ABSTRACT
Women's ways of knowing cannot be separated from their bodies any more than their bodies can be separated from the lineage of other women's bodies that preceded them. For women, the question of the female body has always held a complex relation to their positioning within society. The degree of separation of the body from the perception of intellectual capacity varied considerably with economic and racial privilege. This produced a highly ambivalent relation between attempts to liberate women and any acknowledgment of women's ways of knowing derived from bodily wisdom. The valorization of the intellect separated from the body marginalized those women who held, "the old magic and the secrets of the noble savants before us". The construction of male and female bodies that informed the science of the 19th century was rooted in the complex intersections of church and science in the medieval period.
