My thanks to John Brooke, Jim Secord, Roger Smith and Bob Westman for their generous help, to Leonore Davidoff for the inspiration her work on gender provides, and to the participants in two recent conferences on gender, at the Universities of Essex (April 1993) and London (July 1993) respectively, for their stimulating ideas. Readers should note that this article does not attempt to offer a survey of the literature on gender.

¹ Examples of eighteenth-century survey histories are Black, William, An Historical Sketch of Medicine and Surgery, from their Origin to the Present Time; and of the Principal Authors, Discoveries, Improvements, Imperfections and Errors, London, 1782Google Scholar, and Smith, Adam, ‘The principles which lead and direct philosophical enquiries; illustrated by the history of astronomy’, in Adam Smith. Essays on Philosophical Subjects (ed. Wightman, W. and Bryce, J.), Oxford, 1980, 33–106.Google Scholar Earlier twentieth-century surveys include: Nordenskiold, Erik, The History of Biology: A Survey, New York, 1928Google Scholar; Singer, Charles, A Short History of Science to the Nineteenth Century, Oxford, 1941Google Scholar; Bernal, J. D., Science in History, 4 vols., London, 1954.Google Scholar Titles in the Cambridge series include: Hankins, Thomas, Science and the Enlightenment, Cambridge, 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Brooke, John, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspectives, Cambridge, 1991.Google Scholar See also Brock, William, The Fontana History of Chemistry, London, 1992Google Scholar, and Bowler, Peter, The Fontana History of the Environmental Sciences, London, 1992.Google Scholar

² On ‘modern’, see Berman, Marshall, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, London, 1983Google Scholar; Williams, Raymond, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, London, 1983 (revised edition), 208–9Google Scholar; Smith, Anthony, The Concept of Social Change: A Critique of the Functionalist Theory of Social Change, London, 1973Google Scholar; Xenos, Nicholas, Scarcity and Modernity, London and New York, 1989.Google Scholar Michael Baxandall's notion of the period eye may be useful in thinking about how eras are visualized: Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy, Oxford, 1972, ch. 2.Google Scholar

³ Examples of comparative history are: Emsley, Clive, Essays in Comparative History: Economy, Politics and Society in Britain and America, Milton Keynes, 1984Google Scholar; Kendall, Jane, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860, London, 1985CrossRefGoogle Scholar (in the Macmillan series, Themes in Comparative History); Skocpol, Theda, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China, Cambridge, 1979CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moore, Barrington, Privacy: Studies in Social and Cultural History, New York, 1984Google Scholar; see also the journal Comparative Studies in Society and History.

⁴ Ben-David, Joseph, The Scientist's Role in Society: A Comparative Study, Englewood Cliffs, 1971Google Scholar; Glick, Thomas (ed.), The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, Austin, 1974Google Scholar; Comparative Studies in Society and History (1982), 24, 533–610Google Scholar (a set of papers on ‘The Cultural Diffusion of Freudian Thought’).

⁵ Lovejoy, Arthur, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea, New York, 1960Google Scholar, and Essays in the History of Ideas, New York, 1960Google Scholar; Glacken, Clarence, Traces on the Rhodian Shore: Nature and Culture in Western Thought from Ancient Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century, Berkeley, 1967Google Scholar; Boas, George, Vox Populi: Essays in the History of an Idea, Baltimore, 1969.Google Scholar

⁶ Allen, Garland, Life Science in the Twentieth Century, London and New York, 1979Google Scholar; Coleman, William, Biology in the Nineteenth Century: Problems of Form, Function, and Transformation, London and New York, 1971Google Scholar and Nordenskiold, , op. cit. (1).Google Scholar

⁷ Westman, Robert, ‘The astronomer's role in the sixteenth century: a preliminary study’, History of Science (1980), 18, 105–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Weisheipl, James, ‘The nature, scope, and classification of the sciences’, in Science in the Middle Ages (ed. Lindberg, D.), Chicago, 1978, 461–82Google Scholar consider the issue of discipline formation; another approach is via histories of science: Laudan, Rachel, ‘Histories of the sciences and their uses: a review to 1913’, History of Science (1993), 31, 1–34.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed

⁸ Geertz, Clifford, Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretative Anthropology, New York, 1983, 4.Google Scholar

⁹ See the relatively new journal Science in Context and James Secord's review of it in Isis (1990), 81, 289–90.Google Scholar

¹⁰ E.g. Shapin, Steven and Schaffer, Simon, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, 1985Google Scholar; Desmond, Adrian, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine and Reform in Radical London, Chicago, 1989.Google Scholar

¹¹ Illich, Ivan, Gender, London, 1983Google Scholar; Scott, Joan, ‘Gender: a useful category for historical analysis’, American Historical Review (1986), 91, 1053–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gender and the Politics of History, New York, 1988.Google Scholar

¹² Rosenberg, Charles and Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, ‘The female animal: medical and biological views of women’, Journal of American History (1973), 60, 332–56CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hartman, Mary and Banner, Lois (eds.), Clio's Consciousness Raised, New York, 1971Google Scholar; Ehrenreich, Barbara and English, Dierdre, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts' Advice to Women, London, 1979Google Scholar; Duffin, Lorna, ‘The conspicuous consumptive’, in The Nineteenth-Century Woman Her Cultural and Physical World (ed. Delamont, S. and Duffin, L.), London, 1978, 26–56.Google Scholar

¹³ Rossiter, Margaret, Women Scientists in America: Struggles and Strategies to 1940, Baltimore, 1982Google Scholar; Abir-Am, Pnina and Outram, Dorinda (eds.), Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science, 1789–1979, New Brunswick and London, 1987Google Scholar; Kass-Simon, G. and Fames, Patricia (eds.), Women of Science: Righting the Record, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1990Google Scholar. In The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science, Cambridge, Mass., 1989Google Scholar, Londa Schiebinger has attempted to bring together the study of women practitioners and changing ideas of sexual difference.

¹⁴ MacCormack, Carol and Strathern, Marilyn (eds.), Nature, Culture and Gender, Cambridge, 1980Google Scholar; Ortner, Sherry and Whitehead, Harriet (eds.), Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Construction of Gender and Sexuality, Cambridge, 1981Google Scholar; Davidoff, Leonore, ‘“Adam spoke first and named the orders of the world”: masculine and feminine domains in history and sociology’, in Politics of Everyday Life: Continuity and Change in Work and the Family (ed. Corr, H. and Jamieson, L.), London, 1990, 229–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crompton, Rosemary and Mann, Michael (eds.), Gender and Stratification, Cambridge, 1986, especially chs. 4 and 12Google Scholar; Burke, Peter, History and Social Theory, Ithaca, 1992.Google Scholar

¹⁵ Illich, , op. cit. (11), 4Google Scholar; see also Beer, Gillian, ‘“The Face of Nature”: anthropomorphic elements in the language of The Origin of Species’, in Languages of Nature: Critical Essays on Science and Literature (ed. Jordanova, L.), London, 1986, 207–43Google Scholar; Jordanova, Ludmilla, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Hemel Hempstead, 1989, ch. 4Google Scholar; Duden, Barbara, The Woman Beneath the Skin: A Doctor's Patients in Eighteenth-Century Germany, Cambridge, Mass., 1991, especially 37–41.Google Scholar

¹⁶ ‘Sophia’, Woman Not Inferior to Man, London, 1739Google Scholar, and Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, London, 1792Google Scholar are well-known examples.

¹⁷ Evelyn Fox Keller, , Reflections on Gender and Science, New Haven and London, 1985, part 2Google Scholar, and ‘From secrets of life to secrets of death’, in Body/Politics: Women and the Discourses of Science (ed. Jacobus, M., Keller, E. Fox and Shuttleworth, S.), New York and London, 1990, 177–91Google Scholar; cf. Butler, Judith, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London, 1990, ch. 2.Google Scholar

¹⁸ See e.g., the journal Representations; on personification see: Warner, Marina, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form, London, 1985Google Scholar; Agulhon, Maurice, Marianne into Battle: Republican Imagery and Symbolism in France, 1789–1880, Cambridge, 1981Google Scholar; Pointon, Marcia, Naked Authority: The Body in Western Painting 1830–1908, Cambridge, 1990, especially ch. 3Google Scholar; Schiebinger, Londa, ‘Feminine icons: the face of early modern science’, Critical Inquiry (1988), 14, 661–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

¹⁹ Veith, Ilza, Hysteria: The History of a Disease, Chicago, 1965Google Scholar; Showalter, Elaine, The Female Malady: Women, Madness and English Culture, 1830–1980, London, 1987Google Scholar; Figlio, Karl, ‘Chlorosis and chronic disease in 19th-century Britain: the social constitution of somatic illness in a capitalist society’, in Women and Health: The Politics of Sex in Medicine (ed. Fee, E.), Farmingdale, NY, 1983, 213–41Google Scholar; Brumberg, Joan, ‘Chlorotic girls, 1870–1920: a historical perspective on female adolescence’, in Women and Health in America: Historical Readings (ed. Leavitt, J.), Madison, 1984, 186–95.Google Scholar

²⁰ Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class, London, 1963Google Scholar (‘class is a relationship, not a thing… “It”does not exist’, p. 11); Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act, New York, 1975Google Scholar; Customs in Common, London, 1993.Google Scholar

²¹ Micale, Mark, ‘Hysteria male/hysteria female: reflections on comparative gender construction in nineteenth-century France and Britain’, in Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Enquiry 1780–1945 (ed. Benjamin, Marina), Oxford, 1991, 200–39Google Scholar; Showalter, Elaine, op. cit. (19), ch. 7Google Scholar; Moscucci, Ornella, The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929, Cambridge, 1990Google Scholar; Bynum, William and Porter, Roy (eds.), William Hunter and the Eighteenth Century Medical World, Cambridge, 1985Google Scholar; Porter, Roy ‘A touch of danger: the man-midwife as sexual predator’, in Sexual Underworlds of the Enlightenment (ed. Rousseau, G. and Porter, R.), Manchester, 1987, 206–32.Google Scholar

²² Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, New York, 1980Google Scholar; Keller, Fox, op. cit. (17), chs. 2 and 3Google Scholar; Schiebinger, , op. cit. (13)Google Scholar; Easlea, Brian, Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race, London, 1983, especially 19–28.Google Scholar

²³ Bernard, Claude, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, New York, 1957, 22–3.Google Scholar

²⁴ Jordan, Winthrop, White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550–1812, Baltimore, 1969.Google Scholar

²⁵ Elshtain, Jean, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought, Oxford, 1981Google Scholar, and Meditations on Modern Political Thought: Masculine/Feminine Themes from Luther to Arendt, New York, 1986Google Scholar; Okin, Susan, Women in Western Political Thought, Princeton, 1979Google Scholar; Moore, Henrietta, Feminism and Anthropology, Cambridge, 1988, ch. 2Google Scholar; Lloyd, Genevieve, The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, London, 1984, especially ch. 5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

²⁶ Maclean, Ian, The Renaissance Notion of Women, Cambridge, 1980CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and the works cited in note 25.

²⁷ On embryology see Gasking, Elizabeth, Investigations into Generation 1651–1828, Baltimore, 1966Google Scholar; Roe, Shirley, Matter, Life, and Generation: Eighteenth-century Embryology and the Haller-Wolff Debate, Cambridge, 1981Google Scholar; Horder, T. J., Witkowski, J. A. and Wylie, C. C. (eds.), A History of Embryology, Cambridge, 1986Google Scholar. McLaren, Angus, Reproductive Rituals: The Perception of Fertility in England from the Sixteenth Century to the Nineteenth Century, London and New York, 1984Google Scholar, places these issues in a broad historical context.

²⁸ Jordanova, Ludmilla, ‘Naturalizing the family: literature and the bio-medical sciences in the late eighteenth century’Google Scholar, in Jordanova, L. (ed.), op. cit. (15), 86–116, especially 115–16Google Scholar; Schiebinger, Londa, ‘Why mammals are called mammals: gender politics in eighteenth-century natural history’, American Historical Review (1993), 98, 382–411CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Moscucci, , op. cit. (21).Google Scholar

²⁹ Burkhardt, Richard, ‘Closing the door on Lord Morton's mare: the rise and fall of telegony’, Studies in the History of Biology (1979), 3, 1–21Google ScholarPubMed; Bynum, and Porter, (eds.), op. cit. (21)Google Scholar; Moscucci, , op. cit. (21).Google Scholar

³⁰ Strathern, Marilyn, Reproducing the Future: Essays on Anthropology, Kinship and the New Reproductive Technologies, Manchester, 1992Google Scholar, and After Nature: English Kinship in the Late Twentieth Century, Cambridge, 1992.Google Scholar

³¹ Smith, Adam, The Wealth of Nations, Harmondsworth, 1970, ch. 8, especially 182–3.Google Scholar

³² Malthus, , An Essay on the Principle of Population, Harmondsworth, 1970.Google Scholar

³³ Starting at least with Hobbes' Leviathan, political theorists, including political economists, turned to supposedly natural and original situations and used the relations between men and women that they imagined to have obtained there as models, both positive and negative, often treating them as naturalized legitimations of social relations more generally: Elshtain, , op. cit. (25)Google Scholar and Okin, , op. cit. (25).Google Scholar

³⁴ Davin, Anna, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal (1978), 5, 9–65CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Lewis, Jane, The Politics of Motherhood, London, 1980CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Oakely, Ann, The Captured Womb: A History of the Medical Care of Pregnant Women, Oxford, 1984Google Scholar; Pfeffer, Naomi, The Stork and the Syringe, Cambridge, 1993.Google Scholar

³⁵ Taylor, Frederick Winslow, Principles of Scientific Management, New York and London, 1911, 40Google Scholar, cited in Jordanova, Ludmilla, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Hemel Hempstead, 1989, 118Google Scholar; Haraway, Donna, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, New York and London, 1989Google Scholar, and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London, 1991.Google Scholar

³⁶ In addition to works already cited, the following journals are relevant: Gender and History; Genders; Journal of Gender Studies; Gender and Society, as are the following books: Poovey, Mary, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England, Chicago, 1988CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Laqueur, Thomas, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, Cambridge, Mass., 1990Google Scholar; Showalter, Elaine, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle, London, 1991Google Scholar; Walkowitz, Judith, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, London, 1992CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Russett, Cynthia, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood, Cambridge, Mass., 1989Google Scholar; Fausto-Sterling, Anne, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men, New York, 1985.Google Scholar