Capitalism’s displacement of women from production turned them into science’s audience

Evidence

As capitalist forms of economic life displaced women from household production, creating more leisure time, noble and bourgeois ladies became audiences for the new scientific discoveries. One step in the long process of institutionalizing and integrating classical physics and philosophy into Western consciousness was scientific popularization. A tradition of textbooks for the lay person, popular lectures, museums, and itinerant scientific demonstrators, as well as the foundation of professional societies for the more learned, began to emerge by the late seventeenth century. Part of this effort was directed specifically toward the female. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1013

Categorization

• XREF: Links the gendered economic shift (a recurring polyad thread on women’s labor) to the scientific popularization market—teaching women science at the same moment they lost productive roles. — connects to: Industrialization converted women from producers to consumers and opened teaching to them — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 701; Industrial capitalism erased female wantonness into hygienic respectability; Material and social circumstances rather than talent barred women from artistic genius (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Industrial capitalism erased female wantonness into hygienic respectability #corroborates (0.75)
• Darwinian science was mobilized to justify female subordination #expands (0.75) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 653
• Material and social circumstances rather than talent barred women from artistic genius #expands (0.72)
• Capitalism’s material system is interwoven with cultural reproduction #expands (0.70) — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 122
• Nature’s figuration as submissive female gave scientific exploitation normative sanction #expands (0.70) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 755