The Fruits of Their Labor: The Work of Early American Scientific Women, 1750-1860

FAIN: FT-291761-23

Jessica Linker, PhD
Northeastern University (Boston, MA 02115-5005)

Research and writing leading to a book on women’s scientific practices and redefinitions of science in early America. 

This monograph unsettles assertions that few women practiced science in early America, arguing that the erasure of women’s labor in this period (1750-1860) was both contemporaneous and retroactive, occurring as science was redefined in opposition to women’s gendered roles. I examine gender-based disparities in eighteenth and nineteenth-century scientific societies, in book production, in education, and in archives themselves. The project aims to understand the ways that race and class converged with gender to determine how and when women could be acknowledged as scientific practitioners. I recover the work of understudied women while assessing the historical construction of gender bias in scientific networks and practice – essentially, the book lays out the early modern origins of the modern-day gender gap in science fields.