Women and science
New research explodes old bias
By Joyce
Chediac
Do wild horses really have "harems" of mares, which they
guard from other stallions?
What is fertilization? Is it really a competitive race among
sperm cells, with the fastest and fittest penetrating the
helpless, passive egg?
Women scientists today, influenced by the women's liberation
movement of the 1970s, are asking these and other questions.
The answers are surprising many, and even embarrassing
some.
Scientists claim to be "objective," with their findings
somehow "above society." But scientific inquiry takes place
within a political, economic and cultural context. Science is
not above the bias of capitalist property relations and the
spoken and unspoken assumptions concerning class, gender and
nationality.
For example, a century ago Sigmund Freud searched for the
cause of so-called hysteria in women. In his "Aetiology of
Hysteria," published in 1896, he thought he found the
answer: "At the bottom of every case of hysteria there are one
or more occurrences of premature sexual experience, occurrences
which belong to the earliest years of childhood." Today,
"premature sexual experience" is generally called sexual abuse
of children. But within a year, Freud had repudiated this
traumatic theory on the origins of hysteria.
Why? This condition was very common among women. If Freud's
women patients were telling the truth, and if his theory was
right, then sexual abuse of children was endemic among the
respectable bourgeois families of Vienna, where Freud
practiced. The difference between Freud's findings and what
society was willing to accept was so extreme that Freud chose
to not believe his patients and even to disregard his own
findings.
"Out of the ruins of the traumatic theory of hysteria, Freud
created psychoanalysis. The dominant psychological theory of
the next century was founded in the denial of women's reality.
... Freud has concluded that his hysterical patients' accounts
of childhood sexual abuse were untrue," explains Judith Herman,
author of "Trauma and Recovery." Instead, women suffering from
this condition were told it was all in their heads.
"Not until the women's liberation movement of the 1970s was
it recognized that the most common post-traumatic disorders are
those not of men in war but of women in civilian life. The real
conditions of women's lives were hidden in the sphere of the
personal, in private life," writes Herman.
No idea, no matter how great, can have a meaning unless some
part of humanity is ready to accept it. Like the air we
breathe, the social context in which we live is often not
noticed. At times of mass movements, however, the prejudices of
an era can be exposed and challenged.
The women's movement of the 1970s laid bare much of the
prevailing patriarchal, capitalist and class bias in society
concerning women. Many women who grew up during this movement,
and were strengthened and influenced by it, are now making
contributions to science that are tearing off the veil of
patriarchal assumptions.
Of stallions and mares
Patricia Adair Gowaty, a biologist of the University of
Georgia, explains: "The women's movement of the 1960s and 1970s
had a huge effect on me. ... Ideas I was exposed to I have
since erected as testable, scientific hypotheses. ... I'm not
doing the science any differently, but I'm asking a question
that has not been asked before."
"Science is not value-neutral," adds Londa Schiebinger,
Pennsylvania State University historian and author of "Has
Feminism Changed Science?"
"Getting the right answers--turning the crank--may be
gender-free. But it is often in setting priorities about what
will and what will not be known that gender has an impact."
For example, recently biologists were in the Western plains
of the United States studying herds of mustangs, where the
reigning stallion was believed to have the sole right to
procreate. Then one researcher got the idea to run DNA tests on
the horses. The tests showed that only one-third of the foals
in the herd were sired by the resident stallion. The mares, it
seems, had gone to other herds to mate.
"Blinded by the 'harem' metaphor of mustang social
structure, researchers had not even looked for such female
behavior," Newsweek magazine reported on June 14, 1999.
Researchers also showed bias in attributing motivation to the
resident stallion--that for some reason he guarded "his" mares,
and cared whom they mated with.
Gender among baboons
According to primatologist Linda Fedigan of the University
of Alberta, from the 1950s to the 1970s primatologists studied
savanna baboons, a species that is more aggressive,
male-dominated and competitive than any other nonhuman
primate.
"Most of the scientists were men," says Fedigan. The species
they chose, she says, reinforced the notion that male dominance
and aggression are the norms of primate behavior, including our
own, and that it is the males who bring social cohesion to the
group.
When women entered the field in the 1970s, they questioned
whether male aggression and alliances are the most powerful
shapers of primate society. A closer study showed that elderly
female baboons determine where the group will search for food
each day. And a male's reproductive success is much more
dependent on his relationship with the group's females than on
his place in the chain of male dominance.
Newsweek reported: "When women began studying primates other
than baboons, they found that females actively pursue males and
have loads of extramarital affairs--apparently to get more
males to provide and care for the babies. Females are no longer
considered peripheral to primate evolution."
Does the egg choose the sperm?
Then there is the story of the sperm and the egg.
Conception has traditionally been described as a competitive
race by sperm cells to be the one to penetrate the passive egg.
New research reveals the female side is far from passive.
The new version is that the egg plays an active role in
conception by sending out fingerlike microvilli to reel in the
sperm, and secretions that kill off some sperm, thereby
selecting sperm out. ("Hidden Choices of Females," Natural
History, November 2000)
These contributions to human knowledge, and others, came
from seriously studying the female side. But it took a women's
movement and women researchers to make this happen.
Just think what other fascinating truths will be added to
human knowledge when class relations are overturned and
national oppression ended. Then all oppressed people can come
to science as equals, bringing with them their own unique
insights and perspective.
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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