Almost a man of genius: Clémence Royer, feminism, and nineteenth-century science

631 Pages·1997·3.25 MB·English

by  Joy Dorothy Harvey

Almost a Man of Genius : Clâemence
title: Royer, Feminism, and Nineteenth-century
Science Lives of Women in Science
author: Harvey, Joy Dorothy.
publisher: Rutgers University Press
isbn10 | asin: 0813523974
print isbn13: 9780813523972
ebook isbn13: 9780585029283
language: English
Royer, Clâemence,--1830-1902, Naturalists-
subject
-France--Biography.
publication date: 1997
lcc: QH31.R787H38 1997eb
ddc: 509/.2
Royer, Clâemence,--1830-1902, Naturalists-
subject:
-France--Biography.
"Almost a Man of Genius"
LIVES OF WOMEN IN SCIENCE
Founding Editor: Pnina Abir-Am
Series Editor: Ann Hibner Koblitz
VOLUMES IN THE SERIES
A Convergence of Lives
Sofia Kovalevskaia-Scientist, Writer, Revolutionary, by Ann Hibner
Koblitz
A Matter of Choices
Memoirs of a Female Physicist, by Fay Ajzenberg-Selove
Creative Couples in the Sciences, edited by Helena M. Pycior, Nancy
G. Slack, and Pnina G. Abir-Am
"Almost a Man of Genius"
Clémence Royer, Feminism, and Nineteenth-Century Science, by Joy
Harvey
"Almost a Man of Genius"
CLÉMENCE ROYER, FEMINISM, AND
NINETEENTH-CENTURY SCIENCE
JOY HARVEY
Rutgers University Press
New Brunswick, New Jersey, and London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Harvey, Joy Dorothy.
"Almost a man of genius": Clémence Royer, feminism, and
nineteenth-century science / Joy Harvey.
p. cm. - (Lives of women in science)
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8135-2397-4 (alk. paper)
1. Royer, Clémence, 1830-1902. 2. Naturalists-France-Biography.
1. Title. II. Series.
QH31.R787H38 1997
509' .2-dc21 96-39286
[B] CIP
British Cataloging-in-Publication information available
Copyright © 1997 by Joy Harvey
All rights reserved.
Translations from the French are by the author.
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by
any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage
and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
Please contact Rutgers University Press, Livingston Campus, Bid.
4161, P.O. Box 5062, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903. The only
exception to this prohibition is "fair use" as defined by U.S. copyright
law.
Manufactured in the United States of America
To the memory of
my mother,
Dorothy Hanfling Colby,
a woman of intellect and courage
Page vii
CONTENTS
Series Editor's Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
1 A Fire of the Mind: Family, Childhood, and Youth 5
of Clmence Royer
2 The Question of Abuse and a Mission to Fulfill 24
3 Mind and Love Awaken: Royer in Switzerland 42
4 "True Science ": Translating Darwin, Seeking a 62
New Life
5 Motherhood, Social Theory, and Social Realities 80
6 "A Little Scientific Church ": Royer Returns to Paris103
7 "Woman Is Not Made Like This " 122
8 Years of Trial: A Search for Universal Laws 140
9 "I See Young and Old Coming towards Me " The 166
Final Years
Afterword: Clémence Royer and Her Biographers 184
Appendix: Clémence Royer on Women, Society, and 193
the Birthrate ("Sur la natalié")
Notes 205
Bibliography 251
Index 261
Page ix
FOREWORD
Readers at the interface of history of science and women's studies are
by now familiar with Joy Harvey's superb essay on Clémence Royer,
published almost a decade ago in Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives:
Women in Science, 1789-1979, a collection of essays that played a key
role in Rutgers University Press's establishing a series dedicated
specifically to the lives of women in science.1 Now Harvey expands
the scope of that essay to encompass the first book-length study in
English of Royer, a nineteenth-century French woman thinker, who
wrote extensively on science, philosophy, feminism, and their
interaction, for both specialist and popular audiences.2 Harvey
explores the "anomaly" of Royer's life and work as a pioneering
woman of science whose scientific ideas and professional career had
to come to terms with the problem of gender and science, most
notably in connection with the widely debated implications of
Darwin's theory of evolution for man and woman's place in both
nature and society.3
As Harvey demonstrates in impressive archival and analytical detail.
Royer's life is uniquely situated to illuminate the complex and shifting
relationship between gender and science, especially throughout the
second half of the nineteenth century, a period that witnessed major
changes in the social and political organization of both science and
society. Royer's life reflects the rise of female emancipation, of
professional science, and of their interaction in the context of the
major political changes in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth
century. Indeed, it is one of Harvey's many strengths to account for
Royer's emergence as a renowned woman of science pronouncing on
matters of both science and society, in terms of her long-term
association with the Société d'Anthropologie of Paris. Through her
membership in this major scientific institution, which served as a
sociopolitical forum for the transfer and application of scientific,
positivist, and evolutionist ideals, Royer ensured that
Page x
the standpoint of women and of their gender difference had a voice in
the scientific and hence authoritative issues of the day.
Royer's life is shown by Harvey to be a landmark in female scientific
creativity and its relationship to female social and political
emancipation, not only in her native France but also in other European
countries in which she lived and worked, especially in Britain, Italy,
Switzerland, and Belgium. Like other pioneering women of science in
the nineteenth century, most notably the American astronomer Maria
Mitchell, the Russian mathematician Sophia Kovalevskaia, and the
British physicist Hertha Ayrton,4 Royer had to struggle to reconcile
her fascination with and talent for science with her membership in the
"second sex." That sex was considered by the patriarchy of her time to
be unequal, inferior, and altogether unsuited for the scientific pursuits
that held the key to the understanding and control of both nature and
the social order. As a commentator and translator of Darwin, Royer
was well placed to notice and comment on the social implications of
evolutionist ideas, especially as they related to gender.
The specific manifestations of Royer's life in history, so meticulously
researched and insightfully discussed by Harvey in the context of
nineteenthcentury science, can be seen both as the culmination of a
succession of creative female role models and an apogee of female
discrimination in science. Royer's "career" seems to combine themata
from the lives and works of culturally creative women preceding her
that range from Mme d'Hondt (a seventeenth-century linguist active in
the Académie des Sciences, who was denied formal membership
despite her high qualifications); Mme du Chtelet, the eighteenth-
century author of physics texts, translator of Newton, and collaborator
of Voltaire, whose influence Royer acknowledged directly; Sophie
Germain, the nineteenthcentury author of mathematical texts and
interlocutor of Gauss; to Marie and Irène Curie, mother and daughter,
the twentiethcentury Nobelists in physics and chemistry.5