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Emboldened women across Europe during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries attended universities and received degrees, developed keen interests in the nature of their environment beyond the humanities, cultivated their minds in a �masculine� manner, and published their findings for societal benefit. However, the views towards female participation in scientific learning and advancement all confined women, ultimately, to a �feminine� role; such views, as a result, limited female contributions to the sciences, either discrediting the works� validity or dismissing them as pursuits extraneous to the household role of women.
Contemporary views about women restricted their achievement level, placing women into a cultural identity that, though not necessarily degrading intentionally, only granted them power through the use of their �grace and beauty� (Document 12). Both women, such as Marie Thiroux d�Arconville (Document 12), and men categorized women sexually. Women, according to Gottfried Leibniz (Document 7), surpassed men in their distinct ability to better examine and reflect �the good and the beautiful�. Though on the surface a positive view, Leibniz shared the beliefs of his contemporaries that, if women pursued higher education, they ought to restrict their study to subjects such as the arts (Document 10). A German newspaper article in 1787 positively publicized Dorothea Schlazer, upon receiving her doctorate, because she acquired scientific knowledge while maintaining her primary, feminine role: �She sews, knits, and understands household economy perfectly well� (Document 13). Thus, when lauded, female achievements in the sciences placed below their contributions to the household.
Mores often discredited the occupation of women, such as Maria Winkelmann (Document 8), in the sciences. Women who sought to elasticize the vantage that women should not compete with men beyond the realm of the arts (Document 10) met constraint and rejection. Scientific women during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries wore �antique� dress, according to Samuel Pepys (Document 4), and could maintain neither their appearances nor their households. Thus, achieving scientific knowledge connotated for women a denial of their own sex and a trend toward masculinity. Though the German news article (Document 13) asserted a contrary viewpoint that female scientists did not necessarily appear �unfeminine�, their general scarcity in the scientific field held the expectation, for men such as Samuel Pepys, that these must be truly extraordinary women (Document 4). Women of the time period examined did not concern themselves with �troublesome and laborious causes� (Document 7). Therefore, a woman who pursued knowledge persistently and attentively (Document 5), perhaps even neglecting her feminine upkeep in the favor of scientific interest (Document 3), disappointed especially the men who never before interacted with women intellectually. This created an indignant reaction that led to negative theories about female scientists. Rather than pursuing scientific knowledge for reasons similar to those of men, views held that females sought intellectual growth out of neurosis (Document 13), or because they felt �above� their own sex (Document 9), both of which implied severe mental deficiency. Thus, women who sought fulfillment through scientific knowledge did so in order to make up for a lack of femininity. Conclusively, women denied and defied their sexual limitations when they overstepped the bounds society restricted them to.
According to Marie Meurdrac, the mind had �no sex� and awaited cultivation (Document 2). She postulated that women and men possessed similar capabilities. Though Marie Thiroux d�Arconville disagreed (Document 12), believing women met limits in competence, other women, dissatisfied with their endowments of �grace and beauty� (Document 2), devoted their entire selves to study (Document 5). Though society forbade her to do so, Marie Meurdrac felt passionately about her work and compelled to publish it (Document 2). Women scientists possessed supposedly masculine qualities of learning; Marquise Emilie du Chatelet, aware of time fleeting, worked twenty-one hour days (Document 11). Men who proposed new principles prepared to defend them; in the same vein, Dorothea Erxeblen recognized the popular views on her sexual limitations (Document 9) that she either could discount, to gain recognition, or verify, to gain nothing. Maria Winkelmann in astrology proved her competency, observing a comet her husband missed (Document 6). However, thirty years later society did not change; Johann Theodor Jablonski facilitated a motion from the Berlin Academy of Sciences for obtaining Maria Winkelmann�s removal, based upon the limitations their society still expected of her (Document 8). Thus, when women took actions commonly attributed to and deemed acceptable for men, they met almost unceasingly with hostility.
Women in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated within a society that confined them to a passive, feminine role, one that Betty Freidan in The Feminine Mystique describes. Though the achievements some women facilitated in the sciences forced contemporaries to recognize the potential of intellectual growth existed for women, all views filtered through the limitations of society that allowed women to expand only within their functions of creating a family and maintaining an efficient household. Thus, all views antagonistically designated women who participated in scientific development during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, because these women thereby rejected their societal constraints and structure.
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