Vol. 17, No. 14	Dec. 11, 1997

Book focuses on women science writers

The art of women popular science writers as mediators of knowledge is a testimony to their capacity and tenacity," write Barbara Gates and Ann Shtier in their new book, Natural Eloquence.

Gates is Alumni Distinguished Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University, and Shtier is associate professor of humanities and director of the graduate program in women's studies at York University in Canada. Together they have compiled a group of essays that series editor George Levine says "raises thoughtful questions about marginalization, popularization and originality."

Natural Eloquence consists of 14 essays about women, some of them scientists, some translators of scientific language, who have "repackaged science" to make it more accessible to the public and, in doing so, write Gates and Shtier, have altered literary history, women's history, the history and sociology of science and the history of education. "Relocating portions of that story," Gates and Shtier write, is the primary reason they selected the authors and essays in their book.

The essays are filled with information about women from the 17th-century through today who were attracted to science, a male-dominated discipline. In the pursuit of their hearts' desire, they opened the study of science to everyone, but because of their gender, all of them paid a price.

Gates and Shtier write that some of the women in these essays followed conservative lines and promoted "ideas offered by others." But there were those, like Rachel Carson, who "dared to break new ground," they say.

Whether they were breaking new ground or reconstructing the old, the women depicted in the book managed to do it within a surprising variety of genres. Guidebooks, essays, illustrations, poetry, lectures, women's and children's books all have been used by women as vehicles for explaining the mysteries of science. And, while they were revered by some as civilizers of the sciences, they were vilified by others for overstepping their bounds.

In Bernard Lightman's essay about Agnes Mary Clerke, a 17th-century writer whose passion was astronomy, he describes Clerke as one of the "great popularizers of science in the late Victorian period."

She wrote six major works on astronomy, 149 biographies of astronomers for the Encyclopedia Brittanica and one of the most authoritative secondary sources on the history of 19th-century science.

Lightman writes that Clerke's style was unlike most women of her time-descriptive, impersonal and objective, more like a man's. And yet, one of her contemporaries, a scientist and the editor of a publication that ran much of her work and who reflected the opinions of many during that era, described her work as being hopelessly flawed by the fact that "all women are by their very nature prevented from thinking impartially or rationally."

In contrast is Pamela M. Henson's portrait of Anna Botsford Comstock, a 19th-century illustrator of books about insects, whose science writing took the form of children's books, nature study lessons and popular adult writings.

Although she had a degree in entomology and training in scientific research, Comstock, Henson writes, considered her marriage to John Henry Comstock, a professor of entomology at Cornell University, her primary career and began her work in science as his illustrator.

As the concept of studying nature as well as science gained popularity, so did Comstock's writings and lectures.

She broadened her scope from insects to all of nature. In the 1890s, Henson writes, Comstock crisscrossed the country on the Chautauquan lecture circuit and eventually became internationally known as a teacher, writer, lecturer and illustrator. In 1923, she was voted one of the most respected women in America in a poll conducted by the League of Women Voters.

Each of the women defined in Natural Eloquence offers a different image of the popularizers of science but they converge in Gates and Shtier's interview with Diane Ackerman, poet, naturalist and essayist.

In the interview, the editors ask Ackerman about women and their traditional roles as the civilizers of science. Ackerman responds: "...people want to understand the world around them...but they don't want to be talked down to, they don't want raw science offered in a way that is unrelated to their everyday lives, they don't want jargon.

They want a sense of beauty of the world, a way to understand the mysteries that they move among, and they want respect while they are learning...."

-Barbara Garrison