Concealing and Revealing Women's Secrets: Wax Sculptors in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World
This talk is a study of the history of wax sculpting as a form of female knowledge creation. Professor Carlyle provides a comparative study of three eighteenth-century female wax sculptors in the Atlantic world: the Parisian modeler of wax anatomies, Marie-Marguerite Biheron; Patience Wright, whose lifelike sculptures earned her a following on both sides of the Atlantic; and Margaret Salmon, who attracted visitors to her waxworks museum in London before Mme Tussaud became a household name. She suggests that all three women—Biheron, Wright, and Salmon—drew on the contemporary cachet of "women’s secrets" in order to build their businesses and carve out a place in the male world of wax sculpting. In showcasing models of their own invention, they revealed the hidden "secrets" of women's reproductive bodies while simultaneously concealing their trade secrets—like proprietary modeling materials and techniques—from prying eyes. Biheron gave lessons in reproductive anatomy to elite girls using her lifelike wax models while refusing to divulge her wax recipe to the scientific academies that sought it out. Patience Wright, meanwhile, earned the title of "Promethean modeler" for springing forth waxworks that she concealed under apron, just as Margaret Salmon's death masks were seen as the products of a fertile feminine touch.
Meet the Speaker
Margaret Carlyle is an Assistant Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of British Columbia Okanagan. She was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Cambridge, a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Minnesota, and most recently, a Postdoctoral Researcher here at IFK. Her first book, currently under review, is entitled Women and Anatomy in Enlightenment France. Margaret's second book on the history of reproductive technologies entitled Delivering the Enlightenment is well under way and was developed while she was here at IFK. This presentation is the subject of an article that she is writing that falls somewhere between book project 1 and 2.
Recommended readings
The Lady Anatomist by Rebecca Messbarger
The Anatomical Venus by Joanna Ebenstein
Ephemeral Bodies edited by Roberta Panzanelli
Model Experts by Anna Maerker
Minerva's Sisters by Nina Rattner Gelbart