The JRB presents an excerpt from Christa Kuljian’s new book, Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science.
Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science
Christa Kuljian
University of Massachusetts Press, 2024
Introduction
When I was growing up in greater Boston in the late 1970s, my parents bought me a copy of the revolutionary guide on women’s health, Our Bodies, Ourselves, which gave me not only knowledge about my body, but also a sense of the burgeoning women’s movement. The book was produced and published locally by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in 1970, but it was reaching women throughout the country. I watched my mother, who had previously stayed at home taking care of me and my younger sister, graduate with a degree from Boston University and chart a new course as a rehabilitation counselor at my school. In the fall of 1980, when I was eighteen years old, I arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student, and for a moment I mistakenly thought that, because the women’s movement had peaked in the 1970s, it had largely subsided. I had a subscription to Ms. magazine, and I felt that my classmates and I had benefited from the women’s movement and that it was now our responsibility to fulfill its potential. I soon learned, however, that there was a long way to go in terms of achieving justice for women and that social movements would continue to be a critical force in society.
Part of my education took place in a course taught by Professor Ruth Hubbard, who in 1974 had become the first woman to achieve tenure in biology at Harvard. Hubbard had spent the 1940s through the 1960s as a research assistant in her husband’s lab, conducting experiments to reveal the biochemical workings of the eye. After years of this, she was swept up in the second wave of the women’s movement, which profoundly influenced her. For Hubbard, feminism and questioning the neutrality of science came together at the same time. She asked, If scientists were more representative of society in terms of gender, race, and class, would science look different? Moreover, why, after decades of important lab research, was she not tenured? And why did no one think this was a problem?
Born Ruth Hoffman, Hubbard had fled Vienna as a teenager with her family before World War II. Growing up in a socialist home, she had always identified with left-leaning politics. Yet she admitted that it had taken two major social upheavals—the Vietnam War and the women’s movement—to push her to step back from her lab work, reread Charles Darwin, and recognize that scientists were greatly affected by their social and personal background. In an interview years later, Hubbard said that the idea that science had been made almost exclusively by highly educated, economically privileged, white men hit her ‘like a bolt out of the blue.’ This revelation was one of her most liberating insights, and it caused her to start questioning the concept of scientific objectivity. She shifted her attention from looking closely at proteins in the retina to looking closely at scientists who were biased in their study of women’s biology.
Hubbard was in her late fifties when I took her then-famous course ‘Bio 109: Biology and Women’s Issues.’ In corduroy pants and Birkenstocks, her salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a long braid, she lectured on the social context of science and the social construction of women’s biology, sexuality, sex and gender, sex differences, menstruation, women’s health, and reproductive rights. She talked to us a great deal about scientists, including Darwin, who believed the Victorian stereotype of the active male and the passive female. Many of these scientists, she said, had imposed their beliefs onto their diverse research into animals, humans, algae, bacteria, and cells. She often described them as promoting ‘a self-fulfilling prophecy’: looking for passive elements in nature and calling them female, looking for active dynamics in nature and calling them male. Hubbard helped me to see the tendency of male scientists to use biology to affirm patriarchy. If these revelations sound unremarkable in 2024, that is because of the work that she and many others did to develop feminist critiques of scientific knowledge. Back in 1983, however, they were revolutionary ideas. I had learned a new way to understand oppression.
Influenced by Hubbard, my senior thesis for my degree in the history of science explored how the American medical profession presented women’s biology between 1870 and 1920. In the late 1800s, for instance, doctors were telling young white women to focus their energies on reproduction, not higher education. In Sex in Education, or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873), Edward H Clarke, a respected physician and board member of the Harvard Medical School, argued that women should avoid academic study because it would negatively affect their reproductive system and their unborn children. As I wrote in a class essay, ‘what an ingenious way for the elite male community to keep women in “their place”‘. Clarke’s argument focused solely on middle-and upper-class white women; it did not apply to working-class or enslaved women. In fact, he was a prime proponent of the concept of race suicide, which, in his view, required protecting and propagating white upper-class society. Thus, he believed, women from this class needed to focus on child bearing.
My research for my thesis focused on how certain women in medicine had pushed back against Clarke’s theories. In Hubbard’s course, I learned that it was important to explore the assumptions that inform a scientist’s research questions and findings and to understand the social context that often shapes them. But Hubbard wasn’t my official thesis supervisor. That was Margaret Rossiter, a visiting lecturer at Harvard who had just published her first book, Women Scientists in America (1982). Until this point, many people, even knowledgeable historians of science, had dismissed women’s involvement in science. But Rossiter’s book clearly showed that women had been active in the sciences in the United States for more than a century.
I was honored that she was watching over my work. In addition, one of Hubbard’s teaching assistants, Dolita Cathcart, was a regular support as I researched and wrote my thesis. Cathcart was an African American pre-med student who went on to become a historian, and she pointed out to me that Rossiter’s book had focused on white women, as did Bio 109. The course’s reading list relied heavily on published anthologies that Hubbard had co-edited, including Biological Woman: The Convenient Myth, Genes and Gender II, and Women’s Nature. Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals (1980) was one of a handful of works by women of color that appeared on the recommended-reading list. Another was an essay by Beverly Smith, one of the authors of the Combahee River Collective Statement. Both Lorde and Smith shared their experience of the medical establishment and Black women’s health via an analysis of gender and race. Yet in the mid-1980s, thoughts on race and racism were marginal to the growing feminist critique of science.
Our Science, Ourselves, grew from my formative experience in Hubbard’s course, my thesis research into the history of science, and my conversations with Cathcart, but it also has roots in another era. In 2016, I published Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race, and the Search for Human Origins about the history of paleoanthropology in South Africa. The book explores the kinds of questions that Ruth Hubbard and my other history of science professors, Stephen Jay Gould and Everett Mendelsohn, often asked. How did the changing social and political context over the past century shape the search for human origins? What influence did colonialism and apartheid have on the search? And how did scientists’ assumptions, especially about race, shape their research questions about human evolution?
While writing Darwin’s Hunch, I was immersed in the impact of racism, sexism and race typology in science in the twentieth century. Then, soon after the book appeared, I was struck by several pronouncements by scientists that were again bringing sexism and science to the fore. In July 2017, James Damore, a software engineer at Google, wrote in an internal memo that ‘the gender gap in tech’ likely exists because of biological differences between men and women. Many scientists pushed back against Damore, and Google fired him for ‘advancing harmful gender stereotypes in our workplace’. Not long afterward, the physicist Jess Wade argued that ‘those biases have calcified the idea that the inequalities that surround us are rooted in our biology rather than our society’.
Still, male scientists continued to promote such viewpoints. ‘Physics was invented and built by men’, proclaimed Alessandro Strumia, a senior Italian scientist, during a September 2018 seminar on gender issues in physics at CERN, the European nuclear research center in Geneva. According to him, the low number of women in the field was proof that women were innately less capable than men; and he suggested that male scientists were being discriminated against in order to give opportunities to women.
What was going on? These statements reminded me of what former Harvard president Larry Summers had said back in 2005. Speaking at a conference on women and people of color in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, he’d declared that women were underrepresented in the sciences in large part because of biological and genetic sex differences between men and women—what he called a ‘different availability of aptitude’. Such pronouncements reminded me of Ruth Hubbard’s course and how she had shown that society often shapes a scientist’s assumptions. They also called to mind what Clarke had written in Sex in Education in 1873.
Why were these myths still having an impact today? I decided it was time to go back to my class notes and my thesis and look more closely at Hubbard’s research. Who had she worked with at the time? What were other scientists with a feminist awareness saying in the 1970s and 1980s? Over the course of many interviews and much research into the archives, I discovered numerous feminist critiques of science that had developed during those decades and that continue to be relevant to science today.
In September 2016, Hubbard died at the age of ninety-two. That same month, Margot Lee Shetterly published Hidden Figures, later made into a film by the same name, which focused on African American women mathematicians, including Katherine Johnson, who played a critical role at NASA in the 1960s. Having recently published my own book about science and race, I knew it would be impossible to study gender and science without centering race as well. As I studied scholarship from the decades after I’d taken Hubbard’s course, I learned that feminists of color were also making this point in the study of science. My research on gender and science was leading me into discoveries about race, class and sexuality.
When I began my research for this book in 2019, I learned about a feminist microbiologist named Dorothy Burnham, who had helped Ruth Hubbard understand that the scientific myths about Black women were different from those about white women. Burnham had always loved science. She had studied biology at Brooklyn College in the 1930s, and in the 1960s was the head of Staten Island Hospital’s research laboratory. She also spent several years at Sloan Kettering, focusing on staphylococcal infections, contagion and bacterial spread.
Burnham was part of a small cohort of African American women in science before 1940, and her leadership in a lab was unusual for the time. She was also actively involved in civil rights activism in Birmingham, Alabama and New York City. But in the 1940s and 1950s, women scientists such as Hubbard and Burnham isolated their politics from their science. Thus, despite her long commitment both to racial justice and science, Burnham did not bring these roles together until 1977, when she was sixty-two years old. Then, under the impetus of the women’s movement and the formation of an organization called the Genes and Gender Collective, she spoke publicly about how the field of biology had contributed to scientific racism and sexism. Burnham recognized that the women scientists who were starting to speak out about scientific sexism were not considering scientific racism and how it was affecting Black women. From her experience, she knew it was critical to address both.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Hubbard, Burnham, and other women scientists started focusing more and more on the ways in which biologists were promoting stereotypes of women. They felt compelled to speak about these issues, ask questions, write and publish. What Hubbard’s course represented, and what this book explores in detail, is the major impact that the second wave of the women’s movement had on women scientists and philosophers of science in the United States. It also considers the feminist critiques of science that grew out of this engagement and led to the loose consolidation of a discipline known as feminist science studies.
The Boston area was an important hub for the feminist analysis of science, thanks to a major concentration of universities, colleges, students and scientific research. Yet even though all of the seven women I highlight in this book worked in Boston, none of them grew up there. Ruth Hubbard was from Vienna, Austria. Rita Arditti grew up in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Evelyn Fox Keller, Nancy Hopkins and Anne Fausto-Sterling were born in New York City. Evelynn Hammonds is from Atlanta, Georgia, and Banu Subramaniam is from Chennai, India. Each was drawn to the Boston area to study science, network with other scientists, or to take a research job at a local university.
Thus, in addition to focusing on individuals, this book considers what was happening around the Boston area in the 1970s and 1980s and how those events contributed to the development of feminist critiques of science. The paths and careers of these seven women overlapped or ran parallel in significant ways. During the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, they all knew one another and, with the exception of Nancy Hopkins, supported each other’s writing, teaching, speaking, and critiquing. Some were also influenced by the women’s groups and consciousness-raising groups that were popular at the time. Such gatherings gave them the impetus to begin thinking differently about their role in their field and to question the objectivity of science in new ways. They began to question and write about the ways in which they had been excluded from their field. They began to contemplate the challenges for women in science as well as issues linked to gender and science.
One of my major goals in this book is to chart the efforts that feminist science studies has made over the decades to take an intersectional approach, embracing not only gender but also race, class and sexuality. The Combahee River Collective Statement in 1977 had an influence, as did Kimberlé Crenshaw’s 1989 scholarship on intersectionality. A decade later, in 1999, Patricia Hill Collins wrote about the importance of intersectionality and scientific knowledge, a point that scholars today still struggle to make heard.
Thus, as I discuss these scientists, I’ll consider, too, the relationship between social movements and the development of feminist science studies: the role of the women’s movement, the founding of Science for the People and the Genes and Gender Collective, the growth of Black feminism, and the impact of other groupings that propelled a feminist view of science. These organizations helped women look beyond the private and the personal and begin to examine broader social problems and to ask larger questions about science. They began to see that science was not isolated from politics but shaped by it.
Part 1 explores the history of women in science in Europe and the United States and introduces three of the book’s main characters—Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, and Evelyn Fox Keller—all of whom became scientists after World War II. Part 2 considers how women in groups such as Science for the People began to question scientific bias related to sex and gender. It introduces Evelynn Hammonds, and Anne Fausto-Sterling, who were inspired by Hubbard, Arditti, and Keller and the growing number of feminist scientists who were writing about science in new ways. It also introduces Nancy Hopkins, a scientist who, at the time, wanted to stay far away from feminists. Part 3 explores the impact of a growing feminist awareness on the understanding of science and introduces Banu Subramaniam, the youngest of the seven scientists, who arrived in the United States to study evolutionary biology in 1986.
The seven scientists featured in this book were crucial to the early history of feminist science studies. Their insights helped to create a set of tools and a field of study that has grown over the decades. Today, feminist science studies contributes to many fields, including cell biology, developmental biology, chemistry, physics, science and technology studies (STS), and the history of science. In many cases, the insights these women offered decades ago have become part of mainstream knowledge in their fields. And, like dendrites spreading impulses far beyond their source, they continue to inspire new research, knowledge and writing that shapes our view of the world, science, and ourselves.
- Christa Kuljian, a historian of science and a science writer, is the author of two other books—Sanctuary and Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins (both published with Jacana Media). Darwin’s Hunch was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Alan Paton Award for Non-Fiction as well as the NIHSS Award for nonfiction. Christa is a Research Associate at WiSER. She holds an MA in Writing from Wits University.
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Publisher information
When Christa Kuljian arrived on the Harvard College campus as a first-year student in the fall of 1980 with copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine, she was concerned that the women’s movement had peaked in the previous decade. She soon learned, however, that there was a long way to go in terms of achieving equality for women and that social movements would continue to be a critical force in society. She began researching the history of science and gender biases in science, and how they intersect with race, class, and sexuality.
In Our Science, Ourselves, Kuljian tells the origin story of feminist science studies by focusing on the life histories of six key figures—Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling and Banu Subramaniam. These women were part of a trailblazing network of female scientists in the 1970s, 80s and 90s who were drawn to the Boston area—to Harvard, MIT, and other universities—to study science, to network with other scientists, or to take a job. Inspired by the social and political activism of the women’s movement and organizations such as Science for the People, the Genes and Gender Collective, and the Combahee River Collective, they began to write and teach about women in science, gender and science, and sexist and racist bias and exclusion. They would lead the critiques of EO Wilson’s sociobiology in 1975 and Larry Summers’ comments about women in science thirty years later. The book also explores how these contributions differed from those of Nancy Hopkins’, author of the 1999 MIT report on women in science, and a ‘reluctant feminist’.
Drawing on a rich array of sources that combines published journal articles and books with archival materials and interviews with major luminaries of feminist science studies, Kuljian chronicles and celebrates the contributions that these women have made to our collective scientific knowledge and view of the world.
