Postscript: New trajectories
At the beginning of this collection of stories, I suggested that with the Age of Enlightenment women’s history began to follow a new trajectory. In 1678 the first woman to obtain a PhD, Elena Piscopia, graduated from Padua University in northern Italy.
By the end of the eighteenth century, professional women intellectuals and scientists had become prominent voices in that Enlightenment: the mathematician Emilie du Châtelet, artists like Anne Vallayer-Coster and historians of the stamp of Catherine Macaulay spring readily to mind. Women are prominent among printers and publishers, naturalists and botanists, astronomers and translators and in the field of educational textbooks. In my own exploration of a world of social, political and industrial revolutions in Europe and beyond, The Prometheans, I was able to write in some detail about the careers of many of them: the revolutionary assassin Charlotte Corday; the radical polemicist Mary Wollstonecraft and her novelist daughter Mary Shelley; Mary Somerville (the first person to whom the term ‘scientist’ was applied, in 1830); Germaine de Staël (Napoleon’s antagonist); Caroline Norton and many others. The lives of these women, members of a new cultural elite whose careers were forged, at least partially, independent of social rank, are accessible as never before. In turn, they lay the foundations of the movement that led to the founding of colleges of higher education for women and to women’s suffrage at the beginning of the twentieth century.Years spent disinterring the urban dead of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spitalfields acquainted me with the more humdrum anthropology of women’s lives in one of the great European cities in that period. Among the many hundreds of citizens populating the vaults of this crypt in their lead-lined coffins, women are represented equally with men – in death, if not in life. Their stories are tales of childbirth and arthritis, of marriage and profession, of immigration and social mobility.
Over the hundred and fifty years or so of burial in the Spitalfields crypt from about 1720, perhaps the least conspicuous and most fundamental change in the fortunes of women is the dramatic reduction in infant mortality that characterises the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Women bore fewer children; more of them survived to adulthood. Perhaps, above all, with that salutary statistic the new trajectory in women’s history can be understood.