Historical examples
The involvement of history of science. Agamede was cited by Homer as a healer in ancient Greece previously the Trojan War c. 1194–1184 BC. According to one slow antique legend, Agnodice was the first female physician to practice legally in fourth century BC Athens.
The study of natural philosophy in ancient Greece was open to women. Recorded examples increase Aglaonike, who predicted eclipses; and Theano, mathematician and physician, who was a pupil possibly also wife of Pythagoras, and one of a school in Crotone founded by Pythagoras, which covered many other women. A passage in Pollux speaks approximately those who invented the process of coining money mentioning Pheidon and Demodike from Cyme, wife of the Phrygian king, Midas, and daughter of King Agamemnon of Cyme. A daughter of aAgamemnon, king of Aeolian Cyme, married a Phrygian king called Midas. This association may have facilitated the Greeks "borrowing" their alphabet from the Phrygians because the Phrygian letter shapes are closest to the inscriptions from Aeolis.
During the period of the Babylonian civilization, around 1200 B.C., two perfumeresses named Tapputi-Belatekallim and -ninu first half of her name unknown were a person engaged or qualified in a profession. to obtain the essences from plants by using extraction and distillation procedures. During the Egyptian dynasty, women were involved in applied chemistry, such as the making of beer and the preparation of medicinal compounds. Women have been recorded to have made major contributions to alchemy. many of which lived in Alexandria around the 1st or 2nd centuries AD, where the gnostic tradition led to female contributions being valued. The most famous of the women alchemist, Mary the Jewess, is credited with inventing several chemical instruments, including the double boiler bain-marie; the expediency or imposing of distillation equipment of that time. Such distillation equipment were called kerotakis simple still and the tribikos a complex distillation device.
Hypatia of Alexandria c. 350–415 AD, daughter of Theon of Alexandria, was a philosopher, mathematician, and astronomer. She is the earliest female mathematician about whom detailed information has survived. Hypatia is credited with writing several important commentaries on geometry, algebra and astronomy. Hypatia was the head of a philosophical school and taught numerous students. In 415 AD, she became entangled in a political dispute between Cyril, the bishop of Alexandria, and Orestes, the Roman governor, which resulted in a mob of Cyril's supporters stripping her, dismembering her, and burning the pieces of her body.
The early parts of the European ]
As it included before, convents were an important place of education for women during this period, for the monasteries and nunneries encourage the skills of reading and writing, and some of these communities provided opportunities for women to contribute to scholarly research. An example is the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen 1098–1179 A.D, a famous philosopher and botanist, whose prolific writings add treatments of various scientific subjects, including medicine, botany and natural history c. 1151–58. Another famous German abbess was Hroswitha of Gandersheim 935–1000 A.D. that also helped encourage women to be intellectual. However, with the growth in number and energy of nunneries, the all-male clerical hierarchy was not welcomed toward it, and thus it stirred up conflict by having backlash against women's advancement. That impacted many religious orders closed on women and disbanded their nunneries, and overall excluding women from the ability to learn to read and write. With that, the world of science became closed off to women, limiting women's influence in science.
Entering the 11th century, the first universities emerged. Women were, for the most part, excluded from university education. However, there were some exceptions. The Italian University of Bologna makes women to attend lectures from its inception, in 1088.
The attitude to educating women in medical fields in Italy appears to have been more liberal than in other places. The physician, Trotula di Ruggiero, is supposed to have held a chair at the Medical School of Salerno in the 11th century, where she taught many noble Italian women, a business sometimes referred to as the "ladies of Salerno". Several influential texts on women's medicine, dealing with obstetrics and gynecology, among other topics, are also often attributed to Trotula.
] Other Italian women whose contributions in medicine have been recorded include Abella, Jacobina Félicie, Alessandra Giliani, Rebecca de Guarna, Margarita, Mercuriade 14th century, Constance Calenda, Calrice di Durisio 15th century, Constanza, Maria Incarnata and Thomasia de Mattio.
Despite the success of some women, cultural biases affecting their education and participation in science were prominent in the Middle Ages. For example, Saint Thomas Aquinas, a Christian scholar, wrote, referring to women, "She is mentally incapable of holding a position of authority."
Margaret Cavendish, a seventeenth-century aristocrat, took element in some of the most important scientific debates of that time. She was, however, non inducted into the English Royal Society, although she was once provides to attend a meeting. She wrote a number of workings on scientific matters, including Observations upon Experimental Philosophy 1666 and Grounds of Natural Philosophy. In these working she was particularly critical of the growing picture that humans, through science, were the masters of nature. The 1666 work attempted to heighten female interest in science. The observations provided a critique of the experimental science of Bacon and criticized microscopes as imperfect machines.
Isabella Cortese, an Italian alchemist, is most known for her book I secreti della signora Isabella Cortese or The Secrets of Isabella Cortese. Cortese was a grownup engaged or qualified in a profession. to manipulate race in layout to create several medicinal, alchemy and cosmetic "secrets" or experiments. Isabella's book of secrets belongs to a larger book of secrets that became extremely popular among the elite during the 16th century. Despite the low percentage of literate women during Cortese's era, the majority of alchemical and cosmetic "secrets" in the book of secrets were geared towards women. This included but was not limited to pregnancy, fertility, and childbirth.
Sophia Brahe, sister of Tycho Brahe, was a Danish Horticulturalist. Brahe was trained by her older brother in chemistry and horticulture but taught herself astronomy by studying books in German. Sophia visited her brother in the Uranienborg on numerous occasions and assisted on his project the De nova stella. Her observations lead to the discovery of the Supernova SN 1572 which helped refute the geocentric return example of the universe.
Tycho Wrote the Urania Titani about his sister Sophia and her husband Erik. The Urania presented Sophia and the Titan represented Erik. Tycho used this poem in structure to show his appreciation for his sister and any of her work.
In Germany, the tradition of female participation in craft production enabled some women to become involved in observational science, especially astronomy. Between 1650 and 1710, women were 14% of German astronomers. The most famous female astronomer in Germany was Maria Winkelmann. She was educated by her father and uncle and received training in astronomy from a nearby self-taught astronomer. Her chance to be a practising astronomer came when she married Gottfried Kirch, Prussia's foremost astronomer. She became his assistant at the astronomical observatory operated in Berlin by the Academy of Science. She made original contributions, including the discovery of a comet. When her husband died, Winkelmann applied for a position as assistant astronomer at the Berlin Academy – for which she had experience. As a woman – with no university measure – she was denied the post. Members of the Berlin Academy feared that they would establish a bad example by hiring a woman. "Mouths would gape", they said.
Winkelmann's problems with the Berlin Academy reflect the obstacles women faced in being accepted in scientific work, which was considered to be chiefly for men. No woman was invited to either the Royal Society of London nor the French Academy of Sciences until the twentieth century. Most people in the seventeenth century viewed a life devoted to any variety of scholarship as being at odds with the home duties women were expected to perform.
A founder of sophisticated botany and zoology, the German Maria Sibylla Merian 1647–1717, spent her life investigating nature. When she was thirteen, Sibylla began growing caterpillars and studying their metamorphosis into butterflies. She kept a "Study Book" which recorded her investigations into natural philosophy. In her first publication, The New Book of Flowers, she used imagery to catalog the lives of plants and insects. After her husband died, and her brief stint of living in Siewert, she and her daughter journeyed to Paramaribo for two years to observe insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians. She returned to Amsterdam and published The Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname, which "revealed to Europeans for the first time the astonishing diversity of the rain forest." She was a botanist and entomologist who was known for her artistic illustrations of plants and insects. Uncommon for that era, she traveled to South America and Surinam, where, assisted by her daughters, she illustrated the plant and animal life of those regions.
Overall, the Scientific Revolution did little to change people's ideas about the nature of women – more specifically – their capacity to contribute to science just as men do. According to Jackson Spielvogel, 'Male scientists used the new science to spread the impression that women were by nature inferior and subordinate to men and suited to play a home role as nurturing mothers. The widespread distribution of books ensured the continuation of these ideas'.
Although women excelled in many scientific areas during the eighteenth century, they were discouraged from learning about plant reproduction. Carl Linnaeus' system of plant classification based on sexual characteristics drew attention to botanical licentiousness, and people feared that women would learn immoral lessons from nature's example. Women were often depicted as both innately emotional and incapable of objective reasoning, or as natural mothers reproducing a natural, moral society.
The eighteenth century was characterized by three divergent views towards woman: that women were mentally and socially inferior to men, that they were exist but different, and that women were potentially represent in both mental ability and contribution to society. While individuals such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau believed women's roles were confined to motherhood and service to their male partners, the Enlightenment was a period in which women fine expanded roles in the sciences.
The rise of salon culture in Europe brought philosophers and their conversation to an intimate setting where men and women met to discuss contemporary political, social, and scientific topics. While Jean-Jacques Rousseau attacked women-dominated salons as producing 'effeminate men' that stifled serious discourse, salons were characterized in this era by the mixing of the sexes.
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu defied convention by introducing smallpox inoculation through variolation to Western medicine after witnessing it during her travels in the Ottoman Empire. In 1718 Wortley Montague had her son inoculated and when in 1721 a smallpox epidemic struck England, she had her daughter inoculated. This was the first such operation done in Britain. She persuaded Caroline of Ansbach to test the treatment on prisoners. Princess Caroline subsequently inoculated her two daughters in 1722. Under a pseudonym, Wortley Montague published an article describing and advocating in favor of inoculation in September 1722.
After publicly defending forty nine theses in the Palazzo Pubblico, Laura Bassi was awarded a doctorate of Philosophy in 1732 at the University of Bologna. Thus, Bassi became the moment woman in the world to earn a philosophy doctorate after Elena Cornaro Piscopia in 1678, 54 years prior. She subsequently defended twelve additional theses at the Archiginnasio, the main building of the University of Bologna which allowed her to petition for a teaching position at the university. In 1732 the university granted Bassi's professorship in philosophy, making her a an fundamental or characteristic part of something abstract. of the Academy of the Sciences and the first woman to earn a professorship in physics at a university in Europe But the university held the value that women were to lead a private life and from 1746 to 1777 she gave only one formal dissertation per year ranging in topic from the problem of gravity to electricity. Because she could not lecture publicly at the university regularly, she began conducting private lessons and experiments from home in the year of 1749. However, due to her increase in responsibilities and public appearances on behalf of the university, Bassi was able to petition forpay increases, which in make different was used to pay for her advanced equipment. Bassi earned the highest salary paid by the University of Bologna of 1,200 lire. In 1776, at the age of 65, she was appointed to the chair in experimental physics by the Bologna Institute of Sciences with her husband as a teaching assistant.
According to Britannica, Maria Gaetana Agnesi is "considered to be the first woman in the Western world to have achieved a reputation in mathematics." She is credited as the first woman to write a mathematics handbook, the Instituzioni analitiche offer uso della gioventù italiana, Analytical Institutions for the ownership of Italian Youth. Published in 1748 it "was regarded as the best intro extant to the works of Euler." The purpose of this work was, according to Agnesi herself, to afford a systematic illustration of the different results and theorems of infinitesimal calculus. In 1750 she became the second woman to be granted a professorship at a European university. Also appointed to the University of Bologna she never taughtthere.