Women Authors in the Neville Library

Gabrielle-Émilie de Breteuil, Marquise du Châtelet . Portrait painted by an unknown artist of the French school, 18th century. Courtesy of Château de Breteuil, France.

By Mary Ellen Bowden and Tanya Avakian

Contributions to Early Chemical Theory

Several learned women attempted to make original contributions to the fundamental theories of chemistry in the 17th and 18th centuries––often encountering serious opposition. Unlike authors of “books of secrets” (see CH, Summer 2005, pp. 23–25), who provided directions for preparing new or improved remedies, dyes, or other chemical products, these writers were concerned with changing the underlying chemical science. Several of them also wielded influence as scientific translators. CHF’s Roy G. Neville Historical Chemical Library holds nearly all the treatises by these women.

Class and marital status helped gain these women entrée into the world of science. The Neville Library’s one 17th century example is Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle and wife of a Fellow of the Royal Society. Her interests ranged across physics, astronomy, natural history, and chemistry. She was well-read in the work of current scientific authors—those writing in English and those who had been translated into English, among them Johannes van Helmont and René Descartes. The Neville Library holds a number of her works: Philosophical Letters (London, 1664), Grounds of Natural Philosophy, (2nd ed., London, 1668), and Observations upon Experimental Philosophy, bound with The Description of a New World (2nd ed., London, 1668). The last work describes a female-dominated utopia in which Cavendish does the teaching.

Cavendish was a rationalist in that she relied on her own reason to evaluate the ideas of her male contemporaries and to propose theories of her own; she nonetheless attacked Descartes and Thomas Hobbes for their excessive rationalism. Cavendish was permitted to attend a meeting of the society in 1667 to witness two of Robert Boyle’s experiments, though only after a heated debate about the appropriateness of welcoming a woman visitor. But she remained unimpressed with excessive dependence on experiment, and in her Grounds of Natural Philosophy she suggested that men should seek the causes of phenomena, while relegating experimentation to women. Indeed, in her day women, authors of “books of secrets,” were getting their hands dirty with chemical operations. Among them was “W.M.” (see the Summer 2005 article), whom Cavendish probably knew personally, since both had served Charles I’s queen, Henrietta-Marie, in exile. In any case, Cavendish considered herself possessed of intelligence superior to that of other women. Not surprisingly, she was all but ignored by the male natural philosophers with whom she attempted correspondence.

In 18th-century France women of the Duchess of Newcastle’s social class were to be found at the center of scientific discourse. In contrast to Margaret Cavendish, they were confirmed experimentalists, like their male peers. Among these was the accomplished Gabrielle-Émilie de Breteuil,Marquise du Châtelet, protector and intimate friend of François Marie Arouet (Voltaire). The pair began exploring the fascinating field of chemistry when Voltaire decided to build a laboratory in du Châtelet’s château at Cirey to prepare for a prize competition set in 1737 by the Académie des Sciences. The prize was to reward an adequate explanation of combustion, one of the central problems of 18th-century chemistry. At first du Châtelet assisted Voltaire in his researches, but later she decided to work in secret at night on her own interpretations of these experiments and those of others. For fear of evoking Voltaire’s anger, she did not reveal that she had sent in her own entry until it was announced that the prize had gone to Leonhard von Euler and two less well known competitors.Far from being annoyed, Voltaire arranged for his and du Châtelet’s memoirs to be published along with the three winning papers in 1739 (and again in 1752).

The edition of du Châtelet’s memoir in the Neville Library is one that she published herself: Dissertation sur la nature et la propagation du feu (Paris, 1744). In it she displays her knowledge of the works of roughly contemporary experimenters on the nature of fire and her keen critical abilities in evaluating such experiments. On the vexing question of whether fire had weight and could account for weight gains and losses in various chemical reactions, she—unlike Voltaire––presented a carefully reasoned conclusion that such phenomena were probably due to the addition or subtraction of “foreign” or “heterogeneous bodies,” not fire itself, which she deemed very nearly weightless. Du Châtelet is probably most famous for making the definitive translation into French of Newton’s Principia—published in 1759, after her death from childbed fever.

Marie Thiroux d’Arconville, wife of a member of the Paris parliament and a victim in her 20s of disfiguring smallpox, did not participate in the life of the salons, although she received into her home many of the great intellectuals of her day, including Voltaire. She published on history, morality, physics, medicine, natural history, and chemistry––usually writing anonymously or under a male pseudonym. She has gained notoriety in today’s gender studies for the image of the female skeleton she published in 1759 with her translation of Alexander Munro’s Anatomy. The skeleton’s rib cage is disproportionately small when compared with its hips, and it has a smaller head-to-body ratio than the proportions in her depiction of a male skeleton––features that Thiroux d’Arconville, in the plate legend, connects to the inferior capacities of women. (The female’s rib cage was probably deformed by longterm use of a corset, although Thiroux d’Arconville herself makes no such observation.)

Present in the Neville Library is Thiroux d’Arconville’s 1759 translation of Peter Shaw’s 400-page Chemical lectures . . . for the improvement of arts, trades, and natural philosophy. (Shaw was a popular lecturer on chemistry who became physician to England’s King George III.) For her translation Thiroux d’Arconville wrote a 94-page preliminary essay detailing the history of applied chemistry and disparaging alchemy. Her original contribution to chemistry was a meticulous study of putrefaction, Essai pour servir a l’histoire de la putréfaction (Paris, 1766). Daring to differ with Hermann Boerhaave, she realized that all organized bodies undergo putrefaction or fermentation—not just plants. She proceeded to carry out hundreds of experiments over a five-year period, treating samples of meat with all manner of supposed preservatives, including mineral acids and bases. For each preservative she carefully recorded the time and temperature, as well as other variables, at which samples decayed, and she produced elaborate charts displaying the results in descending order of the preservatives’ effectiveness.

The Neville Library also includes the published contributions to the chemical revolution of Marie-Anne Paulze Lavoisier: her translation (Paris, 1788) of Richard Kirwan’s Essay on Phlogiston (1787), containing the notes by Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier and his followers that helped convert Kirwan and others to the new chemistry; her illustrations for Lavoisier’s Traité élémentaire de chimie (Paris, 1789); her translation (Paris, 1792) of Kirwan’s “Of the strength of acids, and the proportion of ingredients in neutral salts” (1790); and her edition of Lavoisier’s two-volume posthumous Mémoires de chimie (Paris, 1805). Beyond the influence of her publications, her sparkling mentality captivated the international community of natural philosophers who participated in Lavoisier’s experiments at the Arsenal laboratory. The salon she founded in calmer times drew back Lavoisier’s community, which had scattered after his guillotining.

Elizabeth Fulhame was an English physician’s wife, not a member of the glitterati of her day. Her only publication was An Essay on Combustion, with a View to the New Art of Dying and Painting, Wherein the Phlogistic and Antiphlogistic Hypotheses are Proved Erroneous (London, 1794). It occupies an interesting territory midway between a practitioner’s handbook and a treatise on fundamental theory. Fulhame reports that she was led from her initial objective—that of producing gold and silver cloth by chemical deposition—toward a new interpretation of combustion. Her many experiments brought her to the conclusion that water plays an essential role in all oxidations and reductions. According to her, its decomposition is the only source of oxygen in oxidations and of hydrogen in reductions.

In her preface Fulhame predicted that critics would look down on her book because it was written by a woman “and should the spectre [the‘semblance of learning’] appear in the shape of woman, the pangs which they suffer are truly dismal.” It did indeed receive mixed reviews: Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, liked it; Joseph Priestley did not. It appeared in a German translation in 1798 and in an American edition in 1810. The identity of her American editor remains a matter of debate––perhaps James Woodhouse or Thomas Cooper. One of these men may have been responsible for Fulhame’s election as an honorary member of the short-lived Chemical Society of Philadelphia. Original contributions to chemistry by a woman do not appear again in the Neville Library until Marie Curie’s doctoral dissertation, Recherches sur les substances radioactives (Paris, 1904), followed by her Traité de radioactivité (Paris, 1910). The gap may reflect the ever more private roles that learned women of the 19th century were constrained to take. The Neville Library does contain 18th- and 19th-century popularizations that point to women’s continuing interest in chemical subjects (see, e.g., CH, Spring 2006, pp. 29–30).

For Further Reading

Clucas, Stephen, ed. A Princely Brave Woman: Essays on Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 2003.

Davenport, Derek A.; Kathleen M. Ireland.“The Ingenious, Lively and Celebrated Mrs. Fulhame and the Dyer’s Hand.” Bulletin for the History of Chemistry 5 (1989), 37–42.

Poirier, Jean-Pierre. Histoire des femmes de science en France: Du Moyen Age à la Révolution. Paris: Pygmalion/Gérard Watelet, 2002.

———. La science et l’amour: Madame Lavoisier. Paris: Pygmalion, 2004.

Rayner-Canham, Marelene; Geoffrey Rayner-Canham. Women in Chemistry: Their Changing Roles from Alchemical Times to the Mid-Twentieth Century. Philadelphia: CHF, 1998.

Schiebinger, Londa. The Mind Has No Sex? Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989.

Zinsser, Judith P., ed. Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005.