‘The Empire of Man over the inferior Creatures’: British Women, Race, and Seventeenth-Century Science

Abstract

Hans Sloane tells of ‘a Negro’ who healed him of a ‘chego’ in his toe while he was a doctor in Jamaica. She was ‘famous for her ability in such cases’, yet Sloane finally concludes that ‘Blacks … are a very perverse Generation of People’.1 Thus the Secretary of the Royal Society in 1707 provides a glimpse of a different kind of science that might have developed if non-Europeans and European women had been credited as producers of scientific knowledge.2 According to feminist historians of science, a number of women practiced healing and wrote works on natural philosophy in seventeenth-century England, but these possibilities began to diminish. Londa Schiebinger argues that natural philosophy was more open to European women in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries than in later periods, and she traces the process by which women were marginalized as science emerged as an institution. Lynette Hunter, Sarah Hutton, and Patricia Fara have redefined the history of the ‘scientific revolution’ beyond a list of ‘great men’ or ‘great women’ to include domestic knowledge, technical know-how, medicine, midwifery, and family networks where natural philosophy was central. Ruth Watts contends that, whereas many women did participate in scientific activity and the networks associated with it, there was an increasing emphasis on the masculinity of natural philosophy, and its practice at exclusively masculine locations. In her book on Cartesian Women, Erica Harth argues that several seventeenth-century women interested in Descartes’s theories wrote before the new norms of objectivity became universalized, and transformed women from observers into objects of study.3