Judith Zinsser

For Women’s History Month; a rather sad story. Before the women’s movement, Gabrielle Emilie le Tonnelier de Breteuil, Marquise Du Châtelet was remembered as Voltaire’s mistress (if remembered at all). Her biographer, Judith Zinsser, tries to make the case that the Marquise was a first-rate mathematician and scientist in her own right. The catch is that although this book is quite a readable history of an interesting woman and her times Zinsser doesn’t seem to be comfortable enough with mathematics and science for her argument to be convincing on its own.


The irony is circumstantial evidence indicates Zinsser is probably correct. The Marquise translated Newton (I’m not sure if Zinsser’s claim that her translation is still the definitive French version is correct). She mastered calculus, which is no mean feat – I’d bet there weren’t a dozen people in the world who could make that claim in the 1730s. Although Zinsser glosses over it, the Marquise’s most significant work might be experiments with heat – she set up a foundry at her chateau and measured the cooling rate of various molten metals. It seems that Voltaire, although he assisted her, didn’t quite understand what she was trying to accomplish here – although it isn’t very glamorous, the careful measurement of physical properties is the foundation of all science and technology. Her contemporaries acknowledged her with favorable reviews of her books without mentioning her gender or nobility. It’s too bad this book – which I again agree is interesting enough as a biography of a courtier of the time – doesn’t go into more detail on just what was involved in the Marquise’s mathematical and scientific work.… (altro)

In A History of Their Own Volume I, authors Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser serve up a richly detailed history of the lives of women in Europe, from the ninth to seventeenth centuries. Traditional history texts structure the narrative around events central to the development and accomplishments of men (the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, etc.) In their research, Anderson and Zinsser discovered that women were affected by very different forces, and organize their narrative accordingly. Then they set out to explain:
Why had laws, economic systems, religion, and politics excluded European women from the most valued areas and activities of life? How had cultural attitudes evolved which defined women as innately inferior and placed them in a subordinate relationship to men? (p. xiv)

Volume I provides an in-depth analysis of women in several walks of life: women of the fields, churches, castles and manors, and walled towns. In each case, the authors show how over the centuries women gained power, and were subsequently subordinated to men. Sometimes this occurred as the side effect of some technological advancement that changed the role of women. In other cases their loss of power was the result of deeply held beliefs regarding woman's physical inferiority. In all cases, gender was the single greatest factor affecting the lives of women.

Anderson and Zinsser present a compelling thesis, meticulously researched. At times I felt there was almost too much detail, with so many facts and examples that I wanted to say, "all right already! I get it!" And with so many stories of oppression, this book can be rather depressing. And yet it's important for women to understand their history, and this is a very good way to learn it.… (altro)