Women actually did participate in maths quite a bit throughout history. While it’s generally true that formal schooling was more limited and opportunities were rarer than for men in the same fields a keen mind was often seen as a thing best not wasted. The work generally disappears in footnotes of businesses and whatnot where wives were sort of unpaid appendages of their husbands endeavours where they participated wholly in many aspects of the work and were often in a bookkeeping role. Maths was not limited to the nobility and gentry though the mathematical rockstars all came out of the class. Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was born in the 1640’s and became a lecturer of Mathematics in Padua and was the first woman to be awarded a doctorate degree from a University.
The rates of literacy and numeracy are always more than you would think in these periods. The common folk needed those skills but for different stuff so they taught them in informal ways to each other and didn’t tend to use them for flashy things like writing stories or coming up with new stuff because paper was an expense saved for important stuff you needed to record. Most of it was for legal and organizational purposes. A lot of samples don’t tend to survive unless they were either for posterity or kept for sentimental reasons but we know that slates saw a lot of use day to day for regular business. Women were a resource of skilled labour that households could not afford to leave unoccupied and the idea of them in aggregate as limited to being brainless drudges isn’t accurate.
It’s earliest origin traces back to the 1640’s, I doubt many women were practicing it back than yet alone taught maths or anything.
Women actually did participate in maths quite a bit throughout history. While it’s generally true that formal schooling was more limited and opportunities were rarer than for men in the same fields a keen mind was often seen as a thing best not wasted. The work generally disappears in footnotes of businesses and whatnot where wives were sort of unpaid appendages of their husbands endeavours where they participated wholly in many aspects of the work and were often in a bookkeeping role. Maths was not limited to the nobility and gentry though the mathematical rockstars all came out of the class. Elena Lucrezia Cornaro Piscopia was born in the 1640’s and became a lecturer of Mathematics in Padua and was the first woman to be awarded a doctorate degree from a University.
The rates of literacy and numeracy are always more than you would think in these periods. The common folk needed those skills but for different stuff so they taught them in informal ways to each other and didn’t tend to use them for flashy things like writing stories or coming up with new stuff because paper was an expense saved for important stuff you needed to record. Most of it was for legal and organizational purposes. A lot of samples don’t tend to survive unless they were either for posterity or kept for sentimental reasons but we know that slates saw a lot of use day to day for regular business. Women were a resource of skilled labour that households could not afford to leave unoccupied and the idea of them in aggregate as limited to being brainless drudges isn’t accurate.