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  • Kuhn, Feminism, and Science?
  • Evelyn Fox Keller (bio)

I was a friend of T. S. Kuhn’s long before I became his colleague, and I felt his death, first and foremost, as a personal loss. I also experienced (and continue to feel) an acute sense of professional loss, as, indeed, must anyone working in the history and philosophy of science today: Tom’s contributions to the field over the last four decades have been absolutely formative, and the end of those contributions marks the end of an era that may well have been unique in its productivity for our understanding of the historical contingency of scientific knowledge.

Still, when I was asked to write about Tom from my perspective as a feminist, and particularly about his relation to the emergence of scholarship on gender and science, I was frankly stymied. Certainly, he never wrote about gender and science, nor did he have a direct influence on either the emergence or the growth of the subject. Furthermore, the request prompted me to ask, Was he even a feminist?

The question of Kuhn’s relation to feminism would be a difficult one even without all the uncertainties about the meaning of feminism that plague us today, so I want to address it first. I think it is fair to say that when I first met Tom, he was neither more nor less a feminist than other liberal men of his generation—which is to say, not very much of one. Although quick to take pleasure in the intelligence of a few women, like others of his time he had simply never thought to ask why there were so few. But one of his most distinguishing characteristics was his remarkable openness to new questions, and over time, many of the insights produced by contemporary [End Page 15] feminist scholarship found a receptive niche in his view of the world. Again, like that of many others of his generation (as well as of the generations that followed), his view of the world, even if not his actual work, was transformed by the revolution of modern feminism. This was most likely to show in his personal relationships with his women friends, with his wife, and with his daughters, but it also showed in his general responsiveness to many feminist efforts (certainly greater than that of many of his peers), and perhaps especially in his enthusiastic and generous support of a number of feminist enterprises in the last few years of his life (such as the Bunting Institute). But for all this, I doubt that Tom would ever have thought to apply the label “feminist” to himself, and I am certain that most of his readers—or even most of those who knew him—would not think of him as such.

As to Kuhn’s importance to the emergence of scholarship on “gender and science,” just a bit of reflection makes it clear that, even while he played no direct role, there is at least one sense in which his influence, however indirect, was decisive for everyone working on this subject. For me in particular, I must further acknowledge at least two ways in which his role was decisive.

A good part of my own debt to Tom is a personal one, but in order to explain why, I need to interject a frankly autobiographical aside:

I first met Tom almost twenty years ago, and for me, as for most people, it was another era. Six years earlier (in 1972), I had taken a job teaching mathematics at a brand new liberal arts college, a branch of the then rapidly expanding SUNY system, where the spirit of educational innovation that was sweeping the country was taken very much to heart. The mandate at SUNY Purchase was to transcend (or transgress) disciplinary boundaries. Thus, while teaching mathematics, I also taught courses on physics, science and society, women’s studies—indeed, on any subject my colleagues and I had the fancy to invent. It was a transformative opportunity in a time of radical upheaval, and I was transformed. From feminism, I had discovered the power of gender as an analytic tool, and, fueled by the innocent enthusiasms of...

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