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Chemical knowledge is developed in the lab and then communicated through writing and classrooms. Even when women were shut out of established labs and classrooms, women chemists, often working in their own private labs, got the word out to other women.
Marie Meurdrac is one of the earliest examples of this. She published her book, Charitable and Easy Chemistry for Women, in 1666.
Jane Marcet's 1806 book, Conversations on Chemistry, taught chemistry lessons through fictional conversations between a teacher and her two female students. This popular book went through numerous editions and was published in many different languages.
About Marie Meurdrac
Marie Meurdrac (died before 1687) was a 17th-century practitioner of chemical arts in Paris. Very little is known about her life except what can be gleaned from her book, La Chymie charitable et facile, en faveur des dames [Charitable and Easy Chemistry for Women], and its several editions in French. It was also translated into German and Italian, indicating its appeal to 17th- and 18th-century readers.
Meurdrac wrote her book on the basis of wide reading in the chemical literature of the day and her own experience preparing cosmetics and medicines, some of which she distributed to the poor; hence, the “charitable chemistry” of the title. According to her preface, she originally intended her work merely to help herself remember all that she had learned, but when she had finished writing, she realized that she had created a fine product that should be shared with others. Nevertheless, she deliberated for two more years before turning the manuscript over to a printer for publishing, because in her day authoring books was unusual for a woman, if not unknown. As she states in the preface,
“I objected to myself that teaching was not the profession of a woman; that she ought to remain in silence, to listen and to learn, without bearing witness that she knows: that it is above her to give a work to the public, and that such a reputation is not by any means advantageous since men scorn and are bored with the productions of a woman’s mind.”
But she sturdily maintained that other women had successfully published and argued, “Minds have no sex, and if those of women were cultivated like those of men, and if one took the same time and expense in their education, they would equal them.”
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Top: Woodcuts from Marie Meurdrac's Accessible and Easy Chemistry for Women. Courtesy Othmer Library, CHF. Bottom: Portrait of Jane Marcet (1769–1858). Courtesy Edgar Fahs Smith Collection, University of Pennsylvania Library.
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Her book was organized into six parts. The first five parts followed the pattern established for chemical handbooks aimed at teaching how to prepare medicines—first general chemical operations, followed by discussions of how to obtain medicines from a wide variety of plants, animals, and minerals, and then a section on how to make compound medicines from these sources. Meurdrac added a special section on cosmetics. She not only provided recipes for preparing makeup, dusting powders, hair dyes, and perfumes, but she also gave warnings about poisonous substances then commonly contained in such beauty aids. For example, she warned against using skin whiteners containing mercury sublimate (HgCl2) and anti-itch preparations containing “tin glass” (basic bismuth nitrate, Bi[OH]2NO3).
About Jane Marcet
The influential science writer Jane Marcet (1769–1858) was born Jane Haldimand to a wealthy Swiss banking family residing in London. There are no documents from her early life, but education for girls in intellectual families such as hers would have included natural philosophy (science) as well as languages and history. In 1799 Jane married Alexander Marcet (1770–1822), another London-based Swiss, who graduated from medical school at the University of Edinburgh in 1797. The couple eventually had three children.
Alexander practiced as a physician in London and became a lecturer on chemistry at Guy’s Hospital in London. The Marcets counted many scientists among their friends, including Mary Somerville, a mathematician and astronomer. Their social circle also included other women writers and scholars. In 1817 Jane Marcet’s father died, leaving her a substantial legacy, and her husband gave up medical practice to devote himself full-time to chemistry.
Marcet began writing what became best-selling books on science after attending a course of public lectures given by the chemist Humphry Davy. She enjoyed them, she said, but she found them confusing until a kind "friend"—almost certainly her husband—explained the concepts to her in a series of "familiar conversations." Conversations framed in question-and-answer format were considered to be especially appropriate for teaching science to women. (Men, who learned their science at a university, would be taught in lecture form.) That was the inspiration for Marcet’s Conversations on Natural Philosophy, first published in 1805, followed by Conversations on Chemistry in 1806. She went on to write Conversations on Political Economy in 1816 and Conversations on Plant Physiology in 1821. All of the books feature discussions between a teacher, Mrs. B., and her two pupils, Emily and Caroline. Emily, the well-behaved older sister, is about 13 years old and ready, according to her teacher, "to acquire a general knowledge of the laws by which the natural world is governed." Caroline, a few years younger, is less anxious to please and often asks harder questions. But she is, in her sister’s phrase, "an inquisitive little creature," and her questions, with Mrs. B’s or Emily’s answers, often have the value of furthering the lesson.
Marcet’s books were very influential. Her most famous reader was the chemist and physicist Michael Faraday, who read the page proofs for her book while working as a printer’s apprentice and was inspired by them to go into science instead. But thousands of other people must have read them, too, because her books were best-sellers. Conversations on Chemistry alone went through 16 British editions and at least 16 American ones. It was also translated into French and German. Her works became standard texts at girls’ schools throughout the United States, and individual copies still bear the names of their owners. Marcet’s books express what must have been the philosophy, and the experience, of their author: that girls, like their brothers, should keep pace with up-to-date natural and human sciences.
For Further Reading on the Web
Conversations on Chemistry — the complete 10th edition of Marcet’s book in PDF format, from the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Inspired by Science: Janet Marcet and Michael Faraday — an online exhibit from the Northwestern University Library.
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