As I read Cavendish I found myself amused by some the ideas that she presented because to an audience in the 21st century this dislike for science is just plain odd. These days in our daily lives we make use of technology and speak among ourselves about scientific discovery over dinner. We don’t see science as a waste of time or a group of men playing with their toys, well not as much as before anyway. That being said though while I was amused by Cavendish I did understand the point she was trying to make with her shoe analogy.  Because to her microscopes were the wrong pairs of shoes to go along with the outfit so to speak. In this case more valuable pursuits were a functional durable pair of shoes and more trivial pursuits were heels and these men were wearing heels. Men were not using their time to focus on what she considered to be more valuable pursuits like “better and commodious contrivances in the art of architecture to build us houses” or “for the better increase of vegetables and brute animals to nourish our bodies” (pg.2204). Instead men were focusing their time on microscopes and trying to understand things from a micro perspective, one of which hadn’t existed until then, and was a novel approach to science.

Her understanding of science was firmly based on nature and the way things present themselves to us without any alteration. She says, “the best optic is a perfect natural eye, and a regular sensitive perception…but not deluding arts.” (pg. 2205). So, to Cavendish the only way to see beauty was to see it the way nature intended it: with the naked eye and not through some distorted glass. In a sense, this breakthrough for the scientific community to her went against nature and that made it wrong. She did not see how microscopes improved our knowledge of the world around us because she was fixated on the fact that it was a different perspective from what is generally seen by the naked eye.

Going back to my own analogy of the wrong pair of shoes for the outfit I see Cavendish and the point that she endeavoring to make which was the heels were the wrong choice much in the same way using microscopes was a waste of the scientific community’s time. However, I also see that she was fixated on nature in a way that she believed to be enlightened but was perhaps in fact unenlightened. Instead of taking this new information and trying to build from it and grow on her own, she chose to tear it down and try to discredit it, which during her time gave the people around her even more reason to find her strange and not worth taking seriously. Because not only was she a woman trying to speak on science but she was also a woman trying to say that the scientific discoveries of the time were a waste of time and went against nature’s wishes. Something that would’ve especially irritated men like Thomas Sprat and Robert Hooke because to them the true beauty of nature was visible under a microscope, it was seen through all the things that up until then hadn’t been known.

Perhaps what Cavendish needed was a pair of sneakers not heels.

 

– Diana Lara