From the outset, the members of the Dutch ‘Natuurkundig Genootschap der Dames’ (1785-1887) (the Ladies’ Scientific Society) must have known that their gatherings were special. Elsewhere, women had never yet come together in order to study the laws and wonders of divine nature. Yet in Middelburg, with support from local councillors and clergy, they founded a society, purchased scientific instruments and hired an instructor to teach modern empirical science through experimentation. Who were these women? What ideals drove them and their male counterparts? Why did Middelburg, of all places, become the location of the world’s first scientific organisation for women? And how did the rest of the world react at the time to women who displayed a striking interest in telescopes, air pumps, test tubes, and condensers? Focussed on the Zeeland town of Middelburg, yet often turning its attention to developments elsewhere, The Electric Kiss tells the story of attraction and repulsion between women and the burgeoning scientific disciplines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It demonstrates how the new experimental sciences won a place in social and family life in the early modern era, and thus became integrated into Western culture and society. It also relates how this relationship came to an end in the second half of the nineteenth century. Changes in urban sociability, in the education system, and in the social organisation of the sciences signalled the decline of the women’s scientific society in Middelburg. At the same time, this also symbolised the end of an extraordinary era in which male and female enthusiasts could experiment freely with electrostatic generators, and could express their shared fascination for nature through experiments such as ‘the electric kiss’.