Le ambiguità della memoria. Appunti su donne e genere negli archivi della scienza tra Settecento e Ottocento

This essay investigates women’s roles in shaping scientific archives through the management of family legacies in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century France. Focusing on Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier (1758–1836), it shows how, over four decades after the death of her husband, the French chemist Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier (1743-1794), she recovered, reorganized, and reused his papers and other materials. In doing so, she played a key role in shaping his posthumous image as “father of modern chemistry” and “martyr of the French Revolution” while maintaining her own visibility in Parisian scientific circles until at least the 1830s. Drawing on similar cases, the article calls for considering scientific archives as gendered constructions shaped by domestic practices, family dynamics, and memory politics, while exploring the ambiguous traces of women’s contributions – variously visible, rewritten, or obscured over time.