Excluded from the Royal Society, Cavendish wrote an early feminist science fiction

Evidence

In an attempt to gain recognition for her achievements, Margaret Cavendish insisted on a visit to the all-male scientific society, the Royal Society of London, where scientific experiments and instruments were displayed for her surveillance. Samuel Pepys, the London gossip and journalist, “did not like her at all,” but John Evelyn was “pleased with her “fanciful habit, garb, and discourse.” Excluded from membership in the Royal Society because of her sex, she invented her own scientific community in The Blazing World (1666), which would bring her the fame and recognition for which she hungered. “I am not covetous, but as ambitious as ever any of my sex is, or can be; which though I cannot be Henry the Fifth or Charles II, yet I endeavor to be Margaret the First.” The sole survivor of a shipwreck, in which all the men have been killed, a lady resembling the Duchess finds herself on an island where she marries the Emperor and becomes Margaret I. She founds schools and societies and receives scientific instruction from beast-men who walk upright. Bear-men and bird-men are her experimental philosophers, who bring telescopes and microscopes for her investigations. Fish-men and worm-men answer her questions about the sea and earth, while the ape-men, her chemists, give an account of transmutations. Fox-men are her politicians, and spiderand lice-men teach her mathematics. Thus the Duchess, in her fantasies, poems, and many prefaces to her voluminous writings presented one of the earliest explicitly feminist perspectives on science. — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 1009

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to the polyad thread of institutional exclusion of women from knowledge and the utopian imaginary—echoing Bacon’s New Atlantis (ch46-48) as seen from a woman’s alternative.
• SEED: Angle: a female-authored counter-utopia to Bacon’s New Atlantis as syllabus material foregrounding who gets to imagine institutions of inquiry.
• FICTION: Cavendish’s Blazing World—arranging a scientific community of beast-men who teach her—is a ready-made story seed about a woman founding her own epistemic order after male institutions reject her.