This essay offers a short overview of feminist history of science and introduces a new project into that history, namely feminist history of colonial science. My case study focuses on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and reveals how gender relations in Europe and the colonies honed selective collecting practices. Cultural, economic, and political trends discouraged the transfer from the New World to the Old of abortifacients.1.

: This essay offers a short overview of feminist history of science and introduces a new project into that history, namely feminist history of colonial science. My case study focuses on eighteenth-century voyages of scientific discovery and reveals how gender relations in Europe and the colonies honed selective collecting practices. Cultural, economic, and political trends discouraged the transfer from the New World to the Old of abortifacients (widely used by Amerindian and African women in the West Indies).1.

Feminism and the Body presents classic texts in feminist body studies. Intended for undergraduate and graduate students, the volume touches on the medical history of sexual differences, the political history of the body, the history of clothing and its cultural meanings, symbolic renderings of the body, male bodies, and the body in colonial and cross-cultural contexts.

In early modern science, the struggle between feminine and masculine allegories of science was played out within fixed parameters. Whether science itself was to be considered masculine or feminine, there never was serious debate about the gender of nature, one the one hand, or of the scientist, on the other. From ancient to modern times, nature—the object of scientific study—has been conceived as unquestionably female.5 At the same time, it is abundantly clear that the practitioners of science, scientists, themselves, overwhelmingly (...) have been men.But what about science? What gender was it—as an activity and set of ideals—to have? In one tradition the answer was clear: science was a woman. This tradition, stretching back at least to Boethius’ sixth-century portrayal of Philosophy as a woman, was codified and explained in Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia, the Renaissance bible of iconography.6 In this work, Ripa portrayed each of the sciences as a woman. “Scientia”—knowledge or skill—was portrayed as a woman of serious demeanor, wearing stately robes . “Physica”—physical science—was a goddess with a terrestrial globe at her feet. Geometry was a woman holding a plumb line and compass. Astrology, too, was a woman, dressed in blue, with a crown of stars and wings signifying the elevation of her thoughts to the distant stars. With a compass in her right hand and the celestial sphere in her left, she studied the movement and symmetry of the skies. 5. See Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution .6. Boethius describes female Philosophy as she appeared to him in a dream in his De consolatione philosophiae. See also Cesare Ripa, Iconologia , first illustrated in 1603. Londa Schiebinger is an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University. Her book, “The Mind has no Sex”: Women in the Origins of Modern Science, will be published next spring. (shrink)

Publié en 2004, l’ouvrage de l’historienne américaine Londa Schiebinger opère un rapprochement suggestif entre l’histoire des sciences, l’histoire du genre et l’histoire coloniale. À travers l’étude de la « bioprospection » dans l’espace caraïbe des xviie et xviiie siècles (Jamestown, Virginie, Bahia, Brésil, Jamaïque, Guyane, Surinam, Saint-Domingue) l’auteure aborde les facteurs culturels qui interviennent dans la transmission des savoirs naturalistes et pharmaceutiques entre indigènes et a...

For twenty years, the renowned philosopher of science Sandra Harding has argued that science and technology studies, postcolonial studies, and feminist critique must inform one another. In The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, Harding puts those fields in critical conversation, assembling the anthology that she has long wanted for classroom use. In classic and recent essays, international scholars from a range of disciplines think through a broad array of science and technology philosophies and practices. The contributors reevaluate conventional accounts (...) of the West’s scientific and technological projects in the past and present, rethink the strengths and limitations of non-Western societies’ knowledge traditions, and assess the legacies of colonialism and imperialism. The collection concludes with forward-looking essays, which explore strategies for cultivating new visions of a multicultural, democratic world of sciences and for turning those visions into realities. Feminist science and technology concerns run throughout the reader and are the focus of several essays. Harding provides helpful background for each essay in her introductions to the reader’s four sections. Contributors Helen Appleton Karen Bäckstrand Lucille H. Brockway Stephen B. Brush Judith Carney Committee on Women, Population, and the Environment Arturo Escobar Maria E. Fernandez Ward H. Goodenough Susantha Goonatilake Sandra Harding Steven J. Harris Betsy Hartmann Cori Hayden Catherine L. M. Hill John M. Hobson Peter Mühlhäusler Catherine A. Odora Hoppers Consuelo Quiroz Jenny Reardon Ella Reitsma Ziauddin Sardar Daniel Sarewitz Londa Schiebinger Catherine V. Scott Colin Scott Mary Terrall D. Michael Warren. (shrink)

For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify. _The Moral Authority of Nature_ offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of (...) cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of humans, ecological economics, and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place, from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China, medieval Europe to contemporary America. Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome _The Moral Authority of Nature_, which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic. Contributors: Danielle Allen, Joan Cadden, Lorraine Daston, Fa-ti Fan, Eckhardt Fuchs, Valentin Groebner, Abigail J. Lustig, Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, Katharine Park, Matt Price, Robert N. Proctor, Helmut Puff, Robert J. Richards, Londa Schiebinger, Laura Slatkin, Julia Adeney Thomas, Fernando Vidal. (shrink)

The Gendered Cyborg brings together material from a variety of disciplines that analyze the relationship between gender and technoscience, and the way that this relationship is represented through ideas, language and visual imagery. The book opens with key feminist articles from the history and philosophy of science. They look at the ways that modern scientific thinking has constructed oppositional dualities such as objectivity/subjectivity, human/machine, nature/science, and male/female, and how these have constrained who can engage in science/technology and how they have (...) limited our ideas of the possibilities for both humanity and science. Later sections contain readings that present key feminist theories about representation to examine how gender and technoscience are represented in areas of particular contemporary interest: the new human reproductive technologies, science fiction, film and the Internet. The readings constantly ask "Is this for women, for human beings?" Contributors: Alison Adam, Anne Balsamo, Lynda K. Bundtzen, Barbara Creed, Mary Ann Doane, Dion Farquhar, Jennifer González, Evelynn M. Hammonds, Donna Haraway, Fiona Hovenden, Luce Irigaray, Linda Janes, Gill Kirkup, Nina Lykke, Sadie Plant, Rosalind Pollack Perchesky, Londa Schiebinger, Vivian Sobchack, Deborah Lynn Steinberg, Nancy Leys Stepan, Nina Wakeford, Kathryn Woodward. (shrink)

For thousands of years, people have used nature to justify their political, moral, and social judgments. Such appeals to the moral authority of nature are still very much with us today, as heated debates over genetically modified organisms and human cloning testify. The Moral Authority of Nature offers a wide-ranging account of how people have used nature to think about what counts as good, beautiful, just, or valuable. The eighteen essays cover a diverse array of topics, including the connection of (...) cosmic and human orders in ancient Greece, medieval notions of sexual disorder, early modern contexts for categorizing individuals and judging acts as "against nature," race and the origin of humans, ecological economics, and radical feminism. The essays also range widely in time and place, from archaic Greece to early twentieth-century China, medieval Europe to contemporary America. Scholars from a wide variety of fields will welcome The Moral Authority of Nature, which provides the first sustained historical survey of its topic. Contributors: Danielle Allen, Joan Cadden, Lorraine Daston, Fa-ti Fan, Eckhardt Fuchs, Valentin Groebner, Abigail J. Lustig, Gregg Mitman, Michelle Murphy, Katharine Park, Matt Price, Robert N. Proctor, Helmut Puff, Robert J. Richards, Londa Schiebinger, Laura Slatkin, Julia Adeney Thomas, Fernando Vidal. (shrink)

A collection of essays from some of the world's leading intellectual historians, representing an international spectrum of research into the history of philosophy, intellect, science and music. This collection of essays addresses, in specific historical ways and from particular disciplinary standpoints, the problem of knowledge and what used to be called the classification of the sciences. What is, or what passes for, knowledge? What are its divisions, and how should they be related? Who possesses this knowledge, and to what uses (...) has it been put? How is it transmitted, and how can its history be understood and written? Ranging across the epistemological barrier formed by the revolution of modern science, these contributions inquire into the changing disciplinary patterns of the tumultuous times between the renaissance and the enlightenment, that saw the fragmentation of old ideals and the creation of European modernity. Contributors: Donald R. Kelley, Ann Blair, Paul Nelles, Constance Blackwell, Ulrich Schneider, Martin Mulsow, J.B. Schneewind, Donald Verene, Peter Miller, Ann Moyers, Michael Seidler, Anthony Pagden, Paula Findlen, Anthony Grafton, Heikki Mikkeli, Nicholas Jardine, Londa Schiebinger. (shrink)

Johann Friedrich Blumenbach has been called ‘The Father of Physical Anthropology’ because of his pioneering publications describing human racial variation. He proposed a racial typology consisting of five ‘major varieties/races’ of humanity. Since the 1990s, Londa Schiebinger and other Anglophone scholars have argued that Blumenbach’s writings on race show evidence that he was significantly influenced by nineteenth-century race supremacist beliefs which held Europeans/caucasians to be the highest ranked and most beautiful race. However, these modern authors relied largely on Thomas (...) Bendyshe’s 1865 English translations of Blumenbach’s Latin and German texts. As documented herein, Bendyshe’s publication includes numerous translation errors which form a pattern indicating that he employed two translators. The first translator was consistent with five earlier English translations. The second translator was not consistent with the earlier translators. This second translator also used English terms that denigrated extra-Europeans while adulating Europeans. Furthermore, Bendyshe’s1865 translation regularly used the term ‘beauty’ to translate different Latin words that Blumenbach used to express his nuanced view of aesthetics and structural symmetry. Given the inconsistency and errors in Bendyshe’s 1865 translations, they should not be unquestionably accepted as an accurate reflection of Blumenbach’s views. (shrink)

An introduction to the new area of ignorance studies that examines how science produces ignorance—both actively and passively, intentionally and unintentionally. We may think of science as our foremost producer of knowledge, but for the past decade, science has also been studied as an important source of ignorance. The historian of science Robert Proctor has coined the term agnotology to refer to the study of ignorance, and much of the ignorance studied in this new area is produced by science. Whether (...) an active or passive construct, intended or unintended, this ignorance is, in Proctor's words, “made, maintained, and manipulated” by science. This volume examines forms of scientific ignorance and their consequences. A dialogue between Proctor and Peter Galison offers historical context, presenting the concerns and motivations of pioneers in the field. Essays by leading historians and philosophers of science examine the active construction of ignorance by biased design and interpretation of experiments and empirical studies, as seen in the “false advertising” by climate change deniers; the “virtuous” construction of ignorance—for example, by curtailing research on race- and gender-related cognitive differences; and ignorance as the unintended by-product of choices made in the research process, when rules, incentives, and methods encourage an emphasis on the beneficial and commercial effects of industrial chemicals, and when certain concepts and even certain groups' interests are inaccessible in a given conceptual framework. Contributors Martin Carrier, Carl F. Cranor, Peter Galison, Paul Hoyningen-Huene, Philip Kitcher, Janet Kourany, Hugh Lacey, Robert Proctor, Londa Schiebinger, Miriam Solomon, Torsten Wilholt. (shrink)

El análisis de los sesgos de género en ciencia ha dado lugar a una revisión crítica del conocimiento científico y a un cuestionamiento en profundidad del modelo de ciencia existente. Lo que, a su vez, da paso al interés por investigar en torno a las claves epistémicas que harían posible una ciencia no sexista, racista o clasista, fraguando un debate epistemológico de gran alcance.Las pretensiones de estas epistemologías son, principalmente, mostrar que los valores contextuales, es decir, los considerados no cognitivos, (...) influyen en la ciencia, en las metáforas científicas, el lenguaje utilizado, los procesos y métodos de investigación, y en los conocimientos. En esta comunicación se abordará principalmente el tema de la Ciencia Sostenible como alternativa a la denominada ciencia tradicional, y también como disyuntiva a la denominada ciencia feminista. Las posturas que confluyen son las de tres autoras: D. Haraway, S. Harding y Londa Schiebinger. Las cuales, en conjunto, dan lugar a una actividad práctica en ciencia, además de a una forma de mirar diferente, que intenta elaborar propuestas novedosas para la mejora del quehacer científico. (shrink)

Table of Contents I. WHO ARE THE SCIENTISTS? Historically. Women in the Origins of Modern Science, Londa Schiebinger. Women of Third World Descent in the Sciences, Sandra Harding. Recently. Women in Science: Half In Half Out, Vivian Gornick.”How Can a Little Girl Like You Teach a Great Big Class of Men?’ the Chairman Said, and Other Adventures of a Woman in Science, Naomi Weisstein. The Anomaly of a Woman in Physics, Evelyn Fox Keller. Currently. Women Join the Ranks of (...) Science but Remain Invisible at the Top, Natalie Angier. Creeping Toward Inclusivity in Science, Phyllis Goldberg. II. WHAT KIND OF ENTERPRISE IS SCIENCE? Science’s Aims, Methods, and Norms of Behavior. Patriarchy, Scientists, and Nuclear Warriors, Brian Easlea. Culturally Inclusive Chemistry, Catherine Hurt Middlecamp. A World of Difference, Evelyn Fox Keller. Interviewing Women: A Contradiction in Terms, Ann Oakley. Science’s Subject Matter. Have Only Men Evolved?, Ruth Hubbard. Empathy, Polyandry, and the Myth of the Coy Female, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. The Importance of Feminist Critique for Contemporary Cell Biology, The Biology and Gender Study Group. The Engendering of Archaeology: Refiguring Feminist Science Studies, Alison Wylie. Still Seeking Transformation: Feminist Challenges to Psychology, Sue Wilkinson. Science’s Social Effects. Androcentric Bias in Clinical Research, Sue Rosser. Man-Made Medicine and Women’s Health, Nancy Krieger and Elizabeth Fee. The New Procreative Technologies, Ruth Hubbard. A Question of Genius: Are Men Really Smarter Than Women?, Anne Fausto-Sterling. III. WHAT KIND OF ENTERPRISE OUGHT SCIENCE TO BE? Feminist Empiricism. Subjects, Power, and Knowledge: Description and Prescription in Feminist Philosophies of Science, Helen Longino. Epistemological Communities, Lynn Hankinson Nelson. Feminist Standpoint Theory. ”Strong Objectivity’: A Response to the New Objectivity Question, Sandra Harding. Introduction to Tomorrow’s Tomorrow: The Black Woman, Joyce Ladner. Feminist Postmodernism. Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective, Donna Haraway. Though This Be Method, Yet There Is Madness in It: Paranoia and Liberal Epistemology, Naomi Scheman. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany ed. by Corey W. DyckJulia BorcherdingCorey W. Dyck, editor. Women and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 272. Hardback, $85.00.In more ways than one, this volume constitutes an important contribution to ongoing efforts to reconfigure and enrich our existing philosophical canon and to question the narratives that have led to its current shape. To start, while there is (...) a growing amount of research dedicated to recovering the contributions of women to early modern philosophy, much of this work focuses on the seventeenth century, and geographically centers on England, France, and Italy. By turning the spotlight on eighteenth-century Germany, this volume broadens the scope of these efforts in an important way. Further, with the historiography of this period still shaped by a long-standing dismissive treatment of post-Leibnizian German philosophy and by the long shadow cast by the success of Kant's Critical philosophy, which eclipsed many of the thinkers opposed to it, challenges to its traditional narratives seem especially important. The editor's earlier collection (coedited with Falk Wunderlich) on Kant and his German contemporaries already succeeded in mounting such a challenge by showing that German philosophy throughout the eighteenth century in fact presents us with an extraordinarily rich tableau of intellectual life (Kant and His German Contemporaries. Vol. 1: Logic, Mind, Epistemology, Science and Ethics [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018]).The present volume stands as a further valuable contribution to relativizing the still dominant narrative of German philosophy as the story of a select few brilliant minds. It successfully dispenses not only with the idea that those minds were few, but also with the equally persistent one that they were exclusively male. Already in the nineteenth century, we find historians such as Karl Joël explicitly casting the new age of German philosophy inaugurated by Kant as its "masculine epoch"—an image undoubtedly furthered by its main protagonist, who cast philosophical acumen in decidedly male terms when he observed that "[a] woman who has a head full of Greek, like Madame Dacier, or one who engages in debate about the intricacies of mechanics, like the Marquise du Châtelet, might just as well have a beard; for that expresses in a more recognizable form the profundity for which she strives" (Karl Joël, Die Frauen in der Philosophie [Hamburg, 1896], 48; Immanuel Kant, Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen [Königsberg, 1764], translation in Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989], 146; both cited in Eileen O'Neill, "Disappearing Ink: Early Modern Women Philosophers and Their Fate in History," in Philosophy in a Feminist [End Page 154] Voice: Critiques and Reconstructions, ed. Janet A. Kourany [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997], 17–62). Yet as the contributions to this volume forcefully illustrate, women in the period did—in spite of the numerous severe social, religious, and political obstacles they faced—in fact manage to gain access to its intellectual sphere, and actively shaped its philosophical landscape.While the papers collected here are of high quality throughout, they do vary in their approach. Many chapters, especially in the earlier parts of the volume, investigate female figures as philosophers in their own right, and carve out their self-standing contributions to prominent philosophical movements and debates. Focusing on Sophie of Hanover's correspondence with Leibniz, Christian Leduc's chapter begins by examining her metaphysical views and argues, against standing interpretations, that her main aim is to defend a version of the doctrine of physical influence as an account of mind-body interaction while rejecting metaphysical commitments regarding the nature of the soul in favor of a more agnostic, Lockean empiricist approach. In chapter 3, Stefanie Buchenau shows how women engaging with Wolffian Schulphilosophie began to view themselves as more than teachers and translators and started to claim the title of philosophers. Using the example of Johanna Charlotte Unzer, Buchenau convincingly argues that despite the "feminine," aesthetic garb of her thought, Unzer in fact offers a serious critique and revision of the Wolffian model of... (shrink)

Based on a wide range of Latin and vernacular sources, this essay reexamines Thomas Laqueur’s and Londa Schiebinger’s influential claim that the idea of incommensurable anatomical difference between the sexes was “invented” in the eighteenth century, reflecting, in particular, a need to resort to nature in order to justify female subordination against new ideals of equality and universal rights. It provides ample evidence that already around 1600 many leading physicians, rather than proclaiming a “one‐sex model” of female inferiority, insisted (...) on the unique and purposeful features of the female skeleton and the female genital organs and illustrated them visually. The author shares Laqueur’s and Schiebinger’s assumption that the shift toward incommensurable anatomical difference helped legitimize woman’s subordinate position as housewife and mother as naturally given. But around 1600 Enlightenment ideals as yet played no role. Instead, this shift reflected, in particular, contemporary physicians’ growing appreciation of personal discovery and innovation, the rise of a specialist gynecology, and new views on marriage and motherhood in the upper classes among whom the physicians lived and whose support they sought. (shrink)

An examination of the use of medical simulators shows that they contain traces of the one-sex body model found in pre-Enlightenment anatomies. The simulators present the male body as ‘male including female’ rather than ‘male, not female’. Only when female sex organs are relevant to a practice, as in gynaecology, does a simulator need to become ‘female, not male’. The widely held modernist understanding of sex and gender as binary categories is actually masking local practices which allow varied sex and (...) gender paradigms to coexist in simulator use. This analysis applies the discussions of Laqueur, Schiebinger and Faulkner to simulator practice. The consequences of recognizing the presence of the one-sex body are two-fold. Firstly, seeing that the reification of medical knowledge can still be haunted by conceptual paradigms of the past forces a more nuanced understanding of the variety that localized medical practices contain. Secondly, observing the ease with which the reified knowledge of a one-sex body is embraced by subjects who also exist in a world of binary gender points to the complexity our subjectivities can embrace and forces the researcher to acknowledge the implications of the simulations’ context. (shrink)