Bacon rendered women nearly invisible in his ideal patriarchal utopia.

Evidence

Bacon’s Bensalem in the New Atlantis illustrated a patriarchal family structure in which the “Father” exercised authority over the kin and the role of the woman had been reduced to near invisibility. The shipwrecked visitors to Bensalem were invited to a “Feast of the Family” headed by the “Father of the Family, whom they call the Tirsan.” The Father was described entering the room where the feast was to be held followed by “all his generation or lineage, the males before him and the females following him.” The mother, however, although present, was kept hidden behind a glass partition. “If there be a mother from whose body the whole lineage is descended, there is a traverse [partition] placed in a loft above on the right hand of the chair, with a privy door and a carved window of glass, leaded with gold and blue, where she sitteth but is not seen.” After the opening ceremony, the Father began the dinner alone, “served only by his own children, such as are male, who perform unto him all service of the table upon the knee, and the women only stand about him, leaning against the wall.” — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 689

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Relevant to article 3 on sacrifice and gendered ritual hierarchy, and to the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ article’s themes of dress and gendered visibility.
• XREF: Connects to the polyad’s storytelling/interpretation thread: how utopian metaphor encodes gender hierarchy, echoing The Namesake’s immigrant household dynamics and midwife history. — connects to: Bacon’s utopia was more patriarchal and market-driven than prior communal utopias. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 365
• QUESTION: Why did Bacon place the lineage-descending mother behind glass yet frame the father as maker of all — worth pursuing as a genesis point for scientific female invisibility.