m’en a exprim¦ le d¦sir. Tu verras ainsi , ch¦rie, que ta mÀre ne t’oublie pas et qu’elle pense — t’envoyer en ce jour ses meilleurs baisers, avec la tendresse la plus profonde.42

A loving mother, watching over her daughters’ harmonious development, both mental and physical, who would often motivate them to become independent, but at the same time well aware of the possible dangers such independence might entail: thus the ever present intelligent advice to them. From these letters Marie, despite her fame, appears to have had a good relationship with her daughters, especially with IrÀne, the one who would follow her scientific pursuits and with whom she established a strong intellectual empathy. In a letter dated August 1911, IrÀne seems to have no problems with having had famous parents, and rejoices in having an intelligent and likeable mother, someone the two sisters affectionately called ‘douce M¦’.43 During Marie’s recurrent bouts of depression, when she would retreat from the world to live in solitude, she states that the letters she received from her daughters were a great joy and consolation. Goldsmith emphasizes that Marie often worked till late, urged on by an insatiable curiosity, which drove her to persist. A kind of ‘obsession’ that would 40 Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius, p. 149. 41 There are many letters showing the extent of Marie Curie’s suffering from serious, deep, and recurrent bouts of depression since her adolescence, heightened by the loss of her mother and sister. During these periods of ‘psychic retreat’ Marie wanted to be left alone, away from the world (Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius, pp. 29 – 30). 42 Marie — IrÀne, Londres, le 10 septembre 1913, in Marie Curie et ses filles, ed. by LangevinJoliot, p. 33. 43 Ibid. p. 21.

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often end by completely possessing her, a sort of haunting, a rage that in many ways resembles the rage of poetical or artistic creation.44 Moments of intense concentration and exaltation would be followed by moments of deep depression. Horace Freeland Judson notes: as scientists understand very well, personality has always been an inseparable part of their styles of enquiry, a potent if unacknowledged factor in their results. No art or popular entertainment is so carefully built as is science upon the individual talents, preferences and habits of its leaders.45

In Marie Curie’s biography of Pierre, and Eve Curie’s biography of her mother, two elements emerge very clearly : the first is that Marie and Pierre Curie’s success as a scientific couple was due to a complementarity that included, but was not limited to, the partners’ different commitments to chemistry and physics. The second is that science was a family affair. To Helena Pycior, ‘Marie Curie’s marital status and family arrangements were key elements of the sociocultural matrix in which she practiced science.’46 From this point of view, it is vital to consider Marie Curie’s autobiography because here the life models that conditioned how she worked, and also the way in which she directed her laboratory and her relationship with colleagues can be found. Regarding the relationship between Marie and Pierre Curie, Pycior points out: ‘Indeed, a harmonious balance of similarities and differences seems to have attracted Marie and Pierre to one another.’47 Pierre, as Marie recalls, was a ‘dreamer’, contemplative, very slow in his work, while Marie possessed the capacity to concentrate her thoughts with great intensity on a specific object, to achieve precise results.

III.

Between History and Fiction

The Swedish writer Per Olov Enquist has long been investigating themes that involve the presumed ‘objectivity of facts’, an objectivity continuously chal44 It is interesting to make a comparison between women’s acts of creation and women’s scientific discoveries. See The Creative Process: A Symposium, ed. by Brewster Ghiselin (New York: Mentor Books, 1952). 45 Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of Revolution in Biology (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975), p. 19. 46 Helena M. Pycior, ‘Marie Curie’s ‘Anti-natural Path’: Time Only for Science and Family’, in Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789 – 1979, ed. by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram (New Brunswick and London: Rutgers University Press, 1987), pp. 191 – 215 (p. 191). 47 Helena M. Pycior, ‘‘Pierre Curie and his Eminent Collaborator Mme Curie’: Complementary Couples’ in Creative Couples in the Sciences, ed. by Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), pp. 39 – 56 (p. 41).

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lenged by the coexistence of the contradictory points of view of the narrator. He has also devoted research to issues regarding meta-narration involving the use of historical sources and documents.48 The first point to make about this fictionalised biography is that Enquist intertwines two lives, that of Marie Curie and that of Blanche Wittman, Charcot’s enigmatic patient in the SalpÞtriÀre. After Charcot’s death in 1893, Enquist imagines that Blanche Wittman became Marie Curie’s assistant and helped her in her research on radium. He is interested in the link between these two female figures: on the one hand, Blanche Wittman is immersed in superstition and in mesmerism, while on the other Marie Curie is an extremely modern figure, and an emblem of scientific advancement. He comments that: Writing about these two women and all they represent would allow me to work on that threshold between a whole world that was disappearing and another, that of the terrible twentieth century, that was about to begin.49

As often happens in post-modern biographies, Enquist sometimes intertwines his own life with that of the two women. For instance, he compares Marie’s life to that of his widowed mother, painfully raising her young son in a Northern village: What was it about Marie that reminded me of my mother? Someone is walking up toward the house in the forest, through deep snow, thirty two years old, beautiful, quiet, despairing and not yet as hard as fathomless absence of love can make a person.50

Or he describes Blanche’s photo in the Iconographie photographique de la SalpÞtriÀre (1876 – 1880) and compares her white lace collar to his grandmother Johanna Lindgren: She has a white ruffle around her neck, like the one my maternal grandmother Johanna wore in the photograph that I used for my novel The March of the Musicians, the one in which she has round eyeglasses and her hair is pulled back, the one that has gradually supplanted the funeral photo, my memory of her as dead person. A beautiful and strong woman. Yet Blanche doesn’t look as stern or self-assured as Johanna Lindgren. Blanche is looking down, obliquely, to the left; she too has her hair pulled back, but a few wispy curls have come loose, snakes freed as on Medusa’s head, and her very beautiful eyes are sorrowful.51

48 This blending of historical facts and invention is also present in other works by Enquist. See for example, The March of the Musicians (1978) and The Visit of the Royal Physician (1999). 49 From an interview to Per Olov Enquist in Marco Dotti and Andrea Mihaiu, ‘Nelle trame di Per Olov Enquist: La lotta tra misticismo e ragione’, Il Manifesto, Sunday, May 13, 2007, p. 12. 50 Enquist, The Story of Blanche and Marie, p. 82. 51 Ibid., p. 133.

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In the same way, Enquist outspokenly speculates on the shape of his biography and on the choices he has made, in order to make the reader aware of these choices, and consequently his interpretation of facts: ‘If all the stories are placed on top of each other, everything ultimately becomes invisible. Then you have to choose.’52 The book is a skilled mixture of real and fictional facts, because the author is interested in highlighting the weave between scientific research and personal events. Another interesting aspect is the attempt to understand the reasons for the holes and omissions in the sources. To do this, as he makes explicit in his acknowledgments, he not only used Marie’s autobiography, but also Eve’s and other material, in particular Quinn’s for the Curie-Langevin affair. Enquist insists peremptorily on his creative liberty as a novelist: ‘THIS IS A NOVEL: I HAVE MADE USE OF FACTUAL MATERIAL BUTonly to write a novel and for this reason I don’t feel the need to list the list that I have used.’53 Enquist, like Goldsmith and Quinn, stresses that Pierre’s death altered Marie Curie’s professional status: no longer a scientist’s wife sharing her husband‘s laboratory, research, and honours, she was now forced to carve out a niche as an independent woman scientist. In a period still tainted by gender distinctions, the change in Curie’s marital status from wife to widow thus forced adjustments not only in her small family unit, but also in her own professional life – at the Sorbonne, and within the inner circle of radioactivity. For that reason both Enquist and the biographers have tried to offer an understanding of the emotional tie between Marie Curie and Paul Langevin, taking into account his wife’s jealousy and her eventual revenge. Enquist also examines the savage reaction of French public opinion to this personal matter. The research on radium and the causes of hysteria mingle with disturbing questions such as the mysteries of love, on the chemical formula for love and the disquieting union there was in the two women’s lives between love and death. What is the chemical formula for desire? And why isn’t there any standard meter for love? Why does love constantly change, quite unlike the standard meter, that ten million of the earth’s meridian quadrant? Why is there no atomic weight for desire, confirmed, awarded with a prize, for everyone, for all time, forever?54

The structure of the book is very sophisticated: Enquist imagines that Blanche has written The Book of Questions, and the various chapters of the biography follow the sections of that book: ‘The yellow book’, ‘The black book’, and ‘The red book’. As Dacia Maraini says in her essay :

52 Ibid., p. 123. 53 Ibid., p. 219. 54 Ibid., p. 115.

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With her only intact arm, Blanche writes The BOOK OF QUESTIONS, which Enquist claims to follow page by page. Actually, the books seem manly a literary invention, but with what depth, what cunning, what intelligence the author endows the mysterious book of the mutilated Blanche with the function of narrative guide, urging, reflecting, and analysing the questions Blanche asks!55

Enquist also sketches an historical portrait of Paris on the verge of modernity, but still having prejudices linked to a nineteenth century morality which expected women to be faithful wives, devoted to their husbands. Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the book is having linked experiments on radium to those on hysteria, two different trends of science, on the one hand the rationality of Pierre, Paul, and Maria’s physics, on the other Charcot’s neuropsychiatry, imbued with mesmerism and hypnosis. Enquist reminds us that the twentieth century, that is ‘modernity’, began with this interesting blend of enlightened rationality and irrationalism. Charcot’s experiments are in the stream of an occultist tradition: The word medicine, Charcot later told her, and he now addressed her in an informal manner, comes from Medea, the mother of witchcraft. Does that mean that you’re a magician? She asked. No, he said, I’m a prisoner of reason, with my feet buried deep in the mud from which magic is composed.56

When he describes the SalpÞtriÀre, called the Castle, the reader recalls the importance of Foucault’s work on madness and civilization. Enquist reminds us that since the seventeenth century, women who were ‘abnormal’ and who did not find a place in society were kept in that appalling place. Charcot is presented as a doctor of the Enlightenment, who wanted to relieve these women’s pain through his attempt to understand the causes of their disorders and cure them: The young doctor encountered a chamber of horrors of disease, a chaos of unclassified afflictions, of cries, pleas, and prejudices. The chamber of horrors was populated, Charcot wrote as early as 1867, by the mentally retarded, by those who were mentally ill, by idiots, by epileptics and lunatics, all of whom were perhaps simply human beings.57

From Blanche’s point of view, the reader sees that the relationship between Charcot and his patient is an ambiguous one. It is a relationship where the roles of the healer and the healed are continuously questioned. Enquist describes Charcot’s Friday lessons at the SalpÞtriÀre, where hypnotic s¦ances were presented to the public. That mingling of reality with fiction, and the representation of hysteria in such a context, is deeply disquieting. To highlight how, at the beginning of the century, rationalism and mysticism 55 Maraini, ‘Postfazione’, p. 249. 56 Enquist, The Story of Blanche and Marie, p.150 (italics in the text). 57 Ibid. p. 146.

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could be combined, Enquist touches on an aspect of the Curies that has received little attention: the interest they showed in spiritualism58 and in a much discussed woman medium: Eusapia Palladino.59 Goldsmith and Quinn also mention that the Curies quite regularly took part, between 1905 and 1908, in Eusapia’s s¦ances, both in private venues, and at the Institute of Psychology, which was their principal promoter. Scholars such as William Crookes, Charles Robert Richet (winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine), the astronomer Camille Flammarion, Henri Bergson, and the couple’s physicist friends Jean Perrin and Paul Langevin, took part in these s¦ances. From the letters Pierre exchanged with his scientist friends, in particular with Georges Gouy, not only can his curiosity for these phenomena he couldn’t understand be inferred, but also his desire to record and study them scientifically. Pierre perhaps was convinced that spiritualist phenomena could help understand some unknown aspects of the unidentified forces of nature.60 The discovery of X rays unveiled an extraordinary, ‘mysterious’ world where invisible rays could go through the human body ; electromagnetic waves propagated, invisible and silent, in a vacuum, and would allow for radio communication, without any material medium between transmitter and receiver. Then there was the discovery of radium itself, the element discovered by the Curies, whose mysterious properties brought about applications which were as fantastic and improbable as they were dangerous. Pierre’s death was a terrible shock for Marie, and plunged her into a serious depressive state; this psychological condition could explain why, in her intimate diary she addresses her dead husband directly, the way a spiritualist would have done. ‘In her extreme psychic pain, Marie in her diary seems to speak to her late husband as a spiritualist would.’61 Once again we find ourselves faced with an 58 I owe some information on this aspect of Marie Curie’s life to the physicist Ferdinando Bersani with whom I presented a communication to a workshop in Bologna – Women’s Lives in Science and Humanities –, organized by Paola Govoni in 2009. 59 Eusapia Palladino (1854 – 1918), of humble origin, born in a small village in Apulia, Minervino Murge, almost illiterate, started as a nanny in some Neapolitan families; an orphan, she married, at a very young age, a strolling conjurer. Ercole Chiaia, an eminent Neapolitan doctor whose family she worked for, discovered her alleged medium faculties and introduced her to important Italian and foreign scholars. Thus this ignorant, uncouth woman, although not lacking intelligence and guile, started traveling all over Europe (Milan, Warsaw, Russia, Paris, and so on) exhibiting her capacities as a medium to noble or wealthy families and to illustrious personalities of the sciences and culture. For further information, see Enrico Morselli, Psicologia e “Spiritismo”: Impressioni e note critiche sui fenomeni medianici di Eusapia Palladino (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1908). 60 This open minded attitude to the scientific study of such phenomena, although certainly not shared by all scientists and philosophers (most of whom were perhaps skeptical), was nonetheless shared by many of them, including many prestigious names, over and above the ones already mentioned, for example, O. Lodge, A. R. Wallace, W. James, and others. 61 Goldsmith, Obsessive Genius, p. 138.

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aspect of Marie’s personality that highlights the contrast between her rational mind and her depth of feeling. Addressing her husband directly, more than an endorsement of spiritualism, may be seen as a way of still feeling close to her beloved husband. In fact, despite having been brought up in a Catholic family, Marie was an agnostic and had never believed in otherworldly dimensions. She brought up her daughters with a sense of duty and respect for nature, but she never had them baptised, and when they reached the age of reason told them that, regarding religion, they would be free to make their own choices. The Black Book asks, as Enquist says: ‘We have to imagine what life was like for a female scientist at this early stage of the fantastic and scientifically epochal twentieth century.’62 Enquist stresses the relationship between Marie and Blanche, two very different women in their intellectual formation and biographical roots, both, however, having in common a visionary gift and an intense love story. Both were apparently fragile women, but endowed with great strength that helped them to pursue their dominant interest till the very end. Both are seen as enveloped in the vague blue luminescence of radium making them unique, and enabling them to experience living on the edge. Enquist does not present Marie Curie as a cold scientist. This is the portrait that emerges from the letters Marie writes to her lover, Paul Langevin, This is no cold fish speaking, no scientific analyst, no burning revolutionary, no suffragette, no gentle beloved wife, no guarded public figure, and no admired Nobel Prize winner who is a role model for women all over the world. It’s Marie, an animal in a hostile jungle, and a human being fighting for her life, with no holds barred.63

The other disquieting aspect he brings out is that the great discovery of radium causes Blanche and Marie’s own deaths: the first part of the book is dominated by the vision of Blanche’s mutilated body, obliging her to live in a box, since she no longer has any limbs. She writes the book of questions with the one hand she had left. ‘She was then a sort of torso, though with a head. The lower portion of her left leg, the right leg up to her hip, and her left arm had been amputated.’64 Enquist underlines that the mysterious halo of bluish light can evoke great passion, but it also provokes lesions, ulcers, and horrible deaths. It is a mysterious substance, just as mysterious as love. The Story of Blanche and Marie is built up through a tightly woven net of quotations from Marie’s autobiography, her letters and biographies: a skilful blend of biography and invention. Enquist manages, precisely because of these sources, not just to give us a non-conventional image of a scientist, but also to reach out towards the spirit and the thoughts of these two women. As he himself 62 Enquist, The Story of Blanche and Marie, p. 104. 63 Ibid., p. 126. 64 Ibid., p. 17.

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stated in an interview, the aspect that concerns the writer is that of: ‘fill the holes, bridge the gaps, search amongst the folds. It is also for this reason, perhaps, that, if one really wants to, I could be called a story-teller.’65

65 From an interview to Enquist in Dotti and Mihaiu, ‘Nelle trame di Per Olov Enquist’, p. 12.

Zelda Alice Franceschi

Women in the Field: Writing the History. Genealogies and Science in Margaret Mead’s Autobiographical Writings

Studying and thinking over the history of anthropology means facing canonical and official history as well as learning to look into interstices, those places in which marginal pathways and tangential trajectories were conceived and have blossomed. Since I started being interested in the history of this discipline, specifically working on biographical and autobiographical methodology, this concern has gradually deepened and has prompted me to take up unusual works to read, especially in a context such as the Italian one. Franz Boas’s pupils were the ones who started working systematically using the biographical and autobiographical methods: their fieldwork was primarily the North American one, and it was both male (Alfred Kroeber, Paul Radin) and female anthropologists (Ruth Benedict, Ruth Landes, Gladys Reichard, Zora Neale Hurston) who made life history, as methodology and genre, their strong suit.1 The contributions of these thinkers have been analysed elsewhere.2 The scrupulous and complex work of writing down these stories entailed ethical, epistemological, formal, and academic difficulties. Biographies and autobiographies can shed light on the behavior of field researchers, the problems of the genre, and particular epistemological issues such as language, translation, memory (researchers often chose very old witnesses because they were considered the ‘depositaries’ of ‘culture’), the editing of a text, or the relationship between researchers and witnesses. These are pivotal and often critical points that emerge as essential ingredients of ethnographic work, and that play a crucial role in their reception in academia. Life stories and autobiographies are a methodology and a genre that, more than other field research techniques, have settled, and then exploded, the issue of the ‘truthfulness’ of ethnographic reports, of their ‘representativeness’. These are delicate areas compared to the ‘emic’ value of these writings 1 Zelda Alice Franceschi, Storie di vita: Percorsi nella storia dell’antropologia americana (Bologna: Clueb, 2006). 2 ‘Storie di vita/Autobiografie’, ed. by Zelda Alice Franceschi, Annuario di Antropologia, 14 (2012).

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which stemmed from a typically Western genre and produced ambivalent texts. Arnold Krupat, examining Paul Radin’s autobiographies, writes: Strictly speaking, therefore, Indian autobiography is a contradiction in terms. Indian autobiographies are collaborative efforts, jointly produced by some white who translates, transcribes, compiles, edits, interprets, polishes, and ultimately determines the form of the text in writing, and by an Indian who is its subject and whose life becomes the content of the ‘autobiography’ whose title may bear his name.3

This reveals a complex and most certainly non-linear landscape, where, since German anthropologist Franz Boas started his academic activity at Columbia University, many expectations came into play, that shaped the structure and the future development of anthropology in the United States. The ‘extended family’, that Boas created, moulded, and brought up, had its main goal in ‘mapping’4 the North-American continent by a detailed ethnographic investigation that called for studies of a cultural, linguistic, biological, and archaeological type. Many of his students, as already noted, chose autobiography as their field-work methodology, which Boas indirectly encouraged, but which never convinced him totally,5 perhaps because he was creative, but at the same time conservative in his approach. Many of his female students worked on autobiographies and life stories, and some of them left autobiographical accounts of their own lives as scientists, single women or mothers. The auto and bio graphic lens was for them a device to understand themselves and others, an instrument of knowledge, reflection, and involvement, a daily practice which enabled them both in diaries and in their letters from the field, as well as in more general autobiographical writing, to reflect on their choices and their work. Thinking about these women’s lives, about their complicity and at the same time their inclination to share scientific, academic, and family information, I believe there was a deliberate desire to leave traces of their genealogies in order to tell a story of their own. In their lives the border between the center and the margins was always unstable and anthropology was never merely a chosen subject area, but rather a modus vivendi. Fieldwork experience, as well as the life they managed to create as professionals, was what gave them the capacity to produce knowledge in which gender, the geographies of the production of knowledge, and the fences between authorized science and its popularization were hubs they had to skirt round and consequently challenge. For these women the concept of knowledge

3 Arnold Krupat, The Voice in the Margin: Native American Literature and the Canon (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1985), p. 45. 4 Regna Darnell, And Along Came Boas: Continuity and Revolution in Americanist Anthropology (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1998). 5 Franz Boas, ‘Recent Anthropology’, Science, 8 (1943), 311 – 37.

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flows in scientific work that incorporates dissemination, consumption, and appropriation. When attention is paid to gender and geographies, and when hierarchies of knowledge production are rejected, what emerges is a thriving landscape of communities and individuals producing science and pursuing scholarship, evoking a knowledge society avant la lettre that inspires new, broader definitions of science and the production of knowledge.6

They managed to juggle intelligently with whatever tools institutions could provide, which they appropriated with skill and which allowed them to work on the outskirts of the center, and in the center of the outskirts. In this essay I will outline the work of some female anthropologists, directly or indirectly pupils of Franz Boas. In particular, I will focus on Margaret Mead (1901 – 1978) and her mentor Ruth Benedict (1887 – 1948). Mead’s work opens up a heterogeneous and unexpected landscape, which helps us to trace links between women scientists, between different countries, between European and American men and women who were elaborating ethnographic theories and models for the construction of an anthropological paradigm. Exploring these women’s lives through their autobiographies offers an effective way to understand how the social and cognitive structures of the paradigm of a discipline have been constructed, supported, and consequently modified. The American academic universe at the time saw a constant, careful but seldom recognized effort on the part of women, both those who had institutional roles (Benedict, Mead, Reichard), and those who remained outside academia, or institutions in general, or who only in old age were granted formal recognition (Landes, Deloria, Hurston). For all these women, it was a daily and tireless task, faced with institutions that were often hostile and full of prejudices. These women worked hard, ignoring discrimination, keeping a low profile, trying to show there were no risks in their field-work. They often followed in the wake of other women, brave, resourceful, and enterprising women whose journeys came to acquire a symbolic meaning, representing a sort of initiation rite for them. Margaret Rossiter talks about a deliberate strategy where women consciously chose to demonstrate their ‘over-qualification’ and informed ‘stoicism’.7 It was a daily case of appearing like ‘good girls’, capable of dealing with specific themes (cultural and personality studies, the care of children, health and nutrition), ‘suitable’ and above all ‘proportioned’ to what was thought of as ‘feminine’. This was carried out on different levels. On the one hand, there was the formal one, where women appeared endowed with peculiar writing modalities (subjective writing, which was non-academic and for the 6 Christine von Oertzen, Maria Rentetzi, and Elizabeth Watkins, ‘Finding Science in Surprising Places: Gender and the Geography of Scientific Knowledge. Introduction to ‘Beyond the Academy : Histories of Gender and Knowledge’’, Centaurus, 55 (2013), 73 – 80. 7 Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University, 1982), p. 129.

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general public), while on the other hand, women were considered (and actually were), versatile, that is capable of exploiting talents that they shuttled in and out of institutions.8 It was women who managed to popularize the subject, making it accessible to the vast American public. Many of them, between the two world wars and under the aegis of Boas and Benedict made Columbia University an extraordinary and unique place, and many of them graduated and chose alternative channels for their ethnographic work. Boas encouraged them and managed to exploit their capacities to the full, both in the case of women enjoying economic independence (I am thinking of Elsie Clews Parsons or Ruth Benedict) and those from a different social and economic background (the case of Zora Neale Hurston and of Ella Deloria come to mind). All these young women anthropologists worked in the field: Boas would follow them, urging and guiding them even when their work was not easy, especially for Hurston and Deloria, the former being Afro-American, and the latter born on a Sioux reservation, the daughter of an Episcopalian minister.9 Their marginality was marked not only by their being women but by their ‘class’ and their ‘race’. Boas was a spokesman for them on many occasions during his career as an anthropologist.10 Race and class shaped both women’s marginality and added the dimension of financial dependence to their relationship to their patrons – for Deloria, Boas, and for Hurston, both Boas and Mason.11

Margaret Mead wrote on this issue in her autobiography : In 1924 there were four graduate students in anthropology at Columbia and a mere handful in other universities. He had to plan – much as if he were a general with only a handful of troops available to save a whole country where to place each student most strategically, so that each piece of work would count and nothing would be wasted and no piece of work would have to be done over. […] Boas had a keen eye for the

8 Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest, ed. by Nancy J. Parezo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), and Sally Cole, Ruth Landes: A Life in Anthropology (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2003). 9 Charles L. Brigss and Richard Bauman, ‘“The Foundation of All Future Researches”: Franz Boas, Native American Text, and the Construction of Modernity’, American Quarterly, 51 (1999), 479 – 528; Beatrice Medicine, ‘Ella Cara Deloria’, in Women Anthropologists: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. by Ute Gacs, Aisha Khan, Jerrie McIntyre, and Ruth Weinberg (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), pp. 45 – 50; Julian Rice, Ella Deloria’s Iron Hawk (Albuquerque: University of New York Press, 1993). 10 Zelda Alice Franceschi, ‘L’approccio integrato dell’antropologia fisica e culturale: Franz Uri Boas, riflessioni sul concetto di razza’, in Razza, razzismo e antirazzismo: Modelli, rappresentazioni e ideologie, ed. by Zelda Alice Franceschi (Bologna: Emil, 2011), pp. 102 – 27. 11 Louise Lamphere, ‘Unofficial Histories: A Vision of Anthropology from the Margins’, American Anthropologist, 106 (2004), 126 – 39 (p. 133).

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capabilities of his students […] Boas was profoundly human in his concern for students who had no money to live on.12

The ethnographical work was urgent, ‘among many American Indian groups, the last old women who spoke a language that had developed over thousands of years were already senile and babbling in their cups’.13 Boas took on men and women indiscriminately, and would place them wherever they were needed. All the women we now know about, thanks to their monographs or their autobiographical writings, and who worked under the aegis of Boas, Benedict or Mead possess an original writing trait, a liberal and progressive view of anthropology. They are characterized by a reflectivity that does justice to the complexities of ethnographical practice and where persistent continuities between ethnographies and anthropological theories are to be found. They have moved beyond that ‘Brahmin division’14 that had become solidified within the discipline. The social reformist Alice Fletcher ; the wealthy patroness, feminist, and New Woman Elsie Clews Parsons; the mentor and poetess Ruth Benedict; the honorary male Margaret Mead […]; the African American and Native American Boasian Daughters, Zora Neale Hurston and Ella Deloria, who humanized and ‘voiced’ colonized experience; the dutiful daughter Gladys Reichard; and the unruly daughter/disruptive woman, Ruth Landes.15

These were women who dismantled the rock-hard certainties of the dawning anthropological science, initiating reflection on what was already a ‘dehumanized machine’16, where collecting data had to be objective and objectifying. Nancy Lutkehaus underlines how, as a result of the WWI, as a consequence of feminism, and of the respect Boas had for women, in the 1920s and 1930s, thanks also to Elsie Clews Parsons’s generous financial aid, there were many more women graduating from Columbia: In addition to Mead’s mentor, Ruth Benedict, they included Ruth Bunzel, Ruth Landes, Gladys Reichard, Esther Goldfrank, Gene Weltfish and Zora Neale Hurston. Like Benedict and Parsons, Bunzel, Reichard, Goldfrank and Weltfish all did fieldwork in the Southwest. After her initial fieldwork among the Ojibwa, Landes conducted fieldwork in Brazil, and Hurston in addition to the work she initially carried out in the rural south, also did fieldwork in Haiti and Jamaica.17 12 Margaret Mead, Blackberry Winter : My Earlier Years (New York: Touchstone Book, 1972), pp. 127 – 28. 13 Ibid., p. 127. 14 Anthropology and Autobiography, ed. by Judith Okely and Helen Callaway (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 3. 15 Cole, Ruth Landes, p. 54. 16 Anthropology and Autobiography, ed. by Okely and Callaway, p. 3. 17 Nancy C. Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead: The Making of an American Icon (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press 2008), p. 155.

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Benedict’s pupil Ruth Landes, a Jewish woman from Belarus, is a good example of how the texture of Franz Boas’s anthropology was hard and at the same time, extremely flexible, and how many of his pupils followed untrodden, innovative pathways. Landes did not publish her autobiographical work, but her writings (in particular The Ojibwa Woman, 1938; and The City of Women, 1947) are a crystalline lens through which to show the work of those women who even today have not entered the official history of the field. Landes, like Mead, had a strong relationship with Ruth Benedict, and from her monographs and in the letters Sally Cole patiently gathered in her biography, an iconoclastic, original woman emerges. Landes writes: I knew that Brazil in 1938 was governed by a severe dictatorship; that American pressure had barely forced Brazil’s army to give up its Nazi-style ideology, called integralismo […] During that period Boas and Benedict also sent four men students to Brazil to study Indian groups in the great forests – Jules Henry, William Lipkind, Buell Quain, and Charles Wagley. My study of Negro life was to carry me, however, to the coast’s capital cities Rio de Janeiro and Bahia.18

As an independent woman, in Brazil her interests turned to the Candombl¦;19 she primarily worked with women and homosexuals because they were the ones who organized work in the terreiros. Landes focussed on women’s economic autonomy, on their capacity to manage aspects of both material and spiritual life. Candombl¦, according to Landes, operated though feminine solidarity. Women worked in conditions of poverty, discrimination, illness, and insecurity. The interpretation she offered was an original and unheard-of one. According to Nancy Parezo many of these women were ‘hidden scholars’, but managed to find other means of expression, pathways too unusual to be recognized, but chiefly to recognize each other. When these women are remembered, it is mainly because of their personality rather than for their scientific work, but perhaps even this was part of a plan with well-identified objects and aims. In this sense Margaret Mead and her career as an anthropologist seems an ‘interesting bridge’20 between all that happened before her and events after her death. She certainly was a 18 Ruth Landes, ‘A Woman Anthropologist in Brazil’, in Women in The Field: Anthropological Experiences, ed. by Peggy Golde (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1970), pp. 119 – 39 (p. 121). 19 Candombl¦ is an Afro-Brazilian religious system prevalently practiced in Brazil, but also in neighbouring states such as Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, and Venezuela. A mixture of indigenous rites and African beliefs, it consists in the cult of the Orixa, totemic and familiar divinities, each associated to a natural element. Although at the beginning its diffusion was limited to the enslaved population, banned by the Catholic Church, and even criminalised by some governments, Candombl¦ has survived for centuries, and spread widely after the end of slavery in the XIX century. It is now widespread, its followers belonging to all social classes, and with tens of thousands of temples, the terreiros. 20 Lamphere, ‘Unofficial Histories’, p. 135.

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‘controversial figure’21, a strong critical voice in America at the time because prestige, influence, and popularity followed her during her swift career. Margaret Mead managed to put all this to good use, and especially in her adult life was capable of showing the importance and relevance of anthropology for daily life (and daily life for anthropology!), in particular for those who lived in the U.S. at the time, which for her was an important priority.22 In this essay I shall try to show how the testimony she left with her autobiography (1972), along with Ruth Benedict’s intellectual biography (1959), were part of a strategy to adapt and publicize female activities in anthropology at Columbia University, so as to start writing the history of women’s anthropology. Fieldwork methods, family life, compromises, discoveries and intellectual defeats, frustrations and worries, the passion and the tenacity that from her 20s to her 70s were her companions in the field: are all part of the female universe that Mead decided to make common heritage, sharing her life with the rest of the world.

I.

Margaret Mead: Autobiography and History of the Discipline

In 1972 Margaret Mead published her autobiography, Blackberry Winter. Mead was seventy, an intensely lived life as a woman and a scientist behind her. She had a daughter, Catherine, whose father, Gregory Bateson, was a British anthropologist she met in the field, in New Guinea, where she had gone with her second husband, Reo Fortune, another anthropologist, from New Zealand. Autobiographical writings (autobiographies, letters from the field, diaries, and field notes) are a precious instrument for researchers in anthropology to understand the processes of the creation of a theory, of a model, of the intense and unrepeatable moment in which an ethnographic discovery occurs. Each of these documents possesses its own peculiarities and it is not easy to understand how anthropologists have used them in the field and what re-readings they must have undergone once back home. These processes are not usually divulged, and are often jealously guarded, remaining private because they are chaotic and untidy,23 because the moment of reflection, understanding and creativity represents something never completely metabolized, and so difficult to deal with in an objective way. Diaries, for example, as Ren¦ Lourau brilliantly highlighted, can 21 William E. Mitchell, ‘Communicating culture: Margaret Mead and the Practice of Popular Anthropology’, in Popularizing Anthropology, ed. by Jeremy MacClancy and Chris McDonaugh (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 122 – 34 (p. 130). 22 Ibid., p. 131. 23 Fieldnotes: The Making of Anthropology, ed. by Roger Sanjek (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1990).

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work as an ‘overflow’24. For the anthropologist, these can be where research problems are recorded, where one’s fragilities and uncertainties emerge. In the pages of a diary sketches are allowable, there is room for dross, for debris, where undefined ideas and vague overlapping intuitions can be jotted down. All anthropologists keep a diary during field research, a notebook in which to jot down what they have observed and experienced day by day. A field diary is essential to research, it is a vital working tool for anthropologists, because the organization of data begins here. Some anthropologists, such as Bronislaw Malinowski, or Ruth Benedict’s, also kept a personal diary, a more private record of events, not necessarily linked to field research, but not completely disconnected from it. Publishing diaries is extremely controversial; most of the field diaries were not written with publishing in mind, but were posthumously edited, and this is undoubtedly an important difference from biographies and autobiographies. Diaries are, furthermore, a place of even religious interiority, […] a place of moral reckoning, but also of fantastical roaming, of quotations, of micro narrations, of the recording of daily life; and so the genre is difficult to define, and essentially hybrid. Some of its features, however, clearly spring to attention: it is the place of non-finalized and not structured narration, the moment of extemporary, and unplanned narration.25

Here are further fundamental differences between diaries and autobiography, the former seemingly not being formally organized and remaining an intimate instrument: not having been written to be shared, it is a secret territory of existence, in which to record daily feelings. The diary remains a barely ideologically structured device, being extemporary and having a different intentionality from the one to be found in an autobiography. Autobiographies are also intriguing because of the writers’ introspective reflections, also for readers. According to the literary critic Andrea Battistini, autobiography, manipulates, internally, and subjectively, personal memories, repossessing them, also in order to understand the external world; it rediscovers, by memory, past episodes that are experienced a second time, interweaving them with what happened successively ; it thus implies an incomplete narration because, not being able to measure itself against death, it cannot have the last word.26

In her autobiography Margaret Mead manipulated and chose what to make public. The more one reads, the clearer it appears a catharsis in the fullest and 24 Ren¦ Lourau, Le Journal de recherche: Mat¦riaux d’une th¦orie de l’implication (Paris: M¦ridiens Klincksieck, 1988). 25 Bianca Tarozzi, ‘Perch¦ scrivere un diario’, in Virginia Woolf, Diari 1925 – 1930, ed. by Bianca Tarozzi (Milan: BUR, 2012), pp. 5 – 40 (p. 7). 26 Andrea Battistini, Lo specchio di Dedalo: Autobiografia e biografia (Bologna: il Mulino 1990), p. 178.

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most literal sense of the word is taking place; Mead chooses, cuts, separates, splits and then sews together, mends, recomposes. Her critical reflection is profound. For today’s reader, one of the greatest difficulties in assessing Margaret Mead’s autobiography arises on account of the many biographies written about her, because, as often happens, available data and sources differ, and each biographer chooses what to highlight.27 An intense, almost symbiotic relationship with one’s biographee develops, and the events of the life one is meticulously investigating are unfolded. From the biographers’ detailed analyses emerge Mead’s many omissions, which mostly refer to her personal life.28 According to Lapsley, this autobiography constitutes a defence Mead set up when she decided not to make certain choices public: the vividness, warmth, and charm with which she describes her family and childhood and the astuteness of her observations should not divert us from understanding that her reminiscences were organized to certain ends. Autobiographies, ultimately, are defence of the self. The dilemma for women writing autobiography […] is that femininity and achievement are uneasy bedfellows in our culture, so that the writer must account for herself in a way that does not tarnish her self-image, let alone her public image. In writing about herself, Mead had to front up a number of issues that had the potential to cast aspersions on her femininity : failure with husbands, intimate friendship with women, pursuit of career ahead of relationships, apparent neglect of children or domestic duties, and masculine interests or personality traits can be a public relations disaster for the successful woman. It is not surprising that women’s autobiographies often show considerable ambivalence about success.29

This is debatable. I do not think Mead wanted to defend herself, I believe, rather, that going over her life again in words, she tried to take stock of its complexity. When she started writing her autobiography she was an important public figure both in America and worldwide, so her choices had to be well thought out for a host of reasons. Similarly to what happened to many women who had decided to dedicate their lives to their work, Mead found herself playing on many levels. As 27 Ren¦e C. Fox, Margaret Mead (New York: Institute for Intercultural Studies, 1979); Robert Cassidy, Margaret Mead: A Voice for the Century (New York: Universe Books, 1982); Jane Howard, Margaret Mead: A Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1984); Hilary Lapsley, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict: The Kinship of Women (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). 28 Lutkehaus highlights that the two missing photographs in Margaret Mead’s autobiography are Edward Sapir’s and Ruth Benedict’s; it was her daughter Mary Catherine Bateson who decided in 1984 to reveal to the public that her mother and Ruth Benedict were lovers in 1920. Benedict and Mead remained close friends and colleagues till Benedict’s death in 1948. Mead also had a love affair with Edward Sapir. According to Lutkehaus, when in her autobiography Mead wrote that many girls who were part of the Ash Can Cats group at Bernard had fallen in love with older men, she was indirectly referring to her experience with Sapir, who was seventeen years older (see Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead, p. 41). 29 Lapsley, Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict, pp. 10 – 1.

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Lutkehaus puts it: ‘Mead as Modern Woman, Mead as Anthropologist, Mead as Scientist, and Mead as Public Intellectual Celebrity’.30 But, while for some women this culminated in a gap between what they were as professionals and what they might do, be or appear as wives and mothers, for her anthropology became a way of looking at the world, a habitus she never discarded and which made her a complete person. Mead structures her autobiography into three parts: the first and the last focus on her family, on her training in college and then university, on the role played by her paternal grandmother Martha Ramsey Mead, who had a fundamental part in her becoming an anthropologist, and then on maternity, the birth of her daughter and the moment in which she became a grandmother. She establishes a perfectly pitched ending, which allows her to conclude by stitching together what was closest to her heart as a woman and a scholar : links between generations, continuity and fractures in cultural traditions, education, and the importance of family. Her own family is depicted as her first experience of fieldwork, and she shows how living with her brothers and sisters helped her to understand how the particular cultural context in which she lived could be compared with American society in general, and enabled her to grow and develop ideas about family models: But I wondered, as I always have wondered, what made the difference ? […] In thinking about all four of us, mulling over and over my own early memories and the family lore that grew up around each child, as it does in all articulate families, I continually tried to formulate my observations […]. Thinking about the contrasts between my sisters led me also to think about the other women in my mother’s family and of the way in which, generation after generation, pairs of sisters have been close friends. In this they exemplify one of the basic characteristics of American kinship relations. Sisters, while they are growing up, tend to be very rivalrous and as young mothers they are given to continual rivalrous comparisons of their several children. But once the children grow older, sisters draw closer together and often, in old age, they become each other’s chosen and most happy companions.31

The human being’s capacity to understand starts from what is nearest, one’s family, siblings, parents, grandparents, until reaching what seems furthest – different, faraway, apparently incomprehensible peoples. This represents Margaret Mead’s most profound and original legacy, and what all scholars in anthropology should aim at achieving. I like to have my experiences buried deep in a personal context – my experiences of knowing the life of the artist or of being in the company of someone I love while I see – and later remember – a particular play or hear a favorite opera […]. But the tie to my own personal experience – my knowledge of the day a poem was written or of the dream 30 Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead, p. 7. 31 Mead, Blackberry Winter, pp. 67, 69, and 70.

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that preceded the poem, my memory of the room, the particular room in one of our many high-ceilinged houses, that Elizabeth is recreating in a painting – this always gives me a greater aesthetic delight.32

For Mead, every cultural experience had to be understood in terms of the personal and biographical context of whoever was experiencing a specific event. All of Boas’s anthropology was ‘personal focused’33, one started from the person, from what this person said, produced, remembered, and transmitted in order to reach his or his/her culture, the wider socio-cultural and historical context. This was Boas’ historical particularism, a sort of micro-history of indigenous populations that he widened to include various aspects of society (ritual aspects, language, study of geography of territory). Such a working method was crucial on an ethnographic level for Mead, but generally it proved true for all her personal experiences. Her paternal grandmother was the one who conveyed how to elaborate all of this on a private level and educated her in the fullest sense of the word: she was a role model for Margaret as a woman, mother, grandmother and scientist: My paternal grandmother, who lived with us from the time my parents married until she died in 1927, while I was studying anthropological collections in German museums, was the most decisive influence in my life. She sat at the center of our household. […] She became my model when, in later life, I tried to formulate a role for the modern parent who can no longer exact obedience merely by virtue of being a parent and yet must be able to get obedience when it is necessary. […] My grandmother began school teaching quite young, at a time when it was still somewhat unusual for a girl to teach school. […] It was the small children in whom she was most interested […]. She understood many things that are barely recognized in the wider educational world even today. […] She was conscious of the developmental differences between boys and girls and considered boys to be much more vulnerable and in need of patience from their teachers than were girls of the same age […]. This was part of the background of my learning the meaning of gender.34

The education and ‘imprinting’ her grandmother, her mother, and her father offered to Mead were ‘extraordinarily refined’35 and allowed her to develop, from a young age, a liberal perception of the differences between the sexes and to reflect on how much gender was a culturally constructed category. They gave a clear sense of justice, of the meaning of liberty, of the complexity of being different, of the importance of bearing witness to oppression and discrimination. Mead was an anthropologist who was committed and her commitment, 32 33 34 35

Ibid., p. 69. Darnell, And Along Came Boas, p. 44. Mead, Blackberry Winter, pp. 45 – 48. Ibid., p. 96.

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to use Dell Hymes’s definition, was ‘radical’36 because she made anthropology the center from which to observe the universe. She was not only a populariser, she also tried to get rid of prejudices, stereotypes, clich¦s, by insisting on the importance of education for the American nation. As this commitment and her popularity increased, she was increasingly ostracized by academic anthropology, which always had (and still does) a controversial relationship with mass media and popular culture.37 She strove not only to raise awareness of the diversity of feelings that she encountered in her field work, but also to highlight the more insidious issues underpinning the culture of the United States in the 1950s. It is very difficult to know how to evaluate how essential it is to have one’s soul seared by the great injustices of one’s own time – being born a serf or a slave, a woman believed to have no mind or no soul, a black man or a woman in a white man’s world, a Jew among Christians who make a virtue of anti-Semitism, a miner among those who thought it good sport to hire Pinkertons to shoot down miners on strike. Such experiences sear the soul.38

This is also another pivotal point: historical events guided her entire life. She found herself working between two world wars, her daughter Catherine was born in wartime, she lived through the Pearl Harbour attack, and the bombing of Hiroshima when as she writes ‘at that point I tore up every page of a book I had nearly finished. Every sentence was out of date. We had entered in a new age.’39 It was rare for anthropologists to locate their ethnographic work within their own historical context, and to speak out about the ethical and political implications of their presumed involvement, but, Rhoda Metraux, recalled, ‘she never lived in the past and she was not a mere raconteur’40. Her goals were direct and intelligible; it was not a coincidence that the moment when this autobiography was published coincided with one of the most complicated phases of the history of anthropology, in which the paradigms of all humanities were challenged. The now well-known issue of Current Anthropology (vol. 9, no. 5, December 1968), published a few years earlier, had hosted a heated debate on anthropologists’ commitment and actions, on intellectual positions of false neutrality and on the ideological character of any so-called objectivity. The Marxist anthropology of those years was concerned with the transformation of oppression and injustice, and made itself the mouthpiece for solidarity, liberation, and emancipation. In her article ‘New Proposals for Anthropologists’ (1968) Kathleen Gough41 at36 37 38 39 40

Reinventing Anthropology, ed. by Dell H. Hymes (New York: Random House, 1969). Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead, p. 188. Mead, Blackberry Winter, p. 92. Ibid., p. 271. Rhoda Metraux, ‘Margaret Mead: A Biographical Sketch’, American Anthropologist, 82 (1980), 261 – 69 (p. 262). 41 Kathleen Gough, ‘New Proposals for Anthropologists’, Current Anthropology, 9 (1968), 403 – 35.

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tacked the kind of anthropology that was ‘buried’ in specialist areas and unable to face up to the problems of the modern world. Mead’s commitment dates from her college years, when she developed ideas about women’s work, the possibilities she would have in the world as a young, white, American woman, about to acquire a good education: We belonged to a generation of young women who felt extraordinarily free – free from the demand to marry unless we chose to do so, free to postpone marriage while we did other things, free from the need to bargain and hedge that had burned and restricted women of earlier generations […]. We learned loyalty to women, pleasure in conversation with women, and enjoyment of the way in which we complemented one another in terms of our differences in temperament, which we found as interesting as the complementary that is produced by difference of sex.42

Meeting Boas and Ruth Benedict was a turning point in Mead’s life. This encounter took place in 1922, and a bond was forged between Mead and Benedict which would mark both their lives. Their correspondence and the biography that Mead wrote on the death of her teacher bear witness to a profound personal and working relationship. By electing anthropology as a career, I was also electing a closer relationship to Ruth, a friendship that lasted until her death in 1948. When I was away, she took on my varied responsibilities for other people; when she was away, I took on hers. We read and reread each other’s work, wrote poems in answer to poems, shared our hopes and worries about Boas, about Sapir, about anthropology, and in later years about the world. When she died, I had read everything she had ever written and she had read everything I had ever written. No one else had, and no one else has.43

From this moment autobiography becomes history : the history of anthropology, the history of women anthropologists working at Columbia, the history of their fieldwork methods. Meads shows how Boas and Benedict taught her (or did E. Kathleen Gough (1925 – 1990) was born in the United Kingdom and studied anthropology both at Cambridge and Oxford. In the 1940s and 1950s she carried out fieldwork in India (in Kerala, between 1947 and 1949, and in the Tanjore district between 1950 and 1953), which was the basis for most of her successive publications. Her main writings were published after her return from India and Vietnam in 1976 and 1982. Gough held several teaching positions both in England and in the U.S. She never abandoned her deeply felt political positions, although in some cases this forced her to leave her academic posts. On this matter, David H. Price writes: ‘For every Wolf or Sahlins whose career advanced despite their involvement in radical political actions, there were numerous anthropologists such as Earle Reynolds or Kathleen Gough whose careers suffered for such actions. The history of activist anthropology in the 1960s and 1970s still needs to be written’ (in Threatening Anthropology : McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), p. 339). From 1974 to her death from ill health in 1990, Kathleen Gough was Honorary Research Associate at the University of British Columbia. 42 Mead, Blackberry Winter, pp. 108 – 09. 43 Ibid., p. 115.

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not!) fieldwork; what intellectual challenges were to be faced, and how; how older students such as Alfred Krober, Robert Lowie, Alexander Goldenweiser, and Paul Radin had worked. She gives details of her job in New York at the Museum of Natural History through Pliny Earle Goddard, she discusses the representative value of the models they were elaborating and the work she would have liked to carry out on her ethnographic materials (letters, notes, and autobiographical writings), which she wanted to leave for her students, so as to prepare them for fieldwork. That summer [1924] Ruth spent in the Southwest, working with the ZuÇi. At the end of the summer I went to the meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Toronto. As there were only a handful of us, we saw a great deal of everyone who came. Edward Sapir and A. A. Goldenweiser argued about Jung’s recently published theory of psychological types. […] Everyone there had a field of his own, each had a ‘people’ to whom he referred in his discussion. […] At Toronto I learned the delight of intellectual arguments among peers. I, too, wanted to have a ‘people’ on whom I could base my own intellectual life.44 I wanted to work on change: on the way in which new customs in a new country or new ways of life in an old country were related to older ones. This idea had grown directly out of my dissertation, in which I had worked on the question of whether technical processes – such as a method of building a canoe, thatching a roof, or making the black pigment of tattooing – were more stable, that is, more enduring, than the religious and social practices in which such processes were imbedded. This had been a purely cultural problem, based on the assertions of other ethnologists about what the ‘oldest’ or the ‘most unchanging’ traits were – whether they were the kinds of tools a people used and the techniques for making them or the forms of the family and a people’s beliefs about the supernatural world.45

Some scholars who have examined the innumerable papers left by Mead refer to her arrogance, or vanity, to a sort of hubris that she could not keep in check. I agree with Lutkehaus, who stresses the importance to Mead of bearing witness: ‘she wanted this material to be available to others. She believed that letters, drafts of manuscripts, even scheduling folders and itineraries were historical and ethnographic data that could be of value to future scholars.’46 Mead’s questions and doubts, along with her methodology, are part of the landscape today for anyone working with indigenous populations. She highlighted the persistence of certain models, the presumed loss or immutability of traditional practices, and the degree of their permeability, resistance, syncretism, and appropriation. Mead had decided to work on changes, that is, she had decided to abandon the anthropology which had characterized Boas’s research. She observed trans44 Ibid., p. 124. 45 Ibid., p. 125. 46 Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead, p. 81.

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formations without sentiment;47 pointing out that they were not always associated with loss, poverty or disappearance, although the situation Mead and Fortune observed amongst the Omaha was complex and often disarming. We had both worked in living cultures where the dress and houses and external lifestyle of the people were congruent with those parts of their culture, their kinship systems, their mythology, and their religious beliefs, which it had been our task to work out. But this was a culture so shrunk from the earlier style, from the time when the Omaha had been buffalo-hunting.48

Hers was not an apocalyptic vision, it was not simply describing and observing cultures that had been impoverished and debased, but she endeavoured to understand the continuous making and undoing of the cultural weave. It is in the central part of this autobiography that the field is to be found: her first experience in Samoa (1925 – 1926); in Manus with Reo Fortune (1928 – 1929)49 ; amongst the Nebraska Omaha (1930); the Arapesh, the Mundugumor, and the Tchambuli (1931 – 1933) in New Guinea and in Bali (1936 – 1938 and 1939) with Gregory Bateson, where she then returned with Ken Heyman in 1957. An intriguing picture emerges, in which her relationship with Benedict and Boas, with Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson are described with precision and clearsightedness, irony and decision, but above all enthusiasm. Mead kept up a correspondence with her family, teachers, and colleagues; a dialogue that reappears in her autobiography, in her letters from the field, and in Ruth Benedict’s intellectual biography. Boas wrote to all of his students. In the summer of 1924, before her departure for Samoa, he advised her : Stick to individual and pattern, problems like Ruth Bunzel on art of Pueblo and Haeberlin on Northwest Coast. I believe you have read Malinowski’s paper in Psyche on the behaviour of individuals in the family in New Guinea. I think he is much too influenced by Freudians, but the problem he had in mind is one of those that I have in mind.50

The Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski had already published The Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922) and become an example for anthropologists at the time. His character and his fame as a Don Juan are part of the myth that had already been built into the history of the discipline. Mead had not as yet read The Argonauts when travelling to Samoa, but her relationship with

47 Mead was criticized for her imperialistic attitude, still considered by many to be steeped in exoticism. See Marianna Torgovnick, Gone Primitive: Savage Intellects, Modern Lives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. 241. 48 Mead, Blackberry Winter, p. 190. 49 She returned there in 1953. 50 Mead, Blackberry Winter, p. 139.

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her second husband, Reo Fortune, was filtered through the controversial relationship that would gradually grow between the two.51 The long saga of his one-side internal debate with Malinowski, a debate that was deeply tinged with oedipal overtones, had begun. Later, on his first lonely trip to Dobu, an island adjacent to the Trobriands and one of those included in the discussion of the kula, Reo pored night after night over Argonauts, which had become for him a model for the development of fieldwork techniques, a set of theories to argue over, and a way of dramatize life.52

Reo Fortune had been trained in psychoanalysis, and was awarded a grant at the University of Cambridge,53 but he was profoundly different from Malinowski. In Mead’s eyes he appeared ‘innocent and inexperienced […]. He had never seen a play professionally performed; he had never seen an original painting by a great artist or heard music played by a symphony orchestra […]. It was like meeting a stranger from another planet, but a stranger with whom I had a great deal in common’54. Fortune had developed a great enthusiasm for Malinowski’s work, although between Mead, Malinowski, and Fortune there was always going to be controversy with occasional requests for help, tinged with appreciation and bitter criticism. On a visit to the United States, Malinowski had criticized Mead’s research, commenting on the brevity of her stays, and her not learning local languages. In 1930, when Growing up in New Guinea was published, Malinowski ‘inspired one of his students to write a review in which it was said that I had , of course, not understood the kinship system, which had been mediated by a schoolboy interpreter’55. Ruth Benedict had met Malinowski in 1926, when he visited Columbia; their comments on this occasion had not been particularly encouraging.56 It was certainly with Malinowski that the disagreements, and the sometimes very disparaging criticism that the British school anthropologists levelled at Mead’s anthropology, began.57 Alfred Cort Haddon, one of the 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

Ibid., p. 159. Ivi. Ibid., p. 158. Ivi. Ibid., p. 160. Ibid., p. 159. Relations between Mead and Malinowski, and more generally the reactions of the academic world to Mead’s anthropology were a mixture of criticism and admiration. In 1928, when Coming of Age in Samoa was published, William Morrow, its publisher, advertised the book in The Nation. Two positive comments followed, one by Havelock Ellis, the well-known English sexuologist who had published a series of controversial texts, and the other by Malinowski, who added to Havelock’s positive comments: ‘An absolutely first-rate piece of descriptive anthropology, an excellent sociological comparison of primitive and modern conditions in some of the most problematic phases of human culture. Miss Mead’s style is fascinating as well as exact…an outstanding achievement’ (Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead, p. 87). Lutkehaus’s analysis is interesting because it highlights the critical reviews that followed

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founders of the British social anthropological school, commented on Mead’s work by saying it was ‘little more than the observations of a lady novelist’. EvansPritchard described Mead’s work, with a cutting phrase that became famous, as about: ‘rustling-of-the-wind-in-the-palm-trees’58. Such criticism reached its apogee with Derek Freeman’s two works,59 and has continued to this day60 though it now sounds more reactionary than offensive. Judgments were based on her style not being sufficiently academic, and on her non-objectifying writing methods. Perhaps Evans-Pritchard had not considered how Mead’s writing was deliberately populist, recalling images that her American readers might have of the South Seas that had been shaped by the stories of Herman Melville, Jack London, or Robert Louis Stevenson, or by films such as Rain: A Play in Three Acts or White Shadows in the South Seas. They offered images of stereotyped, yet reassuring and convincing representations of Samoan life and landscape.61 But the challenge Mead wanted to take up was actually very open minded. Her autobiography, especially in the central part, sought to be useful for future anthropologists and for anyone interested in the subject. She explains how certain ideas came into being, how in research models had been devised, how the paradigms of the discipline had been created, and how antagonisms and differences between schools of thought had developed. What emerges from these writings is the extent to which research, both in the field and in the laboratory, can be an ordeal, with moments of real ecstasy, but also with times of paralysis, emptiness, and moments of crisis. Mead shared all this, firstly with those who could understand her, such as Reo Fortune, Gregory Bateson, and Ruth Benedict, and then with her readers. What she experienced with Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson was an intellectual and human partnership, as she did with Ruth Benedict, who had a similar relationship with Edward Sapir. Mead writes, recalling her research amongst the Arapesh with Reo Fortune:

58 59

60 61

Mead’s most famous publications, and it is clear that the most severe criticism came from the academic world. Alfred Cort Haddon quoted in Aliston Hingston Quiggen, Haddon, the Head Hunter : A Short Sketch of the Life of A.C. Haddon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948); Edward E. Evans-Pritchard, Social Anthropology (Glencoe: Free Press, 1954), p. 96. These are, respectively, Derek Freeman, The Fateful Hoaxing of Margaret Mead: A Historical Analysis of Her Samoan Research (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1999 [1983]); and Id., Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). In ‘Communicating Culture’ Mitchell wrote: ‘Another colleague who spent eight years at Cambridge said that Mead’s name was never mentioned’ (p. 130). Frederick O’Brien, White Shadows in The South Seas (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1919); John Colton and Clemence Randolph, Rain: A Play in Three Acts. Founded on W. Somerset Maugham’s Story, “Miss Thompson” (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1923). See Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead, p. 90.

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I had invented a new kind of fieldwork. I knew how to study children and place their rearing within the total culture, in this way giving a dynamic element to what would otherwise be a fairly flat picture of the life of another society. We had invented a method of event analysis and had learned how to place small events in a large context. But the problem that I had taken to the field, the question of how culturally attributed contrasts in masculine and feminine behavior differentiated the character structure of men and women, seemed to have yielded very little.62

And again with Fortune, while she was falling in love with Bateson, whom she had met in the field, she wrote: As we discussed the problem, cooped up together in the tiny eight-foot by eight-foot mosquito room, we moved back and forth between analyzing ourselves and each other, as individuals, and the culture that we knew and were studying, as anthropologists must. Working on the assumption that there were different clusters of inborn traits, each characteristic of a particular temperamental type, it became clear that Gregory and I were close together in temperament – represented, in fact, a male and female version of a temperamental type that was in strong contrast with the one represented by Reo.63

Reading Blackberry Winter helps us to understand the complexities of what Mead was trying to do. Alongside writing about her role as a woman and mother, Mead invites the historian of anthropology to think anew about how to write that history, which is non-linear and full of gaps. Mead is calling for a history which should consider all the elements that come into play in the construction of any scientific paradigm. ‘I had always expected to adjust my professional life to wifehood and motherhood’64, she writes, when she had taken the decision to leave Luther Cressman, her first husband, with whom she had not succeeded in having children. A few pages further on, after landing at Kankanamun, the Iatmul village where Gregory Bateson was working, she reflects on her methodological uncertainties, and on the exciting, almost paralyzing enthusiasm felt in sharing one’s first scientific discoveries: In his teaching Boas presented material in such a way that students simply absorbed the correct procedures. As a result, we were quite unaccustomed to the kind of heightened awareness of science that characterized men trained in the English tradition of the period – men like C.H. Waddington, Evelyn Hutchinson, Joseph Needham, ‘Sage’ Burnell and of course Gregory as well. However Gregory had had no contact with the kind of anthropology in which we had been trained. Neither the approach of A.C. Haddon and J.H. Hutton at Cambridge, nor the somewhat differing functionalist approaches of Bronislaw Malinowski and A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, made allowance for the 62 Mead, Blackberry Winter, pp. 199 – 200. 63 Ibid., p. 216. 64 Ibid., p. 164.

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study of individuals or sustained, systematic observation of the minutiae of behaviour.65

Having reached her 70s, and enjoying undeniable iconic status in the United States at the time, Mead was well aware of the way in which Bateson, her third husband, had been trained. Mead refers to some of the most rigorous British scholars whose methods were considered examples of knowledge and learning and who had opened up new experimental horizons in such fields as embryology, zoology, history of science, genetics, biochemistry, and also comparative and trans-disciplinary studies. Bateson and Mead shared a great deal, and for her it was stimulating to experiment new research techniques and new fieldwork models. The American media looked on her as an icon of modernity, as an anthropologist, but first and foremost as a scientific innovator. In 1949 The Associated Press nominated Mead one of the ‘Outstanding Women of the Year in Science’, and in 1955 Edna Yost included her as the only woman social scientist in her American Women of Science: Margaret Mead had already achieved all this when she decided to write a biography of Ruth Benedict, her teacher.66

II.

Her Mentor’s Biography: An Anthropologist at Work (1959)

Mead adored her job, and her success and creativity were fuelled by this contagious, unstoppable enthusiasm. William Mitchell describes a meeting he had with Mead shortly before her death: When Mead was dying in New York Hospital, I visited her briefly while en route to the American Anthropology meetings in Los Angeles. Frail and tiny, she sat wrapped in a quilt and, drugged against pain, her eyes were closed. I took her hands and, when she opened her eyes, she spoke my name in her emphatic way and gave me a radiant smile. When I told her where I was going, she pressed my hands and said, ‘Have fun’.67

As an anthropologist and as a mother, Mead had certainly enjoyed herself. She had made a success of the complex task of presenting her work as exciting and relevant. The American and European public did not look on her as a stereotypical woman scientist, but as a sui generis model. She never stopped wearing frivolous clothes, she never downplayed being a woman, not even in the field, and above all she always tried to put herself in other people’s shoes, whether it was South Seas natives or her students, who followed her publications and public appearances. She asked herself significant questions about the role of science 65 Ibid., p. 209. 66 Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead, p. 165. 67 Mitchell, ‘Communicating Culture’, p. 132.

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and about the extent to which the sciences and the humanities might be interconnected. Her ideas were prescient and most original. Lutkehaus quotes an article in Science (1957) with her colleague Rhoda Metraux where the two women presented some research they had carried out on the perception students had of the ‘scientist’ type. The article was entitled ‘Image of the Scientist among HighSchool Students’, and this image of the male scientist was what the article was attacking: A man who wears a white coat and works in a laboratory. He is elderly or middle aged and wears glasses… he may wear a beard… he is unshaven and unkempt. He may be stooped and tired. He is surrounded by equipment: test tubes, Bunsen burner, flasks and bottles, a jungle gym of blown glass tubes and weird machines with dials.68

Thinking of her commitment as a bridge builder between different disciplinary areas, I would like, as a last point, to reflect on how Mead worked with the history of anthropology. With this aim in mind, I will re-examine the biography she published in 1959, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict.69 According to Mead, anthropology was a discipline balanced between the sciences and literature, too often constrained by academia, considered impoverished or trivialized in its popularization, torn, in its political commitment, between denunciation and silence; ethically involved from the outset but afraid of ‘getting its hands dirty’. When she decided to publish her mentor’s biography, Mead started to reflect on the value of bio and autobiographical writings, and on her commitment to recording Benedict’s work. She was scrupulous in tracing the history of Benedict’s way of working and sought to bring out the lesser-known aspects of Benedict’s ideas. In her biography, together with the articles she found most significant, she included edited parts of Benedict’s diaries, some letters and poems. She divided the text into six parts: Search, 1920 – 1930; Anne Singleton, 1889 – 1934; Patterns of Culture, 1922 – 1934; The Years as Boas’ Left Hand; The Post-war Years: The Gathered Threads; Selected Poems. Mead saw Benedict as a woman with a complex personality, a rigorous scientist but an artist too, who had grasped the fragility and the potentialities of anthropology. It is clear, from this biography, that throughout her career Benedict had striven to show that ‘being an anthropologist’ was a humane but complicated job, and that only a trans-disciplinary outlook could shed light on human beings with all their multiple facets. Mead was aware of the delicacy of her task, because writing about Benedict meant not only having to deal with her own emotional and intellectual involvement, but also compromising other people: 68 Lutkehaus, Margaret Mead, p. 195. 69 Margaret Mead, An Anthropologist at Work: Writings of Ruth Benedict (London: Secker & Warburg, 1959). Mead then wrote a second biography of Benedict which she published in 1974, but which will not be considered here.

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The materials which I have used for this book are first of all the corpus of Ruth Benedict’s work which is now deposited in the library of her college, Vassar […]. I have also her letters to me, and Sapir’s letters to her, and her correspondence with Boas […]. As all of us were frequently in the field and so were separated, some of these letters are very important. I have her poems, both published and unpublished, and Sapir’s poems, published and unpublished – which he had sent to her – and the poems, I wrote within her writing, to serve as mnemonic for the ways in which we felt […]. I have tried to provide the necessary and sufficient documentation essential to future scholars – especially in the chronological life history – but this is an incidental, not the primary purpose of this book.70

She made these issues explicit at the end of her own autobiography : When I wrote a biography of Ruth Benedict, An Anthropologist at Work, I tried to meet these different and sometimes conflicting demands. […] There was the problem, for example, of letters. […] I had the rights to Ruth Benedict’s own letters. […] But the content of Edward’s Sapir’s voluminous letters to Ruth Benedict – her letters to him had no survived – remained the property of his family. […] There were also those whom Ruth had known well who did not wish even their names to be mentioned in a book about her, and I honored their wishes. […] Ruth could never accept any direct comment on her beauty. […] For better or worse, the biography of Ruth Benedict was one expression of my responses to those who had already died and who, in their lifetime, had left their mark forever on my life and on the lives and work of American anthropologists. Necessarily, what they meant to me is also an integral part of this account of my own life.71

This book is very rich in information; Mead describes Benedict as a woman and as an anthropologist, which is why, next to strictly biographical material, she placed a series of scientific articles, many of which, because of Benedict’s shyness and inability to promote herself, had not been fully understood, either by her students, or the establishment. It seems to me that Mead’s intention was to send readers a message about the origins and development of anthropology. According to Mead, writing the history of anthropology, like understanding how any model of scientific knowledge has been constructed, meant taking into consideration both historical and social contexts and personal experiences as recorded in letters, field notes, and diaries. In this way the stories of women’s conflicts, challenges, and fears in the working environment, alongside the occasionally terrifying boredom of everyday life, reflected the experiences of many American women anthropologists at the time. Mead met Benedict together with Mary Bloomfield,72 at the end of the first

70 Ibid., p. XIX 71 Mead, Blackberry Winter, pp. 286 – 87. 72 Mary Bloomfield was a study companion of Mead’s and sister of American linguist Leonard

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semester of 1922 when attending Franz Boas’s lectures. They were both impressed by him and decided to attend all the graduate courses.73 Benedict was a poetess and a prolific writer, but she suffered from ‘chronic’ depression which she tried in vain to conceal. She was already interested in psychoanalysis, and had worked with Alexander Goldenweiser at the New School for Social Research and with Elsie Clews Parsons, who at the time was holding a few courses. Her academic life is examined by Mead who, together with an effective description of her first years at Columbia, published essays, one previously unpublished,74 and some diaries (1923 – 1926). Benedict’s portrait is drawn as follows: Her fellow students at the New School knew her as “Mrs Benedict”, whose husband never was present. She appeared to them as a gentle, wraithlike figure, her hair going prematurely grey and never staying in place, dressed with a kind of studied indifference, just deaf enough to miss a great deal of what was being said before others recognized it, and painfully shy – the beauty which had been hers as a young girl misted over by uncertainty and awkwardness […]. Essentially she was isolated from any milieu, meeting others only at occasional dinners with colleagues of her husband or at lunches or dinners alone with individual old friends.75

An apparently shy woman isolated and uneasy, is how Benedict appeared to the young Mead’s eyes. It is interesting to note how, in the second part, ‘The Story of My Life’, Benedict reflected on some events she recalled and which later on became key concepts in her ethnographical studies: pain, taboos, abnormality, deviance. While she would later do the same in her autobiography, Mead was struck by the topics considered by Benedict and by the way in which she had managed to deal with them. Benedict’s vision of anthropology influenced Ruth Landes, in particular her view of the extent to which individuals manage to forge their own existence regardless of cultural norms. Steered by Benedict, Landes tried to understand how cultural norms can be modelled, ignored, and reinterpreted: Ruth [Benedict] pursued anthropology to answer her own private questions about the individual’s fate. Her lectures focussed on the cultural designs and their sanctions that in each of the various societies mark out the scope of individual lives, bringing torment, dreary suffering, and occasionally special fulfilment. The overwhelming designs or

Bloomfield, who influenced structural linguistics. Mary committed suicide in 1923. Mead talked about her in her autobiography and Benedict mentioned her in her 1923 diaries. 73 Mead, An Anthropologist at Work, p. 5. 74 Respectively : Ruth Benedict, ‘The Vision of Plains Culture’, American Anthropologist, 24 (1922), 1 – 23; Ead., ‘A Matter for the Field Worker in Folk-Lore’, Journal of American FolkLore, 36 (1923), 104; Ead., Patterns of Culture (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1934), chapter 2; and finally the unpublished The Uses of Cannibalism dated around 1925. 75 Mead, An Anthropologist at Work, p. 9.

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‘patterns’ must imprison the soul of each ‘culture carrier’, or member of society, and they accomplish it in ways that vary from place to place and from one era to another.76

As was to be the case for Mead later, for Benedict, anthropology offered an opportunity for self-awareness and for greater understanding of the American society she lived in, and of what seemingly was very far from her in time and space. The type of anthropology they initiated was new because it sought to highlight diversity through the seemingly familiar. Mead and Benedict corresponded throughout their lives, and Mead decided to publish some of their letters, where the two women reflected out loud, so to speak, on the problems they were encountering in the field and in their theoretical readings, in their daily lives and in life in general. Letters were important for both these women. Her ‘diaries’ represented for Benedict notebooks where she could recount everyday occurrences; they have the same function as a ‘field diary’ – a record of small daily moments, short notes about the progress of the work and the gradual, the slow build up of experience. Her ‘journals’ provided a place for reflection and self-criticism, where she could set down her most intimate, private thoughts. Ruth [Benedict] loved the minutiae of real life, and we spent hours telling each other stories about people whom the other had never met, wondering and speculating why they had done or felt or thought what they seemed to have. But in all the stories she told there was no one whom she had really hated or even feared. Her own feeling or being different she saw as a threat to the happiness and the incomprehensible contentment and involvement of the people around her. Her inappropriate gay laughter at some incongruity which no one else recognized was read by her sister as ‘liking to see people put on a griddle’, and in later life it frightened serious young male students who felt uncomfortable studying under a woman who had so much power to hinder or to help them.77

Benedict was a complex woman; Mead portrayed her as very different from most people, as a shy and vulnerable woman, both hard and yet fragile, beautiful and yet seemingly ashamed of this, always trying to hide her beauty. Even in her delightful correspondence with Edward Sapir, Benedict reveals a deep melancholy and feelings of displacement. Introducing Benedict and Sapir’s correspondence, Mead comments on how most of the letters: ‘were written by hand, in a fine, precise script as if for a publication, and when she once typed a letter to him he protested: ‘Use the typewriter for scientific MS but not for correspondence, please!’’78. Such comments enable us understand how details made a difference. Attention to language, to both form and content, to the difficulty of translating complex issues such as silences, gestures, posture is an integral part 76 Cole, Ruth Landes, p. 533. 77 Mead, An Anthropologist at Work, pp. 84 – 5. 78 Ibid., p. 158.

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of this epistolary exchange. The years from 1923 to 1925, when the correspondence became more frequent, were very hard years for Sapir, who had lost his wife, and for Benedict, who was trying to reconcile her professional life and her marriage. What emerges from this biography is a search for control through writing. Clifford Geertz was dumbfounded by Ruth Benedict’s narrative power.79 Anne Singleton’s expository capacity (this was the pseudonym Benedict used in her non-academic writings) was sober, methodical, dry, and called for a means of making things better. Benedict/Singleton proposed discipline for the body and practice for the spirit. She certainly shared this passion with Margaret Mead, but it was above all with Sapir that she could communicate her search for a transversal language, for an original style that might do justice to the ethical, political, and social commitment called for by anthropology. What drove them was not just a passion for art, literature or music, but the hope of finding the language, that could express the special experience that anthropology would reveal. The relationship between Benedict and Sapir was controversial, despite the fact that their friendship and trust was profound and animated by genuine intellectual passion. Regna Darnell, in her autobiography, talking about Sapir,80 describes a partnership that thrived on love of poetry and passion for ethnographic research. To show that the sharing of poetry ran deep in the first years of their friendship, Mead in her 1959 text quotes this letter : Chicago, Illinois Oct. 19, 1925 … I’m glad you thought well of the sonnet entitled “He implores her”… My own favorite among these poems is “Nostalgic Ditty”. Enclosed is a sonnet I wrote last night in bed (it was Sunday and I had decided to take a real rest and try to shake off weeks). […] Will you be a sponge, my dear and sweet counsellor? And you must send me your verse. I can’t suffer Anne Singleton to languish into thin air. ZuÇi myths are important toys, of course, but your verse, even when you’re not pleased with it, it is a holier toy. You may quote this to Boas if you like. I have strayed from the paternal roof and no longer fear the Sire’s displeasure.81

Sapir would read every piece of poetry Benedict sent, and showed Benedict his poems. There are also theoretical and ethnographic essays shared through the letters. When Sapir read Ruth Benedict’s essay on the Guardian Spirit, he was enthusiastic. According to Darnell he reinterpreted Boas’s arguments in accordance with his own particular interests. 79 Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 80 Regna Darnell, Edward Sapir : Linguistic, Anthropologist, Humanist (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 177 – 78. 81 Mead, An Anthropologist at Work, p. 181.

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I should like to see the problem of individual and group psychology boldly handled, not ignored, by someone who fully understands culture as a historical entity.82

According to Darnell, Sapir and Benedict were isolated academically. In fact, theirs was an actual estrangement from the world surrounding them, and in particular the American culture of the time. The relationship between Mead and Sapir was also intense, according to Darnell: ‘Sapir, who was inclined to be somber in those years, perceived her as an elfin sprite and was moved to greater exuberance by her lively presence’83. If he appreciated Benedict’s shy reticence towards the world, he was fascinated by Mead’s stubborn capacity to want to penetrate it. What emerges from Sapir’s biography and the letters between them is how he was ‘extremely conservative in his attitudes towards women and family’84. According to Darnell, Sapir ‘was a family man’: for him, there was no connection between professional life and marriage, between personal choices and fieldwork, between academic commitment and family elections. Benedict, and in particular Mead, tried, on the contrary, to write a different history, a story where for women everything could be inextricably tied together and be mutually beneficial. For Mead, the conflict between family and academic life led her to invent a less conservative way to establish her credentials as a woman, mother, and professional. This was not understood by Sapir, nor by most of the people these women encountered.

III.

Conclusion

In 1974, a few years before her death, Margaret Mead published another book about Ruth Benedict. Once again, it was not an actual biography, but a book where Mead describes her teacher’s life and presents a series of essays and articles. It seems to me that Mead’s idea was link her own life to all those who had shared with her their mentor’s teachings: Sapir, Radin, Kroeber, Parsons, Landes, Reichard, Hurston. Thinking of Mead’s ‘ocean wide production’ in ethnographic terms and as a popularizer, I believe that this idea of writing the history of the discipline starting with the life stories of Franz Boas’s favorite pupils sheds interesting light on how she thought. As we have seen, most of those working under Boas’s aegis were women, and they tended to utilize a wide variety of material, including novels, poetry, theatre, television, and journalism. Women displayed the ability to juggle the public and the private, moving between field experiments and testing hypotheses, between popularization and 82 Ibid., p. 172. 83 Ibid., p. 183. 84 Ibid., p. 181.

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catering for specialists. This emerges very clearly from the biographies of these women and from their autobiographical writings, which offer an opportunity to reflect on issues that are still highly significant in the history of the development of anthropology. These issues continue to be a) the relationship between autobiography and the history of ‘anthropological science’; b) the role of autobiographical writings in the construction of knowledge; d) women’s writing in the history of anthropology and its popularization; e) creativity in science. The practice of women anthropologists who, on the one hand had to adapt themselves to a ‘hard’ and objectifying subject and, on the other, had to be committed to social and human values. In this sense, Margaret Mead’s autobiography, together with Ruth Benedict’s two biographies that Mead wrote in 1959 and 1974, seem to go beyond the single lives but, as often happens when working with biographical material, help to throw light on the whole cultural context, with all of its facets, idiosyncrasies and convergences.

*

Paola Govoni

The Making of Italo Calvino: Women and Men in the ‘Two Cultures’ Home Laboratory

As is well known, science and nature figured prominently in the writings of Italo Calvino (1923 – 1985). Nature for Calvino was never a place for facile marvelling, but rather attested his ‘feeling for the organism’, to use Barbara McClintock and Evelyn Fox Keller’s phrase.1 In tales like The Argentine Ant (1952), The Baron in the Tree (1957), or Marcovaldo, or the Seasons in the City (1963), to say nothing of his works from Cosmicomics (1965) onwards, he offers images of nature without ever forgetting culture and society. His nature is as aesthetically attractive as it is disturbing, and packed with social traits. Leading literary criticism in various languages has shown that Calvino’s preoccupation with nature evolved in the course of time into a system of observation and narration of the world that included among its instruments of enquiry the culture of science.2 Calvino was both scholar and novelist, focusing on societies (ancient and contemporary, western, Soviet and oriental) while attentive to scientific literature, past and present. He never moved in those scientific areas as a mere amateur, because he had benefited from an informal but solid scientific education from his family, as will be seen below; but he was also influenced by a formal scientific education during his two years as a uni-

* I am indebted to Paula Findlen, who enthusiastically encouraged me, if my curiosity in the Mameli-Calvino-Mannessier relationship became a research project. The first results were presented in a seminar co-sponsored by the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and the Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research (Stanford University, March 3, 2009). 1 Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman, 1983). 2 The literature on Calvino is almost infinite. Here I limit my references to: Martin L. McLaughlin, Italo Calvino (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998); Pierpaolo Antonello, Il m¦nage a quattro: Scienza, filosofia, tecnica nella letteratura italiana del Novecento (Florence: le Monnier/universit—, 2005); Massimo Bucciantini, Italo Calvino e la scienza: Gli alfabeti del mondo (Rome: Donzelli, 2007); Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).

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versity student in the School of Agriculture at the University of Turin.3 After this attempt at becoming an agronomist, he decided to leave agricultural studies and opt for the humanities, working first as a journalist, and soon afterwards as an editor. Thanks to that early education, on his desk were to be found books by Heisenberg, Planck, Dyson, Hoyle, Watson and Crick, as well as philosophical, social and literary works.4 This led him to focus frequently on what we now call technoscience. In some of his work he shows he is a master of the narration of interrelations between the natural and the cultural, which our species has been immersed in for centuries. Contrary to the well established Cold War rhetoric about the ‘two cultures’, Calvino was not an exception in his attempt to bridge the two. In the works of other major twentieth century internationally known Italian writers, scientific culture played an important role. This was true of Carlo Emilio Gadda (1893 – 1973), and Primo Levi (1919 – 1987), for example. From a strictly biographical approach,5 the origins of an interest in science are easy to find in Gadda, a professional engineer, and Levi, a professional chemist.6 For Calvino, things seem not so very different if we bear in mind the importance of his informal education, and his early career as a university student. If Gadda and Levi had an advanced science and technology university education, Calvino had much more than is usually recognized. As a boy and young man he acquired this at home thanks to his mother, the professional botanist Eva Mameli Calvino (1886 – 3 See Calvino’s letters to his parents in Italo Calvino, Lettere 1940 – 1985, ed. by Luca Baranelli, intr. by Claudio Milanini (Milan: Mondadori, 2000), passim. See also Album Calvino ed. by Luca Baranelli and Ernesto Ferrero (Milan: Mondadori, 1995), p. 11, 14, 19, 21, and 34, and pp. 52 – 9. 4 Bucciantini, Calvino e la scienza, p. 145. 5 As already mentioned in my introductory essay to this book, I refer to the ‘pragmatic’ approach to biography which is spoken of in Peter Hainsworth and Martin McLaughlin, ‘Introduction’ in Biographies and Autobiographies in Modern Italy: A Festschrift for John Woodhouse, ed. by Peter Hainsworth and Martin McLaughlin (London: Legenda, 2007), pp. 1 – 6. 6 On Gadda and Levi see at least: Albert Sbragia, Carlo Emilio Gadda and the Modern Macaronic (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996); The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi, ed. by Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Science and Literature in Italian Culture from Dante to Calvino: A Festschrift for Patrick Boyde, ed. by Pierpaolo Antonello and Simon A. Gilson (Oxford: Legenda, 2004); Massimo Bucciantini, Esperimento Auschwitz / Auschwitz Experiment (Turin: Einaudi, 2011). On Calvino and science, besides the bibliography quoted in note 2, see: Jeff Wallace, ‘‘The World before Eyes’: Calvino, Barthes and Science’, in The Third Culture: Literature and Science, ed. by Elinor S. Shaffer (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998), pp. 269 – 83; Mario Porro, ‘Images and Scientific Knowledge in Calvino’, in Image, Eye and Art in Calvino: Writing Visibility, ed. by Birgitte Grundtvig, Martin MacLaughlin, and Lene Waage Petersen (London: Legenda, 2007), pp. 60 – 75.

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1978), and his father Mario (1875 – 1951), an experimental agronomist. The home Italo Calvino grew up in was also the headquarters of an experimental station of floriculture in Sanremo (Stazione Sperimentale per la Floricoltura ‘Orazio Raimondo’),7 run by his father Mario, and when he died, by his mother Eva. Here Eva Mameli Calvino set up a lab where she worked for several decades. Moreover, the family was in close contact with Eva’s brother, Efisio Mameli (1875 – 1957), a prominent chemist and university professor, and his wife Anne Ursule Mannessier (1879 – 1944), a French chemist and independent scholar.8 The Mameli-Calvinos and the Mameli-Mannessiers were both successful collaborative couples.9 Italo’s uncle and aunt visited the Mameli-Calvino’s house regularly, and young Italo maintained a correspondence with them.10 Neither of them reached as high a status in the scientific world as Italo would in literature, but the Mameli-Calvino-Mannessier network did play a role in the shaping of Italo Calvino, with his well-known curiosity for scientific and technological issues, and his ability to address them in his literary works. The Mameli-Calvino-Mannessier couples thought of their work in close relation to the political, institutional and entrepreneurial world they lived in; in their youth this was the Liberal age, and later it would become fascism. They will be analyzed here primarily for biographical purposes in connection with Italo Calvino, but they should be viewed also as figures shedding interesting light on the broader panorama of science and twentieth century totalitarian regimes. In that perspective, chemistry (the professional field in which Italo Calvino’s aunt and uncle were involved), and plant breeding (for his parents), played important roles.11 In what follows I will be dealing also with the important relationship Italo Calvino and his relatives enjoyed with two other scholars, women this time and

7 The name of the city has changed over the years from San Remo to Sanremo. Here I shall follow the use made by the protagonists. 8 For the use of the expression ‘independent scholar’, see Gianna Pomata, ‘Amateurs by Choice: Women and the Pursuit of Independent Scholarship in Twentieth-century Historical Writing’, Centaurus, 55 (2013), 196 – 219. 9 On this very useful category, see Creative Couples in the Sciences, ed. by Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996). 10 For references to the correspondence with the ‘Paduan uncle and aunt’, see the 1940s letters of Calvino to his parents in Calvino, Lettere, 1940 – 1985, passim. 11 For the studies on plant breeding, genetics and food production, subjects relevant to the activities of the scholars I shall be speaking of, see the articles in Historical Studies in Natural Sciences, 40/4 (2010); for a discussion of the recent bibliography on the subject, see Tiago Saraiva, M. Norton Wise, ‘Autarky/Autarchy : Genetics, Food Production, and the Building of Fascism’, ibid., 419 – 28. For the Nazi context: Jonathan Harwood, ‘Introduction to the Special issue on Biology and Agriculture’, Journal of the History of Biology, 39 (2006), 237 – 39.

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not scientists: the painter Beatrice Duval (1880 – 1973), and the writer Olga Resnevic Signorelli (1883 – 1973). The documents I have traced, and the life and work of Duval and Resnevic Signorelli, who were very close friends of Eva Mameli Calvino, show that in the ‘laboratory home’ Italo Calvino grew up in not only science, economics, and politics were on the agenda, but also art and literature, and that at a professional level.12 As has emerged from Italo Calvino’s unpublished correspondence, Resnevic Signorelli was the first adult with writing and publishing experience to read young Italo’s early fiction, encouraging him and providing him with practical advice.13 For Beatrice Duval, an artist who left hundreds of valuable paintings, there is at the moment only one piece of indirect evidence of the personal correspondence between the two.14 However, it’s likely that for Italo, who showed an interest in the visual arts from his youth,15 Duval was an interesting interlocutor with a fascinating, mysterious past. A daily presence in the Calvino Mameli house from the early 1930s, Duval was a pupil of Paul Signac (1863 – 1935) and other painters and writers.16 For decades Duval worked every

12 This research has been based on documents found in: Angelo and Olga Signorelli Archive, Cini Foundation, Venice (SACF); Stazione Sperimentale per la Floricoltura ‘Orazio Raimondo’ Archive, Sanremo (SSFA); Mario Calvino and Eva Mameli Calvino Archive, Biblioteca Civica del Comune di Sanremo (CMAS); Folder ‘Mameli Calvino, Giuliana’, Ministero Istruzione Superiore. Direzione Generale Istruzione Superiore. Fascicoli personale insegnante e amministrativo. II versamento 28 serie. b. 94, Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Rome (ACS); Folder ‘Mameli, Efisio’, MPI DG Istruzione Universitaria Fascicoli personali professori ordinari. III versamento (1940 – 1970) (ACS); Historical Archive of the University of Pavia (AUP); Historical Archive of the University of Turin (TUA); Historical Archive of the University of Padua (PUA). For other manuscripts and documents see infra. In October 2008 I managed to consult the documents of the CMAS thanks to the information provided by Virginia Cox and Giovanna Calvino, who I wish to thank here. A professional and kind welcome I was able to find in the SSFA thank to Andrea Pasini and Andrea Sanzý. 13 Resnevic Signorelli and Mameli Calvino were in correspondence at least from 1938 to 1972. See Letters of Eva Mameli Calvino to Olga Signorelli (SACF). The correspondents of Olga Resnevic Signorelli and her husband Angelo Signorelli are now listed in Archivio russoitaliano VI. Olga Signorelli e la cultura del suo tempo, ed. by Elda Garetto and Daniela Rizzi (Salerno: Europa Orientalis, 2010), 1, pp. 13 – 77. That register lists three letters of Italo Calvino, but in actual fact there are four, see Paola Govoni, ‘La casa laboratorio dei Calvino Mameli, tra scienza, arte e letteratura: Con lettere inedite di Italo Calvino a Olga Resnevic Signorelli’, Belfagor, 4 (2012), 545 – 67. On Resnevic, see Daniela Rizzi, ‘Olga Signorelli nella storia culturale italiana della prima met— dell’Ottocento’, in Archivio russo-italiano VI, ed. by Giannetto and Rizzi, 2, pp. 9 – 110. 14 Calvino, Lettere, 1940 – 1985, p. 25. 15 On the importance of the visual in Calvino’s work, see: Franco Ricci, Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures: Word and Image in the Work of Italo Calvino (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001); Image, Eye and Art in Calvino, ed. by Grundtvig, MacLaughlin, and Petersen. 16 FranÅoise Delamarre-Tindy and Jean Selz, La vie et l’œvre de B¦atrice Duval (Thonon:

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day with Eva Mameli Calvino on the organization of campaigns for the protection of the environment, birds in particular. A significant presence in the family, Duval and Resnevic Signorelli do not figure in the many pages of Calvino’s autobiographical writing, nor in the various interviews where he talks of himself or his family. Despite the evidence scattered in his published correspondence and in some autobiographical passages, of those who have worked on Italo Calvino no one seems to have researched on them. In the pages that follow I shall examine the relationships between the men and women belonging to two generations of Italians; those who were born and grew up in the so-called age of science and positivism, and those of the later generation Italo Calvino himself belonged to, a generation maturing in the context of fascism and neo-idealism. From the difficult relationships between these two generations will emerge material for a better understanding of the myth of the so-called two cultures; a myth which, paradoxically, Italo Calvino, narrator of technoscience, helped to consolidate. In a frequently quoted autobiographical sketch he wrote: ‘I am the son of scientists: my father was an agronomist, my mother a botanist […] Among my family and relations only scientific subjects were held in any honor […] I am the black sheep of the family.’17 This has been quoted in dozens of writings on him. And yet from my research no evidence has shown up to confirm some kind of regret on the part of his scientist parents or uncle and aunt for the path of literature which, unlike his brother Floriano (1927 – 1988), the young Italo embarked upon. Why, on examining his own past, did he distance himself from his scientist relations, using an image leading us back to the rhetoric of the two cultures contradicted by the events of his life, his fiction, and his essays? Examination of the Anglo-French-Italian-Latvian and Swiss network of Mameli-Calvino-Mannessier, Beatrice Duval, and Olga Resnevic Signorelli, will help us answer that question. I shall first look at the relationship between Italo Calvino and Olga Resnevic Signorelli, then the life and work of Beatrice Duval. Having examined the professional activities of the uncle and aunt, Efisio Mameli and Anne (Anna) Mannessier Mameli, I shall turn to Eva Mameli Calvino and finally to Mario Calvino, about whom Italo wrote a lot. This specific sequence will allow me to formulate a hypothesis for the reasons which led Calvino to use Vincent Buisson, 1990); G¦rald Schurr and Pierre Cabanne, Dictionnaire des petits Ma„tres de la peinture, 1820 – 1920, Tome I, A — H (Paris: Les Êdition de l’Amateur, 1996), pp. 396 – 97. 17 Italo Calvino, Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, trans. by Martin McLaughlin (London: Jonathan Cape, 2003), 1st Italian ed. 1994, p. 13. Another important autobiographical text where there are many pages on his parents, especially on his father Mario, is Italo Calvino, The Road to San Giovanni, trans. by Tim Parks (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 1st orig. ed. 1990.

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the image of the two cultures to distance himself from his family. The interpretation advanced here is that it was imperative for him to differentiate himself from a generation that had matured cultivating humanitarian, political and ‘progressive’ ideals, where the scientific and the social had been confused ambiguously, leading them to collaborate with the fascist regime. Calvino wrote in those terms of his relations (scientists) and of himself (a literary man) in the most difficult years of the Cold War. After the invasion of Hungary by Soviet troops, he was in his turn forced to face up to another dictatorial regime, the one he had believed in.18 Under the circumstances, he was unable to achieve a really thorough analysis of the relations between himself, his own family, and politics: perhaps no one could have. He did feel the urgent need, however, to distance himself from his parents, and he did it using an apparently ‘neutral’ instrument, culture.19 It was an operation of reconstruction a posteriori of his past, to some extent similar to what he did to remove the role played by some interesting women in his early days as a writer. Not only did the detailed suggestions of Olga Resnevic Signorelli disappear from the autobiographical writings concerning his beginnings, but Beatrice Duval herself disappeared: and Duval was not only a good painter and a multi-lingual traveler of a Conradian past,20 she was the only one of the group who apparently remained faithful and consistent to her antifascism.

I.

The ‘Old Russian Writer’: Olga Resnevic Signorelli

An Italo Calvino not yet nineteen, a writer of short stories and student of agriculture at the University of Turin, for the first time was living away from home. With these words in February 1942 he ended a letter to his parents, to whom he wrote often: ‘Send me the leather belt of Dad’s fascist uniform, otherwise I shall have to buy one because they don’t provide one. Write to me about the Resnevic, if she has spoken of me.’21 ‘The Resnevic’, of course, was Olga Resnevic Signorelli. A month later, he quickly commented on what one imagines his mother had 18 Calvino joined the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, P.C.I.) while a partisan, and left it publicly in 1957. For the relationship between Calvino and the P.C.I., see McLaughlin, Italo Calvino, p. 58 and ff. 19 See Italo Calvino, ‘Political Autobiography of a Young Man’ in Id., Hermit in Paris, pp. 130 – 56. Whereas the text refers to reflections on the early 1960s, in the note on page 156, written later, Calvino intimates that his position on these events changed later. 20 For the importance of Conrad in Calvino’s writing see, Martin L. McLaughlin and Arianna Scicutella, ‘Calvino e Conrad: Dalla tesi di laurea alle Lezioni americane’, Italian Studies, 57 (2002), 113 – 32. 21 Italo Calvino to Mario Calvino, 11/02/1942, in Calvino, Lettere, 1940 – 1985, p. 34.

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written to him concerning the opinion of her friend: ‘I approve (though with some reservations) of the Resnevician criticism.’22 Not many days afterwards, he was writing extensively to Eugenio Scalfari, an ex schoolmate who shared his passion for literature and was then collaborating with fascist journals in Rome: The old Russian writer to whom I gave two of my short stories to read is finally back in Sanremo with a response and good suggestions: L’uomo che ritrový se stesso (The Man Who Found Himself), good, less good Il deserto di pietra (Stone Desert) because it talks of things distant from my own experience. Advice: tell of things, environments, and characters studied in the real world. This is what my mother told me, I personally felt it was not a good idea to call on her.23

It is well known that from when he was a youth, at the junction between ‘rediscovering himself ’ and the ‘stony desert’, Calvino followed the former. As Calvino the essay writer would observe, to narrate well ‘you need to start from what one is.’24 The suggestion of Resnevic Signorelli. The ‘old Russian writer’ (it would seem that Resnevic Signorelli never lost her strong Russian accent) with whom the youth had not ‘thought it a good idea’ to speak to personally, must have reasoned persuasively when proffering her criticisms. The young man, in fact, continued to have her read his work. In another letter to Scalfari of the summer of 1942 he wrote: ‘One of life’s little ironies, the Russian writer was unconditionally enthusiastic about commedia della gente (comedy of the people).’25 It is not clear how Olga Resnevic Signorelli had met Eva Mameli Calvino; perhaps through the Experimental Station, where it was possible to procure cuttings of new varieties of flowers and aguamiel (or pulque), a drink used in South America, obtained by fermenting the juice of agaves which were plentiful in Calvino’s garden. Of these and other botanical curiosities of Resnevic Signorelli, an enthusiastic devotee of gardening, there are many traces in the letters Eva Mameli Calvino sent her over almost forty years.26 It may well be, however, that the friendship went back to contacts that Mario Calvino, before leaving Italy for Latin America, had had with some Russians in 1908, as we shall see. At any

22 Italo Calvino to Mario Calvino, 15/02/1942, ibid., p. 39. 23 Italo Calvino to Eugenio Scalfari, Calende di Marzo 1942, Calvino, Lettere, 1940 – 1985, p. 45. Journalist, writer and politician, Scalfari, born in 1924, after the war was one the founders of the Radical Party, then a member of the Socialist Party, and later, as a founding editor of the newspaper La repubblica, a supporter of the Partito Democratico, a recent evolution of the P.C.I. 24 Italo Calvino, Saggi, p. 2730, quoted in Antonello, Il m¦nage a quattro, p. 174. 25 Italo Calvino to Eugenio Scalfari, 29/08/1942, in Calvino, Lettere, 1940 – 1980, p. 90. 26 In addition, see Giuseppina Volpicelli, ‘Una scatola piena di sabbia’, in Archivio russoitaliano VI, ed. by Giannetto and Rizzi, 2, pp. 295 – 301.

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rate, the tone of the letters to her from young Italo and his mother show that she was a friend of the family. Born in Latvia, in 1902 Resnevic decided to study medicine in Switzerland, at the University of Bern. In 1904 she moved to Siena to continue her studies, which she concluded in Rome, where she graduated in 1908. While she was a student, she met Angelo Signorelli (1876 – 1952). They had two daughters, and although she never married, she took the surname Signorelli, and kept it even after her separation from Angelo. In Rome the Signorellis moved in medical and writer circles, like them of a socialist and humanitarian orientation. Like Resnevic, not from a wealthy family, Signorelli through the people he mixed with quickly became one of the most prominent doctors in Rome, looking after the health of the intellectual and political elite, and was involved even with the health of some members of Mussolini’s family. From their correspondence it would appear that Olga was also in contact with the Duce, who received her in Palazzo Venezia in 1938.27 Having attained an excellent standard of living, the Signorellis were able to dedicate themselves to collecting art. After WWI Resnevic Signorelli decided to abandon the medical profession to devote herself full time to writing, and the translation of writers like Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and others which she helped to make known to the Italian public.28 Her contacts with an extensive panorama of intellectuals also included open supporters of the fascist regime like Margherita Sarfatti (1880 – 1961), a well known journalist and a key figure in the construction of the myth of the Duce, or Nicola Pende, a scientist who signed the Manifesto of the Race. As an author, Olga Signorelli (the name she went under for her publications) became prominent in 1938, when she published a biography of actress Eleonora Duse (1858 – 1924). The volume on Duse went through numerous editions in Italian and was published also in Germany, Switzerland, Russia, Poland and Latvia. The reader may easily appreciate the rather disrespectful irony of the youthful Italo Calvino towards the ‘old Russian writer’ skimming through the English edition of the book on Duse, an actress held by experts to be one of the most interesting theatrical interpreters at the international level between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.29 It tells of Duse’s extreme sensitivity, made worse by quite serious depression which sometimes kept her away from the stage. For Ivor Brown, an expert of the theatre who edited the English edition: ‘[Sarah] Bernhardt had the golden voice and Duse the silver silence. The latter’s

27 Folder ‘Mussolini Mancini, Edvige’ and Folder ‘Telegrammi’ (SACF). 28 Rizzi, ‘Olga Signorelli nella storia culturale italiana’, pp. 9 – 110. 29 Olga Signorelli, Eleonora Duse, pref. by Ivor Brown (London: Thames Hudson, 1959).

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genius was the tranquillity of suffering in a tragic part.’30 With a similar passion for melodrama, Calvino’s mother was moved by Resnevic’s biography of Duse, offering this comment on the many reviews of her friend’s book: ‘Women in general have better understood your work and the great heart of Duse.’31 And yet, beside the fashionable sentimentality, another element emerges strongly from the book: Duse’s professional qualities. Lucidly, she turned her depression into an instrument on the stage to attain levels of performance which brought her extraordinary international acclaim. The meticulous way she chose her texts and prepared her parts, and the stagecraft in general, were accompanied by a vast self taught culture, enabling her to grasp writers like Ibsen, to whose success she contributed significantly. Duse, like the younger Resnevic Signorelli, belonged to the first generations of women active as professionals in very demanding fields.32 Signorelli’s book relates the melodrama Duse loved to indulge in, in her private life, to that professional dimension which she used to control it on the stage. When the young Italo Calvino gave his work to her to read in 1942, the writer’s reputation was at its height, in part for her intense social life in Rome, the capital of the Empire (Mussolini had proclaimed the Empire of Ethiopia with a decree of 1936). It is easy to see why in the letters to his friend he distanced himself from a world which not only exaggerated with rhetoric, but also didn’t disdain contact with the regime, and with intellectuals very close to it. At the same time, he knew that with regard to the instruments of his vocation, his mother’s friend was a high level professional with long experience behind her : her advice was precious, and it was well worth taking her seriously. By March 1947 many things had changed, and after his experience with the partisans Italo Calvino had grown up in a hurry. He had joined the P.C.I., a choice that, as he will write later, never convinced him entirely, but which at the time seemed the only one possible. Besides, taking that political position turned out to be a winner, professionally speaking. He began to write for L’Unit—, the official paper of the P.C.I., and for a quality publisher, Einaudi, also with strong connections to the P.C.I.33 Italo Calvino was no longer the spoilt boy of the messages to his parents, nor the poseur of the letters to his friend. Having left his agrarian studies for the humanities, he now ‘believed it to be a good idea’ to go and see Resnevic Signorelli. In March 1947 he wrote to her :

30 Ibid., p. 4. 31 Eva Mameli Calvino to Olga Resnevic Signorelli, 26/09/1938 (SACF). 32 Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922 – 1945 (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992). 33 Gabriele Turi, Casa Einaudi: Libri, uomini, idee oltre il fascismo (Bologna: il Mulino, 1990).

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Dear Signora, / Resnevic Signorelli,/ My mother writes to me about you and that you remember me and would like to read something I’ve written./ I have had great pleasure in having news from you, because you have been among the very first to read my literary efforts and encourage me, and give me advice. Here are three of my most recent stories. At present I am in Turin for a while, and sometimes in Sanremo. I am about to graduate in Letters. A novel of mine will be published I hope soon, I’m not sure whether by Mondadori or Einaudi. I will be pleased to hear from you. Use the Sanremo address where I shall be staying before too long, staying for some time./ Most cordial regards from/ Italo Calvino.34

Not many days later he realized that the writer could be useful to him for something very important at that moment: his thesis on Joseph Conrad. And so he wrote to her again: Dear Signora,/ You will excuse me if I wish to take advantage of your kindness, but I need to ask you a great favour./ I am working on my degree thesis in English literature, on Joseph Conrad./ I have remembered that you know Emilio Cecchi35 very well, and I would like to get into contact with him, as he is the leading expert on Conrad in Italy. I have been told that Cecchi is in England at present: do you know his address? I would like to ask him about the essential bibliography in English criticism on the subject, and how to get hold of the relevant books. I shall be very grateful if you can send me his address. At the moment I’m translating ‘Lord Jim’, for Einaudi. /My best regards to you, also from my mother and all the family./ Italo Calvino.36

Having obtained Cecchi’s address, on June 20 Calvino wrote more explicitly : Dear Sig.ra Resnevic,/ My mother has sent me a letter, kindness itself, in which I have read many an appreciative comment on my writing. These have given me a great deal of satisfaction and I remember with gratitude that your advice guided my very first literary steps. I thank you for Cecchi’s address. I shall let you have some more of my writing before long. My novel ‘Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno’ (The Path to the Spiders’ Nests) will be published by Einaudi towards the end of the year./ Best regards/ Italo Calvino.37

The tone of a fourth letter of 1952 testifies that the exchanges between the two of them continued over the years.38 Drawing attention to the youth who grew up in the misogynous climate of fascist culture to which he conformed, the relationship between Italo Calvino and Resnevic Signorelli brings up gender issues which literary critics have al34 Italo Calvino to Olga Resnevic Signorelli, 10/03/1947 [on prof. Mario Calvino headed paper], (SACF). 35 Emilio Cecchi (1884 – 1966) was a well-known essayist and literary critic noted for introducing valuable English and American writers to Italy. 36 Italo Calvino to Olga Resnevic Signorelli, 19/03/1947 [on prof. Mario Calvino headed paper], (SACF). 37 Italo Calvino to Olga Resnevic Signorelli, 20/06/1947 (SACF). 38 For this fourth letter, see Govoni, ‘La casa laboratorio’, p. 554.

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ready had to deal with.39 On the other hand, those messages show that after the war Calvino realized he could afford to allow her the recognition for the role she had played in encouraging him at a difficult age. A role recognized only within the private sphere, however : it is well known that he referred instead to the writer Cesare Pavese (1908 – 1950) as his first and most important reader. Pavese, who was to die three years after those letters to Resnevic Signorelli, had taught the youthful Calvino the ‘tricks’ or ins and outs of editorial work at Einaudi as soon as he had started there, as well as others concerning the reading and writing of a literary text. The role of Resnevic Signorelli as guide in his ‘first literary steps’ could not compete in the autobiographical reconstruction of his own literary education with the role taken later by such an extraordinary personality as Pavese’s. Thus Italo Calvino wrote, and more to the point, published: I graduated, far too quickly, in 1947, with a thesis on Joseph Conrad. My initiation into the world of literature came about towards the end of 1945, in the ambience of Vittorini and his journal Il Politecnico, which published one of my first short stories. But by then my very first short story had been read by Pavese.40

It would seem that as part of a reconstruction for the public of his beginnings as a writer, having entered into the circle of important young Italian writers from his very first fiction, the authoress of the book on Duse couldn’t compete with the author of Dialogues with Leucý (1947), a Pavese who, through his suicide, had attained mythical status.41 With that public declaration, Calvino duly paid his debt of recognition and affection to Pavese, and at the same time helped him place himself within that new literary tradition, almost entirely male, which achieved a prestigious position (in Italy and soon abroad), thanks to writers like Pavese, Vittorini and later Calvino himself.42 Resnevic Signorelli belonged to a world that Calvino felt was over the hill, and to be forgotten. Despite the fact that she had been the first to give him practical advice in writing, and enable him contact Cecchi for his work on Conrad. 39 Inge Fink, ‘The Power behind the Pronoun: Narrative Games in Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler’, Twentieth Century Literature, 37 (1991), 93 – 104; P. J. Klemp, ‘‘She Made Us Do What She Wanted’: Desire and the Other Reader’s Reading in Italo Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore’, Quaderni d’Italianistica: Official Journal of the Canadian Society for Italian Studies, 20 (1999), 71 – 90. I would like to thank Rebecca Messbarger for referring me to the quoted literature. 40 Calvino, Hermit in Paris, pp. 7 – 8. Well-known writer Elio Vittorini (1908 – 1966) was editor in the Einaudi publishing house. 41 Literature on Pavese competes for quantity with that on Calvino. See at least Doug Thompson, Cesare Pavese: A Study of the Major Novels and Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 42 On the writers mentioned here, including Vittorini and Levi, see The Cambridge History of Italian Literature, ed. by Peter Brand and Lino Pertile, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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Of this affair one fact stands out: from his adolescence onwards, Italo Calvino was able to take maximum advantage of the right channels for that ‘feeling’ of his, first via his mother and her writer friend, Resnevic Signorelli. Another everyday visitor to the Calvino Mameli’s, not a scientist, was the painter Beatrice Duval.

II.

Signorina Beatrice Duval

‘I have already written to my uncle and aunt and to the signorina Duval’: thus Italo Calvino to his parents, at the eighteen years of age of the letters quoted above.43 At this point in time I have not found documents which prove a direct contact between the painter and young Calvino, but from those preserved among the papers of Eva Mameli Calvino it is clear that Duval’s was an everyday presence in the laboratory home while Calvino was growing up.44 Duval was born in 1880 in a Swiss village near Geneva of a well off family of artists. Like a great grandfather, Adam-Wolfgang Töpffer (1766 – 1847), and an uncle, Êtienne Duval (1824 – 1914), a well known landscape painter, Beatrice’s father, Henri Duval (?-1929), was also a painter.45 He had married an Englishwoman, whose name, like that of a second daughter born in 1882, I have not yet been able to trace. From Switzerland the Duvals moved to England, but in 1884 they undertook a trip that led them to various continents and whose first stage, naturally, was Italy, where they stayed a year. Having visited Greece and Egypt, the four of them journeyed on to the Pacific and the discovery of Tasmania, Australia, New Zealand and islands like Samoa, Tonga and others. After other trips around the world, the Duvals continued their wanderings in other European countries. Although inevitably for just brief periods, Beatrice was encouraged to learn the language and culture of wherever she found herself, attending local schools every time it was possible. It is not clear when she began to paint, but the first evidence is of 1895, when she was fifteen.46 In 1896 the Duvals returned to England, but when the year afterwards Henri Duval decided to take up his pilgrimage around the world again, his wife and youngest daughter didn’t follow him, moving to Sanremo. It was then that for Beatrice and Henri there began an exclusive association which lasted three decades, often painting and 43 Italo Calvino to Mario Calvino, 26/01/1942, in Calvino, Lettere, 1940 – 1985, p. 25. 44 I would like to thank Libereso Guglielmi and Franco Pedrotti who provided me with precious information on Beatrice Duval and the house where she lived, in Sanremo, as well as her daily contact with the Calvino Mamelis and the various relationships she enjoyed with the members of the family. 45 Schurr and Cabanne, Dictionnaire des petits Ma„tres, ad vocem. 46 Delamarre-Tindy and Selz, La vie et l’œvre de B¦atrice Duval, p. 9.

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traveling, but with frequent stays at Saint-Cloud, near Paris, where in 1901 the two of them found a house. There Beatrice Duval mixed assiduously with Camille Pissarro (1830 – 1903) and his circle of friends, which included the poet Êmile Verhaeren (1855 – 1916) and his wife, the painter Marthe Massin (1860 – 1931), as well as F¦lix F¦n¦on (1861 – 1944), Th¦o van Rysselberghe (1862 – 1926), Henri-Edmond Delacroix (1856 – 1910) and the writer Lucie Cousturier (1876 – 1925); but above all, Paul Signac, who had an important influence on Beatrice’s painting and formation. Very briefly, that was Beatrice Duval’s background; she exhibited her work regularly at the well known gallery of EugÀne Druet (1867 – 1916), and on various occasions also at the Salon des Ind¦pendants, gaining some quite warm appreciation from the critics.47 Her watercolors, and more unusually, canvasses, of a neo-impressionist and divisionist inspiration, reveal landscapes full of sunlight and make a strong impact.48 In 1929, on a visit to Sanremo, Henri Duval died, and Beatrice decided to stay on and live where her father had been buried. It would appear that until her death in 1973 Beatrice Duval devoted herself primarily to her love for animals and nature, although without giving up painting. The sweet, bizarre Miss Duval dwelt in the company of cats and birds in a villa full of paintings, artistic objects and mementoes of her travels and her special friendships. With the same determination with which she had cultivated traveling and painting, together with Eva Mameli Calvino she devoted herself to the protection of nature and in particular of birds, organizing campaigns to educate the locals, as well as at the national and international level.49 Among the papers of Mameli Calvino there is plenty of evidence of her commitment to the protection of nature campaigns, also financially.50 47 Schurr and Cabanne, Dictionnaire des petits Ma„tres, pp. 396 – 97; Delamarre-Tindy and Selz, La vie et l’œvre de B¦atrice Duval, p. 11, where one of the letters from Signac to Beatrice Duval is to be found. 48 For 371 of Duval’s paintings, see Delamarre-Tindy and Selz, La vie et l’œvre de B¦atrice Duval, pp. 49 – 205. 49 Eva Mameli Calvino, Gli ausiliari dell’agricoltore: Per i bimbi d’Italia, with 20 ills by Roland Green, intr. by B¦atrice Duval (Milan, Delegazione di San Remo: Edito dal Comitato per la Protezione degli uccelli utili all’Agricoltura e per la diffusione dei nidi artificiali, 1934); Franco Pedrotti, Il fervore dei pochi: Il movimento protezionistico italiano dal 1943 al 1972 (Trento: Temi, 1998); Id., ‘Una vita per gli alberi ed i loro ospiti alati’, Natura Alpina, 3 (2005), 107 – 11. 50 It was Duval who financed and edited the book quoted in footnote 49 (Mameli Calvino to Benedetta Granello, 19/02/1951, Folder 24, CMPS); it was at Duval’s house that the first experimental nest of the campaign for repopulation was installed (Mameli Calvino’s notebook, Folder 24, CMPS); in addition, among the papers of Mameli Calvino are preserved notes and letters for Duval, in some cases with notes and brief messages to Beatrice from Eva, evidence of the everyday contacts between the two friends.

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Italo Calvino’s relationship with writer Resnevic Signorelli and painter Duval show plainly that as a youth the writer talked of art and literature in expert company. The contact with Resnevic Signorelli was useful to him for honing the practical instruments of the professional writer ; the presence of Duval relates to his sensitivity towards the figurative arts, as well as foreign languages and cultures. Beatrice Duval, multi-lingual artist and traveler of a roving life and of unconventional tastes, cannot have left a hunter of stories like young Italo indifferent.51

III.

Efisio Mameli, His ‘Uncle the Chemist’

The Calvinos always maintained close relations with Eva’s elder brother, Efisio Mameli, and her sister-in-law, who signed her papers as Anna Mannessier, and after her marriage with Efisio in 1919, as Anna Mannessier Mameli. Efisio and Anna traveled, did their research, and published extensively, both together and independently of each other.52 Efisio Mameli graduated in chemistry in Sardinia at the University of Cagliari in 1896. His father, Giovanni Battista, served in the army as an officer (in the carabinieri); the mother, Maddalena Cubeddu, bore five children, three boys and two girls. It was an ambitious lower middle class family, where the parents encouraged their children who wished to study to go ahead, whether male or female. To contribute to the family income, Efisio taught chemistry and natural sciences in Cagliari’s technical and normal schools,53 but in 1899 he went back to the university as an assistant to Giuseppe Oddo (1865 – 1954), an interesting chemist who had supervised his graduation. In 1904 Mameli became libero 51 For example, Beatrice Duval’s sheltered life at Sanremo, in a villa immersed in its natural surroundings and full of cats and birds, closely resembles that of the Marchesa described in Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo, or the Seasons in the City (New York: Harcourt Publishing, 1983), chapter 19, ‘Autumn: The Garden of Stubborn Cats’. The Italian edition of the book was published in 1963, but Calvino had already published Marcovaldo’s short stories at the beginning of the 1950s in L’Unit—. 52 Contract of marriage, Folder ‘Mameli, Efisio’ (ACS). In a lovely photo of 1938 Efisio and Anna are together in the laboratory at the University of Padua (see Album Calvino, p. 10). As far as I know, historians have ignored these two interesting scholars with the exception of: Carlo Sandonnini, Anna Mannessier Mameli: (1879 – 1944) (Padua: Tipografia del Seminario, 1944) (extract from: Annuario della Universit— di Padova per l’a.a. 1943 – 44); Luigi Musajo, ‘Efisio Mameli (1875 – 1957)’, Annuario dell’Universit— di Padova, (1958), 665 – 72; Id. ‘Efisio Mameli’, La Chimica e l’Industria, 39 (1957), 705; Antonio Di Meo, ‘Mameli Efisio’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Encicloperia Italiana, 2007), 68, pp. 373 – 75. 53 Efisio Mameli, Elenco dei titoli e delle pubblicazioni (Perugia: Tipografia Umbra, [1923]), p. 3, found in Folder ‘Mameli, Efisio’ (ACS).

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docente, and when in 1915 Oddo moved to the University of Pavia, where at that time science was flourishing,54 he managed to have the younger man follow him as his assistant.55 Mameli’s research had a significant impact at the international level already by the 1910s, but WWI interrupted these promising beginnings. Like many other scientists of his generation56 he volunteered, and by the frontline, at Cervignano del Friuli, he founded and coordinated the Chemical Laboratory of the III Army, where he carried out important research on gas.57 Decorated on several occasions for his important military efforts, in 1922 he obtained a Chair, and in 1936, the year Mussolini proclaimed the Empire, his profile as a ‘war hero’ appeared in a publication which presented men ‘decorated for military valor.’58 In the meantime, in 1931 he had sworn allegiance to the fascist regime, a compulsory act for university professors from that year onwards, to keep their jobs.59 In 1935 he again began to involve himself in the study of aggressive chemicals.60 And yet, both his political positions and his ideas on the social role of the scientist cannot be deduced from what we have set out so far. A freemason, and secular, Efisio Mameli was, like his sister and brother in law, of republican and democratic sympathies.61 In 1925 he was among those who signed the Manifesto of antifascist intellectuals redacted by the philosopher Benedetto Croce (1866 – 1952),62 and he never joined the National Fascist Party (P.N.F.)63

54 In 1906, Camillo Golgi (1843 – 1926), professor of pathology and Rector of the University of Pavia, had shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Santiago Ramûn y Cajal (1852 – 1934) for their work on the structure of the nervous system. 55 The Ministry of Education to the Rector of the University of Pavia (Camillo Golgi), 21/9/1896, Folder ‘Mameli, Efisio’ (AUP). 56 Giuliano Pancaldi, ‘Wartime Chemistry in Italy : Industry, the Military and the Professors’, in Frontline and Factory : Comparative Perspectives on the Chemical Industry at War, 1914 – 1924, ed. by Roy MacLeod and Jeffrey A. Johnson (Dordrecht: Springer, 2006), pp. 61 – 74. 57 Efisio Mameli, Relazione della Commissione per lo studio della difesa collettiva contro i gas asfissianti, presentata alla direzione di sanit— della III armata, in collaboration with dr. Bruno and prof. Poma (Bologna: Stabilimenti poligrafici riuniti, 1916); Id., ‘Il laboratorio chimico della III armata’, Giornale militare, 3 (1922). 58 Decorati al valor militare. Provincia di Venezia e Padova, anno XVIII, IIo dell’Impero (Milan: Historia, [1938]), p. 62. 59 Processo Verbale di prestazione Giuramento (sworn statement), University of Parma, 19/11/ 1931, Folder ‘Mameli, Efisio’ (ACS). Mameli had sworn allegiance to king and state on 10/12/ 1926, Folder ‘Mameli, Efisio’ (PUA). 60 Efisio Mameli, ‘Scienza e industria per la preparazione militare del Paese: Gli aggressivi chimici’, Rivista d’Artiglieria e Genio, 74 (1935), 17 – 32. 61 Efisio Mameli entered the Cardano Lodge of Pavia in 1909. Gianfranco Brusa, ‘L’industria pavese: Storia, economia, impatto ambientale’, Annali di storia pavese, (2000), 339 – 49 (p. 341). 62 Emilo R. Papa, Storia di due manifesti: Il fascismo e la cultura italiana (Milan: Feltrinelli,

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Admired and respected for his sober and honest character, as well as for his enormous capacity for hard work, Mameli was a ‘war hero’, and it was for this perhaps that fascist authorities tolerated the fact that he didn’t join the P.N.F., his belonging to the freemasons, and his taking up a position alongside Croce. On his part, he periodically sent out clear signals of collaborationism.64 Yet, as much as Efisio Mameli had worked for wartime chemistry, he also worked for the chemistry of peacetime, and his complex personality tends to evade all efforts to place him exactly. Of the 213 scientific papers he published, a very great many were the results of research finding application in the pharmaceutical industry.65 In addition, as well as being founder of the important Institute of Pharmaceutical and Toxicological Chemistry, in 1946 Mameli founded the Centre of Studies in Chemotherapy of the National Research Centre of the National Research Council (CNR).66 In addition, for a brief period, and before the coming of fascism, he had been active in politics. At the end of the Great War Mameli had been one of the founders of the Sardinian Action Party (P.S.A.), together with other Sardinian war veterans. With writer and journalist Emilio Lussu (1890 – 1975), and the historian and politician Camillo Bellieni (1893 – 1975), in 1918 Mameli founded at Sassari the association of the ‘Veterans of the Trench’; in 1919 the three of them founded the paper La Voce dei Combattenti (The Veterans’ Voice).67 The group occupied a position near to those described as ‘pragmatic’ by historian Gaetano Salvemini (1873 – 1957), who between 1919 and 1921 was a Socialist MP.68 Mameli’s nu-

63 64

65 66

67 68

1958), p. 101. On the political positions of his family, despite sweetening, see Calvino, Hermit in Paris, p. 130 and ff. In the document summing up Efisio Mameli’s university career from 1897 to 1943 we read: ‘Date of joining the Partito Nazionale Fascista: No’. Folder ‘Mameli, Efisio’ (PUA). For example, he sent Mussolini his paper of 1935 on the aggressive chemicals. This can be seen from the letters of thanks sent, first, by the personal secretary of Mussolini to the Prefecture of Padua which sent the message on to the Rector, then by the letter of the Rector to Mameli which ended with the traditional ‘Saluti fascisti’ (Fascist Regards). The Prefect of Padua to the Rector of the University of Padua, 16/03/1935 (XIII), and Carlo Anti to Efisio Mameli, 20/03/1935 (XIII), Folder ‘Mameli, Efisio’ (PUA). There is a very detailed presentation of Mameli’s researches in Musajo, Efisio Mameli, in particular p. 668 and ff. For the investments in the chemical sector after the war, and especially by the CNR, see Luigi Cerruti, ‘La chimica’, in Per una storia del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, ed. by Raffaella Simili and Gianni Paoloni, 2 vols (Bari: Laterza, 2001), 2, pp. 192 – 250. Mameli’s institute obtained the most financing of that received by the seven principal research centers set up after the war (ibid., p. 201). Leopoldo Ortu, La questione sarda tra Ottocento e Novecento: Aspetti e problemi (Cagliari: CUEC, 2005), p. 198. Camillo Bellieni, ‘Lettera a Gaetano Salvemini, deputato al Parlamento’, La Voce, January 6, 1920 (page not numbered). After his arrest by the fascists in 1925, Salvemini left Italy and settled in the United States, where he continued his antifascist campaigning, and taught history at Harvard from 1930 to 1948.

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merous interventions in La Voce show concrete political positions, guided by ‘a serious spirit focusing directly and tangibly on social and economic problems.’69 When Efisio Mameli got his job at the University of Parma and had to leave Sardinia, he had to abandon his active political involvement.70 In his last intervention for La Voce, Mameli reiterated what he felt should remain the aims of the movement: valorization of the agricultural, mineral and marine resources of the island, and legislative autonomy. Cooperation and organization through associations were the instruments required, in a political vision which, in the struggle to improve the lot of the poorest, thought in terms not of violent conflict between the different social classes, but collaboration.71 In 1922 Mussolini took over the government and strong pressure was applied to the P.S.A. to adhere to fascism, provoking a split in the leadership. In the following years, Lussu and Bellieni, from different political positions, were open opponents of the regime.72 As we have seen, Mameli decided on the other hand to compromise, like most Italians. However, the decision to swear allegiance to the regime by antifascist university teachers such as Mameli, the well known physiologist Giuseppe Levi (1872 – 1965)73 and many others, was not always a case of simple opportunism. Both the Catholics, who followed the indications of Pope Pio XI, and the communists, following those of P.C.I.’s secretary Palmiro Togliatti (1893 – 1964), as well as the liberals who turned to Croce, were all encouraged to take the oath. The advice given by all three representatives of the three main political orientations in Italy aimed to protect the safety and economic security of around 1,200 families. In addition, there was the illusion that if the antifascist staff, or at least those teachers who were not fascists, remained in the university, this further lurch of the country towards the authoritarian hard right would be halted a little, and maybe the students would find some little protection.74 But even in that contradictory context Efisio Mameli’s choices are not easy to understand. A republican, a democrat, and a supporter of the rights of women, 69 Efisio Mameli, ‘Il partito dei combattenti’, La Voce, March 7, 1920 (page not numbered). 70 Editorial Note, ‘Il saluto di Efisio Mameli a tutti i combattenti di Sardegna’, La Voce, December 20, 1920 (page not numbered). 71 Efisio Mameli, ‘Ai compagni combattenti della Sardegna’, La Voce, December 20, 1920 (page not numbered). 72 On that period and its events, see the autobiographical Emilio Lussu, La catena (Milan: Baldini e Castoldi, 1997), 1st orig. ed. 1930. See also Salvatore Cubeddu, Viaggio nel Partito Sardo d’Azione tra cronaca e storia: Testimonianze, documenti, dati e commenti (Sassari: EDES, 1993), 1 (1919 – 1948), p. 147 and ff. 73 Helmut Goetz, Il giuramento rifiutato: I docenti universitari e il regime fascista (Milan: La Nuova Italia RCS, 2000), 1st orig. ed. 1993, pp. 119 – 20. 74 Ibid., p. 11 and ff. Goetz provides a profile of the twelve university teachers who refused to take the oath and interesting interpretations of the reasons why, despite being antifascists, some professors accepted the oath in the end.

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as can be intuited from the concrete support he gave his sister and his wife, there remains the fact that he collaborated to a very great extent with a regime which was racist and destructive of liberty. Lacking autobiographical sources, an article of his of 1924 may help us to grasp why he made the choices he did. The occasion was a discussion of the importance attained by the chemical industry in industrialized nations with WWI, and Mameli in this context set out his own ideas on the social role of the scientist.75 In his opinion, to strengthen Italy at the international level it was necessary in general to invest in applied research for the benefit of chemical industries which could produce dyes and artificial coloring, and chemicals for pharmaceutical, photographic, agricultural and many other civil uses. In this way the country as a whole would be able to enjoy a higher standard of living, and if necessary, those industries could be converted back to the production of aggressive chemicals. He recalled how efficiently Germany had done this during WWI, thanks to an industrial chemistry sector already flourishing for some decades. After the war the U.S. had enormously increased investment in research, he observed, and not just in the chemical sector : in effect, it was impossible to forecast from which research sector new instruments of war might come from. To keep the peace, a greater balance of power between countries was needed: strengthened at the industrial level thanks to science, Italy would have the authority to work for peace.76 Efisio Mameli’s biography, and these pages on science policies, show that he thought of the scientist as a faithful servant of the state ready to work for his country in every circumstance, wartime or peacetime, in a democracy or under a dictatorship. For him, to be a scientist meant knowing how to sacrifice one’s own individual values when necessary for the good of the ‘Fatherland’. The signals (discreet but clear) of a fracture between his personal convictions and his role as scientist in the service of his country remained limited to his refusal to join the P.N.F., and his signature to Croce’s antifascist Manifesto. He belonged to the first generation of Italians born into an Italy politically unified and free. For his generation the honor of the country (like that of Sardinia, the island he had come from) was worth the sacrifice of individual freedoms, even when faced with the demand to swear allegiance to the regime. The idea of an oath to definitively suppress freedom of thought in Italy had been of the philosopher Giovanni

75 Efisio Mameli, ‘La chimica e la difesa, nazionale’, Nuova Antologia, 234 (1924), 269 – 74. 76 Ibid., p. 274. On the history of chemistry in this period, see Luigi Cerruti, ‘La comunit— dei chimici nel contesto scientifico internazionale: 1890 – 1940’, in Una difficile modernit—: Tradizioni di ricerca e comunit— scientifiche in Italia, 1890 – 1940, ed. by Antonio Casella, Alessandra Ferraresi, Giuseppe Giuliani, and Elisa Signori (Pavia: Goliardica Pavese, 2000), pp. 196 – 255.

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Gentile (1875 – 1944),77 a university professor who understood both the hypocrisy and the ‘sense of honor’ of others. He took advantage of these differing sentiments to humiliate his university teaching staff and deliver them, innocuous, into the hands of Mussolini. Only twelve out of more than 1,200 university teaching staff refused to swear, and they were forced to leave the university. Italo Calvino’s closeness to his uncle, his frequently being in his company, are proved by the earlier mentioned references in the correspondence with his parents, and by various photos.78 His uncle Efisio and his mother Eva were deeply attached to each other : it was Efisio who had supported his sister’s ambitions from when she was a child, and as we shall see, encourage her transfer to the University of Pavia. When Efisio died he left his personal library to his sister Eva and nephew, Italo.79

IV.

Anna Mannessier Mameli, His ‘Aunt the Chemist’

Like Efisio Mameli, his wife Anna Mannessier (Italo Calvino’s aunt) also managed to maintain a certain autonomy with respect to the regime and didn’t join the P.N.F.80 But to keep her rights as a libera docente, she too swore allegiance to the fascist regime.81 Born in 1879 at Saint-Ouen, north of Paris, Anne Ursule Mannessier had moved as a child to Maccagno Superiore, in Varese Province, with her mother, Anna Ekatherina Frommlet, and her father, Alfred Joseph, an industrialist in the metallurgical sector. Anna, as she always had herself called, went to school in Como, where she obtained her diploma at the technical secondary school, and then went on to the University of Pavia where she graduated in Chemistry and Pharmacy in 1906.82 An Italian citizen from 1912, she published research on inorganic chemistry which between the two world wars was well received in77 A. James Gregor, Giovanni Gentile: Philosopher of Fascism (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001). 78 See Album Calvino, passim. 79 Handwritten will, Mio testamento (per i miei fratelli), signed by Efisio Mameli and dated 29/ 09/1956. Folder 39 (CMAS). 80 This is deduced from the correspondence concerning the request Anna made in 1938 to go to Switzerland and then Germany in the same circumstances as her husband. Also in her case, the Rector indicated she had not joined the P.N.F. The visa for Switzerland was denied her (Folder ‘Mannesier Mameli, Anna’, PUA). 81 Processo Verbale di Presentazione di Giuramento e Stato di Servizio (sworn statement and service certificate), 15/02/1935, Folder ‘Mannesier Mameli, Anna’ (PUA). 82 The biographical information comes from Student Folder, ‘Mannessier, Anna’ (AUP); Estratto dei registri di Matrimonio, Folder ‘Mameli Efisio’ (ACS); Efisio Mameli to Carlo Sandonnini, 26/02/1944, Folder 39 (CMAS).

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ternationally, especially her work with Giuseppe Oddo, her husband’s teacher mentioned above.83 In 1918 Mannessier was confirmed as an ‘assistant with responsibility’ (a kind of junior lectureship) of general chemistry at the University of Pavia,84 and in 1917 obtained the libera docenza in chemistry.85 In 1919, after ten years studying, working and traveling together, Anna Mannessier and Efisio Mameli married. From that time onward Mannessier Mameli taught courses as a libera docente and continued her research, but there is no evidence she tried to obtain tenure. This anomalous situation, neither independent scholar nor of a regularly recognized professional status, nevertheless gave her the right to use the chemistry laboratory, thanks also to her husband’s influence, and to remain in contact with the national and international community of chemists. Economically independent thanks to her family’s wealth, at the University of Padua, where her husband Efisio had transferred in 1932, Mannessier Mameli made over the money she earned as libera docente to the poorer students.86 In addition, of frail health, she had made her will already by 1936, leaving everything to her husband, committing him to set up scholarships in her name ‘to be enjoyed alternately by poor students from France and Italy’, not specifying their gender. Efisio observed this commitment scrupulously.87 Yet, in the biographical profile of Efisio Mameli, the Anna Mannessier Mameli Scholarship is attributed to him as a gesture in memory of his wife. When Anna died, February 9, 1944, a colleague wrote to Efisio for the information needed to write a commemorative article on her. He replied with a 83 Giuseppe Oddo and Anna Mannessier, ‘Phosphoroxychlorid als kryoskopisches Lösungsmittel’, Zeitschrift für anorganische Chemie, 73 (1911), 259 – 69; Id. and Ead., ‘Phosphoroxychlorid als Lösungsmittel in der Kryoskopie und seine Anwendungen. 8. Mitteilung’, Zeitschrift für anorganische Chemie, 79 (1913), 281 – 91. 84 The Rector of the University of Pavia to the Ministry of Education, 4/02/1918, Folder ‘Mannessier Mameli, Anna’ (PUA) and ‘Mannessier dott. Anna À incaricata delle funzioni (chimica generale) dal 18 febbraio al 31 luglio 1918, con la mensile retribuzione di L. 110 (DM 31 gennaio 1918)’, Bollettino Ufficiale del Ministero dell’Istruzione Pubblica (BUMIP), 45/1, n. 9, 28 febbraio (1918), p. 227. 85 The completion of the business to become libera docente was long and difficult. It began around the spring of 1916 but for the various excuses made by professors called to take part in the deciding commission, it ended the following year. Professor Folder, ‘Mannessier, Anna’ (AUP), and Folder ‘Mannessier Mameli, Anna’ (PUA). 86 Correspondence of Mannesier Mameli with the Rector, and the Rector with Sandonnini, 1934, Folder ‘Mannessier Mameli, Anna’ (PUA). 87 Publication of holograph will, written 30/8/1936 and registered as n. 14926, at Notaio [solicitor] Todeschini, Padua, 25/03/1944, Folder 39 (CMAS). Anna left all her property to her husband (consisting in about one million lire in shares, money and other ; more than one million euros at 2014 prices), on condition that at the latter’s death the money be used for scholarships. Efisio, adding his own money, decided instead to use Anna’s money immediately for scholarships.

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letter with drawings of chemical bonds to illustrate in detail the results Mannessier Mameli had attained in more than thirty years of lab work. Except for just a little, precise data about her life, Efisio’s concern was to stress his wife’s commitment to being a scientist, closing his letter thus: ‘Forgive me if I have exaggerated, on a subject for me so emotional (it includes the best part of my life). But one should do homage to workers highlighting the work they have done.’88 Like signorina Duval and the signora Resnevic, Italo‘s zia Anna was also a woman intellectually and financially independent, polyglot and a traveler, with whom the young man had an affectionate relationship, but at the same time complicated. Together with seeing his ‘chemical’ uncle and aunt distancing themselves from fascism, Italo Calvino also saw all the ways they did not eschew compromises with the regime, just like both his parents.

V.

Eva Mameli: From Sardinia to Lombardy

Italo Calvino’s mother had also received a higher education, and afterwards pursued a professional life quite unusual for a woman in Italy at that time. However, if we limit the context to the few women who around the turn of the century had had a higher education, the fact that Eva Mameli, like her sister-inlaw Anna Mannessier, were active in scientific fields was less of a rarity than was believed until recently. In Italy around the turn of the century, out of the total number of women students (actually not very many), quite a high percentage began to study science and medicine at university. If the first generation of those science graduates found work relatively easily, and went on to achieve significant professional success, things changed as the twentieth century advanced, especially after WWI.89 At the end of the war, many of the male scientists who, like Efisio Mameli, had taken part, returned to faculties and laboratories to find the number of women had increased; not just students, but those employed as assistants or as libere docenti. At this point, in Italy as elsewhere, the women were seen as competitors for jobs.90 To find oneself married to a scientist in favor of the 88 Efisio Mameli to Carlo Sandonnini, Padua, 26/11/1944, Folder 39 (CMAS). 89 Paola Govoni, ‘‘Donne in un mondo senza donne’. Le studentesse delle facolt— scientifiche in Italia, 1877 – 2005’, Quaderni Storici, 130 (2009), 213 – 48; Ead., Challenging the Backlash: Women Science Students in Italian Universities (1870s – 2000s), in European Universities in the 19th and 20th centuries. Historical and Historiographical Considerations, edited by Ana Simþes, Kostas Gavroglu, and Maria Paula Diogo (Springer, forthcoming). 90 Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), pp. 190 – 93 and 269 – 70; Carol Dyhouse, No

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professional employment of women, like Anna Mannessier, and as Eva Mameli would be, was to be able to continue to work in a laboratory, without giving up on living with a partner or having a family. As we have seen, Mannessier had a private income, and her money freed her to carry on her research after her degree without either the need to find a proper job, or a husband who would have to keep her ; this important circumstance probably played a role in the mediation for a relationship on equal terms with Efisio Mameli. Unlike Anna, from the time Eva was a girl she needed a salary to maintain her independence: her life seems rather to follow in the footsteps of her elder brother Efisio, and marriage was not a priority for her for quite some time. In 1903, when there were less than three hundred women graduates in the entire country, and brides’ illiteracy on the island of Sardinia was as high as 68 percent,91 Eva Mameli took a diploma in a secondary technical school in Cagliari which allowed her to enroll in the Natural History Faculty in November of that year.92 When Efisio Mameli in November 1906 moved to the University of Pavia, Eva followed him. She obtained her degree with honors in December 1907,93 and she began to teach science in Normal Schools, the girls’ colleges for primary school teachers.94 However, she also started working in the botanical laboratory of the University of Pavia.95 From 1907 until 1920 she is registered as a ‘voluntary assistant’, ‘additional assistant’, or ‘team assistant’ at the Botanical Institute. There was no pay, or only a symbolic payment, for these positions, but they enabled her to use the laboratory. In 1915 she attained the libera docenza.96

91

92 93

94 95 96

Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870 – 1939 (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 138; Paola Govoni, ‘The Power of Weak Competitors: Women Scholars, ‘Popular Science’ and the Building of a Scientific Community in Italy, 1860s – 1930s’, Science in Context, 26 (2013), 405 – 36. In 1866 the illiteracy of brides in Sardinia stood at almost 100 percent. See Donne: Due secoli di scrittura femminile in Sardegna (1775 – 1950). Repertorio bibliografico, ed. by Franca Ferraris Cornaglia, Mirella Melis Zucca, Marcella Mocci Serri, and Maria Luisa Viola, intr. by Laura Pisano (Cagliari: CUEC Editrice, 2001), p. 327. Leaving Certificate, University of Cagliari, 14/11/1906, Student Folder ‘Mameli, Eva’ (AUP). Information on the school attended, the exams taken, and her marks, are in Student Folder, ‘Mameli, Eva’ (AUP). The reconstruction of her career at the University of Pavia is in Eva Giuliana Mameli Calvino to Director of the Secretary of the University of Pavia, 2/10/1953, Professor Folder, ‘Mameli, Eva’ (AUP). To find out about Mameli Calvino’s career I also consulted her personal folder in ACS, the numerous documents in SSFA, and what she published in Eva Mameli Calvino, Elenco dei titoli e delle pubblicazioni[list of qualifications and publications] (S.l.: Tipografia G. Guerra, 1925). Diploma di Magistero (Diploma of teaching), 23/07/1908, mark 38/40, Student Folder, ‘Mameli, Eva’ (AUP). Letter of 7/01/1906 of Giovanni Briosi, director of the laboratory, to the Rector Golgi to allow Eva Mameli to become ‘voluntary assistant’. Letter of Camillo Golgi of 8/01/1906, agreeing, in Professor Folder, ‘Mameli, Eva’ (AUP). ‘Mameli dott. Eva À abilitata per titoli alla libera docenza in botanica generale nella R.

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The Cryptogamy lab where Eva Mameli worked was an interesting place, open to women.97 Its team of young researchers, led by Giovanni Briosi (1846 – 1919), gained a fine international reputation. A qualified engineer, but early on attracted to botanical subjects, Briosi brought to Pavia the microscopic techniques and the most recent research on plant pathology, as well as modern mycology, which will be the areas Eva Mameli will work in for the rest of her career. The research she produced in the 1910s is interesting, in the lab as well as in the field. When in May 1909 her brother Efisio and Anna Mannessier attended the Seventh International Congress of Applied Chemistry in London, Eva went with them. After the trip to London, she decided to spend time studying abroad, and in 1911 she competed for a grant, but she came second, with just one grant available, and this was the first of a series of academic episodes where she had to give way to a male colleague.98 In 1911, with Gino Pollacci (1872 – 1963), an older researcher in the same lab, she published a paper on the relationship between the assimilation of atmospheric nitrogen by plants matured with combined nitrogen.99 Mentioned by Nature,100 this and other articles on the subject by her alone were still being quoted in international literature in the 1940s, because of their impact on agriculture, in the context of the expansion of the chemical industry between the two world wars. Despite her publications and the important network of collaborators; despite documents showing the tenacity with which she tried to secure her own situation, she never managed to obtain tenure.101 During WWI she was still officially active at the Botanical lab, but with the ‘grade and salary […] of a middle school teacher.’102 In fact, during the war her scientific work slowed down.103 She

97 98 99

100 101 102 103

Universit— di Pavia, ‘DD MM 20 novembre 1915’, BUMIP, 42/2, n. 49, December 9 (1915), p. 3286. There were various female students frequenting the lab in those years, as seen from the annual reports published in Atti dell’Istituto Botanico di Pavia, passim. BUMIP, 38/1, n. 20 – 21, May 4 – 11 (1911), p. 1623. Eva Mameli and Gino Pollacci, ‘Sull’assimilazione diretta dell’azoto atmosferico libero nei vegetali superiori’, Rendiconti Accademia dei Lincei, 20 (1911), 680 – 87; Ead. and Id., ‘Sull’assimilazione diretta dell’azoto atmosferico nei vegetali’, Atti dell’Istituto Botanico di Pavia, 14 (1911), 159 – 257. W. A. D. ‘Recent Work in Italy’, Nature, 96/2404, November 25 (1915), p. 353. There are numerous letters from Briosi to the Rector and from the Rector to the Ministry asking – in vain – for a suitable remuneration for the courses she taught. Professor Folder, ‘Mameli, Eva’ (AUP). The Minister of Education to the Rector of the University of Pavia, 14/12/1917, Professor Folder, ‘Mameli, Eva’ (AUP). In the period 1916 – 1918 the only paper was Eva Mameli and Eligia Cattaneo, ‘Sul geotropismo negativo spontaneo di radici di Helianthus annuus e di alcune altre piante’, Atti dell’Istituto Botanico di Pavia, 17 (1916), 9 – 20. For the other publications, see Mameli Calvino, Elenco dei titoli, pp. 6 – 11.

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had become a registered nurse in 1915, and until the end of the war she worked as a nurse. In 1919, she was awarded the Red Cross silver medal; in 1920 and 1923 she would be awarded another medal and a certificate of merit.104 When the war ended, Eva Mameli’s scientific production picked up.105 In June 1920 the Accademia dei Lincei awarded her a cash prize for her research in natural sciences, and yet that same year she failed to win her state competition place at the University of Cagliari, despite the favorable comments of the commission:106 it seems that the medals for the war were useless to women hoping for an academic career. In the meantime Pollacci, co-author with Eva Mameli of the research mentioned earlier, having gone off to the war as a volunteer, was discharged with the rank of captain in January 1919. Older, and in a better position than Eva to obtain a permanent job (he had entered the lab in 1896, and by 1919 had published seventy-two papers, against Eva’s twenty-eight), Pollacci at the end of the war won the state competition for the Chair in Botany. In 1927 he had the satisfaction of a return to Pavia as director of the Institute of Botany and the Cryptogamy Lab.107 The death of Briosi, Eva Mameli’s former teacher and director of the Institute, had drastically reduced her chances of obtaining tenure. In the post war economic crisis, with a regular salary as a school teacher, her need for tenure at the university was perceived by her colleagues as even less urgent than before. At thirty-four, she was well on the way to swelling the number of female researchers who, with teaching experience and scientific merits, were being forced to give up the university and fall back on work in schools. It was in 1920 that she made a similar choice to Anna Mannessier’s: she married a colleague. The substantial difference was that Mario Calvino also offered her a post with responsibilities, and regularly paid, as a botanist. The decision to accept she took in a hurry, and provocatively in the eyes of the University of Pavia: from correspondence with the Rector we learn that, in July 1920, she was still in Pavia. But writing to the Ministry not long afterwards, in February 1921, the Rector complained that ‘it seems’ she was in Cuba, although – he continued – she hadn’t communicated anything to the Director of the Botanical Institute or to the headmistress of the school she had been teaching in.108 Eva Mameli had left Italy to marry agronomist Mario Calvino, who had been working in South America from 1908. They shared a passion for work and for the 104 105 106 107

Ibid., p. 7. In 1919 Mameli published five papers. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 6. Raffaele Ciferri, ‘Gino Pollacci (1872 – 1963)’, Atti dell’Istituto botanico e Laboratorio crittogamico dell’Universit— di Pavia, 5 (1964), 25 – 38. The biographical note gives the list of Pollacci’s publications. 108 The Rector to the Ministry of Education, 12/02/1921, Professor Folder, ‘Mameli, Eva’ (AUP).

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world of plants, they were adventurous, anticlerical, and cultivated similar political and humanitarian ideals. Their publications and the unpublished documentation show that she was no mere assistant to her husband, as her son Italo wrote, rehashing an old clich¦:109 she was rather a colleague and comrade, showing solidarity beyond the bounds of censorship, as we shall be seeing.

VI.

Mario Calvino, Agronomist and Traveler

In Italy in the decades after unification an important national program for relaunching agriculture took place. Fields were almost everywhere neglected, or cultivated with old methods making for very low productivity. As had already happened in other European countries some decades earlier, in 1886 an Itinerant Chair of Agriculture was established, and agronomists were sent around the country teaching how to cultivate ‘scientifically’, delivering booklets and journals. After gaining his degree in agriculture, in 1901 Mario Calvino, Italo’s father, had obtained the Itinerant Chair in Porto Maurizio, near his Sanremo birthplace. Itinerant Chairs were for the most part financed by local (private and/or public) agencies, such as the Savings Banks, Agrarian Consortia, and Chambers of Commerce. Mario Calvino’s chair was financed by the Provincial Administration.110 His experience with various authorities and institutions, public and private, would continue throughout his career, where his technical involvement was inseparable from his political and social commitment. In South America, as in Fascist Italy, Calvino was an untiring agricultural innovator and popularizer of new knowledge for the peasants and landowners, enjoying uninterrupted collaboration with the chemical industrialists, producers of fertilizer, phytopharmacological products and fungicides, public research institutions and politicians.111 He was convinced that the economic and social growth of the West Riviera was possible through the introduction of up-todate agricultural technologies.112 Although situated in the north of Italy, the 109 Calvino, Hermit in Paris, p. 7. 110 Mario Zucchini, Le cattedre ambulanti di agricoltura (Rome: Giovanni Volpe editore, 1970), p. 103. In 1901 Briosi, with whom it is likely Mario Calvino was in contact, wrote an article on how to rationalize the organization of the Itinerant Agricultural Chair. Giovanni Briosi, ‘Del migliore modo di ordinare le cattedre ambulanti di agricoltura’, Atti dell’Istituto Botanico di Pavia, 7 (1901), 171 – 79. 111 For the reconstruction of Mario Calvino’s activities, especially useful was the rich documentation in CMAS and in Folder, ‘Calvino, Mario’ (TUA). 112 Eva Mameli Calvino, ‘Mario Calvino, 1875 – 1951’, Supplement to the Annali della Sperimentazione Agraria, 6 (1952), i-xi. The text was republished in: Giuliana Eva Mameli Calvino, Mario Calvino, 1875 – 1951, in Nel primo centenario di fondazione, 1860 – 1960: Annuario commemorativo a cura del preside e dei professori (Sanremo: Gandolfi, 1960),

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Sanremo area enjoyed a unique micro-climate, and he believed that in such a special place it would be possible to invest in crops deriving from species hybridized and adapted from tropical plants. On these questions he worked throughout his life.113 Calvino belonged to a family of bourgeois freemasons and was one himself.114 He was, as a republican and a pacifist, an idealistic believer in fraternity who conceived his profession as a kind of lay mission.115 As a young man he had been sympathetic to the communistic anarchism of Peter Kropotkin: political tendencies consistent with the adventure in which he found himself involved in 1908 and which, as mentioned above, forced him to leave Italy. He had got to know the Russian exile Vsevolod Vladimirovicˇ Lebedintzev, and gave him his own passport so he could re-enter Russia, where Lebedintzev was, however, immediately arrested and executed.116 The news alerted the Italian police, and to avoid the legal consequences of his gesture, Mario Calvino left for South America, with a well timed offer of work. It is only at this point that Eva Mameli’s story begins in her biography of her husband.117 In Mexico Calvino served as head of the Department of Horticulture in the National School of Agriculture, and in 1913 he became director of the School. He was also given an itinerant agrarian teaching job to help the Mayas, and introduced the use of mineral fertilizers. He frequently traveled in South America, California, Texas and Florida, studying ways to adapt local species to Mexico and Italy, and selling seeds to Sanremo’s growers, with whom he had remained in touch. Touched by the poverty of the local population, he became a passionate witness to the Mexican peones’ revolution which took over the country in 1910,

113

114 115 116

117

pp. 62 – 72. This biography, with a wealth of precious information, but also of criticisms and voluntary omissions, was the source of what followed on Mario Calvino. See for example: Emerico Mez, ‘Calvino Mario’, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (Rome: Istituto della Enciclopedia Italiana, 1974), 17, pp. 29 – 31; Tito Schiva, Mario Calvino: Un rivoluzionario tra le piante (Molteno: Ace International 1997); this volume does not mention its sources. See among others: Mario Calvino, L’orticoltura delle regioni tropicali e subtropicali italiane: relazione presentata al 11. Congresso Internazionale di Orticoltura, tenutasi in Roma dal 16 al 21 settembre 1935 (San Remo: Gandolfi, 1935); Id., I grandi foraggi tropicali (Rome: Ramo editoriale degli agricoltori 1936); Id., Plantas forrajeras: Tropicales y subtropicales (Mexico: Bartolome Trucco, 1952). Mario Calvino’s activities as a journalist were very intense and he turns out to be editor of several agricultural journals, in Italy as well as in South America. In 1908 he was ‘venerable’ of the lodge of San Maurizio. See Stefano Adami, ‘L’ombra del padre: Il caso Calvino’, California Italian Studies Journal, 1 (2010), 1 – 65 (p. 7). Mameli Calvino, Mario Calvino, p. 65. On this episode: Calvino, Lettere 1940 – 1985, pp. 1349 – 50 and 1379 – 82; Angelo Tamborra, Esuli russi in Italia dal 1905 al 1917: Riviera Ligure, Capri, Messina (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2002), 1st orig. ed. 1975, pp. 227 – 29; Adami, ‘L’ombra del padre’ (in this article a copy of the documents regarding the events is published). Mameli Calvino, Mario Calvino.

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but when in 1917 the political situation deteriorated, he decided to leave Mexico for Cuba. There he served as Director of the Experimental Agricultural Station of Santiago de las Vegas, near Havana. Mario Calvino was a passionate believer in his work, an adventurous romantic, who loved poetry and music;118 he was a bizarre character who, as his son Italo wrote, ‘as a fictional character’ for this reason comes out rather well.119

VII. The Calvino Mamelis: In South America and Back to Fascist Italy In 1920 Mario Calvino offered Eva Mameli a job as Head of the Botany Department of the Agricultural Experiment Station (Estaciýn Experimental Agronýmica) in Santiago de las Vegas, where the couple went to live and where in 1923 their first child, Italo, was born.120 Submerged in the blooming subtropical vegetation, Eva Mameli’s production increased.121 She abandoned systematics to concentrate on botanic physiology and anatomy, extending her interests to tropical agriculture. She also published two textbooks: the first of a series of books and articles for gardeners and hybridizers.122 In 1921 she tried, from Cuba, to win a university post in Italy, and failed once again,123 but in 1924 she began to procure the documentation required for another attempt.124 Perhaps it was these attempts which led her to reflect on the situation of women in science in Italy, for in 1925 she published a brief article on the subject for a local magazine, where 118 Helio Orovio, La dos mitades de Calvino (Habana: Ediciones Uniýn/Editorial Arte y Literatura, 2000). 119 Album Calvino, p. 20. 120 Mameli Calvino, Elenco dei titoli, p. 5. It seems the two married by proxy a first time, and a second time in Cuba, October 30, 1920. Orovio, Las dos mitades de Calvino, p. 10. In CMAS are preserved numerous photos of those years, some published in: Album Calvino, and in Paola Forneris and Loretta Marchis, Il Giardino Segreto dei Calvino/The Secret Garden of the Calvino’s (Genoa: De Ferrari, 2004). 121 The papers were in Italian, Spanish, and a few in English. Immediately after the marriage she signed herself with both surnames: Eva Mameli Calvino, ‘Estudios anatomicos y fisiologicos sobre la caÇa de azucar en Cuba’, Bolet†n n. 46 de la Estaciûn Central Agronûmica de Cuba, Abril (1921). 122 The most famous of these, written together with Mario and reprinted quite recently, was: Eva Mameli Calvino and Mario Calvino, Duecentocinquanta quesiti di giardinaggio risolti (Turin: Paravia, 1940). 123 Mameli Calvino, Elenco dei titoli, p. 6. 124 Il Console reggente, Certificato di buona condotta (the Regent Console, Certificate of good conduct), December 17, 1924, Folder ‘Mameli Calvino, Giuliana’ (ACS). On the certificate it states that Mameli Calvino had arrived in Cuba December 1, 1920, and occupied the role of Head of the Botany Section, Experimental Station and Agricultural School ‘Ciaparra’, San Manuel, Oriente.

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she recounted the activities of the various women researchers working at the University of Pavia.125 In 1925, when Mussolini’s government had evolved into the fascist regime, the Calvinos decided to come back to Italy nonetheless. Thanks to her new publications and her experience abroad in charge of the botanical section of a research centre, Eva aimed to get tenure. And with his naive confidence in revolutionary Mexico as well as in fascist Italy, Mario believed he could realize his dream: to improve the conditions of people living on the Riviera thanks to his work in the newly established Experimental Station of Floriculture. The Station had been wanted by local landowners, and flower hybridizers, and Mario Calvino came to Sanremo with the certainty of a position with a salary.126 His international experience in tropical agriculture fitted nicely into a context in which the fascist regime launched their new economic plan, based on inland and colonial agriculture.127 On April 19, 1926, just back in Italy, he joined the P.N.F.128 With these plans in mind (the university career for Eva and the reformist agrarian commitment for Mario), the Calvinos settled in Sanremo, at that time still an unspoiled if cosmopolitan sea-town. Because of the failure of the local bank, the Experimental Station of Floriculture started its life short of money, so the Calvinos rented five of the many rooms of their villa to the Station. Villa Meridiana, facing the sea, shaded by palms and huge agaves, and with exotic plants from distant lands, became a place for the coming and going of foreign and Italian researchers.129 It was the home lab where Italo Calvino grew up and lived for his first twenty-five years, and where he frequently returned until 1978, when his mother died. In the university competition of 1924, the one Eva Mameli Calvino had taken part in, sending her documentation from Cuba, she came second; it was a great step towards tenure, and in 1926 she was appointed a ‘non-tenured professor’ (professore non stabile) of Botany, and director of the botanical gardens at the 125 Eva Mameli Calvino, ‘La mujer en los Istitutos Cient†ficos de Pav†a, Italia’, Revista de Agricultura, Comercio y Trabajo, 6, 4 junio 1925, pp. 602 – 4. 126 While the salary of a full professor at the university was 17,000 lire c., Mario Calvino’s initial salary was 20,000 lire a year. See Bilancio preventivo 1925, Registro dei Verbali delle Sedute del Consiglio di Amministrazione [Budget Estimates 1925, Register of the Minutes of the Board of Directors’ Meetings], vol. 1, 1925 – 1938, p. 16 (SSFA). Given the difficulties the Station found itself in, in the Budget estimates for 1928 the salary of the Director turned out to be 18,000 lire a year (p. 66), and it fell to 16,169 lire the year after (p. 79). 127 Tiago Saraiva, ‘Fascist Labscapes: Geneticists, Wheat, and the Landscapes of Fascism in Italy and Portugal’, Historical Studies in Natural Sciences, 40 (2010), 457 – 98. On the relations between scientists and the regime: Roberto Maiocchi, Gli scienziati del Duce (Rome: Carocci, 2003), and Id. Scienza e fascismo (Rome: Carocci, 2004). 128 Declaration, not dated, signed by Mario Calvino on the occasion of the request to activate a course at the University of Turin presented in 1936, Folder, ‘Calvino, Mario’ (TUA). 129 The information on the Station is from the very rich SSFA.

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University of Cagliari, in Sardinia. A convinced republican, to obtain the post, she had to swear ‘to be loyal to the King and his Royal successors’; this was a formula slotted into place by a decree of 1924 which began that control over university teachers which culminated in the oath of loyalty to fascism of 1931.130 She worked very little in Cagliari, asking and obtaining numerous periods of leave for reasons of family and health.131 The journey from Sanremo to Cagliari was a long and difficult one and the university did not stimulate any desire to settle there. In a letter to her former colleague Pollacci, Mameli Calvino complained that as soon as she left for Sanremo, a head gardener ‘good for next to nothing’ took possession of the botanical garden to put out to pasture his goats, chickens and a horse.132 Pollacci had become a convinced supporter of fascism and the previous year had been one of the supporters of the Conference for Fascist Culture held at Bologna: the meeting where the idea was born of the Manifesto of Fascist Culture, redacted the same year (1925) by Gentile; this was the one Croce replied to with his own Manifesto of the antifascist intellectuals which, as we have seen, Efisio Mameli signed.133 Evidently aiming to maintain good relations with Pollacci, a powerful academic at that time, Eva Mameli Calvino wrote to him about a post of assistant of botany at Cagliari for whom she had busied herself with the Ministry ; she advised Pollacci that ‘your assistant’ [a woman unnamed] should at once apply to take part in the competition for a university post.134 When in May 1927 Eva Mameli Calvino gave birth to her second child Floriano, Italo was four years old, and she asked for a temporary attachment to the Sanremo Experimental Station. The Rector of Cagliari rejected her application. To achieve her purpose Mameli Calvino also wrote a long letter to the Head of Government, Mussolini. Trying her hand at the then fashionable rhetoric, she declared that if she was not allowed her attachment to the Experimental Station, she would see herself forced to abandon her career for her ‘duties as mother.’135 130 Minutes of the oath-taking of March 12, 1926, R. Universit— di Cagliari, Folder ‘Mameli Calvino, Giuliana’ (ACS). 131 Leave for reasons of health (16/11/1926 – 17/11/1927); leave for reasons of family (16/11/ 1927 – 15/02/1928); leave for reasons of family (1/12/1928 – 30/08/1929), Folder ‘Mameli Calvino, Giuliana’ (ACS). Declaration for pension signed by Eva Mameli Calvino, 25/11/ 1953, to the Ministry of Agriculture (SSFA). The original requests for leave are in Folder ‘Mameli Calvino, Giuliana’ (ACS). 132 Eva Mameli Calvino to Gino Pollacci, 16/06/1926, Gino Pollacci Papers, 33/I/25; Folder 1926; n. 284, Library of the Dipartimento di Scienze Ambientali, University of Siena. I wish to thank Elisabetta Pepi for her kind collaboration. 133 Papa, Storia di due manifesti, p. 47. 134 Eva Mameli Calvino to Gino Pollacci, 16/06/1926, Pollacci Papers. 135 Eva Giuliana Mameli Calvino to His Eminence the Head of Government (S. E. il Capo del Governo), 15/08/1929. This was a three page typewritten letter to which was attached the list of her qualifications and publications. Folder ‘Mameli Calvino, Giuliana’ (ACS).

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Her request was sent on to the Minister of Education, accompanied by a note from Mussolini’s personal secretary soliciting a reply to the interested party.136 The minister rejected her request,137 and she gave up her university career for good, after 1928 working for the Station with a regular salary.138 From the 1930s she concentrated on floriculture, publishing papers on the genetic improvement of flowers.139 In 1931 Eva and Mario shared the editing of Giardino fiorito, a beautiful magazine to which people like art historian Mary Berenson (1864 – 1945), writer Sybil Lubbock (1879 – 1943), and writer and historian Iris Origo (1902 – 1988),140 contributed: early evidence of their interest in collaborating with people working in the humanities. It was indeed in the 1930s that Eva Mameli Calvino’s important relationships with Olga Resnevic Signorelli and Beatrice Duval began. The principal activities of the Experimental Station where Italo Calvino grew up were hybridization and the reproduction of new varieties of flowering plants. One other activity of the Station was the identification of plant diseases, a microscopy activity Eva Mameli Calvino dealt with in her lab at home.141 But flowers were not its only activity. In 1909 Mario had sent from Mexico the first seeds of Mexican avocados, and in 1910 the first specimens of grapefruit. These and other plants imported later were cultivated, and Mario Calvino’s agricultural experimentation continued in Sanremo.142 It is worthwhile pausing here over the latter’s activities during fascism, considering their relation to Italo Calvino, and the relation between biography and autobiography. The popular literature that has dealt with the ‘parents of Calvino’, to succeed in showing Mario and Eva in a somewhat heroic light, has kept quiet about Mario’s activities under fascism. As a matter of fact, as mentioned earlier, it was 136 Note signed Nani [perhaps R. Nani, in charge of the section of reserved business], not dated, on official paper of the Special Secretariat of the Head of Government (Segreteria Particolare del Capo del Governo); a note fixed to the letter of Mameli Calvino with a metal clip. Folder ‘Mameli Calvino, Giuliana’ (ACS). 137 Giuseppe Belluzzo to Mameli Calvino, 6/09/1929, and Giuseppe Belluzzo to Ministry of Education, 9/07/1928. Folder ‘Mameli Calvino, Giuliana’ (ACS). 138 A year’s salary of 10,780 lire. Registro dei Verbali delle Sedute del Consiglio di Amministrazione (Minutes of Meetings of the Board of Directors), vol. 1, 1925 – 1938, p. 79 (SSFA). Notices of dismissal are in: Giuliana Mameli Calvino to Ministry of Education, 9/09/1929/ VII; the Rector of Cagliari to the Ministry of Education, 18/09/1929, Folder ‘Mameli Calvino, Giuliana’ (ACS). 139 Her presence is reported at the 1930 International Horticultural Congress in London, in ‘The Ninth International Horticultural Congress’, Nature, 126, 3174 (1930), 314 – 16. 140 On Origo and ‘biography’, see Gianna Pomata, ‘Dalla biografia alla storia e ritorno: Iris Origo tra Bloomsbury e Toscana’, Genesis, 6 (2007), 117 – 56. 141 Registro degli Esami di Fitopatologia e Determinazioni di Piante (Register of the Examinations of Phytopathology and Determination of Plants), period 1929 – 1948 (SSFA). 142 Registro delle Variet— (Register of Varieties), Registro Introduzione Piante e Semi (Register of the Introduction of Plants and Seeds), period 15/09/1925 – 04/10/1934 (SSFA).

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Eva Mameli Calvino who first traced a portrait where embarrassing episodes, like the Russian affair, and his collaboration with the regime, disappeared. The son Italo did not keep quiet about these episodes, and let it be understood that his father had been an idealist of great sensitivity, but also a dreamer with dangerously ingenuous characteristics even when fully mature.143 To those features, romantically sweetened, the documents we have traced add others. Mario Calvino contributed to the autocratic policies of the Military Chemical Service to produce caoutchouc in the south of Italy and in the African colonies. The aim of the research coordinated by the Military Chemical Service was the production of rubber from plants grown from Latin American seeds cultivated in experimental fields in Italy and the colonies, Tripoli and Benghazi.144 In addition, in 1936 he offered his services to the University of Turin to teach a course on tropical and subtropical agriculture, and to obtain the job, he swore loyalty to the king and the fascist regime.145 In 1936 Italy’s policy of colonization was at its peak, and Mario Calvino began his proposal on the plan of the course in the name of ‘the importance attached to the study of tropical and subtropical cultivations in view of the valorization of the Empire.’146 The following year, after some trips to the Italian colonies in Africa, with Lincoln Nodari and Rosario Averna-Sacc— he co-authored a volume dedicated to Mussolini.147 The book was published under the auspices of the Istituto Coloniale Fascista (Fascist Colonial Institute), and the cover showed a drawing where bayonets and ploughs mixed together are commented on by a phrase of Mussolini’s: ‘It is the plough which makes the furrow, but it is the sword which defends it.’ The content of the book, where some microscopic analyses of ‘Professoressa Eva Mameli’ are cited (without the Calvino surname),148 is interesting for the history of agricultural techniques and policies, but very clearly also for the history of the relations between scientists and the fascist regime. Mario closed his essay on the future of the African country which, ‘under the auspices of fascism’, would be soon ‘evergreen, irrigated, rich in cereals’, proud to show the new ways forward reserved 143 Of his father, including his joining the P.N.F., Italo Calvino wrote in a 1952 manuscript now published in Album Calvino, pp. 19 – 21. 144 On Calvino’s contacts with Pirelli, the caoutchouc company, see Relazione, Folder 39 (CMAS). 145 Processo Verbale di prestazione giuramento (sworn statement), University of Turin, 23/01 [1936], Folder ‘Calvino, Mario’, without place marking (TUA). 146 Mario Calvino to Ministry of Education, 21/09/1936/XIV, Folder, ‘Calvino Mario’ (TUA). 147 Lincoln Nodari, Mario Calvino, and Rosario Averna-Sacc—, Nuovi orizzonti agricoli della Libia, per l’autarchia nazionale, pref. by Angelo Piccioli (Rome: Arti Grafiche, XV [1937]). The book went through a second edition in 1938, and it was quoted and reviewed by Italian and international scientific literature. 148 Nodari, Calvino, and Averna-Sacc—, Nuovi orizzonti agricoli, p. 395. Mameli Calvino had worked on colonial agriculture, see her, ‘Piante che possono produrre alcool da carburazione in Italia e nelle Colonie’, L’Agricoltura Coloniale, 17/12 (1923), 413 – 17.

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‘to our race and our civilization on the fourth shore of Italy.’149 That was the seventeenth year of the fascist regime; only a few months later it reached its most abysmal point so far, when in 1938 the so-called Racial Laws were issued. Mario Calvino’s collaboration with the regime doesn’t seem to have procured for the Experimental Station the investments necessary for the ambitious plans he had in mind for the development of the surrounding area.150 There may be hidden evidence that those links, nevertheless, helped to save both his and his wife’s lives. In 1944 the Calvinos suffered personally from the cruelty of the dying regime. Italo, then twenty-one years old, escaped from the army and joined the partisans, together with his brother Floriano. Mario was arrested, and in order to obtain information from them about their children and other partisans, the SS and fascist militia simulated his execution in front of Eva.151 On this occasion they are reported to have behaved with incredible firmness and the young men were saved. As were saved the Calvinos, husband and wife, who had refused to collaborate. A piece of good fortune in those times that not very many enjoyed. After the war the Calvinos’ contacts with the chemical industry intensified. The Station collaborated with the producers of fertilizer and pesticides, as for example those used to fight the Argentine ants,152 a subject on which in 1952 Italo would write a tale where the technical and scientific details would fuse admirably with those of his imagination.153 Of the generation of scientists spoken of here, Eva Mameli Calvino witnessed the success of the Italian chemical industry, as Efisio Mameli, in particular, had hoped. Success arrived in 1963 with the Nobel Prize for the research chemist Giulio Natta (1903 – 1979), a scientific achievement to be seen together with the emergence of Montecatini, a chemical company among the biggest companies in the country, and with which the Calvino Mameli collaborated.154 When Mario Calvino died in 1951, Eva Mameli Calvino succeeded him as director of the Station. In her letters to Olga Resnevic Signorelli, she wrote about 149 Mario Calvino, ‘Quello che ho visto e considerato in Tripolitania’ in Nodari, Calvino, and Averna-Sacc—, Nuovi orizzonti agricoli, p. 82. 150 Registro dei Verbali del Consiglio di Amministrazione (Minutes of Meetings of the Board of Directors), vol. 1, 20/06/1925 – 23/05/1938 (SSFA). 151 Calvino, Hermit in Paris, p. 142. 152 Among the papers regarding his contacts with the producing companies, there is much information on the Argentine anti-ant poisons, illustrated by quite bizarre drawings, Folder 22 (CMAS). 153 Italo Calvino, The Watcher and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 1st orig. ed. 1952. 154 Folders 22 and 23 (CMAS). In 1946, when the National Committee for the chemical industry was restored, Efisio Mameli and Natta found themselves together on the Board. See Cerruti, La chimica, tab. 2, p. 198.

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her working partnership with her husband.155 She continued to keep herself informed of technological and scientific advances until quite a great age. In 1956 she was fascinated by the literature on the use of radiation to genetically modify wheat: a subject that once again was about the relations between research and its technological applications in industry and agriculture.156 In 1958 Eva retired, but she continued to enjoy a very active life. In 1964, when she was seventy-eight, congratulating the eighty-one-year-old Olga on a new book, she wrote: ‘Work is always great company! […] I have thread enough to weave while I live.’157 In 1965, while awaiting a visit from Olga, she was looking forward to speaking about ‘our children and our work.’158 Eva and Olga exchanged examples of their work. When in 1968 Olga sent Eva a new book on her decades-long correspondence with painter Filippo De Pisis, Eva ‘reciprocated [by sending] a little collection of [her] carnation cuttings.’159 The year afterwards Beatrice Duval died, Eva having always kept up their sisterly and collaborative friendship. These personal recollections of Eva Mameli Calvino offer some concluding reflections on the making of Italo Calvino.

VIII. Conclusion Italo Calvino grew up, played, dreamed, and wrote his first short stories in a lab house which was submerged in a botanical garden, peopled by botanists, agronomists, chemists, botanical amateurs, and floriculturists, as has been described, but also by an artist and traveler like Beatrice Duval, and a professional writer and translator like Olga Resnevic Signorelli. These women, never mentioned in interviews and in the numerous published writings where the writer spoke of his youth, had an important role in the orientation of his cultural tastes when young. The cultural horizons of Eva Mameli Calvino and her friends were close to Italo’s own interests.160 In 1947, when Italo, then twenty-three, had abandoned the idea of becoming an agronomist, and decided to take a degree in 155 Mameli Calvino to Resnevic Signorelli, 31/12/1951 (SACF). 156 Typewritten text, no date, with mss corrections by Mameli Calvino. From a newspaper cutting with the date handwritten by Mameli Calvino one may deduce it was material from 1956, including manuscript notes and that typewritten report (neither dated). Folder 23/3 (CMAS). 157 Mameli Calvino to Resnevic Signorelli, 21/05/1964 (SACF). 158 Mameli Calvino to Resnevic Signorelli, 21/4/1965 (SACF). 159 Mameli Calvino to Resnevic Signorelli, 12/03/1968 (SACF). Filippo De Pisis, Lettere a un’amica: 50 lettere a Olga Signorelli (1919 – 1952), ed. by Olga Signorelli (Milan: All’insegna del pesce d’oro, 1967); Eva Mameli Calvino, Dizionario etimologico dei nomi generici e specifici delle piante da fiore e ornamentali (Sanremo: s.n., 1972). 160 Mameli Calvino to Resnevic Signorelli, 17/5/1940 (SACF).

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the humanities instead, Eva wrote to Olga: ‘Italo is in Turin, in a freezing attic without heating […] At last he has followed his vocation, and he has devoted himself with strong determination to writing.’161 So why in 1960 did Italo Calvino write: ‘Among my family and relations only scientific subjects were held in any honor […] I am the black sheep of the family’? In a political portrait of his parents which he wrote two years later (1962) I think we may find some more evidence to explain this distancing of himself. He wrote: ‘Both [my parents] had grown up under the general urge towards renovation of pre-war socialism – as indeed Mussolini had162 – and their sympathies were not so much with liberal democracy as with all the progressive movements that were out of the ordinary : Kemal Atatürk, Gandhi, the Russian Bolsheviks.’163 Of those ‘out of the ordinary’ figures who had raised the expectations of relatives and friends, here Calvino forgot to mention Mussolini, in whose regime his father in particular had had confidence. We have also seen that Italo’s mother, a republican, did not hesitate to swear allegiance to the king to obtain a university post, nor to write to Mussolini to obtain her transfer from the University of Cagliari to the Experimental Station. As is obvious, history is not written for its ‘ifs’, but in this case it is not easy to avoid wondering how Eva Mameli Calvino would have behaved had she won her professorship: would she have sworn allegiance to fascism like her husband, her brother and sister-in-law, or would she have been the thirteenth university teacher out of more than 1,200 to refuse to swear the oath of allegiance? Things went differently for her, we know, and her son could then write that, unlike his father, his mother was ‘intransigent in her anti-fascism.’164 As we have seen, things were more complicated than that. Perhaps it was impossible for a son to get to the bottom of that complex of contradictions, however dramatic their historical context: a family, including aunt and uncle, where humanitarian and democratic ideals may co-exist with support for fascism, while they cultivated Bolshevik sympathies; a lab home where the love of nature, which included the environmentalist commitment of the mother and her friend Duval, coexisted with massive experimentation of chemicals in agriculture and gardening. To distinguish himself sharply from the previous generation, Italo Calvino could not use political analysis, which involved him too closely as an ex militant communist, but instead an instrument more easily manageable for his feelings, 161 Mameli Calvino to Resnevic Signorelli, 27/01/1947 (SACF). One other letter shows her happy about the success of ‘Italo il fantasioso’ (Italo the fanciful). Mameli Calvino to Resnevic Signorelli, 29/12/1965 (SACF). 162 Renzo De Felice, Mussolini il rivoluzionario (1883 – 1920) (Turin: Einaudi, 1965). 163 Calvino, ‘Political autobiography of a young man’, in Id. Hermit in Paris, p. 132. 164 Ivi.

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that of the ‘two cultures’, a concept which at that time was living through a period of renewed splendor thanks to C.P. Snow. His return to his younger days, meditating on his relationship with his parents, occurred at different times between the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. These were the ‘dark times’ following on after the Soviet invasion of Hungary, when his political ideals were under a good deal of strain.165 But to get right down to the bottom of his relationships with the ideologies Italo Calvino had been forced to grow up with (Fascist and then Nazi) as well as the Bolshevism his parents had sympathized with, and to which he had until recently given his full consent, was too much even for a lucid mind like his own. The use of the notion of the two cultures to distance himself from his parents was in all likelihood a process of ‘adapted’ reconstruction, showing an unawareness of his own past, in the light of the Nazi-Fascist and Stalinist horrors.166 I believe there was little unawareness, instead, about his own removal of Resnevic Signorelli and Duval from his autobiographical writings. In this case, it was a cultural operation, carried out with his eyes wide open, to exclude women from his reconstruction of the education of the writer when young. It was necessary to place himself, right from his beginnings, in that tradition of Italian writers (mostly men), who had profoundly renovated Italian culture, starting from Pavese. However, the lives and works of Mameli Calvino, Mannessier Mameli, Duval and Resnevic Signorelli demonstrate, once again, that focusing on the role of forgotten women can be a decisive step for a better understanding of an author. It was thanks to Beatrice Duval and Olga Resnevic Signorelli that from an early age Italo Calvino learned to relate to that cosmopolitan context of artistic and literary culture which he would go on to cultivate for the rest of his life. Yet, the group biography here retrieved for the first time helps us reach a better understanding of circumstances of wider interest than the affairs of an individual. Only by reconstructing the full network of men and women, and the different institutional, professional and cultural contexts in which they acted, will we be able to undertake new research paths into the relationships between writers, science scholars, and those in power, from the Liberal age, through fascism, to the Cold War in Italy.

165 Calvino used the expression ‘dark times’ in a letter of May 1957 to poet and literary critic Franco Fortini (1917 – 1994). See, McLaughlin, Italo Calvino, p. 58. 166 See the ambiguous closure to the article ‘Was I a Stalinist too?’ in Calvino, Hermit in Paris, pp. 192 – 99.

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Pnina G. Abir-Am

Women Scientists of the 1970s: An Ego-Histoire of a Lost Generation

I.

Prologue: How did I Come to Focus on this Trio of Women Scientists?

The relationship between historians of science and their subject matter, especially when such a subject matter is another human being, often a scientist biographee, female or male, has not been widely interrogated prior to this volume. Such a relationship often remains implicit as a quest for one’s intellectual ancestry.1 Most historians of science (referred to by a founder of this field, as ‘refugees from the lab’) tend to focus on the history of scientists with whom they share a field of training; otherwise, their study will not be a contribution to the history of science, and might be better tackled by professional biographers and journalists who are often more experienced in unraveling personal dramas, in and out of science.2 But such choices of subject matter also reflect moral and cultural affinities * The inspiration of Ellen Daniell’s book Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006), and her gracious cooperation are gratefully acknowledged. So are the guidance to the Bay area of the 1970s and comments provided by Margaret W. Rossiter, Mary F. Singleton and David Givol. Several colleagues from the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, MA, and Arizona State University (hereafter MBL-ASU) workshop in the History of Cell Biology in May 2011, too many to enumerate, offered useful suggestions but those of Cera Lawrence and Chris Orlic were particularly memorable. I also benefited from comments I received in response to presentations of this topic at Brandeis University (22/11/2011), University of MinnesotaMinneapolis (13/10/2011), Universit¦ de Lille I (13/09/2011), and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (14/06/2010). My final thanks are to Paola Govoni who patiently but deftly encouraged my forays into better understanding the historian’s own place in the history s/he produces. 1 Commemorative Practices in Science: Historical Perspectives on the Politics of Collective Memory, ed. by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Clark A. Elliott, Osiris, 14 (1999); also as stand alone book from University of Chicago, 2000. 2 Anne Sayre, Rosalind Franklin and DNA, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000 [1975]); Brenda Maddox, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA (London: Harper Collins, 2002).

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which are rarely made explicit in the history of science3. I still recall my surprise when one of the respondents invited by the Editor to comment upon my paper ‘The 50th anniversary of the first protein X-ray photograph (1984, 1934)’, as part of a special issue of Social Epistemology, requested that I dwell on my relationships with the scientists participating in the anniversary which I witnessed and then analyzed as a new form of ‘ethnographic history’.4 My response was very telling, though at the time I was apparently not ready to pursue its implications. I replied (as part of the ‘Responses and Replies’ section that followed my paper) that I related to the scientists celebrating the 50th anniversary of a discovery as if they were some sort of ‘professional uncles’.5 My reply reflected the fact that at that time I was also involved in getting to know a ‘real’ or biological uncle who had been an inspiring figure for me due to his participation in freedom wars of the 20th Century, most notably the Spanish Civil War, in which he fought as part of the International Brigade, and WWII, in which he fought as part of the British Army. Since my uncle was a member of the same generation as the scientists celebrating their ‘descent’ from J.D. Bernal (1901 – 1971), a similarly engaged scientist, my reply reflected an underlying belief in the kinship of members of the same generation. This previous experience, well buried for two decades, may be relevant to my exploration below, in which I chart how a standard historical project on two ‘brilliant careers’ of the first two women to share a Nobel Prize (in 2009) transmuted into a study of the lost generation of women scientists in the 1970s.6 I came to call the generation of the 1970s, i. e. those whose lives were suddenly changed by the equal opportunity legislation of 1972, a ‘lost generation’ (as opposed to referring to it as a mere transitional one) because of its powerful analogy with Vera Brittain’s lost generation of WWI.7 The generation of women 3 Alfred I. Tauber, ‘Henry Thoreau as a Mirror of Ourselves’, Bostonia, Winter 2001 – 2002, see at http://thoreau.eserver.org/mirror.html (for this and the sites that follow, the date of the last access is 9/12/2013); Nathaniel C. Comfort, The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001); Thomas Söderqvist, Science as Autobiography : The Troubled Life of Niels Jerne (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003). 4 Pnina G. Abir-Am, ‘A Historical Ethnography of a Scientific Anniversary in Molecular Biology : The First Protein X-ray Photograph (1984, 1934)’, Social Epistemology, 6 (1992), 323 – 54; ibid. pp. 380 – 87 (author’s response). 5 Ibid., p. 384. 6 John D. Hazlett, My Generation: Collective Autobiography and Identity Politics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998); Devoney Looser and E. Ann Kaplan, Generations: Academic Feminists in Dialogue. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 7 Jay Winter, The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, available at www.pbs.org/ greatwar, a television documentary which won an Emmy award in 1997; The Great War in History : Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present, ed. by Jay Winter and Antoine Prost (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

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scientists of the 1970s, though not physically lost like that of WWI, lost the opportunity to serve as role models for future generations of women scientists, because the careers of its best, brightest, and boldest were sacrificed on the altar of gender bias in science. If four decades later we are still faced with a persisting problem of the under-representation of women in science,8 perhaps it will help to better understand the predicament of the first generation of women scientists who were hired in order to comply with the equal opportunity legislation in 1972, and fired typically seven years later, through the abuse and exploitation of that legislation’s weakness with regard to retention (as opposed to recruiting). This paper, a chapter in a future study of the lost generation of women scientists of the 1970s, focuses on a member of that generation whose experience can be seen as symbolic of the wider phenomenon of gender bias in science. The paper follows how that member rescued herself from oblivion by becoming the voice of Group, a group of women scientists who survived the 1970s and seeks to become a role model; how I found traces of her fascinating experience in a footnote in the biography of perhaps the most successful woman of that generation, or the only one to win a Nobel jointly with her female student; and finally how I changed my historiographical purpose in order to make sense of such contrasting, yet intersecting lives, while further adding my own, since I am also a member of their generation. This ‘symbol’ is Ellen Daniell, the first woman to be hired and fired by the department of Molecular Biology at the University of California (UC) at Berkeley, where she had been a predecessor and colleague of Elizabeth H. Blackburn, the Nobel co-laureate in 2009 who shared that award with her former graduate student Carol W. Greider.9 I set out to explore to what extent the experience of this ‘woman scientist, interrupted’, known in science policy lingo as joining the

8 National Academy of Science (hereafter NAS), Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering (Washington: the National Academies Press, 2007); Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Forging a New World since 1972 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012); Henry Etzkowitz and Marina Ranga, ‘Gender Dynamics in Science and Technology : From the Leaking Pipeline to the Vanishing Box’, Brussels Economic Review, 54 (2011), 131 – 48; Pnina G. Abir-Am, ‘Gender & Technoscience: A Historical Perspective’, Journal of Technology Management & Innovation, 5 (2010), 152 – 65; Ead., ‘Mme Curie’s 2011 Centennial and the Public Debate on the Underrepresentation of Women in Science: Lessons from the History of Science’, in Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Marie Curie’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry, ed. by Mei-Hung Chiu, Penny J. Gilmer, and David Treagust (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2011), pp. 205 – 24. 9 Daniell, Every Other Thursday ; Catherine Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres: Deciphering the Ends of DNA (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007); Carol W. Greider, interview, June 16, 2000, available at http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bla0int-1; ‘Carol W. Greider’, member profile in American Society for Cell Biology, available at http:// www.ascb.org/files/profiles/carol_greider.pdf

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‘leaking pipeline’,10 may reflect not only the predicament of a whole generation of women scientists, but may also serve as a key to a better understanding of the recent debate on the under-representation of women in science.11 From an initial plan of studying a collaboration between two Nobel co-laureates, the first women ever in the position of sharing a Nobel, or two ‘brilliant careers’, I shifted to studying whether their colleague’s descent into the ‘leaking pipeline’ of women in science was a predicament of the first generation of women scientists hired like her, all over the United States, on tenure-track slots that had suddenly become available as a result of equal opportunity legislation in 1972. For if Ellen’s predicament is the story of a generation as opposed to being a merely personal ‘misfortune’, then it can better illuminate the recent history of women in science, than focusing on what remains a very rare success of two women or men Nobel co-laureates. In addition to interrogating my change of historical strategy in writing the recent history of women in science, this essay also seizes an opportunity to experiment with ego-histoire,12 a new approach that has altered our historical consciousness by providing a theoretical justification for historians to include their own personal experience with the historical events that they witnessed and write about. Yet, they do so with a dual sensibility, combining both the historian’s skills in rigorous documentation and the narrator’s authenticity of ‘having been there’. Situated between history and autobiography, ego-histoire liberates historians from the objectivist paradigm that forced them to ‘keep themselves out of the way of their work’.13 Ego-histoire encourages autobiographical reflection as ‘part of a larger effort to re-vision the process of the production of historical knowledge’.14 Yet, ego10 Etzkowitz and Ranga, ‘Gender Dynamics in Science and Technology’; Elisabeth D. Martinez et al., ‘Falling off the Academic Bandwagon: Women are more Likely to Quit at the Postdoc to Principal Investigator Transition’, EMBO Reports, 8 (2007), 977 – 81; Mary Frank Fox, ‘Women, Science, and Academia: Graduate Education and Careers’, Gender & Society, 15 (2001), 654 – 66; Sue V. Rosser, The Science Glass Ceiling: Academic Women Scientists and the Struggle to Succeed (New York: Routledge, 2004). 11 NAS, Beyond Bias and Barriers; L. L. Summers, selected speeches in 2005, 14 and 19 January, 15 and 17 February, 15 March, available at http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/ 2005/0516_womensci.html and http://www.president.harvard.edu/speeches/; Rosser, The Science Glass Ceiling; Abir-Am, ‘Gender & Technoscience’; Ead., ‘Mme Curie’s 2011 centennial.’ 12 Essais d’ego-histoire: Maurice Agulhon, Pierre Chaunu, Georges Duby, Raoul Girardet, Jacques Le Goff, Michelle Perrot, Ren¦ R¦mond, r¦unis et pr¦sent¦s par Pierre Nora (Paris: Gallimard, 1987); European Ego-Histoires: Historiography and the Self, 1970 – 2000, ed. by Luisa Passerini and Alexander C.T. Geppert, vol. 3 of Historein: A Review of the Past and Other Stories (Athens: Nefeli Publishers, 2001); Gerard Noiriel, Penser avec, Penser Contre: Itineraire d’un Historien (Paris: Belin, 2003). 13 Pierre Nora, in Essais d’ego-histoire, ed. by Nora, p. 5. 14 Ivi.

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histoire differs from the narcissism of unrestricted personal recollection, or from intimate confessions for their own sake, as in autobiography. To sum up, it is a form of personal reflection but only to the extent that it serves the purpose of the historical inquiry at hand. I found ego-histoire to be irresistible in the context of this essay, because there is more to gain from treating the process of doing historical work as a historical subject in its own right than from pretending that an imaginary distance, associated with greater objectivity in the positivist paradigm, separates me from my three subjects. Being members of the generation which first confronted the gender revolution of the 1970s may turn out to be more important than the professional divisions between the three scientists or between them and me as a historian of science. Still, there are notable differences between us. If the personal experiences of the women scientists are rendered by them as autobiographical statements, whether written by themselves as in Daniell’s autobiographical chapter, cited by biographers, as in Blackburn’s biography or recorded by journalists, as in Carol Greider’s interviews with magazines and blogs;15 then, in my hands, those personal experiences become data of historical interest. Such data will be compared (Appendix) or evaluated against other primary and secondary sources. Among those sources, I include my own personal experience as a member of the same generation, one whose own life and career are relevant for assessing whether the women scientists of the 1970s constitute a lost generation, or whether their experience can explain the persisting under-representation of women in science four decades later. This trio of women scientists can be approached from different perspectives, ranging from an intellectual history of their fields of expertise in molecular biology ; an institutional history of the department in which all three worked at a time; a regional history of their career choices which focused on various academic sites in California; or a history of their family choices and life styles, among other possibilities. Though my colleagues and I have previously written on all such options, and especially on how careers and personal lives have intersected historically for both women and men scientists,16 my initial interest focused on interrogating two recent dates in the history of women in science: gender parity at the Nobel awards in 2009 as its highest point, and its lowest, the

15 Daniell, Every Other Thursday, chapter 3; Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres; Greider, interview, June 16, 2000; ‘Carol W. Greider’, member profile in American Society for Cell Biology. 16 Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789 – 1979, ed. by Pnina G. Abir-Am and Dorinda Outram (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987); Creative Couples in the Sciences, ed. by Helena M. Pycior, Nancy G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996); Abir-Am, ‘Mme Curie’s 2011 centennial.’

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year long, frustrating debate on the under-representation of women in science throughout 2005, known as the ‘debate that won’t go away’.17 That debate stemmed from efforts by a former President of Harvard University, an economist who had not conducted any research into the topic of women in science, to explain the fact of their under-representation by three hypotheses which blamed the women (for presumably refusing to work long hours, as well as being less gifted) and society (for dressing up discrimination as socialization),18 but said nothing on the prevailing hiring practices in institutions such as the one he headed at the time, practices which resulted in few offers to women in the preceding four decades, with those few further decreasing during his time in office (2002 – 2006). I became very energized by the public debate that unfolded in 2005 and spent a whole year on a National Science Foundation (US; hereafter NSF) sponsored project seeking to clarify why that debate remained uninformed by pertinent studies in the history of women in science.19 The debate revealed that previous scholarship on women in science by historians of science, to which I devoted a good portion of my effort in the last two decades or so, had made little, if any, dent in public consciousness. Despite the high relevance of historical case studies for drawing useful lessons in framing policies in the present, the debate further revealed that those involved in policy making, often advised by ‘hardcore’ social scientists, such as economists, behave as if historical research has little to offer in addressing current problems. But I also felt vindicated by the debate of 2005, since my colleagues and I had ‘spotted’ the policy relevance of the under-representation of women in science already in 1989, when a workshop at a NATO Institute for Advanced Study (held at Il Ciocco, near Pisa, in Italy), charged with planning the science policy of the twenty-first century, drove a group of us to protest the lack of plans for either women or gender.20 Perhaps we were a bit ahead of our time. The debate’s persistence in all media forms throughout 2005, especially new ones such as blogs and websites, provided a new level of visibility, and hence a unique opportunity to address the problem of women’s under-representation in science.21 To my chagrin, this unprecedented visibility was largely wasted, since the 17 Cornelia Dean, ‘Theorist Drawn into Debate ‘That Will Not Go Away?’’, New York Times, 12/ 04/2005. 18 Summers, selected speeches in 2005; NAS, Beyond Bias and Barriers. 19 See the project at http://people.brandeis.edu/~pninaga/sger/ 20 Pnina G. Abir-Am, ‘Science Policy or Social Policy for Women in Science: Lessons from Historical Case-Studies’, Science and Public Policy, 3 (1992), 11 – 2; Henry Etzkowitz, Carol Kemelgor, and Brian Uzzi, Athena Unbound: The Advancement of Women in Science and Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Rosser, The Science Glass Ceiling. 21 NAS, Beyond Bias and Barriers.

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public interest was saturated by public figures, including several university presidents who had little knowledge or interest in the under-representation of women in science.22 Experts on the policy aspect of women in science, such as activist women scientists, or my colleagues in the history, philosophy, and sociology of science, were rarely consulted.23 By 2011, this media induced ‘fatigue’ could be detected in the centennial of Marie Curie’s second Nobel Prize (1911), which was marked rather modestly despite its conjunction with the International Year of Chemistry.24 To cap it further, in December 2011 I was informed by an anonymous referee of the National Endowment for the Humanities (hereafter NEH, to which I applied for a fellowship to study the Mme Curie Centennial in 2011 and compare it with the centennial of her discovery of radioactivity in 1998), that ‘women in science is no longer an interesting topic’. Such a statement, even if coming from a science innocent scholar in the humanities, reflects the missed opportunity of the 2005 debate on the under-representation of women in science to inform public opinion rather than over-expose it. Still, the under-representation of women in science can be illustrated by other case studies, so, why these three? Moreover, I never before worked on such a recent period. Most of the women or men scientists that I wrote about were at the peak of their career in the 1930s – 1950s.25 By contrast, my encounter with the women scientists of the 1970s discussed below brought me too close to the present and did not have a great start. As part of the Student-Scholar Partnership (SSP), in the Women’s Studies Research Center (WSRC) at Brandeis University, which offers students a paid opportunity to participate in research (students select projects offered by twenty or so scholars), I introduced several science students to oral histories with women scientists that were conducted in the early 2000s by two Library projects. One, based at Iowa State University, focused on women chemists, and the other, based in the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL), focused on molecular biologists and included a few women. The idea was to provide the students with exposure to the women scientists’ own voices and perspectives, as well as acquaint them with oral history as an analytical tool. In this manner, Elizabeth Blackburn came to our attention as one of several 22 See http://people.brandeis.edu/~pninaga/sger/ 23 Ivi; Abir-Am, ‘Gender & Technoscience’. 24 Celebrating the 100th Anniversary, ed. by Chiu, Gilmer, and Treagust; Abir-Am, ‘Mme Curie’s 2011 centennial.’ 25 Pnina G. Abir-Am, ‘Nobelesse Oblige: Lives of Molecular Biologists’, Isis, 82 (1991), 326 – 43; Ead., ‘A Historical Ethnography of a Scientific Anniversary’; Ead., ‘The First American and French Commemorations in Molecular Biology : From Collective Memory to Comparative History’, in Commemorative Practices in Science, ed. by Abir-Am and Elliott, pp. 324 – 72.

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leading women biologists. However, the interview with her did not impress us (the SSP students and myself) as a great source on the predicament of women in science. The interviews of which she was part were designed to document the importance of CSHL as a major center for research in molecular biology, as conference center, and site of an annual summer symposium that has been in operation since the 1930s. Interviewees such as Blackburn, who spent little time at CSHL, had little to say or chose to say little, a wisdom befitting someone who would soon join (and leave) a Presidential Commission.26 Second, other women scientist interviewees proved to be more forthcoming on the subject of women’s predicament in science, or their own experience, possibly because they encountered more dramatic instances of gender bias in their own careers than she did. It later became clear to us, while analyzing her biography, that one of her survival strategies required that she ignore such bias so as to be able to focus undisturbed on her research.27 Another reason for our initial lack of interest in Blackburn stemmed from the fact that we became acquainted with her oral history not too long after the public debate on the under-representation of women in science began unfolding in 2005 – 2006. Hence, we were more interested in women scientists who were active in that debate, such as Nancy Hopkins of MIT, who walked out on Harvard’s then President L. H. Summers following his disparaging comments of January 14, 2005, and helped make history by bringing them to media attention.28 However, our brief acquaintance with Elizabeth Blackburn proved helpful in December 2009 when she became the first woman to share the Nobel Prize with a former woman student, Carol Greider, a feat that became rather exciting for us since we watched the live broadcast from Stockholm on December 10, 2009. This trans-generational accomplishment, which is rare for men as well,29 persuaded our SSP team to look at this duo as signifying a turning point in the history of women in science.30 26 Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres. 27 Ivi. 28 Nancy Hopkins et al., ‘A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT’, The MIT Faculty Newsletter, XI (1999), 1 – 15; ‘Nancy Hopkins’, Oral History, 2001, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Library, http://library.cshl.edu/oralhistory/interview/cshl/special-aspects/scientific-heroes/; ‘Nancy Hopkins’, Oral History, 2002, Women in Chemistry Oral History Project Interviews Iowa State University Library, MS 650, box 2, available at ww.add.lib.iastate.edu/spcl/wise/Dreyfus/dreyfuscolldescription.html 29 Elizabeth T. Crawford, The Beginnings of the Nobel Institution: The Science Prizes, 1901 – 1915 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Robert M. Friedman, The Politics of Excellence: Behind the Nobel Prize in Science (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001); Erling Norrby, ‘A Century of Nobel Prizes’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 146 (2002), 323 – 36; Erling Norrby, Nobel Prizes and Life Sciences (Boston: World Scientific Publishing Company, 2010); Abir-Am, ‘Nobelesse Oblige’. 30 Abir-Am, ‘Gender & Technoscience.’

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The excitement generated by the 2009 Nobel Prizes, as the first ever occasion when gender parity was achieved in the history of the Nobel institution, with five women laureates in biology, chemistry, economics, and literature, further persuaded me to give a talk on this turning point. I thus learned that Greider arrived as a graduate student in 1983, specifically to work with Liz Blackburn, just at the time the first woman to have been hired by that Department in the mid-1970s, Ellen Daniell, had to leave once her tenure appeal was denied. I also learned that Liz and Ellen were colleagues in that department for several years (1978 – 1983). I first encountered ‘Ellen’s story’ in Elizabeth Blackburn’s biography where she explained to her biographer, a quarter of a century after the event, how strongly she felt about what she termed Ellen’s ‘undoing’.31 Quotations from a chapter in Ellen Daniell’s own book,32 were referenced in several footnotes.33 As a fan of The Footnote,34 I rushed to dig out those footnotes, first in chapter 3, ‘Facing Disaster : Ellen’s Story’ and later in her entire book.35 Initially slated to be a small part of my talk, which focused on the 2009 display of gender parity in the context of the Nobel Prize as a turning point for women in science, ‘Ellen’s story’ had a great appeal for my audience of mostly bench women scientists. It channeled a previously muted, or not so muted, discontent that began as soon as I posted the first slide on ‘gender parity at the Nobel Prize of 2009’ into a productive discussion. It thus occurred to me that what I had initially treated as background to my discussion of two women Nobel laureates might be more suited to clarifying my current concern with the historical origins of the under-representation of women in science. This also turned out to be more challenging than historicizing two Nobel Laureates, even though female colaureates remain a novelty.36 What was it in ‘Ellen’s story’ that swung the mood of the audience? Her story revolved around the shattering revelation for her late in 1981 that science, which she believed to be fair and objective, continued to treat men and women differently. The ‘disaster’ in her chapter’s title means her failure to anticipate and prepare for the rise of a ‘double standard’ as a way to bypass the implementation of equal opportunity legislation. Being ‘one of the boys’ was the initial standard 31 32 33 34 35 36

Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres, p. 72. Daniell, Every Other Thursday, chapter 3. Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres, notes 9 – 13, p. 363. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote (New York: Basic Books, 1999). Daniell, Every Other Thursday. Sharon B. McGrayne, Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries (New Jersey : Citadel Press, 1998); Friedman, The Politics of Excellence; Abir-Am, ‘Nobelesse Oblige’; ‘Elizabeth H. Blackburn’, telephone interview (October 5, 2009) by Adam Smith, transcript available at http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/ 2009/blackburn-telephone.html; Greider, interview, June 16, 2000, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bla0int-1

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she and other women of that generation aimed to live up to; they expected equal treatment in return. But the ‘double standard’ meant that a much higher bar was set for the first women to enter or remain in the system. Women were tacitly expected to have a better record than male candidates, as if they had to justify their fitness for science by compensatory means. Indeed, social scientists have shown that the promotion of women had proceeded at a much slower rate than that of men.37 Known throughout the twentieth century as the ‘Curie complex’, this stance reflected a cynical abuse of Mme Curie’s exceptional achievements by denying positions to women on the grounds that they were not quite as distinguished as Mme Curie.38 At the same time, no man was ever told in the context of hiring or promotion that he was not the equivalent of Albert Einstein, Mme Curie’s contemporary, colleague, friend, and like her, a universal symbol for great science.39 Indeed, three full decades after Ellen Daniell’s tenure process in 1981, in the winter of 2011, the highest ranked woman candidate for a junior position at a major U.S. university was shot down by a veteran male faculty with the argument that ‘she was not a star’. No one in the mostly male committee members protested that the comment was totally irrelevant for the hiring process. This tactic, which for historical reasons continues to hurt women more than men candidates, remains common, judging from the reporting of such incidents in The Chronicle of Higher Education. Because such a ‘double standard’ was not a formal policy (it would have been illegal since it went against the ‘equal opportunity’ principle), and since Ellen Daniell was the first woman to undergo tenure review in that department, there was no system in place for an ‘advance warning’. She assumed that having all tenure requirements under control would be sufficient for her promotion, especially at an institution which pursued a policy of promoting from inside.40 In 37 Virginia Valian, Why So Slow? The Advancement of Women (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1998); Nina Toren and Dahlia Moore, ‘The Academic ‘Hurdle Race’: A Case Study’, Higher Education, 35 (1998), 267 – 83; Etzkowitz, Kemelgor, and Uzzi, Athena Unbound; Frank Fox, ‘Women, Science, and Academia’; Rosser, The Science Glass Ceiling. 38 Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Julie Des Jardins, The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010). 39 John Stachel, ‘The Friendship of Mme Curie and Albert Einstein: A Comparison of Two Icons of Science’, lecture delivered at the Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society, Cleveland, November 4, 2011, in a session that I organized on the Centennial of Mme Curie’s second Nobel Prize, see http://hssonline.org/Meeting/2011HSSMeeting/2011_HSS_Program.pdf, p. 28; Abir-Am, ‘Mme Curie’s 2011 Centennial’. 40 Some academic institutions, e. g. Harvard, used to have a policy of rarely promoting junior faculty, preferring to recruit its higher ranks from other institutions. By contrast, UC-

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retrospect, much as most members of that generation, myself included, Ellen Daniell underestimated the challenge that equal opportunity in employment (as opposed to equal opportunity in education), posed for the then patriarchal social order. More specifically, as many other academic women also had to learn, there was a major difference between women being accepted, even lured, as junior or temporary faculty members, in response to mandatory legislation, or various policy incentives; and their becoming tenured or permanent colleagues, positions which would enable them to exercise some power and change the system. This was particularly so in departments such as Ellen Daniell’s with a demographic from an early Cold War generation, a time when ‘domestic careers’ for women were a highly publicized social norm.41 Though Ellen’s department was politically savvy to hire her as its first woman shortly before affirmative action became mandatory, in order to appear progressive and befitting UC-Berkeley’s self-image as a social and political avantgarde which had launched the free speech movement in 1964; it ‘nailed’ the decision to fire her by blaming her for missing a major discovery.42 Making a discovery, let alone one with a Nobel Prize, is a rare event. Most scientists spend their career missing, not making, discoveries. Still, such an irrelevant, even absurd, argument persuaded the tenure committee which apparently believed that if the first woman was to be accepted into the ‘fraternity of molecular biology at UC-Berkeley’, then she must have achieved the unachievable.43 ‘Ellen’s story’ thus became a window for better understanding the first generation of women who pursued scientific careers shortly after the passage of affirmative action legislation, when discrimination became illegal but wasn’t effectively controlled, with (successful) litigation surfacing as a viable option somewhat later, mainly in the late 1980s and 1990s. The efforts to fight the ‘adaptation’ of universities to the challenge of equal opportunity by switching

Berkeley emphasized promotion from inside the institution. Each policy has its own problems. 41 Winifred Breines, Young, White, and Miserable: Growing Up Female in the Fifties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 42 The reference was to the discovery of ‘split genes’ in the mid-late 1970s for which Richard J. Roberts and Philip A. Sharp shared the Nobel Prize in 1993, see http://nobelprize.org/ medicine/laureates/1993 43 I explore below the possibility that this absurd ‘charge’ may have been a projection, i. e. something actually experienced by a committee member who lost priority in discovery to someone else and proceeded to project his own discontent upon a woman he saw as a yet another competitor. The uncharted tenure process for women under conditions of great and threatening social change at the time ensured that such a ‘charge’ would stick.

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from an overt bias of denying entry to a covert bias of denying retention, has become the major challenge of our own time.44 In addition, ‘Ellen’s story’ increasingly appeared to be a ‘precondition’ for the later collaboration that I was hoping to explore, i. e. that between the first two women to share a Nobel Prize for collaboration as PhD adviser and advisee, Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider. Daniell’s experience impacted Blackburn’s demeanor, by her own account, forcing her ‘to lie low’. Hence, the first change in my historiographical scope was to combine Ellen’s story with those of the two women Nobelists who built their later success on the ruins of her experience with ‘facing disaster’ in the early days of affirmative action. At the same time, I could not avoid sensing that comparing the contrasting strategies and trajectories of these women scientists, though a big thrill in itself, might also provide insights into my own career. Drifting from science to history of science, travelling across sea and ocean for PhD studies, conducting research and/or teaching in five countries (including familiarity with the institutions in which the three women made their careers), and striving to strike a balance between my many interests (history of molecular biology, women in science, public memory, and science policy), I rarely had an opportunity to reflect on my choices. An interesting question that began to fascinate me was, had I remained in science, whose trajectory in the trio would my life have most resembled? I drifted from science to history and philosophy of science as a result of my encounter with The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn in an elective course in science teaching during my senior year as a chemistry major at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem (HUJ). The concept of ‘scientific revolutions’ captivated me for two reasons. First, it ratified my own conclusion, based on my attraction to theoretical topics, that bench science was a routine, protocol or paradigm (in Kuhn’s lingo) bound endeavor. By contrast the concept of ‘scientific revolution’ held the promise of providing access to the ‘big picture’ in science, where great theories, fortified as paradigms, succeed each other while precipitating revolutions. Second, working on the concept of a revolution, scientific or otherwise, compensated for my modest participation in the student rebellions of that time because of too high a load of lab exercises. At the time, I perceived my leave of absence as temporary, lasting only until I figured out what a scientific revolution really was. However, my odyssey has 44 Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Suzanne Fischer, ‘Unstable Networks among Women in Academe: The Legal Case of Shyamala Rajender”, Centaurus, 51/1 (2009), 37 – 62; Frank Fox, ‘Women, Science, and Academia’; Vivian Gornick, Women in Science: Portraits From a World in Transition, 2 ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1984 [1983]); Vivian Gornick, Women in Science: Then and Now, 25th anniversary ed. (New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2009); Rosser, The Science Glass Ceiling; NAS, Beyond Bias and Barriers; my research project at http:// people.brandeis.edu/~pninaga/sger/; Abir-Am, ‘Gender & Technoscience’.

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continued well into the present, since the history of science turned out to be a perfect field for someone with interests in both science and the humanities (especially history and philosophy). Moreover, the practice of history of science has enabled me to maintain contact with practicing scientists, often of a previous generation, who would become informants on historical subjects from the 1930s – 1950s, whenever I needed to complement my archival research with oral history. I thus enjoyed the best of both worlds, to the effect that I never regretted my ‘leave of absence’. Nor did I reflect on what might have happened to me had I continued with the program that had accepted me as a graduate student in biochemistry. My encounter with these three, interconnected, women scientists was the first experience in my professional life of dealing with members of my own generation. In addition, due to some striking similarities in our backgrounds, this encounter became a mirror in which I could see the past that I had missed, as in the Snow White fairy tale. For example, much like Elizabeth Blackburn, who took an MSc in biochemistry at the University of Melbourne prior to embarking on doctoral studies in the United Kingdom, in 1971, I also completed an outstanding senior thesis in biochemistry, attained the highest course grades in molecular biology, and the road was open for a MSc program. At that time, both at HUJ and the University of Melbourne, science students had to take a MSc prior to taking a PhD, a program possibly influenced by the fact that both schools were once part of the British Empire.45 Also like Blackburn, I travelled alone across seas and oceans for a doctoral program in a bigger country that offered a scholarship (she went to the University of Cambridge, UK, which had a tradition of taking the best Australian science students; I went to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia which at the time had just begun an exchange program with HUJ). Both of us pursued careers in the U.S. in connection with marriage to born Americans whom we met in graduate school, and who continue to provide insightful advice, professional and otherwise. Each of us has a child born in the mid-1980s (she has a boy, and I have a girl, born weeks apart). Furthermore, being raised outside the U.S., we were both lucky to avoid the culture of a superpower trapped in the Cold War mentality, or a culture which proved toxic for the self-confidence of American women of our generation (though it also endowed them with a greater determination than that of overseas’ women to overturn the gender segregated status quo).46 45 HUJ was established in 1925 in the presence of Lord Balfour, an elder statesman in the British government in the 1920s and a former prime minister. 46 Breines, Young, White, and Miserable; Evelyn Fox Keller, ‘The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics’, in Working It Out: 23 Women Writers, Artists, Scientists, and Scholars Talk About

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With Carol Greider on the other hand I share the formative experience of losing one’s mother as a young girl, a condition which has far reaching ramifications, the most relevant for a career in science being the semi-orphan’s greater independence and self-reliance. There are probably also some negative ramifications, which authors of books on surviving early parental death have long struggled to clarify. One such ramification that comes to mind is that the experience of such a colossal loss at a young age, when the very magnitude of the loss is not even comprehensible and may never be, leads one to underestimate the lesser misfortunes of others, and hence remain indifferent to them. Still, it seems that Carol Greider made the best of such a situation by gravitating toward women mentors in both undergraduate and graduate school, who would serve, subconsciously or otherwise, as maternal figures. These choices played a key role in her fast rising career, because they spared her the more common devastating experience of the brightest female students, namely being sooner or later ignored by the mostly male mentors, who prefer male students as their potential intellectual heirs. Our culture has long conditioned men to bond better with male followers, whose loyalty to a ‘master’ is taken for granted. By contrast, female students are viewed as posing the dilemma of competing loyalties to their work versus their (eventual) families (children, husbands). Male scientists thus tend to invest less in female mentees, an attitude which is exacerbated by codes against sexual harassment. Though such codes are meant to protect the women from actual sexual harassment, they also preclude a certain level of cross-gender work-related intimacy that has been shown to sustain joint creativity.47 Hence, a woman mentee such as Carol Greider was not penalized for being a woman, let alone a very determined and independent one, when she chose to work with woman mentors. But unlike Carol, I could not find women mentors, in part because there were very few to choose from, and those few were already scarred by their experience as a minority group in science. I did have several options to work with male advisers, but most were uninspiring while the most pertinent one (from the lab in which I did my senior thesis) never bothered to find out why I ‘disappeared’. Years later I learned that he assumed that I got married and moved to a remote part of the country. Initially, his answer amused me since during high school I had been member of a group preparing itself to join Revivim, a kibbutz in the southern, desert-like part of Israel, but I decided against such a future long before I chose his lab for my senior thesis. That scientist may have still believed

Their Lives and Work, ed. by Sara Ruddick and Pamela Daniels (New York: Pantheon, 1977), pp. 77 – 91. 47 Creative Couples, ed. by Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am.

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in the primacy of making the desert bloom over engaging in research;48 but eventually I began to wonder whether he would have let an outstanding male student go so easily. By the time I encountered a potential woman mentor who appealed to me, by working on an exciting topic (immunochemistry), lecturing well, and having an engaging personality, I’d already decided to take my ‘leave of absence’ in history of science. Fortunately, I was able to reconnect with her many years later when she sponsored a Symposium on Senior and Junior Women in Science in 2003 and asked me to deliver one of two keynote lectures. With Ellen Daniell I share a ‘two cultures’ persona — la C.P. Snow with interests and aptitudes for both science and the humanities. I also share with her a sense of life as an adventure; a counter-culture heritage of courage to confront establishment figures, often men in positions of power who keep on wondering ‘what a nice girl like you is doing with such an ambitious topic’; and a strong belief in the importance of collegiality. So, let us see how my interaction with my three subjects, only one of whom I have met, has shaped my exploration of them as symbols of the new (post-affirmative action) generation of women in science.

II.

The First ever Team of Women Nobel Laureates: Elizabeth (Liz) Blackburn and Carol W. Greider

The shared Nobel Prize of Liz Blackburn and Carol Greider in 2009 raised hopes that women’s success would no longer be limited to exceptional ‘survivors’ but would come to include more such trans-generational teams of Nobel laureate women. Particularly encouraging was the inclusion of a female student (i. e. at the time the award winning work was done) in the Nobel team, since adviser and advisee co-winners are also rare among men.49 At forty-eight Greider became the youngest woman Nobel laureate in a long time.50 That symbolism was visually reinforced by Carol’s physical appearance. A highly athletic person who took part in several triathlons, she set a new visual standard for how women scientists might look at the time of their winning a Nobel Prize: youthful, radiant, tall, and dressed in a daring strapless turquoise 48 Ephraim Katzir, A Life’s Tale, trans. by Riva Rubin (Jerusalem: Carmel Publishing House, 2009) explicates that dilemma. 49 The most recent such team among men shared the Nobel for Chemistry in 2004, but the male student in the team, Aaron Ciechanover, was not as young as Carol Greider, having already taken an MD prior to conducting the research that won him a share of the 2004 Nobel. 50 The youngest ever, the Curies, mÀre et fille, won their Nobels at ages thirty-six and thirtyeight, in 1903 and 1935, respectively ; Marie Curie won a second Nobel in 1911 at age fortyfour.

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evening gown. Her picture was more encouraging for girls and young women seeking careers in science than, for example, the appearance of eighty-one year old Barbara McClintock receiving her Nobel belatedly in 1983, a quarter of a century later than her classmate George W. Beadle, and in the aftermath of a semi-reclusive life in both science and society.51 Moreover, Carol Greider was flanked by her two young children, a boy age eleven and a girl age eight, which she raised jointly with her husband, a biomedical historian, as a dual career couple at Johns Hopkins University.52 The collaboration which led to the discovery of telomerase, an enzyme that protects the telomeres or the ‘ends’ of the chromosomes and plays a major role in key biological processes such as replication, aging, and cancer, began early in 1984. It depended, by Blackburn’s own account, on her relief at just having received tenure and hence, being able to engage in a riskier project. She let her second year graduate student Carol Greider pursue the possibility that molecular activity in telomeres might be due to a yet undiscovered or unknown enzyme. Blackburn had been studying the tips of the chromosomes of the ciliated protozoan Tetrahymena, an ‘experimental system’ with which her post-doctoral adviser, Joseph Gall of the Department of Cell Biology at Yale University, had considerable experience. Aside from being a leading scientist and former President of the American Society for Cell Biology, Gall had acquired a parallel reputation for being a good mentor for women scientists. Three of his former women students also became Presidents of the American Society for Cell Biology.53 Having been among the first graduate students to learn DNA sequencing from Fred Sanger, one of its inventors, and a Nobel Laureate in Cambridge (UK),54 Blackburn became the first to apply that new technique to an organism studied in Gall’s lab which was suitable for her because it had many short chromosomes, and thus many more ‘ends’ to sequence. That combination produced a synergetic pay-off when she discovered that the telomeres had a unique structure consisting of a hexanucleotide repeat, GGGGTT. In its turn, the expertise with DNA sequencing was acquired in Sanger’s lab at 51 Evelyn Fox Keller, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (San Francisco: W. H. Freeman and Company, 1983); Comfort, The Tangled Field; Lee Kass and Ken Gale, ‘McClintock, Barbara’, in The Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History, ed. by Bonnie G. Smith, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3, pp. 200 – 01. 52 Personal communication from Nathaniel C. Comfort, April 2011. 53 Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres, chapter 4. 54 Soraya de Chadarevian, Designs for Life: Molecular Biology after World War II (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Miguel Garcia-Sancho, Biology, Computing, and the History of Molecular Sequencing: From Proteins to DNA, 1945 – 2000 (London: Palgrave Mcmillan, 2012); Frederic Sanger, ‘Sequences, Sequences, and Sequences’, Annual Review of Biochemistry, 57 (1988), 1 – 28.

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the suggestion of her MSc adviser at the University of Melbourne, who knew Sanger from his own time at Cambridge University after WWII. Her choice of adviser and lab for her PhD was thus influenced by the professional networks of Australian scientists with their ‘mother country’. Cambridge (UK) was also the center of Commonwealth science, as the former Empire came to be known after WWII. Still, Blackburn was the only woman student in Sanger’s lab during her doctoral studies. In addition to acquiring early on the new powerful technique of DNA sequencing, as well as the confidence that comes from being associated with a top lab,55 Blackburn also acquired a dual, personal and professional asset when, upon completing her PhD, she married John Sedat, who she had met in Sanger’s lab. Sedat came to Sanger’s lab as a post-doc from Caltech, becoming one of the first to sequence DNA. However, when DNA sequencing became routine, he lost interest in it and shifted his research effort to visualizing the in vitro structure of chromosomes. Upon completion of his post-doc in Cambridge (UK), in 1975, he spent an academic year at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, eventually accepting a position as a senior post-doc with William Summers at Yale. Having become engaged in Jerusalem during Liz’s visit there, the couple married shortly after their arrival at Yale. Late in 1977, Sedat landed a tenure-track position in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of California in San Francisco (hereafter UCSF), where, in the 1990s, he became part of a team that built advanced DeltaVision microscopes for 3D images of time lapse studies.56 I have included information on Sedat’s background because Blackburn’s career was influenced by their association. Though she searched for positions of both post-doc and assistant professor as a ‘trailing spouse’, being subject to geographical constraints set up by his career, there was no danger that her work would be viewed as secondary to his, as often happens when spouses work in a related field, because he left the area of DNA sequencing in which he had been an early student of Sanger. Moreover, his professional contacts were available to Blackburn for professional socializing, thus offsetting the isolation often faced by women scientists as a minority group in science. They often have to ‘network’ without the benefit of a mentor, a partner, or a friend, let alone someone who fulfills all these key roles. Though nowadays women’s professional organizations provide advice and opportunities for networking,57 at that time it was a definite

55 De Chadarevian, Designs for Life; Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres; John Finch, A Nobel Fellow on Every Floor: A History of the Medical Research Council Laboratory of Molecular Biology (Cambridge: Medical Research Council, 2008). 56 Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres. 57 See e. g. the Association for Women in Science (www.awis.org).

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advantage for a woman to socialize as the spouse of another scientist, especially if he did not work in quite the same area.58 Furthermore, by virtue of their marital relationship he shielded her from many of the tribulations that adversely affect the careers of many women scientists, especially single women, who were often preyed upon scientifically, sexually, or both.59 For example, a female post-doc colleague of Blackburn was told by her ‘mentor’ after complaining that she felt mugged when he added the names of his male prot¦g¦s to a discovery she had made alone, ‘at least you weren’t raped’.60 Blackburn’s career thus benefited from the cumulative effect of four mentors: two formal mentors who equipped her with new techniques and experimental systems (Sanger and Gall, respectively); and two informal mentors (husband Sedat and his boss, Bruce Alberts, then Department Chair and later President of the National Academy of Science), who helped her find and land a faculty slot in a nearby institution, at a time her husband’s home institution (UCSF) could offer her a non-tenure track position only. Yet despite all this multiple mentorship, she still had to exercise her own battery of survival strategies. For example, she had to continuously ignore various instances of gender bias around her, pretending they didn’t exist; convey an image of total devotion to science as if no other aspects of life mattered, and ‘lie low’ and refrain from ‘making waves’ even when such an attitude went against her convictions.61 By contrast, Carol Greider’s career reflects a relatively new phenomenon of the 1980s, the scientifically precocious woman scientist who can find suitable woman mentors and move ahead fast by being spared the range of obstacles that scientific careers continue to pose for women scientists as a minority group in science, as well as a group tagged by the culturally loaded baggage of the female gender. A native of California (born in San Diego but raised in Davis), Carol excelled in science and planned to major in marine biology when she became an undergraduate at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She went there so as to differ from her classmates in Davis, most of whom limited their choices to UC-Davis or Berkeley. At UC-Santa Barbara, Carol Greider found a congenial mentor, the marine biology professor Beatrice Sweeney (1914 – 1989), who guided her into early lab 58 Creative Couples, ed. by Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am. 59 Gornick, Women in Science: Portraits; Gornick, Women in Science: Then and Now; Molly Gleiser, ‘The Glass Wall’, in Women in Science: Meeting Career Challenges, ed. by Angela Pattatucci (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1998)., pp. 203 – 18; Elga Wasserman, The Door in the Dream: Conversations with Eminent Women in Science (Washington: The National Academies of Press, 2002). 60 Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres, p. 43. 61 See section III below.

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experiences. This experience enabled Greider to realize sooner that biochemistry was the right discipline for her, thus saving a great deal of anguish and time when compared to students who remain undecided. A graduate of Smith College with a Radcliffe PhD (1942), Sweeney held research positions at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and Yale University, prior to becoming a professor at UCSB in 1971, where she excelled in mentoring students of all ranks. As she put it: ‘I advise young women in science to keep their maiden names, dare to be assertive, and refuse to get discouraged’.62 In a similar way, Carol effectively opted for UC-Berkeley over Caltech for her graduate work,63 because, again, she sought and found the right woman mentor, this time in Liz Blackburn.64 Carol Greider’s parents graduated in science from UC-Berkeley so she had familiarity with its large and complex campus. She was fortunate to complete the obligatory rotation among various labs in the Department of Molecular Biology at UC-Berkeley just at the time Liz received tenure and was willing to engage her in a ‘risky’ project. During a relatively short period of eighteen months, Carol executed the experiments that identified telomerase, and together with Liz provided interpretations and supporting evidence in several joint papers published in the mid- and late 1980s.65 When Carol Greider left UC-Berkeley in 1987 for post-doctoral studies at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, she was able to continue her scientific project, even though most doctoral students do not continue with the projects they worked on as degree students. By the time she landed her first academic position at Johns Hopkins Medical School in Baltimore, in 1997 (after a quarter of a century of affirmative action in place), Carol could soon become an established co-founder of a rapidly growing field of telomerase with her own research lines. 62 University of California in memoriam, http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb4p30063r& doc.view=frames& chunk.id=div00063& toc.depth=1& toc.id= 63 On the paucity of women molecular biologists at Caltech see Abir-Am, ‘The First American and French Commemorations’; and Ead., ‘Creativity and Gender in Research Schools: Where are the Women of the Phage Group?’, lecture delivered at the Annual Meeting of the History of Science Society, Arlington, VA, November 2, 2007, in a section honoring the 25th anniversary of Women Scientists in America, 1880 – 1940 by Margaret W. Rossiter, see at http://www.hssonline.org/Meeting/oldmeetings/archiveprogs/2007archiveprogs/2007meetingprogram.pdf, p. 28. On a woman physicist who arrived there as post-doc without the chairman knowing she was a woman see Fay Ajzenberg-Selove, A Matter of Choices: Memories of a Female Physicist (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994). 64 Greider, interview, June 16, 2000; ‘Carol W. Greider’, member profile in American Society for Cell Biology. 65 Carol W. Greider and Elizabeth H. Blackburn, ‘Identification of a Specific Telomere Terminal Transferase Activity in Tetrahymena extracts’, Cell, 43 (1985), 405 – 13; Ead. and Ead., ‘The Telomere Terminal Transferase of Tetrahymena is a Ribonucleoprotein Enzyme with two Kinds of Primer Specificity’, Cell, 51 (1987), 887 – 98; Ead. and Ead., ‘ATelomeric Sequence in the RNA of Tetrahymena Telomerase Required for Telomere Repeat Synthesis’, Nature, 337 (1989), 331 – 37; Ead. and Ead., ‘Tracking Telomerase’, Cell, 116 (2004), S83-S86.

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Her cache further enabled her to negotiate a dual career package at Johns Hopkins University which included her then husband, Nathaniel C. Comfort, a science journalist turned biomedical historian. They met at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory when he came to interview her for its Newsletter. His flexibility as an academic dad also meant that he was and remains a full partner in raising their two children,66 though Comfort and Greider separated in 2009.67 Greider’s recognition proceeded relatively fast in the last decade, including the Rosenstiel Award at Brandeis University (1999), membership in the National Academy of Science (2003), the Lasker Award (2006), the Louisa Gross Horwitz Award at Columbia University (2007), and the Nobel Prize (2009). All these awards were shared with Blackburn, and some of them also with Joseph Gall, or with Blackburn’s collaborator in the early 1980s, Jack Szostak, with whom Blackburn and Greider shared the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology. As the EMBO Journal was quick to point out, Carol’s trajectory and youthful image are a source of great encouragement for the younger generation of women in science, who find in her an inspiring role model. Nevertheless, Blackburn and Greider’s collaboration began not too long after Blackburn, whose main worry at the time was improving her student evaluations, witnessed the denial of tenure to Ellen Daniell, an apparently traumatic event that she still remembered well for her biographer a quarter of a century later. The only other tenure-track woman in the department, Ellen Daniell supported Blackburn’s hiring and acted as a mentor. Blackburn, who felt that her colleague ‘more than deserved tenure’,68 was compelled by that shattering experience to ‘lie low’ and refrain from ‘making waves’, until she herself received tenure in 1984. Yet, that crucial step in her career, the career of a highly privileged woman scientist who enjoyed the patronage of no less than four scientists, three of them big power brokers, not to mention her own dedication and accomplishments, apparently had to be paid for with a piece of her soul. Despite strongly disagreeing with the department’s decision, Blackburn felt she could not advocate for her colleague, nor initiate or join in any form of protest, without jeopardizing her own future. She only vented her frustration in the presence of the Department’s secretary, and also let Ellen Daniell know that

66 PAPA PhD: Essays on Fatherhood by Men in the Academy, ed. by Mary Ruth Marotte, Paige Martin Reynolds, and Ralph James Savarese (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010); MAMA PhD: Women Write about Motherhood and Academic Life, ed. by Elrena Evans and Caroline Grant, foreword by Miriam Peskowitz, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2008). 67 Personal communication from Comfort, April 2011, and Greider’s interview at http:// www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/134-carol-greider 68 Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres, p. 72.

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she strongly disagreed with that decision.69 Still, the question remains whether other options to pursue one’s convictions existed at the time, if open protest was not temperamentally or otherwise feasible. For example, it was not uncommon at the time to contest tenure decisions by participating in individual and class law suits; indeed, many well known women scholars owe their academic position to just such a form of mobilization, often on the part of woman student, colleague, faculty, and other activists.70 This option was famously pursued at UC-Berkeley in the early 1990s, when a group of women activists known as WAGE (We Advocate Gender Equity) contested the denial of tenure to mathematician Jenny Harrison, among other faculty women, mostly at UC-Berkeley but also on other UC campuses.71 A founding member of that group, Mary F. Singleton, became the plaintiff in the first successful class law suit at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (LLNL), a facility administered by the UC-Berkeley, which had been paying lesser wages to women than to men in comparable positions.72 Later in the 1990s, when Singleton retired from her position as chemist in charge of plutonium safety at LLNL and took my courses in the History of Molecular Biology and in the History of Women in Science at UC-Berkeley, I had the opportunity to learn from her about collective activities on behalf of women in science, conducted in the Bay area since the 1970s.73 The question thus persists; why were such options not exercised at the time Ellen Daniell’s career ended in the ‘leaking pipeline’ for women in science? 69 Daniell, Every Other Thursday, chapter 3; Brady, Elizabeth Blackburn and the Story of Telomeres, pp. 72 – 3 and p. 164. 70 Charity Hirsch, ‘A History of We Advocate Gender Equity or WAGE (2004)’ (I am indebted to Mary F. Singleton for a copy of this document detailing WAGE’s pioneering activities); Gregory Kohlstedt and Fischer, ‘Unstable Networks’; Women in Science, ed. by Pattatucci; Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, vol. 3. 71 Hirsch, ‘A History of We Advocate Gender Equity’. 72 A similar experience occurred at MIT in the late 1990s, but MIT, especially then President Charles Vest and Provost Donald Brown, conducted an internal inquiry, admitted the problem and took steps to correct wage and other forms of gender discrimination, thus avoiding litigation, as detailed in Hopkins et al., ‘A Study on the Status of Women Faculty at MIT.’ 73 Singleton served as Chair of the Women’s Committee in the Pacific Section of the American Chemical Society (ACS). In that capacity she hosted many guest talks including by Liz Blackburn (1996) and by myself (1998). Singleton also co-organized with me an international conference on ‘Wo/men Scientists as Public Intellectuals: Comparative perspectives from Canada, Mexico, and the United States (NAFTA signatories)’, co-sponsored by half a dozen departments and centers on the Berkeley campus in November 1999. On October 12, 2011, Singleton, in her current capacity as officer of the New Mexico Chapter of ACS, coorganized, together with Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Division of Chemistry, my talk on the Centennial of Marie Curie’s 2nd Nobel Prize (in chemistry) at the Bradbury Museum. At the biennial Conference on the History of Women in Science, Technology and Medicine, held at ENS in Paris, September 14 – 17, 2011, both Tanya Belcher-Zanish, Director of Special Collections and Rare Book Services at Iowa State University and myself, reminded the international audience of Singleton’s pioneering activism on behalf of women scientists in

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The Discrete Charm of ‘Ellen’s Story’: Why Historicize a ‘Scientist, Interrupted’?74

Prior to the arrival of Ellen Daniell as an assistant professor early in 1976, the Department of Molecular Biology at UC-Berkeley (now Cellular and Molecular Biology), which consolidated various units in 1964 in order to keep up with the rise of molecular biology as a new discipline, had no experience with women faculty.75 With the passage of affirmative action legislation in 1972, the Department’s Chairman, Howard Schachman, decided to hire a woman ‘on his watch’.76 Much as several other faculty members in that Department, Schachman had arrived there in 1948 as a prot¦g¦ of the Department’s founder Wendell M. Stanley, a Nobel co-laureate in chemistry who relocated to UC-Berkeley from the Rockefeller Institute in Princeton.77 Having been among those few who protested the loyalty oath required by UC-Berkeley Regents during the McCarthy era, Schachman was keen to hire a woman prior to that legislation becoming mandatory, presumably in order to reaffirm his own progressive stance. At the time, other leading government contractor academic institutions such as MIT had already hired their first tenure track woman in molecular biology (Mary-Lou Pardue) in 1971.78 Ellen Daniell, a 1973 PhD from UC at San Diego (UCSD), interviewed at Berkeley in December 1973, while on her way to a post-doctoral position at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory on Long Island, New York (CSHL). Due to her

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the Bay area. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, vol. 3; Gloria Bowles, Living Ideas: The Tumultuous Founding of Berkeley Women’s Studies, 2009, see at www.gloriabowles.net; Laurel Smith-Doerr, Women’s Work, Gender Equality vs. Hierarchy in the Life Sciences (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004). The metaphor alludes to the book Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen (New York:Vintage Books, 1993). It became a movie that won an Oscar for Angelina Jolie. Marian Koshland had previously worked in this Department as research associate of its founder, Wendell M. Stanley between 1965 – 1970. Upon his death in 1970 she got a regular faculty slot in the Department of Microbiology where she became Chairperson in 1982 (see Wasserman, The Door in the Dream, pp. 53 – 62). Even though she had an option to be faculty in Ellen’s department, as part of a deal to lure her husband Dan Koshland to UC-Berkeley, Marian chose to remain a research associate as long as their five children were still at home (see Wasserman, The Door in the Dream, pp. 53 – 62). The impact of such a superwoman on the tenure decision of younger women such as Ellen on UCB campus remains to be further investigated. Daniell, Every Other Thursday, chapter 3. Angela N.H. Creager, ‘Wendell Stanley’s Dream of a Free-Standing Biochemistry Department at the University of California, Berkeley’, Journal of the History of Biology, 29 (1996), 331 – 60; Angela N.H. Creager, The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930 – 1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Wasserman, The Door in the Dream, pp. 97 – 102.

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outstanding talk which reported on her own research in graduate school with the bacterial virus Mu;79 her standing as a candidate from a campus in the UC system which was notably strong in biology ; and her plans to move into a field in which the Department wanted to acquire a presence (animal viruses especially adenoviruses);80 she received an offer to join the faculty in May 1974. She arrived in January 1976, having negotiated another year of post-doctoral experience. Ellen’s success in negotiating an additional post-doctoral year suggests two rather different scenarios, and I will try to sort between them by weighing the evidence in favour of each: 1) either Berkeley was very keen on Daniell because she was their best candidate; 2) or the Department so much liked the idea that it could show compliance with the new legislation while further postponing the actual arrival of its first woman until after she would complete two post-doctoral years, that it chose the most junior candidate. Indeed, Ellen Daniell did not intend to apply for such a position prior to completing her post-doc but, her PhD adviser John Abelson suggested that interviewing could be a good experience.81 Given UC-Berkeley’s top status at the time (e. g. as measured for example by having more Nobel Laureates than any other university), the best candidates from that cohort would have competed for the position offered to Ellen; we can deduce that she was indeed the very best in the entire country! However, Daniell must have been the most junior since most other candidates would not have applied to a top school without a solid post-doctoral experience of two-three years. The department’s initially absurd expectation that she arrive with only one year of post-doctoral studies, and its very selection of her as a very junior candidate, moreover one hired in part because of her interest in switching to another field of greater interest to the department, suggest that no thought was given to her future prospects. This is surprising because UC-Berkeley promoted from inside, which means that it sought to hire those it was most likely to retain. Apparently, that department was not ready, as yet, to contemplate the tenuring of a woman, especially since prior to Ellen Daniell’s arrival, women researchers in her department occupied positions of research associate only, often after marrying a male faculty, whose lab they would often manage.82 In 1971, the De79 Ellen Daniell, Rebecca Roberts, and John Abelson, ‘Mutations in the Lactose Operon Caused by Bacteriophage Mu’, Journal of Molecular Biology, 69 (1972), 1 – 8; Ellen Daniell, William Boram, and John Abelson, ‘Genetic Mapping of the Inversion Loop in Bacteriophage mu DNA’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 70 (1973), 2153 – 56. 80 Ellen Daniell, ‘Transcription of Adenovirus Cores in Vitro: Major RNA Products Differ from those Made from a DNA Template’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 79 (1982), 1834 – 38. 81 Daniell, Every Other Thursday, chapter 3. 82 For example Bea Singer, a student and later wife of Heinz Fraenkel-Conrat, another faculty member and Stanley prot¦g¦ in that department, managed his lab as a senior research associate. She was among the non-faculty women who tried to be helpful to Ellen Daniell.

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partment refused to hire the female spouse of a scientific couple with similar training and accomplishments.83 Indeed, prior to her interview, Ellen was told by her PhD adviser that she should not be nervous, since ‘that department will never hire a woman’.84 During her job interview in December 1973 as well as upon her arrival in January 1976, Daniell noticed that some members were uncomfortable with having a woman faculty as colleague. For example, animal virologist Harry Rubin told her that she was the same age as his daughter, and he certainly could not consider his daughter to be his colleague.85 A department member told a talented female post-doc not to bother to apply for a subsequent slot (filled by a male scientist in 1977) because ‘we already have a woman’.86 A member of the department of botany used to state in public talks that he was damn proud that his department had no women.87 Ellen Daniell’s hiring evidently shattered a gendered segregated social order whereby women in the lab did not hold faculty positions.88 Though some of the backlash that ‘greeted’ Ellen’s generation was to be expected, it was hard for a given individual to divine how long the department’s adjustment would take. She had to deal not only with the ‘big picture’ of women as tenure track faculty but also with the local peculiarities of her department and university. Due to its problematic merger a decade earlier the department remained divided into factions which did not get along; this also meant not having a mentor since by the time of her arrival one of those factions had ousted the Chairman who hired her. In such isolating situations, an individual tends to overestimate one’s capacity for self-reliance and make decisions that remain uninformed by the advice or experience of others. For example, Daniell let herself be trapped into demanding teaching duties, assuming co-responsibility for both graduate and undergraduate new courses. Those appealed to her because in the absence of suitable colleagues, students became her main source of professional interaction. She also hired technicians and students who could be also friends, since she did not wish to maintain

83 The reference is to Joan and Tom Steitz, who did their doctoral work at Harvard and their post-doctoral work in Cambridge, UK. They were able to find comparable positions at Yale where both became leading scientists. See Wasserman, The Door in the Dream, pp. 144 – 50. 84 Ivi. 85 Daniell, Every Other Thursday, chapter 3. 86 Ivi. 87 Personal communication from Margaret Rossiter who heard Lincoln Constance speak publicly in such a manner during her own time on the UC-Berkeley campus in the 1970s. 88 Maresi Nerad, The Academic Kitchen: A Social History of Gender Stratification at the University of California, Berkeley (Albany : State University of New York Press, 1999); Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, vol. 3.

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hierarchical relationships, a value typical of the anti-establishment ethos of the late 1960s when she was in college. Moreover, unlike Elizabeth Blackburn, whose life totally revolved around science, Ellen Daniell, with her initial roots in the humanities, believed that humans should have a life whether they were scientists or not. She thus infused her life as a single woman with diverse cultural content, maintaining various friendships, sharing in a ski cabin, organizing backpacking trips, and leading the singing at holiday events. By contrast, with Liz’s husband being also a scientist in a pre-tenure situation, their main recreational diversions were limited to hiking and sailing. At her interim review in 1978, Ellen was advised by the only Department member with whom she had a collegial rapport, Harrison Echol,89 that she should focus on getting more publications, advice she heeded.90 Described by her as a well mannered southern spoken gentleman, Echol succeeded Arthur Knight upon Knight’s retirement in 1978.91 But Echol remained Chair until 1980 only, when Gunther Stent succeeded him. Also by 1978, two new assistant professors were hired, Steve Beckendorf, a fly geneticist who came from Harvard in 1977, and Blackburn, who came in 1978 from Yale via UCSF, where she had no faculty position. Ellen thus acquired colleagues more similar to her in age and stage and developed collegial relationships with both, with all serving on each other’s student committees. Also in 1978, Daniell met David H. Gelfand, a scientist at nearby Cetus, a pioneering biotech company,92 whom she married in 1980. Despite all these improvements in her initially solitary life as sole female faculty in her department after 1978, Ellen Daniell was informed in December 1981 that the Department would not recommend her for tenure, a decision which also meant that she would have to leave Berkeley, albeit a year later. The decision 89 Harrison Echols, Operators and Promoters: The Story of Molecular Biology and Its Creators, ed. by Carol A. Gross (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1995). 90 Between 1976 and 1978 Ellen published a paper that summarized her work at CSHL (Ellen Daniell, ‘Genome Structure of Incomplete Particles of Adenovirus’, Journal of Virology, 19 (1976), 685 – 708), and another, based on her work at Berkeley. Between 1978 – 1981 she published two papers in 1980, two papers in 1981, and one in 1982, the latter in the PNAS, a high prestige journal, which required submission by a NAS member, in her case Robley Williams. All these papers were in the adenovirus area. Following the tenure denial, Ellen switched to plant viruses; she left academic science for good in mid-1983, becoming director of licensing in a leading biotech company. 91 Much like Schachman, the Chair who hired Ellen Daniell, Knight was a prot¦g¦ of the department’s founder, W.M. Stanley ; Knight succeeded Schachman when Schachman was ousted as Chair around the time of Ellen’s arrival early in 1976. 92 Stephen Hall, Invisible Frontiers: The Race to Synthesize a Human Gene (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Eric Vettel, Biotech: The Countercultural Origins of an Industry (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006).

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was justified in terms of Ellen’s allegedly too modest record of publications, while further intimating that she had also missed a major discovery in her field. Despite the fact that she was considered a successful teacher who poured her heart into new courses, the decision denigrated her teaching, even going out of its way to find discontented students. Her academic service record was the only aspect that was praised. Most scientists who are denied tenure at a top institution find such a position sooner or later at another one, perhaps of lesser rank. Ellen Daniell however made a different decision. As she eloquently argued in her semi-autobiographical book, the experience of tenure denial led her to abandon science altogether.93 This occurred because the records of her appeal, which she still considers more painful than the decision itself, suggest that both decisions ignored her actual record. Such decisions interrupted and effectively terminated the scientific career of a very gifted woman, possibly the most gifted of her cohort. To the extent that Ellen Daniell’s decision is exemplary of the generation of women hired as the ‘first woman’ in their departments as a result of new legislation, and then fired (i. e. denied tenure), once the old guard found the main loophole in the new legislation, namely that it monitored recruiting but totally missed the even more critical aspect of retention; then it is instructive to interrogate her predicament in more detail than the neat account she provided in her book, while still maintaining the ‘good soldier’ posture (essentially, taking responsibility for not anticipating what happened). But Ellen’s predicament could be the key to the experience of a whole generation, an experience which may further explain why four decades later we are still debating the under-representation of women in science. In the remainder of this essay I focus on the contingency or inevitability of the decision to deny tenure to Ellen Daniell, and by extension, to many other women scientists who were hired like her as ‘firsts’ on tenure-track positions and fired when the new legislation failed to extend its coverage to their retention. The first query that needs to be addressed is whether that decision was preordained given the lack of diversity training by the university administration, and the department’s factionalism and skewed demographics which made it impossible for Ellen to find a mentor so as to better navigate the minefield of tenure at a time of major social change. That decision was also unusual in the sense that those who are not expected to be tenured often receive advance clues to seek an alternative position elsewhere in time, so as to avoid an appeal, a process which often becomes embarrassing for both sides. The second query is whether Ellen could have better prepared herself by 93 Daniell, Every Other Thursday.

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consulting more widely on and off campus, especially with women faculty who had already gone through the tenure process. Though such consultation might have helped to figure out scenarios that might develop, still it would have been very difficult to anticipate the accusation that she missed an important discovery in her field. In her book,94 written in order to advocate for the proliferation of groups similar to Group as a solution to the career problems of women scientists, Ellen Daniell provides interesting clues to her own perspective of these events. She also denied that Group members, most of whom are tenured faculty at Berkeley, UCSF, or research institutes in the Bay area and half of whom are members of the National Academy of Science, intervened with her book (one declined to be included). However, in thematic terms Ellen had subordinated her personal narrative to Group’s narrative – her book is about Group, seen as a vehicle for public good or a forum to be emulated by younger women scientists. It is not about her most telling and remarkable odyssey in and out of science (chapter 3 being the only autobiographical chapter out of eighteen). Hence, the public persona she chose remains that of a devoted perpetual secretary of a scientific society with limited membership, a mutual admiration society, a club such as the Victorian X Club, even a forum for collective therapy, and of course a group which maintained friendship among surviving members over a long time. As a result of Ellen’s opting for a share of the collective identity of successful women scientists (the book’s subtitle), she left out a great deal of professionalautobiographical material that is necessary to illuminate the dilemmas of her generation. For example, there is too little information on her experience as a doctoral student at UC in San Diego which was at the time a center of counterculture with Herbert Marcuse and Angela Davis in its Department of Philosophy. Ellen Daniell’s own PhD adviser John Abelson was part of the counter-culture fringes.95 It would have helped to know how her proximity to a counter-culture center may have been shaped her outlook. For example, if her overall demeanor allowed the quasi elderly male faculty in her department to perceive her as a ‘paler version’ of Angela Davis (confronting senior male faculty, seeking to establish an egalitarian social world in her lab, over reliant upon herself), then the decision to terminate her can be easily explained in terms of that generation’s fear of the drastic social change symbolized by the new generation of women who were willing and able to challenge patriarchy. 94 Ivi. 95 John Abelson, ‘From Molecular Biology to Geology : A Surprising Trajectory’, Journal of Biological Chemistry, 284 (2009), 35997 – 36006.

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Along these lines, Ellen does not comment on the possibility that misunderstandings in the area now known as ‘sexual harassment’ could have also had an impact on her future, or lack of it, at Berkeley. For example, the above mentioned case of tenure denial to mathematician Jenny Harrison, also at Berkeley, involved a prior intimate relationship between her and the Department Chairman, a relationship that terminated prior to the tenure decision and influenced the stances.96 Even when no such relationship existed, there is always room for misunderstandings when creativity and intimacy mix together across the gender divide.97 Yet another aspect that Ellen Daniell does not reflect upon was the role of the Department Chairman at the time of her tenure decision. Recent studies suggest that Department Chairmen and Chairmen of Hiring, Tenure, and Promotion Committees, as the faculty with the most power, can sway decisions the way they choose.98 A few words on the Department Chairman at the time, Gunther Stent (1924 – 2008), can help convey the problematic context in which the decision in Ellen’s case was taken. His autobiography, Nazis, Women, and Molecular Biology : Memoirs of a Lucky Self-Hater (Stent, 1998) mentions women, next to Nazis, as if those were comparable categories in his self-hating experience. A jocular recommendation letter for his own promotion at Berkeley in the 1950s, written by a group of colleagues headed by Salvador E. Luria, a 1969 Nobel Laureate, focused on Stent’s resounding ‘impact’ on female students in ‘home economics’, a long time sole destination for women seeking to study science at Berkeley.99 During my own time at UC-Berkeley in the late 1990s, as NSF Visiting Associate Professor, Stent tried to prevent me from attending a workshop, apparently fearing criticism of his views on the history of molecular biology, with my writings on this topic.100 To his surprise and chagrin, he learned that he could not bar me, or any member of the faculty, from attending an academic event on campus. This conduct was obviously a vestige of an earlier, more hostile, period in which men in power believed they could evict women whose views they did 96 Harrison was reinstated as a professor in the Department of Mathematics at UC-Berkeley. Other such cases also obtained reinstatement though in some cases plaintiffs chose positions elsewhere and accepted a financial settlement. For details see Hirsch, ‘A History of WAGE.’ 97 Women in Science, ed. by Pattatucci; Creative Couples, ed. by Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am. 98 NSF, Advance Program, available at http://www.portal.advance.vt.edu/index.php/tags/nsfadvance; the reference is to the University of Michigan troupe which enacts the behavior of such committees’ members per script provided by faculty members. I attended such a “performance” at the 2005 meeting of Advance in my capacity as principal investigator of another NSF Program (Science, Technology, and Society). 99 Nerad, The Academic Kitchen. 100 Pnina G. Abir-Am, ‘Deconstructing The Historiography of Molecular Biology’, History of Science, 15 (1985), 83 – 117; Ead., ‘Nobelesse Oblige.’

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not like or could not control. Without elaborating further on Stent’s attitudes to women (his autobiography details his ‘conquests’ as well as his quarterback demeanor), it is obvious that his being the Department Chair at the time of the first ever tenure decision for a woman in that department was not helpful. Indeed, the issue of ‘double standard’ was evident in how the cultural latitude displayed by both Stent and Ellen Daniell was accepted at the time. Ellen’s broad cultural interests and her refusal to hide them were taken, as Blackburn suggested, as evidence of her lack of commitment as a scientist, who should presumably be absorbed by science around the clock or 24/7, or at least pretend to be so. By contrast, no one held his publication of philosophical musings against Stent,101 quite the opposite, it was seen as a mark of being a cultivated scientist. Nor did anyone seem to reflect on the fact that his reputation was based on writing textbooks and hobnobbing with leading figures in molecular biology.102 While Ellen was dismissed for presumably having missed a great discovery, nobody asked how many discoveries Stent, or others, had made, and how many they had missed. At that time, prior to historians of science exposing the gender division of labor in science,103 the double standard remained rampant. Yet another aspect that could have played a bigger role in her career than she admits pertains to her relationships to other women at Berkeley at the time (1976 – 1983). Those women included several groups ranging from radical social activists protesting racial and class inequities; feminist activists protesting gender inequality ; women faculty seeking to carve a new niche as role models for women students, including some in dual career couples who exemplified a new form of equality in family relations;104 faculty wives who often controlled the social life on campus and would also participate in social causes, including 101 Gunther S. Stent, Paradoxes of Progress (San Francisco: W.H. Freeman. 1978). 102 Abir-Am, ‘Nobelesse Oblige.’ 103 Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, vol. 1; Ead., Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action, 1940 – 1972 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Ead., Women Scientists in America, vol. 3; Keller, A Feeling for the Organism; Uneasy Careers, ed. by Abir-Am and Outram; Women, Gender and Science: New Directions, ed. by Sally G. Kohlstedt and Helen Longino, Osiris, 12 (1997); Women in Science, ed. by Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am; Joy Harvey, Almost a Man of Genius (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering, ed. by Londa Schiebinger (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 104 Creative Couples, ed. by Pycior, Slack, and Abir-Am; For Better or For Worse? Collaborative Couples in the Sciences, ed. by Annette Lykknes, Donald L. Opitz and Brigitte Van Tiggelen (Berlin: Birkhauser, 2012); Nancy Slack, ‘A Theory of Collaborative Couples”, AAAS session, February 16, 2013 in Pnina G. Abir-Am, ‘The 25th anniversary 25th anniversary of Uneasy Careers…’, in HSS Newsletter, 42/2 (2013), 13 – 8 (pp. 15 – 6). See also Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, ‘Marital Collaboration: An Approach to Science’, in Uneasy Careers, ed. by AbirAm and Outram, pp. 104 – 25, and Ead. ‘Patterns of Collaborations in Turn-of-the-Century Astronomy : The Campbells and the Maunders, in Creative Couples, ed. by Pycior, Slack and Abir-Am, pp. 254 – 66.

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the protesting of tenure denial to women faculty ; and women staffers who sought better jobs, working conditions and child care. In the early 1990s, a coalition of various such groups managed to coordinate its action and became instrumental in UC-Berkeley’s decision to reinstate several women who were denied tenure, as well as settle the cases of those who preferred to go elsewhere. In Ellen Daniell’s time at Berkeley (mid-1970s to early 1980s), the women most committed to gender equality were absorbed in a tumultuous battle to establish a Program in Women’s Studies,105 so as to provide a theoretical rationale for understanding, and combating, the persisting gender bias and discrimination in society.106 But Ellen said she had no time for such ‘asides’, having had to establish her new lab, train students, and publish (or perish). Ellen does recall being once taken to a rally by another, more activist woman scientist, Mina Bissell, who arrived at UC-Berkeley in 1972 on a fellowship. Though she is now a cancer expert in great demand, as well as a distinguished scientist and former Director of the Life Sciences’ Division at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory,107 her potential as a role model for other women students was also cut off when the department discouraged her from applying for a tenure-track position on the ground that they already had one woman. Ellen does not say much either about her relationships with other women scientists on the Berkeley campus, both older and those from her age group. The above mentioned Marian Koshland, who became Department Chairperson in Microbiology in 1982, was not known to be sympathetic to the concerns of ‘lesser’ women, and could be intimidating. Her own strategy was to combine only two demanding activities at a time in her life cycle, doing research and child rearing first while taking professorial responsibilities, i. e. teaching and research, only after her five children went to college.108 Marian was also part of a dual career couple. Her spouse, Daniel Koshland, a scientist in the Department of Biochemistry, who was very encouraging of her career, was instrumental in reforming the organization of biology at Berkeley, which also consolidated Ellen’s department with other units.109 The question persists as to how such a high profile couple could have better helped the cause of women in science on the UC-Berkeley campus. Ellen Daniell 105 Bowles, Living Ideas. 106 Theories of Women’s Studies, ed. by Gloria Bowles and Renate D. Klein (London: Routledge, 1983). 107 See at http://www.lbl.gov/Science-Articles/Archive/Bissell-Lawrence-Award.html 108 She had the means to employ full time child care, yet declined to use live-in help; Wasserman, The Door in the Dream. 109 Daniel Koshland, ‘How to Get Paid for Having Fun?’, Annual Review of Biochemistry, 65 (1996), 1 – 13; Randy Schekman, ‘The Nine Lives of Daniel E. Koshland, Jr. (1920 – 2007)’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104 (2007), 14551 – 52.

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does not reveal whether she had contact with them, though obviously they could have been of help in the context of an appeal. But the generation of the counterculture detested both hierarchy and the establishment, so Ellen would have been unlikely to seek the company of too powerful scientists such as the Koshlands. Mary-Claire King, a contemporary of Ellen Daniell, arrived at Berkeley at the same time (1976) and remained for two decades, becoming a star geneticist and human rights activist (she left in 1991 for the University of Washington in Seattle). Her then spouse, John A. Clark, whom Ellen described as ‘very Californian’ (i. e. an early follower of social trends that became a trademark of the Californian life style such as swami), was a member of the committee that hired Ellen. Could Ellen Daniell have benefited from consulting such dual career academic couples, versed in the inner working of two different departments? Perhaps, and Ellen stated that she was in touch with King. Still, King, who was then married with a small child born in 1975, just before Ellen’s arrival, would have been overly committed as well as still facing her own tenure ordeal. Another interesting question which is not addressed in great detail in Ellen’s book is whether other Group members, especially those based at UC-Berkeley, or those who knew her longest, could have been more helpful. Judith Klinman, a chemist and would-be department chair who arrived in 1978 with tenure (to discover that she was paid less than all other department members) was raising two children on her own, and would have been taxed to the extreme.110 Mimi Koehl, an integrative biologist and would be MacArthur Fellow, had no children but did field work on coral reefs across the world, which kept her off campus.111 These two joined Group in 1981, or right in time to alert Ellen of the vagaries of tenure which both already had. Other Group members were based in San Francisco, mostly at UCSF. Christine Guthrie, based at UCSF since 1973, and who co-founded Group in 1977, had long been part of a commuting marriage with Ellen’s PhD adviser John Abelson (i. e. between his position at Caltech and hers at UCSF). Could she have been of more help because of her longer time in Group? Ellen valiantly suggests that she did not seek enough help from Group, which she credits with helping her survive the disaster of an unexpected denial of tenure. It would have been difficult for Ellen Daniell, or anyone else, to anticipate, let alone prepare to preempt or combat the vicious accusation that seems to have swung the decision, namely that of having missed one of biggest discoveries in her field, the discovery of ‘split genes’ which won two Nobel Prizes in 1993. It was as if Ellen had to earn the right to be tolerated in science by making a Nobel Prize level discovery. 110 Daniell, Every Other Thursday, p. 257. 111 Ibid., p. 256.

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Such a charge could have come only from someone on the tenure committee who may have already faced that charge himself (there were no women on that committee), possibly for good reasons, and then projected its vicious sting on a vulnerable woman in the context of tenure. This is the same mechanism mentioned earlier in this paper as being used in 2011 to turn down the leading woman finalist for a tenure track position. In both cases, in 1981 and 2011, a more established male member of the committee took advantage of the prevailing gender bias in order to eliminate the most gifted woman. Hence, regardless of other career related aspects that Ellen could have played better, we can safely conclude that gender bias was not irrelevant to her experience. It is also plausible that the veteran faculty in Ellen Daniell’s time, most of whom obtained their own positions and promotions due to horse trading among their patrons, as was the custom in the ‘good old days’, were in genuine difficulties over evaluating anyone by criteria other than loyalty to a boss. It appears that Ellen’s ‘fault’ was her presumption that one could become a permanent faculty member without being compelled to imitate a style that habitually confused professionalism with old boys’ networking and alpha-male kowtowing. UC-Berkeley, the focus of repeated federal investigations pertaining to gender discrimination in employment,112 also failed Ellen, among many other members of the ‘first’ generation of tenure-track women, by lacking an impartial process for both tenure and appeal so as to ensure that junior women candidates got a fair shot at such a critical promotion in a time of major social change with regard to gender equality. Above all, neither the department, nor the university seemed to care for gender diversity in 1981, when under the new Reagan administration (whose values were well known in California where he had served as Governor), many of the progressive regulations implemented by the Carter administration were dismantled. As Ellen Daniell put it: I was thrust into a situation for which I had no training and for which none was available […] There was little or no recognition at the time that new faculty could benefit from having a dedicated mentor to identify pitfalls. I needed an advocate within the department, someone to take responsibility for my case, advise me on my progress, and counter my detractors. Neither the former Chair nor any of the others who had so enthusiastically persuaded me to go to Berkeley took steps to be mentor or advocate.113

If the Department seems to have used the processes of both hiring and tenure, and of course the period in between, for ensuring that the first woman to be hired 112 I am indebted to Margaret Rossiter who served as a witness in such investigations during the 1970s, and to Mary Singleton who served as a plaintiff in a class suit (see above), for conveying to me a sense of the early days of affirmative action in the Bay area, and the efforts of a presumably public university to minimize compliance. 113 Daniell, Every Other Thursday, p. 67.

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would not be retained, then the university administration appears to have been equally complicit. Perhaps weakened by repeated mistakes it made in the 1950s and 1960s on other political issues such as the loyalty oath and the free speech movement,114 the university administration merely ratified a decision with no public accountability, instead of using the appeal process for setting a precedent so as to ensure that gender bias would no longer constrain the process of tenure. It took more than another decade, and wide community mobilization, until the university felt compelled to settle cases of unjust denial of tenure to women. Blackburn, Ellen Daniell’s more junior colleague, was propelled by Ellen’s experience of tenure denial into a few years of acquiescence, as she knew that any making of waves in Ellen’s favor (in spite of her belief that Ellen more than deserved to be tenured) could jeopardize the decision in her own case. She left that department in 1990 for UCSF and until 2013 she remained the only member of that Department to win the Nobel Prize for work done in molecular biology at Berkeley. Her suggestion that Ellen was denied tenure because she challenged the lack of collegiality of senior men, as well as because she refused to project an all consuming interest in science (as if a career in science required one to pretend to have abandoned any other interests), seems very perceptive. If she is right, then the tenure decision was yet another outcome of the double standard. In Ellen Daniell’s time (1981), both she and the social movements that sustained her pioneering trajectory, still naively believed that the doors to science and the academy will simply open in response to progressive ideas, such as gender or race equality. As we have seen during the ‘debate that won’t go away’ of 2005 – 2006, the rearguard opposing gender equality is still erecting structural barriers. At a recent symposium on Leaders in Science and Engineering: The Women of MIT, on March 28 – 29, 2011,115 part of its 150th anniversary, speakers in science and academia admitted again that greater efforts remain to be made. Though the situation nowadays is better than in the late 1970s, Ellen Daniell’s time, many opportunities for gender equality were squandered in the last decades. Not only the generation of the 1970s was shortchanged, but also those for whom that ‘lost generation’ could have served as role models and mentors.

114 Todd Gitlin, ‘Echoes of 1968’, Columbia Spectator, March 23, 2008, available at http:// www.columbiaspectator.com/2008/03/23/echoes-1968; see there, references to his books on activism in the 1960s, written in the 1970s; Gleiser, ‘The Glass Wall’; Vettel, Biotech. 115 See http://mit150.mit.edu/symposia/women-of-MIT

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Conclusions

Having compared the experiences of the three women scientists, can I now reply to the question as to whose life mine would have most resembled had I remained in science? The fastest trajectory to success, Carol Greider’s (entering graduate school in 1983), would have been unlikely for me, since there were almost no women mentors to shield an aspiring young woman scientist from the above detailed obstacles prior to the 1980s. Elizabeth Blackburn’s success is the greatest, being the first woman scientist since the legendary Mme Curie to have trained another woman Nobel laureate, the first to win a Nobel (among many other prizes) with her woman student, and one of very few women to have launched a whole research school of many women and men scientists.116 But that success required a singular focus on science, as well as a total blindness to its gender bias, neither of which I wish I had possessed. Moreover, I doubt whether I could have survived the years of inauthenticity, during which I would have had to refrain from protesting strings of misconducts, both gender related and otherwise, just in order to secure my own place in it, as she had to do. Such misconduct became so rampant in science that the National Institutes of Health had to establish an Office for Research Integrity (ORI, which has a regular Newsletter), to deal with such issues. Surviving in science by witnessing how other women (and also men, but they are not the subject of this essay…) are routinely mowed would have been too much of a betrayal of my sense of justice; no system, science included, deserved such a price. But the science that attracted Ellen, Liz, or me as undergraduates in the late 1960s may not have been the same science in which they had to make their careers in the late 1970s and 1980s. Our idealistic views were formed at a time science was expanding and competition was not a key issue. Quite the opposite, after the Sputnik late in 1957 women and men students were lured with scholarships to science, because science became a key in the Superpower contest of the Cold War.117 By contrast, after the oil embargo of 1973 and the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, state support for science declined and competition increased. The rejection encountered by the first generation of women faculty in science plausibly stemmed not only from a long tradition of gender bias in patriarchal 116 Telomeres, ed. by Titia de Lange, Vicki Lundblad, and Elizabeth Blackburn, 2nd edn (Cold Spring Harbor : Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2006). 117 John Krige, American Hegemony and the Postwar Reconstruction of Science in Europe (Cambridge: The M.I.T. Press, 2006); ‘Spotlight on Post-WW2 Transatlantic Science Policies’, with essays by Pnina G. Abir-Am, Ronald E. Doel, John Krige, Naomi Oreskes, and Peter J. Westwick, Special issue, Centaurus, 52 (2010), 273 – 362.

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society, but also from the effect of dwindling national science budgets after the mid-1970s, when the post-WWII linear economic growth began to level off. The increasing competition that ensued led both to endless incidents of misconduct, by no means all gender related, and resistance to newcomers, mostly women whose hiring was mandated by law after the mid-1970s.118 Their non-retention, as well as the rise of misconduct, may have been a defense mechanism by a system that was artificially inflated during the height of the Cold War and had to suddenly shift from entitlement to scarcity.119 At the same time, the decline of public spending on science was matched by private investing in biotech, especially in the 1980s.120 Many scientists, both men and women, left academia once grant getting became a low probability game. Many moved to biotech, Ellen Daniell herself being one of those who chose to leave academic science (as opposed to seeking a position at another university), in part because biotech opportunities were widely available in the Bay area.121 Many women, including Ellen, found more gratification and equality in biotech than in academic science.122 Historical scholarship thus inadvertently satisfied a need for personal justification. If I have ever had any doubts that leaving science at an early stage was a bad idea, or at least one that should have been contemplated more seriously, then my encounter with Ellen’s experience cured such doubts. Had I stayed in science, most likely I would have encountered some version of Ellen Daniell’s experience, the experience of the first generation of women scientists whose careers were sacrificed in the battle over gender equality in and beyond science. Not unlike the WWI soldiers in the trenches who were sacrificed by the miscalculations of their national leaders, Ellen’s generation was sacrificed to Cold War male vanity in science and the wider academic delusion that gender equality is a threat to the social order. Four decades later, there is a woman or sometimes two, in many science departments, but the under-representation of women in science persists. I also hope that if and when I’ll have an opportunity to meet the other two of my three subjects, we will discover that despite our different trajectories, we remain soul mates in promoting the cause of future generations of women in science. Included in them are the children and step children of this trio of women 118 Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, vol. 3. 119 ‘Spotlight on Post-WW2 Transatlantic Science Policies’, and Special issue, Centaurus. 120 Paul Rabinow, Making PCR: A Story of Biotechnology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996); Arnold Thackray, Private Science (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998); Vettel, Biotech; Sally Smith Hughes, Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 121 Paul Rabinow and Talia Dan-Cohen, A Machine to Make a Future: Biotech Chronicles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Vettel, Biotech; Smith Hughes, Genentech. 122 Smith-Doerr, Women’s Work.

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scientists; my own daughter, now in her last year of medical school; and my SSP students who majored in both science and women’s studies while finding role models in the intersecting lives of these, among other women scientists. The stories of the trio are also our story, the story of women historians of science who write about women scientists (among other topics, or as a sole focus) as a way of better understanding not only science in history, but also our own generation’s slow pace toward gender equality.

V.

Appendix: Career Trajectories as Historical Data

1

Factor Year of Birth

E. Daniell 1947

2

Place of Birth

New Haven, CT.

3

Undergraduate Institution

Swarthmore College

PhD Institution Topic of PhD experience

UCSD Univ. of Cambridge Univ. de Montreal Genomics of DNA New key technique History of Molecular bacterial viruses of DNA sequencing Biology in UK

PhD adviser Post-doctoral institution

John Abelson Cold Spring Harbor Lab, NY

Fred Sanger

Quality of postdoctoral experience Post-doctoral adviser

Bad; scared by rough competition

Great; Discovery of Mixed; Award winrepeat sequences in ning publication; Major Grant; A baby telomeres

Joe Sambrook

Joseph Gall

William Bynum

1973 – 1975

1975 – 1977

1984 – 1989

4 5 6 7 8 9

10 Post-doc timing Institution of 11 first job

Prof. status at Assistant pro1st job fessor M. status at first 13 Single (1976) job M. status at tenure Highest job sta15 tus

16

Timing of tenure

Melbourne, Australia Univ. of Melbourne

Yale University

UC-Berkeley, 1976 UCSF, 1977

P.G. Abir-Am 1947 Bucharest, Romania Hebrew Univ., Jerusalem

Camille Limoges Univ. of London (Wellcome Inst.)

Johns Hopkins,1991

Research associate

Visiting Assoc. Professor

Trailing spouse (1977)

Married +1 (1991)

Married (1980)

Married (1975)

Married (1978)

Assistant Professor

Professor ; Dept. Chair

Visiting Assoc. Professor

1981 (Negative)

1984 (positive)

N/A

12

14

E. Blackburn 1948

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Women Scientists of the 1970s

(Continued) Factor Compliance 17 with EO legislation at tenure ‘Double stan18 dard’ advance notice Pretending sci19 ence was a 24/7 vocation 20 Behavior

E. Daniell Yes; another woman (Blackburn) in the dept. None; 1st woman to undergo process Life included social & cultural activities Lively conversationalist; confrontational

Publication proField switching file No contact with Intellectual PhD /post-doc 22 mentorship advisers

21

Social/ institu23 tional patronNone age Collaboration in 24 W own students dept Collaboration None outside the dept. Enemies within 26 Yes dept. 25

27

Dates of Key Publication

1973, 1981, 1982

E. Blackburn

P.G. Abir-Am

Yes; EB was the only N/A woman Alerted by Daniell’s Knew of M. W. Rosexperience in siter’s long struggle 1981 – 82 Life revolved around science

Life included social & cultural activities

Quiet disposition, limited to science

Lively conversationalist on many topics

Cumulative

Cumulative

PhD adviser ; Post-doc adviser

No contact with PhD /post-doc advisers

Spouse J. Sedat; his Chmn. Bruce AlNone berts W own students W own students only J. Szostak

Four co-editors

Unknown

Unknown

1978, 1982, 1984, 1985, 1987, 1989

1982, 1987, 1992, 2000, 2006, 2011, 2014

28 Teaching

New courses; high Had to improve New courses; high student evaluastudent evaluations student evaluations tions

29 Service

Outstanding

Unknown

Modest

Afterword

*

Zelda Alice Franceschi

On the Margins of the Margins: Awareness and Delay

In 1978 Roger Sanjek presented a detailed account of the position of women in twenty-two departments of anthropology in the United States. He took the most representative departments, namely those that ‘have produced the majority of PhDs teaching in departments of anthropology, and exert a strong influence upon the field as a whole’.1 Sanjek’s aim was to take stock of the situation in order to gain an understanding of the extent to which the recent new regulations had been fulfilled, following the important 1972 resolution2 which had specified: Therefore, be it resolved that all departments of anthropology immediately initiate and/or continue fair practices of hiring and promotion so that the number of women in all ranks reflect the proportion of women to men in the profession. At the end of five years (1972 – 1977), departments which have failed to comply with this resolution should be subject to censure to the American Anthropological Association.3

Sanjek considers the years from 1967 – 1968 to 1975 – 76, and several variables are analyzed: the percentage of women and men employed in departments of anthropology, academic qualifications, area of specialization, average length of teaching and work contracts, proportions of annual teaching loads, the academic standing of women and men respectively, and appointments and length of service in the case of women:

* This essay was translated by Elizabeth Freeman. My thanks are also due to Bianca Tarozzi, Vita Fortunati, and Valentina Peveri who read various versions of my essays in this volume and were most generous with comments. Furthermore, I thank Paolo Albertazzi for sharing his bibliographical expertise with me and for helping me find various publications. 1 Roger Sanjek, ‘The Position of Women in the Major Departments of Anthropology, 1967 – 76’, American Anthropologist, 80 (1978), 894 – 904 (p. 894). 2 This resolution was published in ‘Two Resolutions to Go on Mail Ballot’, Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, 13/1 (1972), 11 – 12. 3 ‘Resolutions and Amendment Pass’, Newsletter of the American Anthropological Association, 13/6 (1972), 1 (p. 1).

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The experience of women in the major departments of anthropology over the nine-year period studied has been one of less opportunity for employment and for achievement of senior rank than in all departments taken together.4

The research in question is based on a data-collection exercise undertaken by the Committee on the Status of Women in Anthropology (COSWA) who appointed a board for the purpose – a board to which Sanjek belonged between 1974 – 1975. There had been various significant events which gave rise to the 1972 regulation. In 1968 Peggy Golde and Ann Fischer published an essay where they underlined the decline in the proportion of women holding a PhD in anthropology during the post-war period: in the prewar period (1921 – 1941) women were granted 27 percent of PhDs’ in anthropology ; in the postwar period (1946 – 1962), the proportion of degrees received by women dropped to 20 percent.5

In order to investigate the causes, the essay dwelt upon the historical and social reasons which had deterred U.S. academia from investing in women anthropologists during the post-war period.6 According to Margaret Rossiter, this publication prompted discussion and did exert a certain impact on some women anthropologists, but the central theme of ‘the common attitude of discrimination of women anthropologists within academia’, which is discussed by the authors, was given short shrift. Rossiter wrote: To a certain extent the article reflected its place of origins. It was conceived as essentially a data-collection exercise with some assertions about discriminatory behaviors. But despite the authors’ prime location at the ‘center’ of the behavioral sciences in the mid-1960s, the whole topic was far from consideration in ‘central’ circles at the time. Their article did not refer to such essential works on the topic as Fava’s 1960 report, Rossi’s 1964 Daedalus essays, or Rossi’s MIT speech in Science 1965. Nevertheless, this collaborative project inspired Golde, a research assistant and lecturer in the Stanford anthropology department and an assistant professor of psychiatry at Stanford’s medical school, to collect and edit Women in the Field: Anthropological Experiences.7

4 Sanjek, ‘The Position of Women’, p. 903. 5 Ann Fischer and Peggy Golde, ‘The Position of Women in Anthropology’, American Anthropologist, 70 (1968), 337 – 44 (p. 338). 6 According to Golde and Fischer, during the pre-war period anthropology was still a relatively new discipline. The authors argue that it was thus necessary to ‘recruit’ staff. In the following period fewer women were admitted to graduate schools and the access of women to universities drastically diminished. Cf. Betty Friedan, Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1964) and in the same years Mary McCarthy’s novel, The Group (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963). 7 Margaret W. Rossiter, Women Scientists in America: Before Affirmative Action 1940 – 1972 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 522, note 17.

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In 1970 Carol Vance published a few findings which represented the outcome of research conducted by consulting issues of the Guide to Departments of Anthropology.8 The aim of these investigations was to monitor the situation of women anthropologists within institutions. In the ‘high-endowment’ universities (Columbia, Chicago, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Stanford, Princeton, Yale, Johns Hopkins) only 2 percent of full professors were women […]. Women were substantially less likely than men to achieve promotion.9

A year later Morton Fried, a well-known professor of anthropology at Columbia University, wrote: There is evidence that, despite the fact that some women have scaled the heights of the anthropological profession, the profession as a whole is not hospitable to women. It may well be that anthropology is relatively more accessible to women than many other professions, but there is still enough of a problem of equal female participation in the field to dispel any pride in anthropologists’ achievement in this area […]. We shall have to assume that the charges feminists are currently making against academic anthropology are true. What is more, we must begin immediately to correct the imbalance.10

But the most persuasive statement which allows us to grasp the historical, political, and social complexity characterizing the position of women anthropologists in American academia is to be found in another article by Sanjek, published in 1982 in Sign. This article conveys the diffusion of data collected between the 1960s and 1970s. In this instance the anthropologist furnishes a detailed account of the astonishing and somewhat sobering events following the 1972 resolution. The decade subsequent to the 1972 resolution was characterized by a string of events that Sanjek chose to explain fully, thereby allowing the trickiness of the issue to be seen. Time and space for decision-making had been expanded so that regulations could be approved; furthermore, the possibility of making the data in question public and, by extension, effective, could be evaluated. The academic institution had turned out to be (or was simply confirmed to be!) a slow, conservative body, where inequality was rife and, in a certain sense, systematic. Indeed, the 1979 report produced by COSWA which revealed a succession of instances of non-fulfillment on the part of various university institutions, was repudiated by the executive board of the American Anthro8 I am referring in particular to Carol Vance, ‘Sexual Stratification in Academic Anthropology 1974 – 75’, Anthropology Newsletter, 16/4 (1975), 10 – 12; Sylvia Helen Forman, ‘Occupational Status of Women in Anthropology Departments, 1976 – 77’, Anthropology Newsletter, 18/9 (1977), 10 – 12. 9 Roger Sanjek, ‘The American Anthropological Resolution on the Employment of Women: Genesis, Implementation, Disavowal, and Resurrection’, Signs, 7 (1982), 845 – 68 (p. 849). 10 Morton H. Fried, ‘Employment of Women in Anthropology’, Anthropology Newsletter , 12/2 (1971), pp. 6 – 7.

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pological Association. In 1981, four years after the expiry of the resolution, and through a sustained awareness campaign headed by many New York academic institutions (including students, student societies, and museums), who were capable of confirming the need to approve of what had previously been disclaimed by the members of the commission that had assessed the final report, a resolution was finally reached. There were five departments that had failed to meet the 1972 resolution. These departments received formal letters in which the non-observance of the 1972 resolution was restated. In 1982 this was made public in the Newsletter of the American Anthropologist. At the end of his essay, Sanjek commented as follows: But from my point of view as a participant, the events of the past ten years relating to the issue of discrimination against women in anthropology have revealed complacent and persisting antifeminist sentiment. The efforts of key figures in the association to slow down, dilute, discredit, and deny implementation of the resolution are the untold part of the story […]. The lesson we draw from this ten-year episode may sound commonplace. Large organizations change slowly and only under concerted pressure. Those who are comfortable and secure do not want to hear, and do not want others to hear, that inequalities are institutionalized on their home turf. […] There is still great sexism in academia.11

Reading these articles makes for a somewhat unusual experience for Italian women anthropologists. In Italy we are not familiar with using biographical and autobiographical documents as tools for analyzing and interpreting the history of the discipline of anthropology ; it is not standard practice to use materials, let alone teach students how to exploit them as sources to foster an understanding of the models and paradigms that have informed the discipline. Many biographies, even those of distinguished anthropologists, have not been translated into Italian. Moreover, many ‘classic’ monographs (of both women and men anthropologists) do not yet exist in Italian translation. It is only in recent years that we have witnessed critical studies on the history of anthropology and works which invite Italian readers (and anthropologists!) to rethink the canons of the history from a comparative, trans-disciplinary vantage point, while attempting to include various unusual and lesser known itineraries.12 The dissemination of the history of anthropology in Italy, its legacy both within the realms of academia and outside the institutional milieu, should be considered when rethinking the methods used to construct the discipline of anthropology as well as its implications for gender and feminist studies that have germinated around this. In this respect I have found some of the contributions in this volume most thought11 Sanjek, ‘The American Anthropological Resolution’, pp. 847 and 867. 12 I am thinking of the contributions of Pier Paolo Viazzo on historic anthropology ; also those of Antonino Colajanni, and Matilde Callari Galli.

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provoking. I use the verb ‘germinate’ in its etymological sense, inasmuch as it allows considerations on the ability and willingness to get involved or ‘to emerge’. In their individual biographical journeys and using biography as a tool for gaining knowledge, Evelyn Fox Keller, Pnina Abir-Am, and Londa Schiebinger are women who have taken a stand and have found meaningful links between what they were doing, and what they were studying and discovering, as well as the history that informed their lives both within and outside academia. In this sense they are committed to their work because they wanted to leave a mark, or a pignus, something to indicate the path for other women, a testimony of words and facts. So I found it extremely interesting to consider the percentages pertaining to the academic standing of women and men anthropologists between the 1950s and 1960s in the United States and, furthermore, to reflect upon all the variables under review, to see what can be readily consulted and what, on the other hand, is more complex and less accessible, and what requires arduous archival research. How has all this helped me? What use has all this been to me? What lesson have I learned from this research and mode of working? What have I ‘discovered’? Primarily, I became aware of the inaccurate and somewhat perfunctory image which – as a scholar of the history of anthropology – I had harbored regarding the position of women in U.S. academia in that period. As a committed researcher of the history of anthropology, my desire was to analyze the interstices and the duskier areas. The data provided a helpful tool which, in turn, pointed me towards an in-depth study of the traditional canons of history, the history of women anthropologists and the paramount importance of not neglecting marginal journeys. It came as a surprise to discover how many women anthropologists I did not know of; those whose journeys I knew only superficially ; women on the margins of those margins that, on the other hand, I knew very well. Within U.S. academia on the cusp of the twentieth century, in those research centers which originated in universities (the Bureau of Ethnology, the BAE, and the Smithsonian, for example) the systematic promotion of the study of the anthropology of the ‘natives of the Americas’, at the time considered ‘vanishing savages’, had to be promoted.13 Franz Boas welcomed women as researchers, as had John Wesley Powell before him. The latter took on, for example, Matilda Coxe Stevenson in the Bureau of Ethnology.14 Together with Stevenson, Alice Fletcher and Erminnie Smith, they had proven to be capable researchers in the 13 Jacob W. Gruber, ‘Ethnographic Salvage and the Shaping of Anthropology’, in American Anthropologist, 72 (1970), 1289 – 99 (p. 1294). 14 Hidden Scholars: Women Anthropologists and the Native American Southwest, ed. by Nancy J. Parezo (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), p. 43.

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field. Anthropology had an objective need for women as data-gathers and women who could do fieldwork, so many women anthropologists were prompted to go into research. Many got involved and wrote while remaining outcasts in a male-dominated environment. They were also marginal compared to those women who had somehow managed to procure positions in institutions, even if they too were a somewhat peripheral presence. In this respect I am thinking of the margins of the areas of shade on the outskirts of the periphery which underwent an intellectual ferment and where experiences, too, were intense and robust, yet porous. The resulting situation now emerging from the studies of many U.S. women anthropologists shows several different experiences in the field and in writing. While it is undeniably true that the interpretation, analysis, translation and direction of projects and the coordination of the theoretical and epistemological aspects of knowledge was a male-dominated domain, many women were successful, choosing to work regardless of the inherent obscurity ; if this was at great personal cost it was effervescent and creative, notwithstanding. The career paths of Ethel Alpenfels (1907 – 1981), Ann Kindrick Fischer (1919 – 1971), Erna Gunther (1896 – 1982), Dorothy Lee (1905 – 1975), Hortense Powdermaker (1900 – 1970), and countless other women also became clear to me. There were women who had experience of migration, whose fieldwork was particularly original, as well as those engaged in creative writing, or women with commitments outside academia, whose careers had often not materialized. There were also women free of the ties that a relatively new discipline such as cultural anthropology was starting to impose, given that it was in the throes of becoming established and was ‘securing’ resources and space in which it could perform. Forward-looking women who, today, strike us as being surprisingly modern owing to the standard of their (in)formal writing, choice of ethnographic subjects, and the versatility of their work, were able to get involved on various fronts. Such complicated trajectories, contrasting theoretical reference models, differing perceptions of ethnography, and flexibility in research are indicative of women who assert their difference. But were these women really so eccentric and idiosyncratic? And where did the ties that they so eloquently sidestepped lead them? Today we feel obliged to reflect upon these constraints, which are inherently linked to gender, schools, teachers, and to a discipline that had imposed its own paradigm on the standards of objectivity, alongside neutral stance, the liberty of women, and their ability to ignore these fetters. Nancy Parezo underlines the extent to which women anthropologists who tried to enter the world of dissemination and the creation of knowledge, rather than just questioning the issue of gender, were instantly downgraded as deviant and eccentric, and were considered to be propagators of knowledge to which academia of the period was unaccustomed. Women who did

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not protect themselves by maintaining a low profile in keeping with their marginal position were soon singled out for upsetting the normal course of the canons of knowledge. Women who adopted a modified acceptance strategy tended to concentrate on areas that minimized their potential, or actual, competition with men. This included such strategies as working on peripheral topics (art or children rearing), developing a nontheoretical but descriptive writing style, emphasizing their roles as teachers rather than researchers, and popularizing anthropology. […] Women recognized and accepted the inequalities, problems, and barriers as things they could not change. Instead they tried to work around them – to whittle away the edge – by working hard, ignoring the discrimination, hoping no one noticed them, demonstrating that they were not bad risks (ever if other women were), holding long-term goals, and making compromises that involved minimal risks.15

Many of these women anthropologists have been studied and considered by American women anthropologists who, above all, from the 1980s onward, painstakingly completed the cataloguing and classifying of their biographies and scientific paths.16 Many have received attention from gender studies experts and women anthropologists who have re-read and interpreted these academic journeys from a feminist vantage point. In this regard, some women historians of anthropology have tapped into Gender and Feminist Studies to re-create the historical biographies and academic paths of these women, while also making them readily accessible, and producing a sound genealogy packed with ideas. Two years after Nancy Parezo’s text was published and seven years after the publication of the famous volume edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus which triggered the so-called ‘post-modern’ current,17 Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon published Women Writing Culture, a volume whose aim was to reflect the narrative strategies of some women anthropologists – both the well-known and less known. In her introduction Ruth Behar clarifies: ‘I needed to refigure the canon of anthropological knowledge as it defined and passed on from one generation to the next in the academy. I needed another past, another history.’18 Thus cultural anthropology is a genealogy and history which finds transversal connections with the history of science and literary criticism, an area in which, moreover, from the end of the 1970s onward women have felt the need to rewrite 15 Hidden Scholars, ed. by Parezo, pp. 338 – 39. 16 In this respect, see Women Anthropologists: Selected Biographies, ed. by Ute D. Gas, Aisha Khan, Jerrie McIntyre, and Ruth Weinberg (Westport Conn: University of Illinois Press, 1989); also Hidden Scholars, ed. by Parezo; Women Writing Culture, ed. by Ruth Behar and Deborah A. Gordon (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press Berkeley, 1995); numerous publications of Regna Darnell and Sally Cole. 17 I refer to Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, ed. by James Clifford and George E. Marcus (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1986). 18 Ibid., p. 13.

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history. As underlined by Vita Fortunati in her essay, ‘Only later, in the late 1980s, did biography start not only to be studied as a distinctive genre, but also to be considered as a useful instrument in the interpretation of the literary text. This revaluation of biography was helped by interest in this genre within women’s and gender studies.’ The situation of women up to the end of the seventies was a great deal more complicated. Despite the work of scholars such as Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead,19 women anthropologists continued to make only a fleeting appearance in academia, while the roles they performed continued to be far more unfavorable compared to similar roles covered by men. I found that many of these women remained for a strikingly long time the show-pieces on the anthropological scene. What in textbooks is often called the ‘beginning’ (I am thinking of the Boasian era and the immediately preceding period) remained as such for an extended period. History and the biographical journey of a few of those women who entered the canons of history did not represent a shift; rather, it was a period in which – as was the case in other disciplines – there were various leading personalities. Although this helped make a difference to the role of women social scientists in history, what followed was patchy and inconsistent; it was intermittent and interrupted by cuts and a severe lack of reconciliation. Thus, I was surprised by the stalemate and the discontinuity in a school – such as the U.S. one – which was promising and potentially fertile. I recorded how many of these women to this day remain excluded from the canons of history ; conspicuous invisibility was the hallmark in the history of women scholars between the 1950s and 1960s, with the exception of the ‘ubiquitous Margaret Mead and the outspoken Rachel Carson’20. What can we conclude with hindsight? And what is conveyed by these marginal histories whose common elements are today apparent to us in the histories of disciplines? Do the biographies and autobiographies of these women really allow history to be rewritten? And what are the objectives? And what about those women who represent an unicum, like Mead in the history of anthropology or those Nobel prizes for the history of science? How do we re-interpret the centers in the light of the foregoing? Nancy J. Parezo provides a magisterial account of the invisibility of women anthropologists; she endeavors to highlight the contributory causes, and the historical, social, cultural, political, and economic reasons. Her book contains contributions from many women, some of whom actively engaged in making 19 Neither were the academic careers of these two women particularly straightforward. Benedict’s career was slow to take off despite her prolific output. Her Patterns of Culture (1934) was well received in both the U.S. and Europe. Margaret Mead worked at the Museum of Anthropology for her whole life. 20 Rossiter, Women Scientists in America, p. 304.

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visible the biographical and academic journeys of the ‘hidden scholars’ who still find it hard to resurface from silence: Matilda Coxe Stevenson, Elsie Clews Parsons, Gladys Reichard, Esther Goldfrank, Ruth Bunzel, to mention just a few. Parezo’s questions are direct and invite reflection: For if female anthropologists were necessary for the discipline, where are they? Why do we know so little about them? Why, when we tell people how many women have worked in the Greater Southwest, are we met with looks of disbelief ? Why are women not in our history of anthropology books? Why are they not cited in theoretical discussions? Why, with the exception of Benedict and Mead, are women anthropologists hidden, seen only in the shadow of men or at the margins of the field? Is anthropology really a good discipline for women? Are women hidden because women’s contributions had to be made invisible, shown to be handmaidenly or less important than those of male theoreticians, for anthropology to be accepted as a science?21

This is not the place to discuss the various themes discussed by Parezo in response to such important issues, and neither is it possible to consider how the situation has changed since 1993, or at least, how it has stimulated various studies on these scientific and biographical trajectories. It should be noted that textbooks of anthropology – those (written by Italian anthropologists) that I have personally used to teach my students – are still peopled with eminent men: Morgan, Tylor, Boas, Kroeber, L¦vi-Strauss, Sapir, Linton, Lowie, Kardiner, Durkheim, Malinowski, Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard, Griaule and the women: Mead and Benedict. As Curtis Hinsley had underlined, ‘We have been taught that the history of science and anthropology is the history of individuals’, and as Parezo notes, ‘only those of certain types of individuals.’22 Thus, having a precise idea of how the history of science developed within academia in terms of the institutional roles covered, the areas dealt with, the subjects taken into consideration, and the specializations and commitment both within academia and outside, allows us to carefully rethink the history of women and men within the discipline. My reading of the essays in this book has been informed by this awareness; furthermore, it has taught me to consider historians of science – or rather, women historians of science – by analyzing their biographical journeys and the journeys of these woman scientists whom they took into account.23 This is the crucial starting-point for feminist studies in anthropology. In an interdisciplinary text on feminism (including archaeology, cultural and genetic anthropology) Louise Lamphere has this to say : 21 Hidden scholars, ed. by Parezo, p. 6. 22 Ibid., p. 7. 23 My thanks are due to Paola Govoni for conveying to me the need to observe the history of women and men in science so meticulously.

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One of the most central trends in broadening and diversifying feminist anthropology has been historical. Not only have we acknowledged the importance of nineteenthcentury women anthropologists (e. g., Alice Fletcher, Matilda Coxe Stevenson) but we have rediscovered a feminist legacy within anthropology that goes back to the early writing of Elsie Clews Parsons. This has led to a revaluation of the work and lives of Parsons and her colleagues Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead and to a reclaiming of Zora Neale Hurston and Ruth Landes as feminist foremothers.24

Biographies and the Writing of Biographies On method: in order to write about the biographical trajectories in these texts many authors – both men and women – consciously stated that they have attempted to put themselves ‘in their shoes’, in an effort to understand the idea of science, gender or the professionalization of knowledge that these women had attempted to pursue throughout their lives as scientific women. In the 1950s cultural anthropology coined an expression which today has become obsolete but which I personally am fond of: emico. The purpose of this etymon was to underline the method of knowing and describing a culture of those people belonging to it, of scholars who endeavor to adhere to a ‘native’ system of knowledge, by attributing to the members of a particular culture the final judgment of acceptability and appropriateness of the results obtained. Thus emico is that particular conceptual mechanism which is crucial to anthropology when embarking upon research; it is that which characterizes ethnographic work and, in a certain sense, allows us to suspend judgment, to observe and attempt to understand how other people perceive the world in which they live. This is perforce a profoundly tricky operation, in which many factors come into play, each of which brings its own challenges. In one of her best-known witty essays, Susan Sontag referred to the complexity facing the scholar whose quest is to capture the ‘sensibility of a period’, for which a prerequisite was the ability to be ‘tentative and nimble’. In a note the author adds: The sensibility of an era is not only its most decisive, but also its most perishable, aspect. One may capture the ideas (intellectual history) and the behavior (social history) of an epoch without ever touching upon the sensibility or taste which informed those ideas, that behavior.25 24 Louise Lamphere, ‘Foreword: Taking Stock–The Transformation of Feminist Theorizing in Anthropology’, in Feminist Anthropology : Past, Present, and Future, ed. by Pamela L. Geller and Miranda K. Stockett (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), ix-xvi (p. xi). See also the classic volume Women, Culture and Society, ed. by Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974). 25 Susan Sontag, ‘Notes on ‘Camp’, in Ead., Against Interpretation, and Other Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1998 [1961]), p. 276.

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I have always given thought to how complicated it must be for the historian who tries to capture a ‘consistent sensibility which underlines and gives rise to a certain taste’ because a ‘sensibility is almost but not quite, ineffable.’26 A similar discourse is valid also in the case of the anthropologist’s fieldwork, but as Carlo Ginzburg perceptively observes, In contrast to anthropologists and students of popular traditions, historians obviously begin at a great disadvantage. […] historians are unable to converse with the peasants of the sixteenth century (and, in any case, there is no guarantee that they would understand them).27

By exploiting different, yet transversal, modes of approach and with reference to biographic documentation, Evelyn Fox Keller, Londa Schiebinger, Georgina Ferry, Marta Cavazza, Paula Findlen, Massimo Mazzotti, Vita Fortunati, Pnina G. Abir-Am, Paola Govoni and I, all have attempted to enter the complex emotional domain. How did these women – and, in the case examined by Govoni, how did Italo Calvino – portray their ideas of science? How exactly did they perceive modesty and pride, their relationship with political commitment and institutions? How did they handle creativity? What conceptual notions can we refer to today? And what happens when biographic and autobiographic descriptions overlap? What is conveyed by biographic narration? Biographic history implies the tradition of emotions and processes subject to their manifestation,28 and this is the case both in narrative terms and in ‘techniques of the body’. Emotions involve feeling and thinking and this allows us to look more closely at the resulting data. Respect and passion are prerequisites for this challenging arduous research, and moreover, ultimately these substantial works are worthy of respect. This is exemplified in Keller’s exposition of the viewpoint of a woman whom she had personally known. She attempts to tease out those sensibilities which characterize that particular style of science which shaped that woman at that particular moment in history – both the history of science and the history which molded her personal history. These are not separate watertight compartments, (the historical context, the history of a discipline or the biographic discourse of an individual – that is, the woman or man who compiles a biographic text, just as the man or woman who is the protagonist of the biography in question), but a set of elements marked by constant contact, the outcome of chance encounters, often the result of unexpected means of communication, circumstances of those 26 Ivi. 27 Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller, trans. by John and Anne Tedeschi (London: Penguin Books, 1980 [1976]), p. XV. 28 John Leavitt, ‘Meaning and Feeling in the Anthropology of Emotions’, American Ethnologist, 3 (1996), 514 – 39.

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elements from which ideas, intuition, and discovery stem. A relationship – the one between individual and society, institutions and individuals –, complementary, unceasing and eternal, an ongoing construction, a sort of interminable anthropos-poieo and koinos-poieo29 in which multifarious factors come into play and in which today what we call agency is everywhere highlighted. However, as Massimo Mazzotti underlines in his contribution, all this is cultural work, and we, as anthropologists and historians, study its manifestations rendered as ideas, material and intangible constructs that authors compose, undo, create, and recompose. Thus, it is necessary to use multifarious means to foster a relationship of continuous interdependence between all these elements because – especially in the case of biographies and autobiographies – what often emerges is not limited to the fact that culture is highly stratified, but rather we are dealing with the possibility – and in a certain sense the duty – to investigate the ‘ethical and moral economies that come into play’ (as underlined by Mazzotti at the beginning of his essay). Keller looks at the case of the strained approach towards an idea of free science, freed from its moorings of gender. Throughout her life McClintock made an effort to renounce some of the stereotypes that had characterized the female gender even if – and this seems to me the author’s most compelling point – it was these very refuted stereotypes that shaped her idea of science. With this in mind Keller cites the expressions ‘a feeling for the organism’, ‘the power of identification’, ‘forming a personal relationship with the object of study’, and ‘the importance of intuition’. These are all issues that have received attention from women historians of science who have contributed to this volume; moreover, they are all themes which have been much discussed in contemporary anthropology.30 For McClintock it was science that allowed gender to disappear ; she hoped to reach a neutrality of knowledge. This intriguing discourse has been taken up in several essays in this volume, and, in particular, in the contribution by Londa Schiebinger, who explains the reasons that prompted her in the quest 29 This theme was ‘opened’ by the anthropology of Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). Judging by the debate in the U.S. and Europe it has been fruitful both within anthropology and in other disciplines, such as the history of science, molecular anthropology, and branches of neuroscience. In Italy Francesco Remotti made a particularly rich contribution from the 1990s onward. There are two concepts that Francesco Remotti introduced into the common currency of Italian cultural anthropology (resuming the debate opened by various disciplines in the 1970s) and they refer to the cultural construction of humankind owing to its incomplete nature both from a biological and cultural viewpoint. Anthropos-poieo (anthropos and poieo) and koino-poiesi (anthropos and koin¦) are Greek expressions that indicate the extent to which humankind has conformed during its existence and been shaped through a constant relationship with society. 30 In the Italian case Leonardo Piasere’s contributions to Clifford Geertz’s interpretive anthropology spring to mind, and also authors such as Roy D’Andrade.

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to respond to a succession of tricky issues. Schiebinger writes: ‘The goal, as I see it, is not to do away with gender (or sex for that matter) but to understand what these are, and how they are formed and maintained’. For the author, the ideals of gender represented a powerful force which has shaped science, investing it with a precise form so as to establish some ideal and objective details. Gender is deconstructed by Schiebinger and re-interpreted in the light of categories such as ‘race’, ‘class’, and sexual preference; for Schiebinger gender studies paved the way for a transversal language in order that the disciplines might find a common language. In a robust analysis we glimpse an ethical and political responsibility reminiscent of the ‘radical anthropology’ that at the end of the 1960s doubted the very possibility of its existence, had it not been for commitment both within and outside of academia. On the conceptual and theoretical tools: Keller explains McClintock’s mode of working by making readers participate in the personal experience of a woman in academia wrestling with a biographic history that left a deep mark on the existence of the person who writes and witnesses. This is the very technique that Schiebinger, Abir-Am, and Findlen use, whereas Abir-Am underlines the importance of the inter-generational dialogue as a form of scientific education. Reading this essay put me in mind of the work carried out in Italy by, inter alia, Luisa Passerini, Pietro Clemente, and Alessandro Portelli who have given a great deal of thought to oral histories. The work began in the 1960s at a time when unease was prevalent in many disciplines; where intellectuals felt constrained by the straightjacket of structuralism, and enmeshed in binary and dichotomous oppositions. Many of these people continued their work of testimony with respect to the methods and the demands of transversality ; furthermore, they smuggled important debates and discussions on gender into Italy. In a recent essay on the value of interviewing, Portelli wrote: And our presence? Does it not interfere, falsify, change? Of course it does. That is why we are there. If it weren’t for us that document would not exist. Thus somehow, what took place at the end of the seventies and the beginning of the eighties, in the wake of the influence of psychology and linguistics, was a real Copernican revolution in the relationship with oral sources. Thus we have gone from the idea of having to purify/rid them of the interviewer’s presence and the subjectivity of the interviewee to the idea that the interviewer’s presence and the interviewee’s subjectivity constitute that story ; they constitute exactly the documentation of a relationship between people, culture and classes, between times and various strata of the first-person narrator.31

31 Alessandro Portelli, ‘L’inter-vista nella storia orale’, in Vive voci: L’intervista come fonte orale di documentazione, ed. by Massimo Pistacchi (Rome: Donzelli Editore, 2010), pp. 3 – 13 (p. 11).

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‘Empathy’ appears to be what determines the possibility of capturing that particular sensibility that characterized the emotional universe of Laura Bassi, Marie Curie, and McClintock, as well as that of Elizabeth Blackburn and Carol Greider. It would seem to be personal experience and historic memory that provide the vantage point from which history can be rethought. For without empathy, consciousness remains superficial. According to Georgina Ferry, sharing is invaluable in creating a link, a sort of gift, an intense reciprocity which fosters identification, a feeling of being at ease between biographer and biographee. The image created by Georgina Ferry particularly struck me since it contains many elements that break with the traditional purposes of biography (I have in mind biography in its meaning of laudatio and as an encomium of prominent figures), highlighting rather the modernity of total and pervasive sharing that the genre biography offers its readers. So empathy and resonance are invaluable for a knowledge which the author of each text makes use of wisely and with acumen. But what is it about? What do resonance and empathy mean for research? The Norwegian anthropologist Unni Wikan explains that resonance is pivotal in guiding us beyond words to reach the driving force of individuals. As the author states: Resonance thus demands something of both parties to communication, of both reader and author : an effort at feeling-thought; a willingness to engage with another world, life or idea; an ability to use one’s experience […], to try to grasp, or convey meanings that reside neither in words, ‘facts,’ nor text but are evoked in the meeting of one experiencing subject with another or with a text.32

It appears that today both anthropology and the history of science – as holds true of literature – are striving for an approach to understanding which is both united and ethical, as methodology and biography once were, and that these stratagems should to continue to be particularly appropriate, flexible and porous.

32 Unni Wikan, ‘Beyond the Words: The Power of Resonance’, American Ethnologist, 19 (1992), 460 – 82 (p. 463).

Contributors

Pnina G. Abir-Am has written widely on the history of molecular biology, the history of cultural memory, the history of women in science and the history of science funding. She received a History of Science Society Award for outstanding research. She has taught in Canada, Israel and the U.S., and held research positions in the U.S., France and Great Britain. She is the author of a forthcoming book DNA at 50: History and Memory. Since 2007, Pnina has been a Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University. Marta Cavazza was, up until 2012, Associate Professor of the History of Science at the University of Bologna. Her research concentrates on early modern Italian scientific institutions, on the participation of women in those of Bologna, and on the Enlightenment debate on gender, culture and society. She has written many articles focusing on figures like Laura Bassi, and women’s contribution to the spreading of Newton’s natural philosophy in eighteenth-century Italy. Georgina Ferry is a professional science writer, editor, and broadcaster. She is the author of biographies such as Dorothy Hodgkin: A Life (1998) and Max Perutz and the Secret of Life (2008). She is Chair of the Advisory Committee of the Oral History of British Science project at the British Library, and a member of the Editorial Board of the Biographical Memoirs of the Fellows of the Royal Society. Paula Findlen is Ubaldo Pierotti Professor of Italian History and Director of the Suppes Center for the History and Philosophy of Science, Stanford University. She has written many articles and books on women, gender and knowledge in early modern Italy and is completing a study of the world of Laura Bassi. Vita Fortunati is Professor of English and Comparative Literatures at the University of Bologna. She is the author of books and articles on utopian studies, the interaction between fiction and visual arts, and gender and women’s studies. She is the editor of many books, including, with R. Trousson, Dictionary of Literary

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Utopias (2000); Histoire transnationale de l’utopie litt¦raire et de l’utopisme (2008); and, with G. Castellani, C. Franceschi and E. Lamberti, of Biocomplexity at the Cutting Edge of Physics, System Biology and Humanities (2008). Evelyn Fox Keller is Professor Emerita of History and Philosophy of Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has been awarded numerous academic and professional honors, and is the internationally known author of many books on the history and philosophy of modern biology and on gender and science. Keller’s first book was a biography, A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock (1983). Zelda Alice Franceschi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Bologna. She is the author of books and articles on life stories/autobiographies in the history of anthropology, the Wich† population of Mis†on Nueva Pompeya (Argentina), and on gender issues. She is the editor of Le storie di vita: Percorsi nella storia dell’antropologia americana (2006); with C. Dasso, of Etno-graf†as: La escritura como testimonio entre los Wich† (2010); and of Razza, razzismo e antirazzismo: Modelli, rappresentazioni e ideologie (2011). Paola Govoni is Assistant Professor of History of Science at the University of Bologna. She is the author of books and articles on science and society in the 19th and 20th centuries. She recently published ‘The Power of Weak Competitors: Women Scholars, ‘Popular Science’ and the Building of a Scientific Community in Italy, 1860s – 1930s’, Science in Context (2013). Massimo Mazzotti is Director of the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society, and Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God (2007); the editor of Knowledge as Social Order: Rethinking the Sociology of Barry Barnes (2008); and, with Giuliano Pancaldi, of Impure Cultures: Interfacing Science, Technology, and Humanities (2010). Londa Schiebinger is the John L. Hinds Professor of History of Science, Stanford University, and Director of E.U./U.S. Gendered Innovations in Science, Health & Medicine, Engineering, and Environment. In 2010 Schiebinger presented a paper at the United Nations on Gender, Science, and Technology. In 2013 she presented the Gendered Innovations Project at the European Parliament. Schiebinger is the recipient of numerous awards, and her prize-winning books include: The Mind Has No Sex? (1989); Nature’s Body (1993); Plants and Empire (2008); and, with R. N. Proctor, Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance (2008).

Acknowledgments

Discussion on scientific (auto)biographies, of women in particular, began among some of the authors of this book at a workshop organized in 2009 at the University of Bologna. The occasion was the closing event of extensive work carried out within the European Thematic Network Project ACUME2 – ‘Interfacing Sciences, Literature, and Humanities’. It is a pleasure to thank Ferdinando Bersani, Marco Bresadola, Simona Cerrato, Sylvie Coyaud, Pino Donghi, Francesca Fava, Claudio Franceschi, Andrea Grignolio, Vanessa Maher, Graziano Piazza, Simona Poidomani, Valeria Savoia, Kirsten Shepherd-Barr, Annamaria Tagliavini, and Bianca Tarozzi who, in various ways, contributed to the workshop’s success. The dialogue on writing about lives in science continued with some of the participants – Marta Cavazza, Georgina Ferry, Vita Fortunati, Evelyn Fox Keller, Massimo Mazzotti –, while Pnina G. Abir-Am, Paula Findlen and Londa Schiebinger joined the project later with enthusiasm and generosity. It has been a privilege to work with all of them. We are grateful to Charles Hindley and Matteo Serafini for their precious assistance in the final editing of the book. Many thanks are due also to the Scientific and Editorial Boards of the Interfacing Sciences, Literature, and Humanities Series, for accepting the book. Thanks are due to Elena Agazzi, Raoul Calzoni, and Susan Bassnett for their kind collaboration. Finally, very special and warm thanks are due to Vita Fortunati, for her generous and unremitting support. P.G. and Z.A.F.

Name Index

Abelson, John 245, 249, 253, 258 Abir-Am, Pnina G. 9, 11 – 12, 14, 18, 22, 26, 28 – 29, 67, 258 – 259, 267, 273, 275, 279 Agazzi, Elena 279 Agnesi, Maria Gaetana 25 – 26, 74, 81, 89, 91, 93 – 94, 100 – 101, 104, 106 – 109, 111 – 114, 117, 122 – 136 Agnesi, Maria Teresa 131 Agnesi, Pietro 108, 131 Alberts, Bruce 240, 259 Aldrovandi, Ulisse 90 Algarotti, Francesco 73, 92, 96 Alic, Margaret 90 Alpenfels, Ethel Josephine 268 Amigoni, David 143 Anzoletti, Luisa 126 – 127 Ardinghelli, Mariangela 94, 100 – 101, 107, 109 – 114 Arrhenius, Svante A. 151 Atatürk, Kemal 220 Austen, Jane 20 Averna-Sacc—, Rosario 217 Ayrton, Hertha P. S. Marks 150 Bagni, Biagio 109 Baldi, Bernardino 119 Balestracci, Duccio 115 Bandiera, Giovan Niccolý 112 Barbapiccola, Giuseppa Eleonora 94 Baret, Jeanne 50 Barnes, Barry 24, 137 Bassi Veratti, Laura Maria Caterina 9,

24 – 25, 67 – 86, 89, 91 – 94, 96 – 98, 100 – 107, 111 – 115, 128, 276 Bassnett, Susan 279 Bateson, Catherine M. 167, 172 Bateson, Gregory 167, 175, 177 – 179 Battistini, Andrea 168 Beadle, George W. 238 Beckendorf, Steve 247 Behar, Ruth 269 Bellieni, Camillo 202 – 203 Benedict, Ruth Fulton 27, 161, 163 – 168, 173, 175 – 177, 179 – 186, 270 – 272 Benedict XIV, Pope 96, 108, 113 Bentivoglio Davia, Laura 96, 103, 114 Berenson, Mary 216 Bergalli Gozzi, Luisa 106 Bergson, Henri-Louis 158 Berlan, Francesco 99 – 100 Berlin, Isaiah 55 Bernal, John Desmond 56 – 57, 224 Bernhardt, Sarah 194 Bersani, Ferdinando 279 Betusi, Giuseppe 105 Bianchi, Giovanni 95 – 96 Bianconi, Gian Ludovico 77 Bissell, Mina 252 Blackburn, Elizabeth H. 9, 11, 22, 26, 28 – 29, 225, 227, 229 – 231, 234 – 235, 237 – 242, 247, 251, 255 – 256, 258 – 259, 276 Bloomfield, Mary 181 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 44 – 45 Boas, Franz Uri 27, 161 – 166, 171, 173, 175, 178, 180 – 182, 184 – 185, 267, 271 Boccaccio, Giovanni 98, 105

282 Bocchi, Dorotea 99 Bohr, Niels H. D. 62 Bonafede, Carolina 101, 103, 105 Borel, Marguerite (Camille Marbo) 150 Bourdieu, Pierre 118, 137 Bourguet, Louis 77 Boyle, Robert 88 Bragg, Lawrence William 57, 63 Bresadola, Marco 279 Brico, Antonia 33 Briosi, Giovanni 209 – 210 Brittain, Vera Mary 224 Britten, Benjamin Edward 55 Brown, Ivor John Carnegie 194 Brucker, Johann Jacob 76, 78 – 79, 112 Buffon, George-Louis Leclerc, Comte de 47, 49 Bunzel, Ruth Leah 165, 175, 271 Buonsignori, Maddalena 99 Busi, Patrizia 71 Bynum, William 258 Byron, George Gordon 62 Caldani, Leopoldo Marc’Antonio 96 Calvino, Floriano 191, 215, 218 Calvino, Italo 27 – 28, 30, 187 – 198, 200, 205, 207, 211, 213 – 221, 273 Calvino, Mario 28, 189, 191, 193, 210 – 214, 216 – 218 Calzoni, Raul 279 Caminer Turra, Elisabetta 106 Canonici Fachini, Ginevra 99 Carr, Edward H. 7, 12 Carson, Rachel Louise 270 Castellucci, Paolo Quintilio 109 – 111, 114 Cavazza, Marta 9, 24, 92, 100, 128, 273, 279 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle 89 Cecchi, Emilio 196 – 197 Ceranski, Beate 71 – 72, 92 – 93 Cerrato, Simona 279 Charcot, Jean-Martin 155, 157 Ch–telet, Êmilie de Breteuil, Madam du 88 – 89, 112 Chekhov, Anton P. 194

Name Index

Clark, John A. 253 Clemente, Pietro 275 Clifford, James 269 Cole, Sally 166 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 62 Comelli, Giovanni Battista 70 Comfort, Nathaniel C. 21 – 22, 35, 39, 41 – 42, 242 Comte, Auguste 47, 120 Conrad, Joseph 196 – 197 Conway, Anne 88 – 89 Cook, Miranda 63 Cousturier, Lucie 199 Cox, Jane 62 Cox, Virginia 88 Coyaud, Sylvie 279 Cressman, Luther Sheeleigh 178 Crick, Francis Harry Compton 60, 188 Croce, Benedetto 201 – 204, 215 Crookes, William 158 Crowfoot, John 56 Crowfoot, Molly 56 Cubeddu Mameli, Maddalena 200 Curie, EugÀne 152 Curie, Eve 146 – 150, 152, 154 Curie, Marie 19, 26 – 27, 33, 55, 141, 143, 146 – 156, 158 – 159, 229, 232, 237, 243, 256, 276 Curie, Pierre 146 – 152, 154, 157 – 158 Dalle Donne, Maria 91, 94, 101 – 102, 104 d’Andrea, Bettina 99 d’Andrea, Giovanni 99 d’Andrea, Novella 99 Daniell, Ellen 11, 28 – 29, 225 – 227, 231 – 234, 237, 242 – 259 Darnell, Regna 184 – 185 d’Arpinello dalla Foglia, Raniero 103 Davis, Angela 249 Davis, Natalie Zemon 87 Davy, Humphry 62 de la Croix, Jean FranÅois 106 de’ Liuzzi, Mondino 103 de Martino, Nicola 96 de Pisan, Christine 99, 105 De Pisis, Filippo 219

Name Index

Delacroix, Henri-Edmond 199 Delfini Dosi, Maria Vittoria 77, 98 della Chiesa, Francesco Agostino 105 Della Torre, Giovanni Maria 109 Deloria, Ella Cara 163 – 165 Desmond, Adrian 20 Diogenes Laertius 118 – 119 Dolfi, Pompeo Scipione 104 Donato, Maria Pia 107 Donghi, Pino 279 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 194 Druet, EugÀne 199 Duden, Barbara 43 Durkheim, Êmile 271 Duse, Eleonora 194 – 195, 197 Duval, Beatrice 28, 190 – 192, 198 – 200, 207, 216, 219 – 221 Duval, Êtienne 198 Duval, Henri 198 Dyson, Freeman John 188 Echol, Harrison 247 Edel, Leon Joseph 144 – 145 Ehrman, Ester 88 Einstein, Albert 35 – 36, 61, 151, 232 Elena, Alberto 92 Elisabeth of Bohemia, Princess 88 Elliot, Clark A. 67 Ellmann, Richard 144 Enquist, Per Olov 27, 141, 154 – 159 Ercolani Ratta, Elisabetta 96, 114 Evans-Pritchard, Edward Evan 177, 271 Fantuzzi, Giovanni 76, 79, 103, 113 Fava, Francesca 279 Fedele, Cassandra 105 Feijoo, Benito Jeronimo 105, 112 F¦n¦on, F¦lix 199 Ferri, Pietro Leopoldo 99 – 100 Ferry, Georgina 9, 11, 19, 21, 23 – 24, 273, 276, 279 Findlen, Paula 9, 19, 24 – 25, 72 – 73, 128, 273, 275, 279 Fischer, Ann Kindrick 264, 268 Flammarion, Camille 158 Fletcher, Alice Cunningham 165, 267, 272

283 Fontana, Felice 96 Fontana, Francesca 90 Fortunati, Vita 9, 19, 26 – 27, 270, 273, 279 Fortune, Reo Franklin 167, 175 – 178 Foucault, Michel 129, 157 Franceschi, Claudio 26, 279 Franceschi, Zelda Alice 9 – 10, 20, 26 – 27 Franceschi Ferrucci, Caterina 101 – 102 Franklin, Rosalind 19 Frayn, Michael 62 Freeman, Derek John 177 Fried, Herbert Morton 265 Frisi, Paolo 119 – 120 Frommlet, Anna Ekatherina 205 Gadda, Carlo Emilio 188 Galilei, Galileo 119 – 120, 126 Gall, Joseph G. 238, 240, 242, 258 Gallagher, Catherine 48 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand 220 Geertz, Clifford James 184 Gelfand, David H. 247 Gentile, Giovanni 204 – 205, 215 Ghirardacci, Cherubino 103 Ghiselli, Anton Francesco 104 Gielgud, John 55 Ginzburg, Carlo 273 Giuliani, Alessandra 103 Goddard, Pliny Earle 174 Golde, Peggy 264 Goldenweiser, Alexander 174, 182 Goldfrank, Esther Schiff 165, 271 Goldsmith, Barbara 19, 27, 141, 146, 149, 151 – 153, 156, 158 Gordon, Deborah A. 269 Gordon, Lyndall 11 Gould, Stephen Jay 36, 48 Gouy, Georges Louis 158 Govoni, Paola 9, 19, 26 – 28, 273 Gozzadini, Bitisia 98 – 99, 101 – 103, 106 Greider, Carol W. 9, 11, 22, 26, 28 – 29, 225, 227, 230 – 231, 234, 236 – 238, 240 – 242, 256, 276 Griaule, Marcel 271 Grignolio, Andrea 62, 279 Grillo Borromeo, Clelia del 94 – 96, 114

284

Name Index

Guerci, Luciano 95 Gunther, Erna 268 Guthrie, Christine 253 Haddon, Alfred Cort 176, 178 Hales, Stephen 94, 109 – 110 Hall, Marie Boas 44 Hankins, Thomas 121 – 123, 127, 129 Hardy, Godfrey Harold 62 Harrison, Jenny 243, 250 Harth, Erica 88 Heisenberg, Werner K. 62, 188 Henry, Jules 166 Herschel, William Frederick 62 Hessen, Boris 44 Heyman, Ken 175 Hindley, Charles 279 Hinsley, Curtis M. 271 Hodgkin, Dorothy Mary Crowford 11, 19, 23, 55 – 63 Hodgkin, Thomas Lionel 56 Holmes, Richard 62 Hopkins, Nancy 230 Hoyle, Fred 188 Hume, David 44 Hurston, Zora Neale 161, 163 – 165, 185, 272 Hutchinson, Evelyn 178 Hutton, John Henry 178 Hutton, Sarah 88 Huxley, Thomas Henry 16 Hymes, Dell 172 Ibsen, Henrik J.

195

Joliot-Curie, IrÀne 55, 150 – 152 Judson, Horace Freeland 154 Jung, Carl Gustav 174 Kardiner, Abram 271 Keller, Evelyn Fox 9, 14, 17 – 18, 20 – 22, 29, 87, 187, 267, 273 – 275, 279 Kendrew, John Cowdery 57 King, Mary-Claire 253 Kirch, Gottfried 45 Kleinert, Andreas 93

Klinman, Judith P. 253 Knight, Arthur 247 Koblitz, Ann 39 – 40 Koehl, Mimi 253 Koshland, Daniel 252 – 253 Koshland, Marian 252 – 253 Koyr¦, Alexandre 12 Kroeber, Alfred Louis 161, 185, 271 Kropotkin, Peter 212 Krupat, Arnold 162 Kuhn, Thomas Samuel 16, 234 Lagrange, Joseph Louis 124 Lamphere, Louise 271 Landes, Ruth 161, 163, 165 – 166, 182, 185, 272 Langevin, Andr¦ 151 Langevin, Jeanne 150 – 151 Langevin, Paul 148 – 151, 156, 158 – 159 Lapsley, Hilary 169 Laqueur, Thomas W. 48 Leavis, Frank Raymond 142 Lebedintzev, Vsevolod Vladimirovicˇ 212 Lee, Dorothy Demetracopolou 268 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 45 Levati, Carlo Ambrogio 98 – 99 Levi, Giuseppe 203 Levi, Primo 188 L¦vi-Strauss, Claude 271 Limoges, Camille 258 Lindgren, Johanna 155 Linnaeus, Carl 46, 49 Linton, Ralph 271 Lipkind, William 166 Locke, John 44, 47 Logan, Gabriella Berti 71, 93 London, Jack 177 Loria, Gino 124 – 125, 127 Lourau, Ren¦ 167 Lowie, Robert 174, 271 Lubbock, Sybil 216 Lunelli, Benedetta Clotilde 94 Luria, Salvador E. 250 Lusignani, Maria Elena 94 Lussu, Emilio 202 – 203 Lutkehaus, Nancy 165, 170, 174, 180

285

Name Index

Macchiavelli, Alessandro 75 – 76, 98, 103 – 104 Macchiavelli, Carlo Antonio 75 – 76, 98, 103 Macchiavelli, Elisabetta 75 – 76 Magliani, Eduardo 99 Maher, Vanessa 279 Maier, Charles S. 67 Malebranche, Nicolas 131, 133 – 134 Malinowski, Bronislaw Kasper 168, 175 – 176, 178, 271 Mameli, Efisio 28, 189, 191, 200 – 209, 215, 218 Mameli, Giovanni Battista 200 Mameli Calvino, Eva 27, 188 – 191, 193, 198 – 200, 205, 207 – 221 Manfredi, Eustachio 76, 79, 112 Manfredi, Maddalena 91 Manfredi, Teresa 91 Mannessier, Alfred Joseph 205 Mannessier Mameli, Anne Ursule (Anna) 27, 189, 191, 200, 205 – 210, 221 Maraini, Dacia 149, 156 Marcus, George E. 269 Marcuse, Herbert 249 Maria Theresa, Empress 124 Masini, Antonio 103 Mason, Otis T. 164 Massin, Marthe 199 Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau de 136 Mazzotti, Massimo 9, 24 – 26, 100, 273 – 274, 279 Mazzuchelli, Giammaria 106 – 114 McClintock, Barbara 17 – 18, 21 – 22, 29, 33 – 42, 62, 87, 187, 238, 274 – 276 Mead, Margaret 27, 161, 163 – 171, 173 – 186, 270 – 272 Mead, Martha Ramsey 171 Medaglia Faini, Diamante 94 Maddox, Brenda 19 Melli, Elio 71 Melville, Herman 177 Menuhin, Yehudi 55 Merchant, Carolyn 88 Merian, Maria Sibylla 45, 49 – 50, 88 Merton, Robert K. 44

Metraux, Rhoda 172, 180 Mitchell, William 179 Mitterrand, FranÅois 146 Momigliano, Arnaldo D. 13 – 14, 145 Montucla, Jean Etienne 119 Moore, James 20 Morandi Manzolini, Anna 81, 89, 91, 94, 101, 104, 114 Morelli, Salvatore 101 Morgan, Lewis Henry 271 Muratori, Ludovico 130 Mussolini, Benito 95, 194 – 195, 201, 203, 205, 214 – 217, 220 Natali, Giulio 95 Natta, Giulio 218 Needham, Joseph 178 Newton, Isaac 88, 119 – 120, 126 Nodari, Lincoln 217 Nollet, Jean-Antoine 109 – 110, 113 – 114 Nora, Pierre 8 Oddo, Giuseppe 200 – 201, 206 Olivier, Laurence 55 Origo, Iris Margaret 216 Orlandi, Pellegrino Antonio 104 Ornstein, Martha 44 Palladino, Eusapia 158 Pancaldi, Giuliano 136 Pardue, Mary-Lou 244 Parezo, Nancy J. 166, 268 – 271 Parsons, Elsie Clews 164 – 165, 182, 185, 271 – 272 Passerini, Luisa 275 Pavese, Cesare 197, 221 Pearson, Karl 136 Peiser, Gisela C. M. 61 Pellegrini, Ernestina 145 Pende, Nicola 194 Perrin, Jean Baptiste 158 Perutz, Max Ferdinand 23, 57, 59 – 61 Petrini, Giuseppe Antonio 134 Piazza, Graziano 279 Piccillo, Caterina 110

286 Pignatelli, Faustina, Princess of Colubrano 94, 114 Pio XI, Pope 203 Piscopia, Elena Lucrezia Cornaro (Cornelia) 69 Pissarro, Camille 199 Planck, Max 188 Poidomani, Simona 279 Pollacci, Gino 209 – 210, 215 Portelli, Alessandro 275 Porter, Theodore M. (Ted) 136 Powdermaker, Hortense 268 Powell, Wesley John 267 Prince of Tarsia (see Spinelli, Ferdinando Vincenzo) Proctor, Robert N. 43, 49 – 51 Pycior, Helena M. 154 Quain, Buell H. 166 Quinn, Susan 19, 27, 141, 146, 148 – 151, 156, 158 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred Reginald 178, 271 Radin, Paul 161 – 162, 174, 185 Ramanujan, Srinivasa 62 Rampinelli, Ramiro 96 Reichard, Gladys 161, 163, 165, 185, 271 Resnevic Signorelli, Olga 28, 190 – 198, 200, 207, 216, 218 – 219, 221 Reyneau, Charles Ren¦ 131, 133 Ribera, Pietro Paolo de 104 Richet, Charles Robert 158 Riskin, Jessica 14 Roccati, Cristina 91, 95, 104, 114 Rodella, Giambattista 114 Romano, Massimo 145 Rossi, Alice 264 Rossiter, Margaret W. 87, 163, 259, 264 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 47 Royer, Cl¦mence 67 Rubin, Harry 246 Ruskai, Mary Beth 39 Russell, Bertrand 55 Rysselberghe, Th¦o van 199

Name Index

Salvemini, Gaetano 202 Sambrook, Joe 258 Sanger, Frederick (Fred) 63, 238 – 240, 258 Sanjek, Roger 263 – 266 Sapir, Edward 27, 173 – 174, 177, 181, 183 – 185, 271 Sarasohn, Lisa 88 – 89 Sarfatti, Margherita 194 Sarton, George 15 Savoia, Valeria 279 Scalfari, Eugenio 193 Schachman, Howard K. 244 Schiebinger, Londa 9, 14, 18, 21 – 23, 88 – 89, 267, 273 – 275, 279 Scupoli, Lorenzo 132 Sedat, John 239 – 240, 259 Serafini, Matteo 279 Serdonati, Francesco 105 Shelley, Mary 62 Shepherd-Barr, Kirsten 279 Shortland, Michael 122 Signac, Paul 190, 199 Signorelli, Angelo 194 Singleton, Anne 180, 184 Singleton, Mary F. 243 Skłodowska, Bronia 148 – 149 Skłodowska, Helena 148 Smith, Erminnie 267 Snow, Charles Pierce 221, 237 Sobel, Dava 19 Söderqvist, Thomas 15, 122, 137, 142 Soemmerring, Samuel Thomas von 44 – 45 Sontag, Susan 272 Spallanzani, Lazzaro 96 Spinelli, Ferdinando Vincenzo, Prince of Tarsia 109 – 110 Stanley, Wendell M. 244 Stegani, Lorenzo 75 Stent, Gunther 247, 250 – 251 Stevenson, Matilda Coxe 267, 271 – 272 Stevenson, Robert Louis 177 Stimson, Dorothy 44 Suardi, Giambattista 96 Summers, Lawrence H. (Larry) 125, 230

287

Name Index

Summers, William 239 Sweeney, Beatrice M. 240 – 241 Szostak, Jack 242, 259 Tacconi, Gaetano 72, 96 Tagliavini, Annamaria 279 Tambroni, Clotilde 91, 104 Tanzi, Carlo Antonio 107 – 108 Tarozzi, Bianca 279 Terrall, Mary 136 Tettoni, Emma 98, 101 Thackray, Arnold 12 Thatcher, Margaret 57 Togliatti, Palmiro 203 Tolstoy, Lev Nikolayevich 194 Tomasi, Raffaella 71 Töpffer, Adam-Wolfgang 198 Truesdell, Clifford Ambrose 127, 130 Turing, Alan 62 Twain, Mark 29 Tylor, Edward Burnett 271 Vaihinger, Hans 43 Valenti Gonzaga, Silvio, Cardinal 108 Vallisneri, Antonio 94 – 95 Vance, Carol S. 265 Veratti, Ferdinando 75 Veratti, Giuseppe 69, 75 – 76, 78, 92

Verhaeren, Êmile 199 Verona, Agostino 99 Vesalius, Andreas 45 Villani, Carlo 100 Vittorini, Elio 197 Volta, Alessandro 136 Waddington, Conrad Hal 178 Wagley, Charles 166 Watson, James (Jim) 36, 60, 188, Weltfish, Gene 165 Westfall, Richard S. 126 Whewell, William 120 Whitemore, Hugh 62 Wikan, Unni 276 Winkelmann, Maria Margaretha 45 Wittman, Blanche 155 Woolf, Virginia 13 – 14, 20, 145 Wright, Abbey 63 Yeo, Richard 122 Yost, Edna 179 Zahm, John Augustine 90 – 91 Zanotti, Francesco Maria 96, 112 Zanotti, Giampietro 111 Zilsel, Edgar 44