Today, we view the conservative face of revolution.
The University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Movies and novels about
18th-century France show us salons run by witty and
intelligent women -- women with a fine cutting
edge, functioning as equals in that rational,
enlightened world.
Two men give us a window into that world. They are
the great author and wit,
Voltaire; and Diderot,
writer of novels and a great technical
encyclopedia. Both were revolutionaries and
freethinkers. Both were in constant trouble with
the law. Both saw science and technology as major
parts of 18th-century revolution.
When he was 35, Voltaire took up an affair with a
brilliant aristocratic married woman, Emilie, the
marquise of Châtelet. That went on for 16
years, during which time Emilie raised children,
managed an estate, carried on a bone-crushing
social life, and taught herself mathematics
and physics on the side.
History now calls the indefatigable Emilie the
greatest French woman scientist of the 18th
century. Sleeping only 4 or 5 hours a night, she
studied the flow of heat. She produced the first
French translation of Newton's
Principia.
Voltaire never got over her death in childbirth
when she was 43. When he took up with a new
mistress, he spent years vainly trying to draw the
same mental brilliance from her that he'd found in
Emilie. His later writings are populated with
heroines who echo Emilie's strength and
intelligence. Voltaire is frank about craving
virtues which he perceives as masculine in a woman.
Diderot's story is similar. He lost interest in his
marriage after his children were born and spent
years in an affair with one Sophie Volland. Diderot
wrote reams about women, and we're pretty clear on
his beliefs. "Friendship," he says,
which needs firmness of spirit, right conduct,
and discernment of choice, is ill suited to a sex
that's weak by nature, frivolous by education,
scatter-brained by pretension, coquette by vanity,
& inconstant for want of occupation.
He rails against marriage -- calls its
permanence a recipe for unhappiness. Yet he tells his
daughter that, in marriage, she should put her
husband's happiness above her own. Like Voltaire, he
praises his mistress's masculine qualities. That
theme of underlying masculinity also wreathes his
fictional heroines.
Voltaire and Diderot waged 18th-century revolution
as formidably as Ben Franklin did. Both were
determined to improve a dysfunctional social order
using the tools of applied science.
How odd, then, that each could be so easily trapped
by unscientific 18th-century convictions about
gender. Neither could see that the masculinity they
so craved to find in a woman was no more than
freedom. It was the very freedom that they, by
writing and by action, were systematically
stifling.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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