Page 435 - Western Civilization A Brief History, Volume I To 1715 9th - Jackson J. Spielvogel

were so good that you “would hardly believe they were done by a woman at all.”
In the seventeenth century, women joined this debate by arguing against these male images of women. They argued that women also had rational minds and could grow from education. Further, since most women were pious, chaste, and temperate, there was no need for male authority over them. These female defenders of women emphasized education as the key to women’s ability to move into the world. How, then, did the Sci- entific Revolution affect this debate over the nature of women? As this was an era of intellectual revolution in which traditional authorities were being overthrown, we might expect significant change in men’s views of women. But by and large, instead of becoming an instrument for liberation, science was used to find new support for the old, stereotypical views about a wom- an’s “true place” in the scheme of things.
An important project in the new anatomy of the six- teenth and seventeenth centuries was the attempt to illustrate the human body and skeleton. For Vesalius, the physical differences between males and females were limited to external bodily form (the outlines of the body) and the sexual organs. Vesalius saw no differ- ences in male and female skeletons and portrayed them as being the same. It was not until the eighteenth cen- tury, in fact, that a new anatomy finally prevailed. Drawings of female skeletons between 1730 and 1790 varied, but females tended to have a larger pelvic area, and in some instances, female skulls were portrayed as smaller than those of males. Eighteenth-century stud- ies on the anatomy and physiology of sexual differences provided “scientific evidence” to reaffirm the tradi- tional inferiority of women. The larger pelvic area “proved” that women were meant to be child-bearers, and men’s larger skulls “demonstrated” the superiority of the male mind. Male-dominated science had been used to “prove” male social dominance.
Overall, the Scientific Revolution reaffirmed tradi- tional ideas about women. Male scientists used the new science to spread the view that women were inferior by nature, subordinate to men, and suited by nature to play a domestic role as nurturing mothers. The wide- spread distribution of books—written primarily by men, of course—ensured the continuation of these ideas. Jean de La Bruye`re (ZHAHNH du lah broo-YARE), the seventeenth-century French moralist, was typical when he remarked that an educated woman was like a collec- tor’s item “which one shows to the curious, but which has no use at all, any more than a carousel horse.”6
Toward a New Earth: Descartes, Rationalism, and a New View of Humankind
Q FOCUS QUESTION: Why is Descartes considered the “founder of modern rationalism”?
The fundamentally new conception of the universe con- tained in the cosmological revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries inevitably had an impact on the Western view of humankind. Nowhere is this more evident than in the work of the Frenchman Ren􏰀e Des- cartes (ruh-NAY day-KART) (1596–1650), an extremely important figure in Western history. Descartes began by reflecting the doubt and uncertainty that seemed perva- sive in the confusion of the seventeenth century and ended with a philosophy that dominated Western thought until the twentieth century.
Rene􏰀 Descartes. Ren􏰀e Descartes was one of the primary figures in the Scientific Revolution. Claiming to use reason as his sole guide to truth, Descartes posited a sharp distinction between mind and matter. He is shown here in a portrait by Frans Hals, one of the painters of the Dutch golden age who was famous for his portraits, especially that of Descartes.
Toward a New Earth: Descartes, Rationalism, and a New View of Humankind 397
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Louvre (Thierry Le Mage), Paris//a RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY