Introduction: The ‘Man of Science’ as a Gendered Ideal

Abstract

Scholarship exploring connections between the history of science and the history of gender in nineteenth-century Britain is not new. Since the early 1980s, pioneering feminist historians like Carolyn Merchant,¹ Evelyn Fox Keller,² Londa Schiebinger³ and Ludmilla Jordanova⁴ have highlighted the ways in which scientific knowledge and practices have been deliberately shaped to exclude women. While the actions and identities of men certainly played a significant role in the work of these scholars, the primary focus was necessarily upon women and upon exposing the gender biases of historical systems of scientific knowledge. These works are chiefly concerned not with the formation of masculine identity per se as with the construction of narratives of female inferiority through the language, discourse and practices of male-dominated science. The focus remains upon the fashioning of those oppressed and marginalized groups whose voices have often been erased from the historical narrative. Such feminist treatments of the history of science are joined by important works from historians of sexuality like Thomas Laqueur⁵ who have analysed the ways in which narratives and systems of scientific knowledge, in particular medicine, have constructed certain groups of men as inferior, diseased or damaged. This has particularly been the case with the history of male homosexuality.⁶