HSCI 4455,WoSt 4102 (Fall, 2003)
Women, Gender, and Science
Wednesday, 3:35-5:30
Prof. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt
123 Pillsbury Hall, 4-9368
sgk@umn.edu
Office hours: TTh 10-11 am; by appointment
This course offers an
historical perspective on issues of women in science and on the
relationship of gender to scientific studies.
We will start with aspects of the scientific revolution that
establish the emerging professional orientations and theoretical
assumptions associated with modern western science.
Much of the reading will be based on topics and research
relating to North America, although comparative work is included
at several points and invited via student projects.
Several themes will reoccur throughout the semester, most
particularly the ways in which women have pursued scientific and
technological knowledge, the cultural factors that established their
environment, the family situations and personal relationships that
facilitated or inhibited them in their work, and the ways in which
scientific theory and research influenced their identity and opportunities. The practice and general orientation of the
sciences (including home economics) can be readily viewed as gendered
by the practitioners and by the problems they addressed. We will be reading literature that explores the ways in which gendered
practices and project definitions intersect with the fruitful participation
of women in certain disciplines.
There are no prerequisites.
A balance of students with backgrounds in history, science
and technology, and education would be particularly good for our
discussions. Meeting just
once a week, this class is a seminar, and students are expected
to come to class prepared to discuss the reading assignments which
form the core of the course. Reading
logs and journals have proven particularly valuable for facilitating
class discussion, and you will be asked to circulate your questions
and opinions ahead of class discussion (by midnight on Monday before
each class). Each student will lead one class discussion period and produce a
written review of readings for that week as well. The three book reviews will constitute about 45% of your final
evaluation if you are taking 4455; the reviews and final paper will
constitute 65 % of the final
evaluation for those taking 8441.
A second review may also be done on a book assigned for class
(and due at the beginning of that class period), and third review
will be on a book in an area of special interest to each student,
chosen in consultation with me. There are a number of opportunities
on our campus to attend lectures on not only in history of science
but also in history of medicine, philosophy of science, and feminist
studies. You will be expected
to attend at least two lectures outside of class relevant to our
work, write a one page report on it to distribute to class, as well
as report briefly to the class; this assignment counts for 10% of
your final grade. The remainder
of your grade will be based on your on-line and in-class participation.
You may find it useful to sign on for the weekly list serve
of the Office of University Women (\fs22fs22 women@umn.edu)
which will announce relevant lectures on campus.
All of the reading assignments
will be on reserve in Walter Library. Several of the books have also been ordered through the Coffman
Union bookstore.
Topics and Assignments
All assignments should
be read before the indicated class date and in time to circulate
questions and comments to the rest of the class.
Those marked with an asterisk (*) should be read by everyone. Other readings may be assigned for individual
reports and are supplementary.
You may also want to consult reviews on the various texts
that we read in class, particularly those on which you report. Many of them have been reviewed in historical journals (American Historical Review,
Isis, Journal of American History) or in women's studies
journals (Women's Review of Books, Signs, Women's
Studies).
Introduction and Overview
Reflections on women, science, gender, and history. What do we mean by science? by technology? What do we mean by the terms woman/women, female, and gender?
How does science influence those definitions?
Why are there so few women evident in the standard histories
of science? Does it make a difference to have women in science, technology,
and medicine?
Assignment: After looking over the syllabus, write a paragraph in class
about some issue that you perceive to be important for our discussion
during the semester.
II. September 10
Gender and Science in the Origins of Modern Science
Consider the ways in which various contemporaries might have thought about
women’s intellect, identities, and roles in the 16th
and 17th centuries.
What is most compelling about Merchant's argument?
Why do you think it has been controversial?
How does her interpretation problematize the Scientific Revolution
as it has been popularly understood?
*Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, (San Francisco:
Harper and Row, 1980); summary version in Earthcare: Women
and the Environment, chapters 1, 4, 7, 9 and 11.
*Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledge: The Science Question in Feminism
and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” reprinted in Simians,
Cyborgs, and Women: the Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge,
1997).
III. September 17
Naturalizing Bodies in the Enlightenment
In what ways did ideas about the body change in the eighteenth century? In what way did the new kinds of scientific
thinking have an impact on discussions of male and female physiology
and intellect?
*Karen Harvey, “The Substance of Sexual Difference: Change and Persistence
in Representations of the Body in Eighteenth-Century England,” Gender
and History 14 (2002): 202-223.
*Estelle Cohen, “‘What Women at All Times Would Laugh At’: Redefining
Equality and Difference, circa 1660-1760,” Osiris 12 (1996):
121-142.
IV. September 24
Women’s Expertise, Apprenticed and Empirical
Consider the kinds of expertise required by successful midwives in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
How did they acquire their evident knowledge of the natural
world, both human and botanical?
What was their attitude toward other kinds of expertise,
acquired through more formal or systematic training?
Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard,
Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Vintage, 1990).
Popular and Popularizing Science
What sciences attracted women in the era and class of "learned ladies?"
What have been the incentives for studying within the scientific
tradition? What are the boundaries of science as practice?
How did women negotiate the amateur versus new professional
terrain being established during the nineteenth century?
What accounts for the loss of access and status of women
in botany?
*Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora's Daughters and Botany in England 1760-1860
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins,
1996).
VI. October 8
Domesticity, Women’s Rights, and Finding a Voice in Science
Locating a space to study science and to create opportunities for others,
including women, to do so provided income to many women in the natural
sciences. Still, only a
few negotiated the more complicated networks of the physical and
astronomical sciences. Does the life of Somerville give you some clues
as to why that might be true?
*Kathryn A. Neely, Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination, and the
Female Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
M. Susan Lindee, “The American Career of Jane Marcet’s Conversations
on Chemistry, 1806-1853” Isis, 82 (1991): 8-23.
Taking Risks and Creating Opportunities
This already classic text frames women’s scientific labor in ways that
reveal the dominant and often constricting institutional settings
in which women pursued their work.
This pioneering work has produced a vocabulary now found
in writing about women in American history: protege chains, women’s
work in science, the “Curie effect”, territorial segregation, and
other insights.
*Margaret Rossiter, Struggles and Strategies: Women in Science to 1940
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1982), chapters 1-5.
VII. October 22
Relating Women’s Rights to Science
The routes of access to science and the motives to do science varied from
place to place. Radicals
who were resisting traditional authorities often found in the promise
of scientific “rational thinking” an attractive route to envision
social and economic change. Think
comparatively about the experiences and aspirations of the American
women who went to Europe for advanced degrees and those who went
from Russia.
*Ann Hibner Koblitz, A Convergence of Lives: Sofia Kovalevskaia: Scientist,
Writer, Revolutionary (Rutgers University Press, 1998 [1993]).
VIII. October 29
Medical and Biological Constructs of Gender
How were the issues of health, sexual practice, and personal identity
negotiated among physicians, scientists, ordinary women, and reformers?
*Alice Domurat Dreger, Hermaphrodites: The Medical Invention of Sex (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).
*Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender, rev. ed., chapter 8
*Joan Burstyn, “Education and Sex: The Medical Case against Higher Education
for Women in England, 1870-1900" in Proceedings of the American
Philosophical Society, 117 (April, 1973): 79-89.
IX. November 5
Reconfiguring Gender and Sex in the Social Sciences
In the expansive mood of progressive America, opportunities and new ideas
invigorated not only those in the well-established sciences but
also those who wanted to use the methods of science to investigate
questions about humans and human society.
Women found opportunities in the still developing social
sciences and brought their own concerns to the research arenas in
which they worked. Consider the range of their interests and the impact they seem to
have had during this fruitful and foundational period.
*Rosalind Rosenberg, Beyond Separate Spheres: Intellectual Roots of
Modern Feminism (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1982).
X. November 12
The New Woman of the Early Twentieth Century
Anthropology provided not only a way to think about people different than
the investigating social scientists but, in the case of Elsie Clews
Parsons, a way to think about her own culture.
Carolyn Heilbron suggests that writing a biography of a woman
is perhaps different from writing one about a man.
What do you think about her arguments in relationship to
the Deacon biography?
*Carolyn Heilbrin, Writing Woman’s Life (New York: Ballentine Books,
1988), chapter 1.
*Desley Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons, Inventing Modern Life (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997)
XI. November 19
Women, Culture and Technology
Historians of technology have been more intent on theorizing their subject
in ways that tended to obscure gender.
Recent work by Ruth Oldenziel, Nina Lerman, and Arwen Mohen
have challenged that older scholarship even as they illuminate some
of its strengths in their work on women and gender in technological
ideology and practice.
XII. November
26
NO CLASS
XIII. December 3
Surviving, Challenging, and Flourishing in Science in
the Mid-20th Century America
Like Caroline Heilbron, Berenice Carroll considers the issue of how we
write about women, but their angles of inquiry are quite distinct. What does constitute creativity or originality?
*Berenice Carroll, “The ‘Politics of ‘Originality’: Women and the Class
System of the Intellect,” Journal of Women’s History, 2 (Fall,
1990): 136-163. (Handout)
*Linda Lear, Rachel Carson, Witness for Nature (New York: Henry
Holt, 1997)
XIV. December 10
Final Class Discussion and Dinner
How does changing demographics in scientific practice
change science, or does it? What
does Schiebinger mean by feminism?
What are the benchmarks of change?
*Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1999).
*Evelyn Fox Keller, “Developmental Biology as a Feminist Cause,” in Osiris
12 (1997): 16-28.
No Final Exam. Final
Papers and Reviews due on December 17th.
Issues to consider when reading books (and articles)
on the history of women, gender, and science:
1) What are the sources used by the author? Monographs and articles? Manuscripts
or other unpublished materials? Biographies? Philosophical
treatises? Visuals?
Quantitative Data? Literary texts?
2) What is the author’s purpose? Adding
to scholarship? Challenging
a standard or highly specific interpretation? Entering a scholarly debate? Contextualizing an idea? Mapping a larger terrain? Responding to or interpreting a scholarly article?
Making a complex matter more straight-forward?
3) What is the date of publication? What
other were the scholarly or public issues that framed the authors’
questions? What information
was or was not available to the author?
4) What is the background of the author? Was this person discipline based and happily situated there? Was this author a feminist scholar by training?
Is there a particular theoretical approach on which the author
relies?
5) What is the audience for this book?
Is this author reaching for an interdisciplinary reading? What does the style do to make the book more
or less accessible? Would
generalists or specialists get the most from reading this book?
6) What is the organizing principle for book? Ideas? A person? A group? An
institution? Relationships?
Concepts? Patterns of change? Cultural norms?
7) How would you characterize the book in terms of its content? Its coverage? Its depth of argument? Its
emphasis on historical continuity or change? Its contextual development? Its focus on topic?
8) What makes the book successful for you as someone interested in the
history of women, gender, and science?
What limits its success, if anything?
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1. The two major grading systems
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