Jeanne Dumeè

Jeanne Dumée turned all of her attention to astronomy when she was widowed at the age of seventeen. Her manuscript, Entretiens sur l’opinion de Copernic touchant la mobilité de la terre (Discourse on the Opinion of Copernicus Respecting the Mobility of the Earth), written around 1680 but never published, was praised for its analysis of the motions of the earth. An advocate of women’s right to study science, Dumée hoped to refute—through her own example—the idea that a woman’s brain was not equal to a man’s, a common notion in her day.