Making her case: gendered evidence and women's astronomical writing of the long eighteenth century.

• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/2047/D20293978

In my dissertation, titled Making Her Case: Gendered Evidence and Womens Astronomical Writing of the Long Eighteenth Century, I explore the ways in which gender surfaced in womens science writing and identify patterns in what I define as gendered evidencethat is, literary accounts of evidence that emerged in the texts of these women that were at odds with male-dominated norms of scientific writing at the time. I identify specific strategies and techniques that authors used to articulate evidence, and argue that these variances in rhetorical evidentiary tactics complicate ideas of standardization in enlightenment scientific writing and even call into question scientific knowledge-making processes. This project thus explores the extent to which the writing of these women, some of them astronomers in their own right, and the range of scientific genres in which they wrote (and from which they learned) used gendered evidence to productively push against systemic institutional exclusion.