Geschlechterverhaltnisse in Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik

The library of books on gender and the history of medicine, science, and technology (MST) is becoming larger and more impressive by the day. We have excellent historical accounts coming from different countries, problematizing gender in the medical, scientific, or technological enterprise. Scholarly discussions on how to study this phenomena have still not come to an end. Lately the call has arisen for a more theoretically underpinned gender analysis of the history of MST.

Geschlechterverhältnisse in Medizin, Naturwissenschaft und Technik is based on a conference of the same title held in September of 1995 in Bonn. It aims to give an overview of the various researches about gender and the history of MST currently being carried out in Germany. As the editors, Christoph Meinel and Monika Rennenberg, point out in their preface, the book takes as its analytical starting point the notion of gender, a concept that is not part of the German language but that is imported from the Anglo-Saxon women’s studies repertoire. This concept entails the assumption that masculinity and femininity are not natural facts, nor are they biological criteria by which to distinguish people, but that they vary with time and culture. A positive side effect of this is that by taking up gender as an analytical category the old framework in which women always came out of the analysis as the ones suppressed and men as the suppressors has been overcome. With gender as an analytical category at least a conceptual space has been created to situate women (and men) in the context of their time and culture.

For readers who are starting a study in the history of MST this volume surely will be inspiring. In addition to a theoretical section called “Historiography and Gender,” different parts of the book offer well-informed and critical insights into various biographies of female German doctors, scientists, and engineers, into how gender is (re)produced in various disciplines of MST, into professional roles, and into the problems women have (had) in entering academic institutions.

Readers looking for new theoretical stimuli in their research on gender and the history of MST will be disappointed by the collection. Although the editors in their preface describe the notion of gender that guides the book, they do not make explicit how the notion of gender as an analytical category has been employed in the history of MST. Such a discussion is also missing from the theoretical section of the book, in which Johanna Bleker deals with gender and the historiography of medicine, Barbara Orland with gender and the historiography of technology, and Hubert Mehrtens with gender and the historiography of science. It is only Bleker who, in an excellent essay, claims that the notion of the sex/gender distinction developed in the United States has been quite productive in, for instance, research on why medical writers kept reducing women (Frauen) to females (Weiber). However, she fails to point out what this insight means for the mutual shaping of gender and medicine. Furthermore, the authors of the remaining (thirty-one!) case studies do not make explicit how they use gender in their analyses. In most cases the authors do not even explain from which notion of gender they started their studies. The only exceptions are Sarah Jansen, who in a thought-provoking essay on how the content of the masculine identity of entomologists changed between 1900 and 1920, points out that she takes her notion of “discursive gender” from the American philosopher Judith Butler, and Sabine Schleiermacher, who in a programmatic article about female doctors in the German empire mentions that she adheres to the notion of gender developed by the American historian Joan Wallach Scott. As a result the book does not contribute to the debate on how to study the mutual shaping of gender and the MST-enterprise in the past. This is a pity. However, that the...