Gender and Science: The Feminist Vision

Once science had been shown, by the radical science movement and by sociologists of science, to be a thoroughly social process, the way was open to an exploration of a variety of different aspects of this sociality: science could be seen as following the dictates of instrumental reason in its ‘modernist’ mission to subdue nature, as expressing the worldview of a dominant class or culture, or, more narrowly, as the arena for the power play of scientists themselves.

At first, feminist scholars emphasized the exclusion of women from science, analysing the mechanisms by which this exclusion took place (for accounts of this literature, see Harding 1991: part 1; Rose 1994: chs 3, 5 and 6). They held not that women were absent from science, but that their presence was predominantly confined to ancillary and supporting roles, providing the practical support for research almost always defined by men. The aim of this ‘liberal’ feminist research was to bring the obstacles to female participation and advancement in science to public attention. That science itself would benefit from greater female participation followed from the obvious fact that a huge reservoir of talent was simply not being tapped.

But this assumed that women had the inherent capacity for science, and at the same time did not pose the possibility that women in science might make a qualitative difference to the way science was done. Studies of the work of that small minority of women who have been allowed to make their mark as scientific innovators (see Keller 1983; Rose 1994; also this volume, Chapter 9) revealed interesting answers to both questions. Despite immensely greater obstacles, some women clearly had made important contributions to science - this dispensed with the prejudice that women were somehow constitutionally incapable of major scientific achievement.

At its most fundamental, this challenge could be seen as one which identified the whole project of an objective knowledge of nature as inseparable from a (white, Western) masculine aggressive desire to dominate nature, women and racial ‘others’. In the face of this, the liberal feminist agenda of increased female participation in science was clearly far too narrow. But what were the alternatives? Here feminists remain divided, and we will consider some of the subsequent debates in Chapter 9. For the moment, however, we focus on an influential line of feminist analysis of the natural sciences which explores the relation between the prevailing ideology and practice of science, on the one hand, and gender and sexuality, on the other. This approach does not abandon science altogether, but instead poses the possibility of a different practice of science on the basis of changed gender-relationships, and identifies trends in current science which point in that direction.

Influential work by the pioneering ‘eco-feminist’ (see Glossary) Carolyn Merchant (1980) and Brian Easlea (1980) established connections between witch-hunting and male challenges to previously female roles (in medicine and midwifery, especially), on the one hand, and the shift away from an organic, holistic and feminine vision of the world to the impersonal, mechanical philosophy of nature proposed by the New Science of the seventeenth century, on the other.

Evelyn Fox Keller (1985) draws upon this work, but subtly shifts its emphasis. She detects ambiguities in the sexual and gendered metaphors by which the New Science justified itself. She describes the rivalry between two versions.

[W]here the Will or Passion hath the casting voyce, the case of Truth is desparate... The Woman in us, still prosecutes a deceit, like that begun in the Garden; and our Understandings are wedded to an Eve, as fatal as the Mother of our miseries.

(Joseph Glanvill, quoted in Keller 1985: 52-3)

What Keller interprets as the ‘hermaphrodite’ image of science in the hermetic tradition was attacked by the advocates of the mechanical philosophy as complicit with witchcraft, disorder and the radical sects. So, the establishment of the Royal Society after the English Civil War consolidated the victory of a self-consciously masculine and socially conservative view of science as committed to the rational ‘penetration’ of the secrets of nature. For the mechanical philosophy, nature was still represented as female, though no longer as ‘mother’, or as partner, but rather as the object of dispassionate exploration and rational control.

Keller’s argument is that wider cultural and social changes in gender relations contributed to the formation of this new masculine ideology and practice of science, and also that the growing authority of science as associated with masculine virtues contributed to a consolidation of new gender divisions in the wider society. The link between femininity, emotion and subjectivity was opposed to masculine objectivity and rationality as the ‘separation of spheres' came to characterize the division of labour between men and (middle-class) women in early industrial capitalism.

Keller, like other contributors to the discussion of gender and knowledge, draws on the ‘object relations' school of psychoanalysis, and in particular on the feminist development of it associated with the work of Nancy Chodorow (see Chapter 9). That approach emphasizes the problems encountered by the developing infant in forming a stable sense of self-identity. These problems are different for boys and girls, and they may lead, especially in the case of boys, to the formation of defensive personalities which can maintain their autonomy only through a sharp boundary between self and other, and by aggressive, dominating relationships with threatening ‘others'. The association of objectivity, autonomy and masculinity with domination of nature as ‘other' in the prevailing ideology and practice of science can be understood in terms of these underlying psychological dynamics. The division of mothering and fathering roles, the cultural definitions of masculinity and femininity and the gendered character of science are thus a mutually sustaining system.

However, for Keller this does not imply a feminist rejection of science as such. On the contrary, she holds out a radical vision of a quite different practice of science, linked to changed gender relations:

the aim of these essays... is the reclamation, from within science of science as a human instead of a masculine project, and the renunciation of the division of emotional and intellectual labour that maintains science as a male preserve.

(Keller 1985: 178)

But as the phrase ‘from within science' implies, this is not some utopian vision imposed from without. Keller re-works the object relations approach to develop a vision of a personality structure in which objectivity, power and love might be connected in ways denied by current formations of both masculinity and femininity. In this alternative, self­identity becomes sufficiently secure to soften the boundaries between self and other, and to recognize interdependence and relatedness.

For Schachtel, allocentric perception is perception in the service of a love ‘which wants to affirm others in their total and unique being.' It is an affirmation of objects as ‘part of the same world of which man is part'. In turn, and by contrast with perception that is dominated by need or self-interest (autocentric perception) it permits a fuller, more ‘global’ understanding of the object in its own right.

(Keller 1985: 119)

Keller’s optimism about the possibility of a different science is grounded in her perception that the victory of the mechanical philosophy was never complete. The practice of science has always been pluralistic, with rival and subversive visions persisting despite their marginalization by the dominant approaches. Moreover, nature itself, given the methodology of orthodox science, can be expected to be an ally in bringing about change:

But nature itself is an ally that can be relied upon to provide the impetus for real change: nature’s responses recurrently invite re-examination of the terms in which our understanding of science is constructed.

(Keller 1985: 175-76)

And once we acknowledge that nature itself is active in requiring scientific traditions to adopt new ways of thinking, and new methods of investigation, the hope for change from within looks more plausible. Keller argues that, in fact, current developments in the sciences, and most especially in the life sciences, are leading to a recognition of complexity and interaction in dynamic systems, as against the mechanical philosophy’s pursuit of unified laws which nature ‘obeys’.

Keller’s biography of the geneticist and developmental biologist Barbara McClintock (Keller 1983) illustrates the persistence, at least in the work of this scientist, of a cognitive relation to her subject-matter very like that identified by Schachtel. In McClintock’s vision, nature is infinitely complex and resourceful, so that there is no hope for science to encapsulate it or subdue it in simple formulae. Rather, the method of science should be one of attention to particularity and difference, and of humility in ‘listening’ attentively to what the object of study has to say. This attitude of reciprocity and affection between scientist and subject of study is not a sacrifice of objectivity, but a necessary condition for it. As Keller puts it:

The crucial point for us is that McClintock can risk the suspension of boundaries between subject and object without jeopardy to science precisely because, to her, science is not premised on that division. Indeed, the intimacy she experiences with the objects she studies - intimacy born of a lifetime of cultivated attentiveness - is a wellspring of her powers as a scientist.

(Keller 1985: 164)

The themes of respect and love for nature, and the recognition of the integrity, complexity and particularity of the objects of scientific knowledge, are widely shared among feminist commentaries on science. They are acutely present when feminist concerns intersect with compassion for the suffering of animals as subjects of research, and anxiety about the wider ecological destructiveness of modern capitalism. Lynda Birke, herself a former researcher on animal behaviour, has explored the interconnections between a certain ‘masculine’ training in scientific method and the suppression of sensibility to the suffering of animals as subjects of laboratory research (Birke 1994).

But she goes further than this in analysing the complexities in the intersecting dualisms of nature-culture, feminine-masculine and animal-human. Freeing ourselves from the desire to conceptualize ‘animals’ as other and inferior to the human, and as appropriate subjects for objectifying and reductionist science, is essential to the struggle against maltreatment of (non-human) animals. But it is also necessary to the feminist opposition to biological determinisms which denigrate women: recognizing the individuality and subjectivity of non-human animals is a key to resisting attempts to represent humans themselves as biological ‘automata’.

The complex and indefinable work of Donna J. Haraway has also addressed the woman­human-animal-science nexus, with a particular focus on the discourses of primatology - both in their ‘scientific’ forms, and in the popular cultural forms of TV documentary, cartoon, advertisements and so on (Haraway 1992). A recurrent theme in her work is the post-modern one of dispelling dualisms, transgressing boundaries and the proliferation of hybrid forms (symbolized with the image of the ‘cyborg’ - see Haraway 1991). This takes material forms in the replacement of human organs by mechanical parts, or by organs taken from transgenic animals, and discursive forms in the overcoming of sharp human­animal dichotomies. The way we represent our primate kin, especially the great apes, is clearly a very fertile field to explore this shift. Haraway’s analysis remains ambiguously poised between several of the approaches we have discussed in this chapter, and which she calls ‘temptations’. But Haraway’s apparent abandonment of any clear cognitive or normative stance, as implied by this ambiguity, seems problematic. As Birke points out:

We are already witnessing suggestions that pigs be bred to supply hearts for human patients; and transgenic animals sometimes become factories for human use. These kinds of boundary transgressions are not ones I would wish to celebrate.

(Birke 1994: 147)