Hester Pulter’s 17th-century Spaceflight of Imagination
From a darkened bedroom in rural England in 1648, Hester Pulter traveled to the edge of the known universe. She closely observed the moon, deeming it “another world,” confirmed that the sun was “the center of all the rest” of the planets, counted the four large moons of Jupiter, and counted two moons orbiting Saturn. After gazing at the galaxy stretched out before her, she returned home to her bedroom, where she lay in pain from a difficult pregnancy. Her account of her voyage would remain unknown until 1996, when a graduate student discovered her manuscript in the University of Leeds Brotherton Library.
Long before Anne McClain had to forego her spacewalk because there weren't enough suits sized for women’s bodies, and well before NASA engineers asked Sally Ride if 100 tampons were enough for a week in space, women's bodies were used as excuses to exclude them from the practice and discussion of science. Philosophers and early scientists assumed that women’s bodies were unstable and therefore unfit for serious scientific thought. In 17th-century England, as the rise of science—then called natural philosophy—inspired people to observe and explore the world around them, women were systematically excluded from the scientific institutions and professional societies that formed to advance scientific and medical knowledge.
However, many 17th-century women still found ways to participate in and conduct scientific work. Pulter’s imaginative space travel poem, “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With My Son John,” is one example of a much larger phenomenon of women’s scientific work in 17th-century England. Though they were often excluded from academic scientific inquiry, women of all classes practiced natural philosophy in many different forms in their own homes, social circles, and kitchens.
“Though they were often excluded from academic scientific inquiry, women of all classes practiced natural philosophy in many different forms in their own homes, social circles, and kitchens.”
Pulter’s poem reveals the ways that many women used their imaginations and household tools to make a space for their scientific and experimental investigation. “This Was Written in 1648” is not the only one of Pulter’s poems to make room for women’s bodies and physical labor in scientific study. Many of her poems take up the major questions of the day in astronomy, alchemy, and reports of new animals from the recently “discovered” New World. Her poetry consistently makes the case that women’s experiences add unique perspectives to the enterprise of natural philosophy by asserting that women’s domestic, reproductive, and intellectual labors create new worlds and provide an optimal lens to understand the natural world.
Pulter, born in 1605 in Dublin, balanced the expectations of a 17th-century aristocratic woman with a scientifically-minded curiosity. Like most women of her time, Pulter wasn’t formally educated as a scientist, rather as the daughter of an earl, she received an education befitting a lady, including lessons in music, art, languages, and literature. She lived through the English Civil War, which lasted from 1642 to 1651, and weathered the death of 13 of her 15 children. (The “John” in the title of her space travel poem was Pulter’s 15th child). Throughout all this political turmoil and personal trauma, she maintained a rich intellectual life, keeping up-to-date on the latest discoveries in 17th-century astronomy, natural philosophy, and chemistry, which she wove throughout her poetry. Her poems reference natural history, alchemy, and descriptions of America much like William Wood’s “New England’s Prospect,” as well as the period’s major scientific discoveries, including Galilean astronomy, the heliocentric model of the solar system, and the microscope. Between the 1640s and 1660s, she wrote at least 120 poems and a prose romance, titled The Unfortunate Florinda.
Giving birth to 15 children over 24 years, Pulter was pregnant for much of her adult life, and as a result, she was often isolated, ill, and in pain. And while Pulter often laments her isolation at her husband’s estate a day’s journey north of London, scholar Alice Eardley has argued in her edition of Pulter’s poems that her isolation allowed her the creative freedom to craft innovative and insightful poetry that was unlike anything her contemporaries were writing.
Pulter’s writing often demonstrates that the work of managing a household can provide tools for women to think about the nature of the world and create knowledge about its workings. For example, she occasionally adopts the tone and style of 17th-century recipes in her poems in order to think about the composition of plants and the human soul. At other times, she applies the scientific techniques of close observation to the world around her estate, producing information about the behavior of ant colonies or the characteristics of flowers.
In “This Was Written 1648,” Pulter insists that women’s physical pain and reproductive labor are central to producing new knowledge about the world. She writes this poem while in the early stages of lying-in, a childbirth ritual that extended from labor to at least one month after delivery. During this time, a new mother would be confined to a darkened room, joined by other women—her relatives, midwives, and neighbors. Gradually, she would heal, begin to walk around the room, and move about her house. While she recovered in this communal space, writes literary scholar Amanda Zoch, a new mother would also have ample time to think, pray, or write.
While Pulter lays in bed, “sad, sick, and lame,” fighting “pain and passion,” she turns to scientific contemplation for comfort and distraction: “My thoughts being free, I bid them take their flight / Above the gloomy shades of death and night.” And her thoughts fly all the way up to space, “overjoyed with such a large commission.” Her journey through the solar system focuses primarily on observing the characteristics of each planet and their movements around the sun.
Throughout her poems, Pulter’s observations are up-to-date with scientific advances of the period, and some even anticipate planetary discovery. Writing about Saturn, she notes, “About [its] orb two sickly Cynthias roll.” Cynthia, another name for the Roman goddess of the moon Diana, was common 17th-century poetic shorthand for the moon. The first recorded observation of Saturn’s moons is typically credited to Christiaan Huygens in 1655, published in his 1659 text Systema Saturnium. From her bedroom in 1648, Pulter imagines Saturn to have at least two moons, several years before Huygens observes a single moon.
Having ventured beyond the horizon of human knowledge, Pulter’s journey stops when she observes the vast galaxy and “fixed stars” stretching before her: “But their vast brightness so my mind amazed / That my affrighted fancy downward flew.” Just as pain and the rituals of lying-in allowed her to begin her exploration, they also draw her back from the edge of the universe. As the sun begins to rise, Pulter returns from her intellectual exploration to the community of women: “And then my maids my window curtains drew, / And, as my pain, so comforts did renew.”
In writing the poem from within the space and time of lying-in, Pulter makes an argument for the role of women’s spaces and women’s time in natural philosophy. Contemplating natural philosophy is her antidote to an isolated and painful experience, but she uses the isolation of lying-in as an opportune time to contemplate new scientific discoveries and what may lay beyond the horizons of knowledge. Pulter presents this lens as an advantage for producing new understandings of the world and new answers to emerging scientific questions.
“[T]he 17th-century poems of Pulter, Cavendish, and others provide a vision of scientific disciplines where women’s bodies and experiences are vital components of inquiry, exploration, and imagination.”
Pulter wasn’t the only one imagining new worlds. Her contemporary, Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, was fascinated with the possibilities raised by newly discovered atoms. Her poem “A World in an Earring” imagines a whole particle-sized landscape within a lady’s earring, setting up a thought experiment that worlds that might exist at the atomic level.
These women’s writings show us that the scientific landscape was much richer and more imaginative than traditional accounts of the Scientific Revolution portray. Archives and libraries around the world contain abundant examples of women spending their time conducting experiments, observing nature, and advancing theoretical explorations of the undiscovered universe. And the 17th-century poems of Pulter, Cavendish, and others provide a vision of scientific disciplines where women’s bodies and experiences are vital components of inquiry, exploration, and imagination. Because there were no rockets carrying humans up to the stars, everyone had to rely on the same mechanism to explore space—imagination, fantasy, art, and curiosity. From within their households and lying-in chambers, Pulter and others demonstrated that the intellectual skills of observing and world-making were available to all who were interested in asking the questions.
Hester Pulter’s 17th-century postpartum space travel imagined a role for women’s knowledge and experience in astronomical discovery. Due to the recent increase in women’s spaceflight, we now have data that suggests that women’s bodies might actually be better suited to spaceflight. Centuries before NASA figured it out, Pulter knew that her mind and body made her uniquely qualified:
“Then, being enfranchised, free as my verse,
I shall surround this spacious universe,
Until, by other atoms thrust and hurled,
We give a being to another world.”
Further reading:
Ruth Connolly, “Hester Pulter’s Childbirth Poetics.” Women’s Writing 14, no. 2 (2016): 1–22.
Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, gen. eds. The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, 2018. http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu
Olivia Meikle, “The Poet: Hester Pulter,” What’sHerName podcast, podcast audio, May 6, 2019, https://www.whatshernamepodcast.com/hester-pulter/.
Image credit: Dwarfed by Saturn, NASA/JPL-Caltech/Space Science Institute, 2012. Saturn moon Mimas appears near Saturn, dwarfed by its parent planet in this image. Mimas appears tiny compared to the storms clearly visible in far northern and southern hemispheres of Saturn (NASA Image and Video Library)
