Gender and Space in Enlightenment Science: Madame Dupiéry’s Scientific Work and Network

Abstract

‘Dear fellow chemist… I picture thee surrounded by papers and work’, Antoine-François Fourcroy wrote in 1799 to Mme Dupiéry.¹ Who was this woman addressed by the well-known academician as a fellow chemist? What was she working on? And where did she work? So many questions raised by a single sentence by an eighteenth-century male savant, addressed to a woman of whom we know very little. How does this specific case fit the distinction between professional/institutional and amateur/domestic typical of how some modern historiography interprets the gendering of scientific knowledge? According to this dichotomized interpretation, women who took part in scientific endeavours are not considered producers of knowledge, but mere auxiliaries, supporting male savants from the domestic space where they seem confined, without entitlements to affiliations with learned, scientific institutions — these being the preserve of men of science. This assumed emphasis on exclusion from the institutional and professional sphere persisted, even amid women’s growing involvement in public scientific life during the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment.²