Minerva's French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France by Nina Gelbart

Abstract

Reviewed by: Minerva's French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France by Nina Gelbart Christopher Coski Gelbart, Nina. Minerva's French Sisters: Women of Science in Enlightenment France. Yale UP, 2021. ISBN 978-0-300-25256-9. Pp. 360. This book offers brief biographies of six little-known women scientists of the eighteenth century. Each of the six chapters is devoted to one female scientist (in one case, two) in a particular discipline: Ferrand (mathematics), Lepaute (astronomy), Barret and Basseporte (botany), Biheron (anatomy), and Thiron d'Arconville (chemistry). Gelbart intentionally refrains from discussing the comparatively well-known Mme du Châtelet, given the literature covering her already. Instead, Gelbart focuses on women who made major contributions to their fields, but who were subsequently "relegated to the shadows" (2). Because so many documents produced by these women have not been preserved in historical records, Gelbart examines not only the scant remains of their own accounts, but also texts written by men about them, including "letters […], ship logs, obituaries and eulogies […], newspapers, memoirs, dedications, portraits, homages, mini-biographical entries, chronicles, and gossip sheets" (10). The voices in these documents include those of Condillac, Diderot, d'Alembert, Rousseau, Buffon, Bougainville, Grimm, Franklin, and a host of others. This framing of the women's lives enables the reader to see a fairly broad multifaceted contextual portrait of each scientist, her personal struggles, and her professional accomplishments. We see crucial issues such as the way in which marriage and other intimate relationships impacted the efforts of these scientists, the importance of social networks, the extremes some had to go to—most strikingly in the case of Barret, who disguised herself as a man—to practice their scientific pursuits, and the degrees to which members of the male-dominated scientific establishment accepted them. Above all, Gelbart highlights what these women contributed to science—as she says in her introduction, "deeds do not lie" (11). The book is structured in a "hybrid" fashion, combining traditional "omniscient" narrative with Söderqvist's concept of an "open collaboration between writer and subject" (13). This "collaboration" is most keenly felt in the interludes between chapters, in which Gelbart writes a brief personal letter to each scientist examined, in effect inserting herself, her reflections, her questions, into the narrative. In her interlude letter to Basseporte, for example, Gelbart writes of her own time in the Jardin du Roi: "There is of course a big statue of Buffon in the Jardin. What would you expect? […] It irks me that nothing around here is named for you" (163). The text in all its components—traditional and collaborative—is well organized. The prose is clear, concise, and easy to read. Gelbart provides sufficient scientific context to make the significance of each woman's contributions understandable to non-scientists, and offers sufficient socio-historical information to make the narrative clear to non-humanists. The study is detailed enough to inform the professional scholar, but not so detailed as to overwhelm a less formally trained reader. This balance yields a work that will appeal to both scholarly and lay readers with an interest in women's studies, history of science, or Enlightenment culture. [End Page 247] Christopher Coski Ohio University Copyright © 2021 American Association of Teachers of French