Gendered Language and the Science of Colonial Silk

What is it about?

Historians of science have long debated whether gendered language (Nature = female) marginalized women from natural scientific and philosophical inquiry in formative years of the early modern era. This article suggests that in applied scientific industries like sericulture, we can use gendered language to identify where and how women participated in debates about silkworm cultivation and silk-thread production. Rather than treating gendered language as "good" or "bad," it argues that a close reading of the marking pronouns in silkworm treatises allow new insights into women's and men's collaborative technical practices in colonial Virginia and the Anglophone Atlantic world.

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Why is it important?

The long debate about women and science is important to historians and literary scholars of the colonial Americas and early modern world. By drawing on a different kind of scientific text -- silkworm treatises and letters, rather than natural philosophies -- this study allows a new way of approaching the debate. The change in genre allows us to understand how gendered language indexes women's contributions to colonial scientific industries, while still acknowledging the important registers of Baconian metaphors about a feminized and subordinated Nature.

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