Questioning the Status of the ‘Man of Science’ as a Modern Masculine Hero
For many people today, the feminist historian Ludmilla Jordanova writes, ‘the abstract noun science evokes not only grandeur and power but also a particular type of mastery of the world.’ A product of the Scientific Revolution and Enlightenment, the popular image of the Victorian scientist is a powerful, authoritative figure, subjecting the forces of nature to his will.
The story of science in 19th and early 20th-century Britain is often imagined as a succession of biographies of great men: Humphry Davy, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin and the rest. And this was the narrative the scientific establishment told about itself. A 1917 report produced by the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) recommended that all boys should become familiar with “the lives and works of such men as Galileo, Newton, Faraday and Kelvin, Darwin and Mendel.”
Today, historians argue that the professionalisation of science over the course of the 19th century entrenched the dominance of men and the exclusion of women. This professionalisation was not just a social and economic process but also a cultural one that formed the stereotypical identity of the Victorian “man of science” as a secure and authoritative masculine persona.
Yet the research behind my new book, [Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918](http://www.palgrave.com/br/book/9781137311733), suggests this was not how Victorian “men of science” saw each other or themselves. On International Women’s Day, it is important to acknowledge that masculine authority is as much an artificial historical construct as female inferiority and weakness. Historians have been too willing to believe the confident public image projected by 19th century male scientists. In fact, a number of prominent male scientists from this period were accused of effeminacy and unmanliness.
For example, Sir Humphry Davy, inventor of the famed miners’ safety lamp and President of the Royal Society, was denounced by a writer in the magazine The Chemist in 1824 as “one of the most exquisite triflers of the day”. The same writer went on to attack the leading men of science as “dandy philosophers” whose highest ambition was to “cut a figure in the drawing-rooms of good society”.
To understand why male scientists received such gendered attacks, we need to recognise the intellectual and cultural position science held at the time. Far from enjoying the kind of dominance it does within academia and wider society today, science had no base at the ancient universities of Oxford and Cambridge and was widely perceived to be in decline. As my book shows, scientists, by extension, also lacked cultural authority and were popularly seen as reclusive and effete figures.
The charges of effeminacy directed against scientists were also connected with broader changes in the way manliness was viewed in general. The Regency ideal of manliness which idolised the rich and fashionable aristocrat was gradually giving way to a more serious and sober Victorian vision highlighting individual merit and character, reflecting the growing influence of the professional middle class.
In the first half of the 19th century, male scientists worked hard to associate themselves with the older ideal of manliness represented by the landed aristocracy. Founded in 1831, the BAAS had no fewer than six noble presidents in the first ten years of its existence and it cultivated a distinctly aristocratic style, holding lavish banquets and balls at its annual meetings (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/978-1-137-31174-0_3).
Yet at a time when ideals of masculinity were shifting towards a more sober and middle-class vision, it was precisely these attempts by male scientists to ape the aristocratic style that often led to the gendered attacks on them in the 1830s and 40s. Addressing the “defunct … gentlemen philosophers” of the BAAS, The Times declared in 1839:
Away with you; betake yourselves to your academic bowers and cloisters, to your studies and laboratories; and there, if you are able, become known to us by your labours! … What are your persons to us, your limbs and lineaments? We wish not to see how you eat and drink, and speak, and sport.
By the 1840s and 50s, the rising generation of male scientists including Charles Darwin and fellow evolutionary theorist Thomas Huxley were increasingly accepting the new meritocratic ideal of manliness. Yet they too were subject to accusations of effeminacy based on different reasons than those used against the previous generation.
Davy had been exposed to ridicule for his aristocratic lifestyle and foppish dress. For the likes of Darwin and Huxley, it was the tendency to carry out their research in private laboratories, located in their own homes with their wives and children assisting them, that provoked charges of unmanliness. Huxley even liked to compare science to the feminine comforts of home, describing it as a welcome refuge from the external world of male struggle, where men “toil to cut one another’s throats”.
It was not to be until the First World War that these suspicions about the masculinity of male scientists finally dispersed. For the first time, the British government had to engage decisively with men of science and to fund scientific work properly. The image of science changed dramatically over the course of the war as it generally became acknowledged that the work of scientists had been crucial to achieving victory (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F978-1-137-31174-0_7).
This promoted a new self-confidence among British men of science which, in turn, encouraged them to demand much greater recognition and long-term funding from the government after the war. In doing so, the natural and physical sciences secured the position which they still enjoy to this day.
Masculinity and Science in Britain, 1831–1918 by Heather Ellis. Palgrave Macmillan: London.
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