Lady Mary Wortley Montagu

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689-1762) was an outstanding example of what the early Enlightenment chose to describe as Scientific Ladies. She is best known today for her correspondence; in an age of letter-writing, she is perhaps the nearest English counterpart of the great French epistolist, Madame de Sevigne. Her interests and accomplishments, however, ranged as widely as those of any of her male contemporaries; she wrote a series of "Court Eclogs," poetry which Alexander Pope felt moved to preserve a manuscript copy of, though "she was prevented by the decorum of her sex and social class from publishing under her name" (Montagu, 1977, p. vii), and distinguished herself as a proto-feminist two generations before Mary Wollstonecraft.

She was also keenly interested in scientific subjects of all sorts; writing her daughter about her granddaughter's education,

I believe there are few heads capable of making Sir I. Newton's calculations, but the result of them is not difficult to be understood by a moderate capacity. Do

not fear this should make her affect the character of

Lady --, or Lady --, or Mrs --: those women are

ridiculous not because they have learning, but because

they have it not. (Alic, 1986, pp. 90-91)

As the wife of the English Ambassador to Turkey, she had the opportunity and the powers of observation to take note of an indigenous practice among Turkish peasants which caused them to be nearly free of the scourge of smallpox, a di

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operation and the French ambassador says pleasantly that they take the smallpox here by way of diversion as they take the waters of other countries. There is no example of anyone that has died in it. (Shurkin, 1973, pp. 123-24) She had her son inoculated while in Turkey, and after her return, had her daughter inoculated in 1721, when a smallpox epidemic swept London. This time the procedure was performed by her family physician, a Dr. Maitland, and its effects were closely watched by the learned and prominent. Under Lady Montagu's encouragement, Princess Caroline had her children inoculated, though only after the procedure had been tested on condemned inmates, and then on children in an orphanage. Histories of medicine and science, as noted earlier, have tended to slight Lady Montagu's contribution to the development of smallpox inoculation. We must ask to what degree this is due to her having been a woman, and to what degree it may have been true of other factors. Certainly in her day public life was wholly male-dominated, and whatever women may have thought and said privately, the official ideology of the age, shaped entirely by men, regarded women as unfit by the nature of their sex for any serious i

Category: Literature - L