In recent years, the efforts to recognize and develop the work of women in the sciences have brought to the fore a number of important scientists who a mere fifty years ago may have been left largely unknown, whose work may have been unrecognized or ascribed to another, or whose talents may have been discouraged – or even inhibited – from being developed. And with this, a number of other women whose accomplishments in the past have begun to receive their justly deserved and long overdue recognition.
Regarding the latter, Yale University Press will this very month be publishing Prof. Nina Rattner Gelbart‘s new book Minerva’s French Sisters; Women of Science in Enlightenment France that brings to light the names, lives, and remarkable works of six women who have been too-long left unrecognized. Presenting short biographies of:
- Elisabeth Ferrand (mathematician and philosopher)
- Nicole Reine Lepaute (astronomer)
- Jeanne Barret (field naturalist)
- Madeleine Françoise Basseporte (garden botanist and illustrator)
- Marie-Marguerite Biheron (anatomist and inventor)
- Geneviève d’Arconville (chemist)
Prof. Rattner Gelbart brings to her readers the vast range of activities engaged in by, challenges that faced, and discoveries made by these remarkable women in their respective fields. To these biographies, she also adds an “unorthodox” but highly effective twist of including “interludes” between each chapter in which are presented letters she herself has written to each her subjects detailing her own thoughts about what she has discovered and subsequently written about them. This is an unusual technique for a historian, to be sure, but one that serves particularly well to bring the humanity of these six all-but-forgotten women into a more vital perspective, and as a result will better fix them into the minds of her readers and as such restore them to a more deserved place in the living narrative of the history of natural history and science.
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