RESEARCH General Arts World Affairs

WOMEN AND THE SCIENCES
Book looks at how female writers of 19th century promoted sciences

"Poetry is the antithesis to science" – poet and critic Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1811

Andrea Lynn, Humanities Editor
(217) 333-2177; a-lynn@uiuc.edu

4/1/02

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Coleridge must not have been paying attention, for in the 19th century, poetry actually promoted the sciences. Poetry by women, that is.

Indeed, it was largely women of letters who did everything in their literary power not only to advance science, but also to incorporate it into "a female worldview." To be sure, they had few options, since they were for all intents and purposes locked out of the sciences, that turf belonging only to men.

"Science was for women only insofar as they accepted their gender-determined secondary place in its regimen," English professor Nina Baym wrote in her new book, which, like the work she analyzes, breaks new and fertile ground.

In "American Women of Letters and the Nineteenth-Century Sciences: Styles of Affiliation" (Rutgers), Baym explores the myriad ways women worked – through a variety of affiliations with men and institutions – to advance knowledge about science and the sciences. Among her case studies:

Almira Phelps, author of "Familiar Lectures on Botany," which sold 350,000 copies.

Sarah Hale, who filled the wildly popular "Godey’s Lady’s Book" with articles about science.

Emma Willard, an educational reformer, textbook writer and best-selling historian and one of the nation’s most prominent public women, who promoted the study of science in women’s schools.

Elizabeth Agassiz, who ghost-wrote much of what the public thought was written by her husband, Louis Agassiz, the "big science celebrity of the age," Baym said.

Women novelists, such as Phelps, Susan Warner and Maria Susanna Cummins.

As it happens, Emily Dickinson also was a major promoter of science. Indeed, "The science in her poetry is extensive," Baym wrote. At least 270 of Dickinson’s poems contain scientific language.

Dickinson's "unwillingness to publish," however, sets her apart – as she meant it to – from the crowd of 19th-century women who "claimed the print domain for themselves and other women." Still, "the rich scientific texture of her poetry invites scrutiny in a study like this," Baym wrote.

According to Baym, people who affiliated with the sciences insisted that "to know science was to know God's benevolence and wisdom, and, implicitly, to know that he existed." Dickinson, however, used the sciences to argue that they could not provide knowledge of God's existence and attributes.

Baym concedes that her interpretation of Dickinson's poetry of science contests "the leading critical view, which sees it as evidence of a heroic struggle to reconcile an abiding religious faith with the destabilizing implications of scientific findings."

Moreover, Baym argues that in her science poetry, Dickinson "begins to relocate the arena of faith from theology to psychology. She can write, with excruciating exactness, of how it feels to live in a world where the answers to the most important questions are by their nature unknowable."