Noretta Koertge on feminist
critiques of science
From: Skeptical Inquirer,
March-April 1995 v19 n2 p42(2)
[Noretta Koertge is professor of
history and philosophy of science at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405.
She is co-author of Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange
World of Women's Studies, Basic Books, 1994. ]
Twenty years ago the dominant
mood of feminism could have been represented by the World War II poster of
Rosie the Riveter. Activists were rolling up their sleeves and demanding access
to traditionally male jobs. Women were no longer always willing to be nurses,
or legal secretaries, or lab technicians. They were demanding the opportunity
to be electricians, engineers, forest rangers, and astronauts - and gender
stereotypes that implied that women couldn't deal with machines or think
analytically were anathema to them.
A feminist Rip Van Winkle who
fell asleep during the seventies would be amazed at the contrasting ethos
prevalent within academic feminism today. The tough-minded and strong-armed
Rosie Riveters have been displaced by moralizing Sensitive Susans, each
desperately seeking to find a new ideological flaw in the so-called hegemonic
discourse of patriarchal, racist, colonial, Eurocentric culture.
All of this might be cheerfully
relegated to the Ivory Tower's already overflowing dust bins if one were not
concerned about its impact on idealistic young women who are making curricular
and career choices while struggling to construct lifestyles that will be quite
different from those of their mothers and grandmothers.
As Daphne Patai and I
interviewed faculty, students, and staff from Women's Studies programs for our
book Professing Feminism, there emerged a complex picture of what we call
"negative education" - a systematic undermining of the intellectual
values of liberal education. And as Paul Gross and Norman Levitt have so
impressively documented in Higher Superstition, it is the natural sciences that
are under the heaviest fire.
Young women are being alienated
from science in many ways. One strategy is to try to redefine what counts as
science. For example, instead of teaching about the struggles - and triumphs -
of great women scientists, such as Emmy Noether, Marie and Irene Curie, and
Kathleen Lonsdale, feminist accounts of the history of science now emphasize
the contributions of midwives and the allegedly forgotten healing arts of
herbalists and witches. More serious are the direct attempts to steer women
away from the study of science. Thus, instead of exhorting young women to
prepare themselves for a variety of technical subjects by studying science,
logic, and mathematics, Women's Studies students are now being taught that
logic is a tool of domination and that quantitative reasoning is incompatible
with a humanistic appreciation of the qualitative aspects of the
phenomenological world.
Feminists add a new twist to
this old litany of repudiations of analytical reasoning by claiming that the
standard norms and methods of scientific inquiry are sexist because they are
incompatible with "women's ways of knowing." The authors of the
prize-winning book with this title report that the majority of the women they
interviewed fell into the category of "subjective knowers,"
characterized by a "passionate rejection of science and scientists."
These "subjectivist" women see the methods of logic, analysis, and
abstraction as "alien territory belonging to men" and "value
intuition as a safer and more fruitful approach to truth" (Women's Ways
of Knowing, by Mary Belenky et al., p. 71).
The authors, some of whom were
trained as psychologists, admit that because of the high value Western
technological societies place on objectivity and rationality, these women's
ways of knowing have certain "maladaptive consequences," but they
emphasize that even the most epistemologically mature women in their study
continue to rely heavily on subjective experience. Even those they describe as
"integrated knowers" have a need to "connect" in an
empathetic way with the material they study. These women are uncomfortable with
the idea of a detached, impartial observer; they dislike debates, and they find
it impossible to separate a critique of ideas from a criticism of the people
who hold them.
Given the traditional roles of
nurturer and peacemaker ascribed to women, it is perhaps not too surprising
that the researchers found these profiles, although one wonders how much such
attitudes were reinforced by current feminism. But what is absolutely shocking
to me are the conclusions that these feminists, who are presumably trying to
better the lot of women, draw from their research. Instead of arguing that
young women need special help in learning how to debate and deal with
abstractions, instead of calling for studies of how best to alleviate math anxiety
and science phobia, instead of deploring the forces that threaten to make many
women innumerate and scientifically illiterate, the authors argue that society
must simply place more value on "maternal thinking."
In addition to these generic
repudiations of the methods of scientific inquiry, feminists have criticized
the content of various sciences, taking a special dislike to biology. In our
book we describe a series of recurring maneuvers that we call the game of
Biodenial. Some feminists, for example, have claimed that the pain of
childbirth is a social construction that would disappear in a more women-
positive society and that the biological classification of human beings into
two sexes is inspired by the political desire to clearly demarcate those who
are to dominate from those who are to be oppressed. And of course there is the
recurring talk about human parthenogenesis.
Once again it is difficult to
imagine that even the perpetrators of these fantastical views take them
seriously. Yet the effects are very real. Women who do decide to become
scientists find themselves under attack from the self-proclaimed
"echt" feminists, who call them "Athenas" and "Queen
Bees." In many scientific disciplines, women are a tiny minority and find
themselves in a climate where they could use a little feminist support as they
seek to gain acceptance and equal treatment, but they may well not find it in
today's feminist circles.
Even more troubling are the
deleterious effects on the young women who buy into the feminist attacks on
rationality and science. To give just one example: Traditional feminists often
talked about the mysogynist elements in Freud's theorizing and pointed out
weaknesses in his methodology - the case of Dora was a favorite example of how
Freud browbeat clients in his attempt to find the repressed memories he
"knew" were there. What a painful irony that today's feminists have
so uncritically endorsed the methods by which hypnotists and psychological
counselors purport to unearth repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse and
Satanic rituals of the most bizarre kinds. I cannot think of a better
demonstration of how the credulous trust of subjective beliefs and the
dismissal of the methods and content of science can turn out to be dangerous to
all involved.
Feminism has a great past and
there remains much to be done to ensure that women really do have an equal
opportunity in all aspects of society. What would our great feminist
fore-mothers say about what's happening today - Harriet Mill, Susan B. Anthony,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton, all of the women who fought for the right to go to
college and enter med school, the women who couldn't get into Caltech or the
Chemical Society or the Royal Society until a relatively few years ago? I think
they would be proud of the gains women have made in this century, but it might
break their hearts to see the strange doctrines now being promulgated in the
name of feminism.