Authors and Readers

Despite the prevailing barriers to acquiring a formal education, eighteenth-century women had access to a variety of textbooks tailored to disseminate knowledge of natural philosophy. Often perceived as having fragile minds, these women only needed minimal knowledge of the era’s progress. Titles such as Astronomy of the Ladies, Newtonianism for Ladies, and Chemistry for Women – the latter written by the Italian author Giuseppe Compagnoni – were among these books. However, the work that had the most profound impact, remaining a topic of discussion to this day, is Conversations on Chemistry, authored by the English writer Jane Marcet and published in the early nineteenth century. Shortly after, in the United States of America, Almira Hart Lincoln Phelps stood out as an author of science textbooks for girls. Moving into the twentieth century, the American chemist Mary Fieser excelled in writing university textbooks.