Personal Exploration and the Unknown Frontier

Portrait of Marie Curie, by R. chido Hanečková

As expeditionary voyages became more common during the early Renaissance period this sense of exploration spread across the land.  It permeated the cultural atmosphere of Europe and led to a fascination with discovery. People were excited - and rightly so - as these explorers would bring back new ideas, new stories, and new possibilities.

But physical exploration isn't the only way to discover new worlds of possibility.  During the Reformation many people found their world expanded with a similar set of new possibilities: religious and ideological freedoms.  This brave new world of ideas and opportunity would be just as inspiring to the reformers as those voyages had been to the watching public.

Enlightenment Restrictions on Female Scientists

Currently, I am working on a bachelors degree in Microbiology, planning to continue on to achieve a master's degree in a Physician's Assistant program. Because of this, I was interested in societal trends regarding women in science during the Enlightenment Era.

In the Renaissance, learned women went against the social grain. Educating women was really only seen in the upper class. Some fathers taught their daughters their trade, but even then it wasn't really very academic. Educated women were seen as neglecting their homemaking roles.

In the Enlightenment, however, these societal trends actually became enforced through restrictions. Women were not allowed to access certain instruments like microscopes. A microbiologist cannot get very far without her microscope. Even midwives had restrictions on the tools they could use.

As the study of science became more structured, there began to be right and wrong ways to do it. Somewhere along the line, being male became part of the "right" way.

As a woman pursuing a career in science in a world very concerned with social equality between men and women, it would be really easy to point to these restrictions as the birth of an oppression women continue to be hurt by. That, however, is not the point I would like to make.

I would like to be thrilled at how far we have come. I have access to a microscope. In fact, I have a favorite microscope that I race others in my class for. And I win. I draw pictures with bacteria on differential media plates:

My professor is a fantastic woman with a PhD. My teaching assistants in both of my science classes this semester are highly capable and confident female peers. I don't think women should at all be ashamed of their position or opportunities in science. In fact, with the men having such a head start, we should be very proud of how far we have come. The only restrictions we have now are the ones we put on ourselves.

Image Credit: Courtney Hilton

The Bugs And the Bees

We all go through phases and cycles in our lives, but there's one that I've never been able to escape- I love bugs. It may sound like I'm joking, but I'm not. I fell in love with insects (especially ants) when I was a kid and I've never kicked it. Being a young girl obsessed with bugs wasn't the most popular thing to be, but it was who I was, and I really couldn't help it.

One of Merian's butterflies

I think that's why I felt such a strong an immediate connection to Maria Sibylla Merian, an entomological (bug scientist) painter from the Enlightenment period.  Born in Frankfurt Germany, Merian became intrigued with silk worms, and the possibility of them transforming into butterflies.She collected as many worms as she could find, watched them transform, and recorded their metamorphosis in painting.

Merian went on to record thousands of insects in painting, and her work as a naturalist illustrator has been considered the foundation of modern entomology, a field very dear to me. What's most interesting to me about Maria Sibylla Merian, however, is not just that she made these great contributions, but the circumstances that she made them under.

In the mid to late 1600's when she was illustrating, women were all but completely disregarded in the field of science. Merian's landmark book about the transformation of caterpillars into butterflies was ignored by scientific institutions because it was in German. Regardless of this, she went on a two year excursion to Suriname and discovered and painted enough new species of plant and insect to fill a book.

In a way, I feel like Merian was not only a crucial part of the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution, but also a symbol of it. She strove on in the face of tremendous odds, she broke ground, she paved the way. But most importantly, she was interested in the metamorphosis of one remarkable thing into another, in observing that change and recording it. When it comes down to it, what else was the Enlightenment really about?

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