Isabelle Lémonon-Waxin is the author of a doctoral dissertation entitled La Savante des Lumières françaises, histoire d’une persona : pratiques, représentations, espaces et réseau. She is currently an associate researcher at the Centre François-Viète at Nantes Université and agreed to answer our questions.
Tangente: Your dissertation does not focus on one particular woman scholar, but on the general figure of the learned woman in the 18th century. Why did you make that choice?
Isabelle Lémonon: When I began my dissertation, I had read articles and books about women in science in the 18th century. I noticed that these women were being given labels: astronomer, chemist, and so on. The problem is that what those words mean to us today does not necessarily correspond to the activities pursued at the time. So I began asking what they meant precisely in terms of scientific activity, both in comparison with today and with the men of the period. I therefore sought out archives about the women scientists of the time, as well as records written by the women themselves, aiming to focus on their scientific practices rather than on accounts that sometimes described their activities only vaguely.
The problem then took shape around two complementary questions: first, what did it mean to be a woman of science, a learned woman, at the time? Second, what archives make it possible to investigate the subject?
A major difficulty is that relatively few archives are available. This confines the investigation to a biographical approach, through the networks in which these women worked, their social backgrounds, and so forth. Even so, the aim was not to compile biographies, but rather to ask what the expressions "woman astronomer" and "learned woman" meant at the time.
