Valeria Tettamanti, Ecole française de Rome (résidence scientifique jeunes chercheurs UNIONE –November 2025-July 2026) Awardee, discuss her project “Popular science in Italian feminine press at the turn of 20th century”.
“Making science accessible” by “giv[ing] examples of women”: this is how UNESCO, in March 2026, frames its support for girls’ access to quality STEM learning. At the heart of this statement lies a paradox: the idea of science as a universal mode of knowing sits uneasily alongside the biographical exemplum as a gendered practice of scientific “translation”. My current research project investigates this paradox though a rarely credited source about science and feminine imagery: science popularization in the Italian feminine press at the turn of 20th century.
The tension is not new. On the one hand, the universalist credo of the “Republic of sciences” (praised by popularizers like Angelo Secchi, Antonio Stoppani and Paolo Mantegazza), presupposing an accessible, shared, and cultivated knowledge by all, collides with expressions of women’s subjectivation, gendered specializations, and structural barriers to professionalisation. On the other hand, women tend to constitute the privileged relay of a “scientific communication” that separates the production of knowledge from its transmission, the medium from its message.
From the history of science, where women’s scientific popularization has largely been approached through paradigmatic cases, to the bestselling biographies such as Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World (2016), the dominant mode of making women visible in science reproduces rather than interrogates the “top-down model” of scientific communication. Understanding the historical roots of this paradox — and the diversified, scattered and largely unacknowledged popularization that emerged in the Italian feminine press at the turn of the 20th century — is a necessary condition for rethinking the relationship between gender, science, and public knowledge today.
Most of these writers, not degree-holding scientists, adopt hybrid intellectual statuses, answering to divergent logics of legitimation: as amateurs, as novelists, as “wives of” or “daughters of”. Popularization is often one “station” within diversified writing careers and surfaces as metadiegetic inserts in various articles (from serialized novels to socialist reportages). Unlike popularization in the specialized press, these writings do not always stem from a complete expertise of the matter, nor do it often rely on leading scientific journals, as such “high” popular science or academic. How does feminine popularization differ from “masculine” popularization and from pedagogical “feminine” writing? My project traces this indeterminacy in a privileged place of negotiation: in feminine press, the interplay of knowledge transmission, social categorization, moral judgement and gender prejudice is concentrated on the page.
At the BSR, I’ve been investigating how the genesis of these texts and the conditions of production, which can be identified in archival correspondences and official Roman documents (Archivio Centrale dello Stato, Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Roma, Fondazione Primoli), allows to trace an intertext of relations and circulations (reprinted articles, synopsis…). Reconstructing science popularization in the feminine press will offer a more comprehensive image of nineteenth-century science communication, of the periodical press culture, of women’s writing production and of history of science.
I am grateful to the BSR for the time and very warm support it gave me in beginning this fascinating project.
