Article ID: CBB000775034

Science and Sociability: Women as Audience at the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1831--1901 (2008)

unapi

This essay recovers the experiences of women at the meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS) from its founding in 1831 to the end of the Victorian era. It aims to add to research on women in science by reconsidering the traditional role of women as consumers rather than producers of knowledge and to that on science popularization by focusing on audience experience rather than on the aims and strategies of popularizers. The essay argues that, in various ways, the ubiquitous and visible female audience came to define the BAAS audience and the public for science more generally. The women who swelled the BAAS audiences were accepted as a social element within the meetings even as they were regarded critically as scientific participants. Portrayed as passive and nonscientific, women allowed the male scientific elites to distance themselves from their audiences. Arguing from diary and other evidence, we present examples that complicate existing notions of audiences for science as necessarily active.

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Authors & Contributors
Hutton, Sarah
Bernstein, Susan David
Jeremy J. D. Greenwood
Tanja Hammel
Ellis, Heather
James Parry
Concepts
Women in science
Science and gender
Newtonianism
Popularization
Biographies
Societies; institutions; academies
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
Places
Great Britain
South Africa
France
Gambia
Toulouse (France)
England
Institutions
British Association for the Advancement of Science
British Ornithologists' Union (BOU)
Oxford University
Linnean Society of London
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