Historians have often linked two quite separate phenomena: the gendering of early modern natural inquiry as a masculine form of activity in theory and, to a large extent, in practice, and the gendering of nature as female in many early modern texts and images. There is no necessary logical connection between these two phenomena, despite persistent and profound historiographical investments in their linkage, most notably as part of broader critiques of the scientific enterprise by writers with feminist commitments. But there are important and interesting historical connections, which this chapter seeks to explore.

The critical focus on the masculine nature of scientific activity has had the longer history. Antivivisection campaigns in nineteenth-century Britain and America, for example, often (though not always) overlapped with feminist concerns. Antivivisectionists saw biological science in particular as indelibly marked by cruelty toward the animals it used as experimental subjects and by an attitude toward nature that placed more emphasis on advancing scientific knowledge than on respect for the natural world. Others claimed more generally that certain qualities of the scientific enterprise reflected its “masculine” character, that is, were rooted in force and power, as were gender relations in society as a whole. One such writer was Clémence Royer (1830–1902), the first French translator of the works of Charles Darwin (1809–1882), a member of Paul Broca’s (1824–1880) Anthropological Society, and a lifelong activist for feminist and other movements of social reform. In her Le bien et la loi morale (The Good and the Moral Law) of 1881, she described science as masculine in its practitioners and thereby “masculine” in its practices.