The Odyssey of Women Writers in Antiquity: an example of coeducation and fostering vocational science

Abstract

This paper describes four methodological proposals for rescuing from oblivion and highlighting women writers in Graeco-Roman Antiquity. In workshops employing a variety of active methodologies, students become acquainted with Greek writers like Sappho, Diotima of Mantinea and Aspasia, and their Roman counterparts, including Sulpicia and Agrippina the Younger, while also becoming aware of the authorship of these women writers and their lack of visibility. The proposals take the shape of activities aimed at fostering a vocation for science among baccalaureate students in Spain but can also be easily adapted to secondary and even higher education in other educational contexts.

Introduction

At Pablo de Olavide, a public university in Southern Spain, a project aimed at popularising and fostering vocational science, funded by the Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología (Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology, FECYT) and aimed at baccalaureate students (aged between 16–18) at secondary schools in Andalusia, was developed during the academic year 2022–2023. This experience was continued during the following academic year in the activities scheduled in the framework of a science communication event revolving around the humanities, organised by the same university. During the two academic years, a total of six events were conducted with the participation of 800 students from 16 education centres in Western Andalusia, accompanied by their teachers.

The scientific objective was to highlight women writers throughout history and to prompt students to reflect on the circumstances that have led to the fact that the Western literary canon is still androcentric. On the one hand, there is a need to reconsider the history of literature and, consequently, cultural and social history with an eye to progressing towards a more inclusive and fair society through the implementation of coeducation strategies (Romero and Lugo, 2014, 1035–1059; Vargas Jiménez, 2011, 137–147). At the same time, the project attempted to increase and improve the culture of science and innovation of baccalaureate students by disseminating research in this field in an enjoyable and participatory way. The project was thus in line with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, specifically with those of Quality Education and Gender Equality (Boeren, 2019, pp. 277–294). To this should be added that in Spain, especially in the field of non-university education, science tends to be identified with the experimental kind, for which reason it is imperative to stress that research is also performed in the humanities and to enhance the prestige of careers in this field.

The project's main activity involved the conducting of a series of events with the participation of different groups of baccalaureate students. In addition to workshops with researchers focusing on a specific topic, authoress/es or period, many of which had to do with Graeco-Roman Antiquity, there were recreational activities for all at the beginning and at the end of each event. As to gamification activities (Corrales, 2021, 23–48; Martínez Navarro, 2017, 252–277; Romero Claudio and Álvarez Ramos, 2020), the first consisted of a quiz using the app Kahoot!, whereas the second took the shape of a team gymkhana on the campus of Pablo de Olavide University. The different questions in the quiz were related to the obstacles that authoresses in all ages have had to overcome to write and publish and to be read and acknowledged for their literary works. Supporting materials were also published: a video entitled The Odyssey of Women Writers ¹ and an educational-informative booklet² (Nisa Cáceres and Marina Castillo, 2023) containing the methodology of the workshops conducted in the first edition, which was awarded the Rosa Regàs prize by the regional government of Andalusia for its coeducational value.

This paper describes the activities carried out in the four workshops devoted to women writers in Antiquity, in the expectation that the different proposals will be applicable and useful in other educational environments. The first three deal with Greek writers (Sappho of Lesbos, Diotima of Mantinea and Aspasia of Miletus), whereas the fourth addresses Roman writers. Each subsection of this paper is divided into two parts: (1) A brief presentation and contextualisation, both useful for teachers for introducing the activities to their students, accompanied by the proposal's objectives; and (2) A series of practical activities and their methodological development. Some of the materials, as they are presented to students, are included in the tables of each subsection.

The different proposals pursue the following general objectives:

• To highlight the great female figures of Antiquity who played an important role in culture, literature and thought.

• To understand the socio-historical context in which they pursued their activities and the factors that have contributed to their lack of visibility or to the distortion of their work.

• To detect the gender biases present in both the extant primary (mostly male-authored) and secondary sources.

• To familiarise students directly with the primary sources, with ancient texts, for the purpose of fostering their critical thinking and creativity.

• To understand that our knowledge of the past is constructed in an ongoing and ever-changing process.

Sappho of Lesbos

Presentation

Known in Antiquity for the vividness of her lyric poetry, in which she addressed love themes from a quotidian perspective, Sappho of Lesbos is currently famous for her homoerotic verses. In the workshop described below, the intention is to become acquainted with the poetess through some of the extant fragments of her oeuvre.³

The value of Sappho's work is down to both the fact that she is one of the known ancient poetesses and the intimate quality of her poetry. In her poems, she reflects very realistically those moods inherent to the feeling of love. Of her original work, estimated in the region of 10,000–12,000 verses, only around 650 have survived.⁴ The subsequent consideration of her figure has been very varied throughout history, as evidenced by the fact that Plato calls her ‘the Tenth Muse’ (Palatine Anthology 9.506.2), whereas in his Address to the Greeks (33) Tatian refers to her as a prostitute.

Born into a noble family in Mytilene on Lesbos in the sixth century BCE, she married a man called Kerkylas of Andros with whom she had a daughter, Cleïs. She was commissioned to write epithalamia, or wedding hymns, and began to surround herself with a group of girls, with whom she formed the ‘House of the Muses’ Servants'. She possibly taught them literature or music, prepared them for marriage or they worshipped the Muses or Aphrodite. From her poems it can be deduced that Sappho maintained romantic and sexual relations with several of these girls, which has converted her into an icon of bisexuality or lesbianism: indeed, the terms ‘sapphic’ and ‘lesbian’ derive from her name and place of birth.

The main objective of this workshop is to offer students the opportunity to familiarise themselves with the figure of Sappho of Lesbos in a straightforward and engaging manner, with three main objectives:

• To become acquainted with the relevance of Sappho in Antiquity and with the scant biographical information available on her, in order to examine the context in which she wrote her poetry.

• To understand the importance of her figure throughout history, how her poetry has been received and how a veil has been drawn over some aspects of her life and identity.

• To leverage creative and critical thinking to understand how classical Graeco-Roman culture and its ideas about gender have influenced subsequent cultures.

Methodological proposal

Students are offered the chance to read and reflect on some of Sappho's translated works,⁵ which together with the activities are included in a dossier (see Figure 1). In the first activity, the idea is simply to answer some questions, whereas the final activity involves creative writing in groups. The intention is to combine the teaching of the Graeco-Roman Classics with creativity in order to recreate the lives and experiences of women in Antiquity (Hauser, 2019, 168–169).

Figure 1. Sappho Workshop.

The workshop, which lasts 60 minutes, has been organised for between 25 and 30 students. They are first provided with some biographical information on Sappho in an initial approach (5 min), accompanied by some sort of meme to arouse their interest through humour. For the next 15 minutes, Fragments 51, 36, 31 and 38 of Sappho's work are compared with Lope de Vega's sonnet 126, Esto es amor (‘Various Effects of Love’), the lyrics of the song En la imaginación (‘In the Imagination’) by Silvia Pérez Cruz, another humorous meme and a sequence from Céline Sciamma's film Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019), respectively. The students participating in the workshop are also asked to reply orally to Questions 1 and 2 about Fragments 16 and 31, appearing in the table above.

Following this, the active methodologies are implemented in the second part of the workshop, in which the students are divided into groups of either four or five and each given pens, paper sheets and a dossier containing fragments by Sappho. The idea is that, in groups, they should put their heads together to include the fragments in new poems which they themselves must write from their own current perspective (20 min). For 10 minutes, the members of each group read aloud those poems that they themselves have liked most. Then, in the last 10 minutes some considerations are set out on the link between Sappho and lesbianism or bisexuality, before stressing her contemporary influence with the reading of Fragment 147.

The aim of the creative writing activity is that the participants familiarise themselves with Sappho's oeuvre not from an academic or conventional perspective, as something far removed from their time, but on the understanding of how those fragments can indeed be relevant nowadays. According to Emily Hauser (2019, 175), ‘When I have allowed creativity to sit alongside research […] I have enjoyed Classics the most, and […] I have been able to impart that enjoyment in inquiry to others’. The experience of this workshop has actually demonstrated on several occasions that students, working in groups to compose such poems, can show a high degree of sensitivity, often connecting with the poetess of Lesbos at a very intimate and personal level.

Diotima of Mantinea

Presentation

The name and figure of Socrates are familiar even to those who know nothing about the Classics. Students find his philosophical method particularly appealing, which converts him into a sort of midwife attending women in labour: through a dialogue with other conversation partners (Phaedrus, Cratylus or Phaedo, who give their names to several of the works by his disciple Plato) the teacher, accompanied by them, gains access to the solution, to certain aspects of truth, to ‘their latent ideas’, according to the definition of ‘maieutic’ appearing in The Oxford Dictionary. In the history of philosophy, on the other hand, Socrates was a veritable milestone: with certain vagueness, we talk about the ‘pre-Socratics’, foundation stones of sorts of critical thinking and philosophical enquiry, because there is the belief that the Athenian marked a turning point. Furthermore, Socrates is credited with being the teacher of none other than Plato and Xenophon, plus other young philosophers living in fifth-century Athens, as well as being recognised as an influential figure in his time whose commitment has remained engraved on Western imagination: nor do students forget the hemlock that he used to commit suicide with the intention of setting an example for the city that had unjustly accused him. In his magnificent book Un mestiere pericoloso (A dangerous profession), a profession that is none other than the exercise of philosophy, of freethinking, Luciano Canfora (2000) addresses the difficult relationship of philosophers with their age and political power in ancient Greece.

Lastly, if students are asked about Plato, it is more than likely that they will mention the handful of myths and powerful images peppering and illustrating his philosophy: his allegory of the cave, the chariot and his world of ideas, among others, and also certain very widespread – and hackneyed – concepts that are often misunderstood, the most popular being ‘platonic love’.

But in a memorable passage from The Symposium, the most well-known Platonic dialogue and precisely the kernel of the Socratic-Platonic erotic doctrine, Socrates himself recognises the intellectual debt owed to a foreigner, ‘a Mantinean woman named Diotima: in this subject she was skilled, and in many others too’ (Plato, Symposium 201d, transl. Lamb, 1925). We know precious little about Diotima, a sage and priestess who revealed to the teacher the nature of love and perhaps also the method that is nowadays known as Socratic.

Diotima, who might well be a mask in the Platonic dialogue, seems however to stand on her own virtues in the memory of Socrates and, of course, acts as a shining and inspirational example and as an enduring symbol – very appealing to young readers and students – reappearing in crucial moments and works such as Hyperion by the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and the works that the Spanish philosopher María Zambrano (1904–1991) wrote in exile. In Hölderlin's epistolary novel, which the poet finished in the final years of the Enlightenment, Diotima is more than the lover of the main character: between the friendship of Alabanda and revolutionary hope, both ultimately betrayed, Diotima is the embodiment of love itself. As to Zambrano, she wears the mask of Diotima to describe, from her place of exile where no one now asks the savant anything, the crisis of her world. Following the path of this fascinating figure leads us to reconsider the role of women in the arts and thought in Antiquity and their huge repercussions – albeit often forcibly enshrouded – for our lives and history.

The objectives of this workshop can be summarised as follows:

• To familiarise young students with the enigmatic figure of Diotima of Mantinea and to follow her trail in subsequent literature.

• To prove that ‘direct contact’ with the Classics, namely, the reading of these works, without being content with the textbook information learnt at school, is a very pleasurable exercise and a box of equally marvellous surprises and revelations.

• Ultimately, to foster critical thinking, questioning the roots of the tradition received.

Methodological proposal

This activity and its results (Figure 2)⁶ allow students to acquire some background knowledge in order to reflect on stereotypes and the place and role that we give women in history in opposition to or together with men. Aspects include contrasts and tensions, like those between word pairs and concepts. For instance, Sophia (‘wisdom’) is written with a capital ‘S’ and in the feminine (in Spanish), but only fractions of that wisdom are applied or, better said, that abstract concept is found in daily life in the figure of the sophoi, namely, ‘sages’, men almost without exception. The same perhaps occurs with the Muse, who serves as inspiration chiefly for male authors, more often than not relegating female creativity to elusive and ideal spheres, seldom specific or embodied.

Figure 2. Diotima workshop.

The workshop continues with the texts: several passages from The Symposium, in which the figure of Diotima appears arguing about Eros, plus a few from Hölderlin's Hyperion (2008 [1797]) and Zambrano's monologue Diotima de Mantinea (2000 [1956]).

Resorting to anecdotes also serves to attract the attention of the participants, who usually show an interest in the details of Hölderlin's biography: his revolutionary ardour, his disillusionment and madness and the hospitality that the erratic poet received from the carpenter Zimmer and his family, who looked after him until his death … and, beforehand, his unhappy love affair with Susette Gontard, the mother of a student of his, who he called Diotima. To end on a sensationalistic note, they are shown a picture in which the presenter is seen placing a wreath at the poet's tomb in the city of Tübingen.

Besides these anecdotes, it is explained that they are neither authors nor works that can be regarded as minor. For both the young Romantic poet and María Zambrano, Diotima was a key figure for expressing the rootlessness and radical solitude of the freethinker, of the free spirit, the disillusionment in the wake of the first warlike and revolutionary impulses and the twists and turns of history. In the face of institutional banality that is often unworthy of the most just demands (like those defended by the authors of this paper), vs simplifying and stolid arguments, the always enjoyable reading of these ancient works and the versatile persistence of these figures of the past reveal a reality that thought clarifies and which is anything but uniform.

Aspasia of Miletus

Presentation

The third and last Greek authoress also had contacts with Socrates and perhaps was even personally acquainted with Diotima, with whom she shared important similarities. Apart from being a foreigner, there is also the fact that she is not directly known to us through her oeuvre (regrettably, this has been lost) but through the references of others. Indeed, despite her being an intellectual, art lover and authoress of political speeches, a biased portrait of Aspasia has passed into history due to the works of male authors, who have associated her with prostitution, erotism and moral corruption, at a moment when women were excluded from politics (Pritchard, 2014, 174–193; Vallejo, 2019, 171–174).

In order to help students participating in the workshop to approach the figure of Aspasia, they are told that she was about their age (between 16–18) when she emigrated from Miletus to Athens, a city that was flourishing at the time. Similarly, to comprehend the city's ascendency, recourse is made to interdisciplinarity, drawing from their previous knowledge (Segovia et al., 2010, 138–169; Zavala Arnal and Salinas Ramón, 2017, 281–291), recalling unconnected content, covered in different modules and academic years, and interrelating it to understand the case at hand.⁷ All these considerations can serve as catalysts for the development of the activity.

After arriving in Athens, the sources mention Aspasia principally in relation to two men, who have made a huge contribution to the fact that news of her has come down to us. On the one hand, Socrates who, in one of the speeches of his disciple Plato (Menexenus 235e–236c, 249), recognises that she taught him the art of rhetoric and wrote some important speeches. On the other, the political leader Pericles, who was also a student of hers and later her partner. As a matter of fact, two of the main sources mentioning the Milesian woman relate her to Pericles, who was the target of political criticism at the time, for which reason Aspasia's image was also affected (Vickers, 2015, 163). In the first of these, the comedian Aristophanes, a contemporary Athenian, singles her out as the casus belli of the Peloponnesian War, in connection with the kidnapping of some prostitutes of whom, according to him, she was the owner (Acharnians 523–539). Secondly, from a now Roman and very different East (more than five centuries later), the philosopher Plutarch (Pericles 24.9, 32.5) describes the political leader as weak and pusillanimous, subject to the whims of Aspasia – publicly seeking her kisses and shedding tears for her before a court. Despite the fact that she outlived her husband, following the death of Pericles practically nothing is known about Aspasia. All of which shows that her memory has nothing to do with her own worth or merits – which are indeed underscored in some sources – but to the fact that she forms part of the biography of another male figure, which has earned her the reputation of being a ‘prisoner of history’ (Henry, 1995).

Therefore, the workshop on Aspasia has a dual objective:

• In particular, the idea is to reflect on what is known about the authoress and why.

• In general, the intention is to observe how these questions serve to delve into how history ‘functions’, especially how it is constructed from a selection of available information.

Methodological proposal

The teaching methodology employed in the 90-minute workshop is described below. It starts with an introductory presentation lasting ten minutes, which takes into account both the focus of interest and reality of the students participating in it. An initial survey is conducted with the aim of determining what they know about Aspasia and her context (fifth-century BCE Athens) and helping them to connect this content with their previous knowledge.

The following activity is devoted to examining the available literary sources so as to help the students to broaden their knowledge of Aspasia. The class is divided into groups among which a text on Aspasia written by a different author – viz. Plato, Aristophanes or Plutarch⁸ – is distributed, together with a brief note about this author and a worksheet (see Figure 3). After reading the text, they are asked to determine whether it is a primary or secondary source. Between 20 and 25 minutes are devoted to this part of the workshop.

Figure 3. Aspasia Workshop.

After concluding this activity, the members of each group are asked to place the author and his text on Aspasia on a timeline of Greece and Rome projected on a screen. During the following 15 minutes, they are then asked to debate on what is known about the life of Aspasia, according to each source, and the influence that the closeness of each one to the events has. This exercise highlights the importance of cooperative learning (Devi et al., 2015, 1–14; Markoglou, 2022, 45–54; Slavin, 2014, 785–791).

In the second part, a deeper understanding of Aspasia is acquired directly. With the students still forming the same groups, they are asked to write a brief biographical note on the authoress. This exercise combines the information provided in the previous section. As a supplement to the previous debate, they are encouraged to reflect on the importance of putting information down in writing, as well as the type of information that is remembered.

After devoting between 20 and 25 minutes to writing the note, the spokesperson of each group reads it aloud. In the meantime, the most frequent ideas and keywords are noted down on the blackboard. This activity is followed by the workshop's verification stage with an action that has an impact on the participants. Specifically, the presenter selects the texts and randomly tears up some of them: one is torn to pieces which are then thrown away; another is torn up and its pieces are shredded with some scissors: another is torn into large pieces that are then crumpled: and one is left intact.

The intention behind this action is to compare the notion of preserving sources as an essential part of information transfer and, in sum, of the historical process. In turn, the fact that the content that the students themselves have created is destroyed helps them to understand the consequences of destroying sources and to become more committed to protecting them. This is supplemented by the screening of images relating to the agents influencing the destruction of sources, as well as to some papyrus discoveries. Likewise, one of the torn-up texts is selected, while explaining that the scarcity and fragmentary state of sources is commonplace in studies of the ancient world, and that the job of researchers is to study the available material with a view to reconstructing history.

The last ten minutes of the workshop are devoted to pooling information by way of conclusion. This involves connecting all the factors that have influenced the transmission of the figure of Aspasia and why she has been called a ‘prisoner of history’. Similarly, the students are encouraged to engage in the activity by explaining to them that they have unknowingly participated in this process of recovering sources and have contributed to reinstating the figure of Aspasia. In short, their active participation in the activity goes a long way to favouring learning.

Roman authoresses

Presentation

The reading of any history or anthology of Roman literature can give the impression that this was the exclusive preserve of men. A closer reading of the literary and historical sources obliges us to reconsider the role of Roman women in literature. It is true that in ancient Rome higher education was the privilege of men belonging to the elite, as a way of preparing them for a career in politics, but women also came into contact with culture which was a necessary aspect of their daily lives.⁹

The education that women received at home could be continued in the homes of their husbands. Whereas some such husbands devoted themselves to the task of educating their young wives, others took a rather jaundiced view of this education (Seneca, Consolation to Helvia 17.4). For instance, Seneca's mother could not devote her time to the study of philosophy until she was widowed. Notwithstanding these obstacles, there were many women who wrote – although their works have not come down to us – some of whom are discussed below.¹⁰

Correspondence was a mode of communication par excellence, some letters being so well written as to be regarded as literary works. Although some of the correspondence of great orators (like Cicero and Pliny the Younger) has survived, this is not the case with that of women. For instance, Suetonius mentions the correspondence between the emperor Augustus and the empress Livia as regards the future emperor Claudius, but only reproduces a few extracts from the letters that Augustus sent to his wife (Claudius 4), whereas there is no trace of those that Livia sent to her husband. The work of Cornelius Nepos contains fragments of two letters written by another famous woman, Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi brothers. However, their authenticity has been traditionally rejected. Genuine letters penned by women of the Roman Empire have survived thanks to Egyptian papyri (Bagnall and Cribiore, 2015) and archaeological finds. In these cases, doubt has not been cast on their female authorship.

Two poetesses called Sulpicia are known to us. Of the first, who was the niece of Messalla Corvinus, the patron of Tibullus, Ovid and other poets, there are six extant love poems, no more than 40 verses, in the so-called Corpus Tibullianum. Of the second, praised by the poet Martial (10.35 and 38) only two verses have survived. Nero's mother Agrippina wrote her memoires, a work that was cited as a historical source but which has not survived the passing of time.

Only a small fraction of all ancient literature has survived to this day and regarding literature written by women, a very rare phenomenon in itself, very little has weathered the centuries: ‘Dentro del canon ellas son fragmentadas excepciones. Como Eurídice, vuelven a hundirse en la oscuridad cuando alguien intenta rescatarlas. Al seguir el rastro de sus huellas borradas, tanteamos un paisaje de sombras donde ya solo es posible conversar con los ecos’/‘In the canon, these women are the fragmentary exceptions. Like Eurydice, when anyone tries to rescue them, they sink back into darkness. Following their erased footprints, we feel our way through a landscape of shadows where only the echoes can answer’ (Vallejo, 2019, 384, trans. Whittle, 2022). In this workshop, the participants are encouraged not only to converse with those ‘echoes’ and ‘shadows’ but also to broaden the focus to construct a more inclusive history of literature, encompassing a greater variety of texts and also considering the role of women as receivers and promotors. The workshop's objectives are as follows:

• To highlight not only the female writers of ancient Rome but also the different roles played by women in Roman culture.

• To understand the socio-historical factors that hindered the access of women to education and writing.

• To detect the gender biases that contributed to silencing women writers at Rome in both the ancient literature and its contemporary interpretations.

Methodological proposal

The brief conceptual presentation described above is made to the students in a meaningful and experiential way adapted to their knowledge. The presenter recounts her own personal experience: as a student of classical philology in the 1990s; she was never taught about women in ancient literature nor did she translate the work of any authoress (except for Egeria in Vulgar Latin seminars). The students are offered several examples of manuals or anthologies of Roman literature (in English and Spanish), in which women are conspicuous by their absence or have a token or biased presence. Explanations about authoresses, female readers and literary patronesses are combined with images of both artistic works (especially the paintings of Angelica Kauffmann)¹¹ and archaeological evidence of women writers (the poems of Julia Balbilla, the letter written by Claudia Severa on the tablets found in Vindolanda, Pompeiian graffiti, etc.), which are related to the current reality of the students.

Additionally, the participants are shown several videos created with Artificial Intelligence¹² in which a painting of Sappho and a bust of Agrippina the Younger come to life and address them directly. On the other hand, in order to maintain their attention during the brief explanation, they are asked to take a mental note of the names of the women who are mentioned and to try to retain basic information. Following the explanation, each student is given a piece of paper containing either the name of one or another Roman woman or some information on her and her role in the Roman cultural world or on her family. In order to form groups, the students are asked to encounter others with bits of paper referring to the same woman (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Cutout information sheet for Roman women authors workshop.

Each group works with one or several translated texts which are given to them in a dossier, along with the activities (Figure 5). The groups ‘Cornelia’, ‘Hortensia’ and ‘Agrippina the Younger’ work with two prose texts (Texts 1: Pliny, Letters 1.16.6 and Text 2: Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 8.3.3), while the groups ‘Sulpicia’, ‘Julia Balbilla’ and ‘Octavia’ work with a text written by Ovid (Text 3: Ovid, Tristia 3.7). It is a simple proposal for cooperative learning (Devi et al., 2015, 1–14; Slavin, 2014, 785–791), with group readings and questions and answers, followed by a debate and recap.

Figure 5. Roman women authors workshop.

Conclusions

This study has described four proposals for recovering some female figures of Graeco-Roman culture, with a variety of methodologies and resources: gamification, cooperative learning, challenging preconceived ideas, creativity and teamwork. In sum, they are different options for meaningful learning.

It warrants noting that the absence of women writers from Antiquity in the secondary education and baccalaureate curricula is also the case in studies performed to date in this regard. For which reason, the compilation of an ample bibliography with an eye to helping teachers to include the authoresses analysed here in their classroom activities is equally important.

The workshops in which these proposals were implemented were so successful that they were repeated in the following academic year. The students participating in each workshop were able to gain a deeper understanding of female authorship in the past and to contrast it with the present. For their part, the classical culture (Latin and Greek) teachers attending them welcomed this initiative both because of the subject, necessary for coeducation, and the new resources and methodological strategies with which they provided them. In point of fact, some of them admitted to having implemented these proposals afterwards.

In conclusion, these workshops met their two main objectives: to recover and highlight forgotten women and to foster vocational science and humanities. Activities of this sort, in which university professors engage in a dialogue with secondary school teachers, also contribute to ‘bridge the gap’ (Goodman, 2017) between secondary schools and universities.