Men, Women, and the Birthing of Modern Science

In the early 1600s, Francis Bacon could encompass all knowledge of both the physical and the metaphysical in a single term: natural philosophy. Over the next two hundred years, however, natural philosophy gradually split into philosophy--the study of first causes and ways of knowing--and science--the study of the material world, based on direct observation and verifiable experiment. Science was not initially an exclusively masculine domain.