Feminism in Twentieth-Century Science, Technology, and Medicine (review)

This volume of essays emerged from an October 1998 workshop at Princeton University, "Science, Medicine, and Technology in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Has Feminism Made?" Whereas other recent anthologies (The Gender and Science Reader and Feminist Science Studies, both 2001) focus exclusively on women, gender, and science—the topic of the landmark 1995 conference at the University of Minnesota that preceded the Princeton conference—this one reflects the current consensus that technology and medicine are also inseparable from the concerns of feminist science studies. Indeed, the common denominator among the essays is the attempt to understand what difference the feminist project of connecting gender to science, technology, and medicine has made to the development of knowledge as well as to individual scientists.

In seeking to answer the question posed by the Princeton workshop, a distinction must be drawn between the influence of feminist theory in the academy, with its goal of infusing all disciplines with the insights of feminist scholarship, and the influence of the feminist movement in creating a climate that affected women both inside and outside the academy. In "Making A Difference: Feminist Movement and Feminist Critique of Science," Evelyn Fox Keller argues that the real agent of change was the social movement itself, the women's movement of the 1960s and second-wave feminism. She also makes the important point that mass movements are gendered feminine—"emotional, antithetical to rigor, argument and logic" (p. 108)—and that this perception may help account for the common oversimplification of subtly nuanced feminist arguments in science studies. Reducing them to essentialist questions about whether men and women do science differently only serves to alienate women scientists.

In "Boys' Toys and Women's Work: Feminism Engages Software," Michael Mahoney provides an example of the intricacies feminist scholars must confront, demonstrating the ways in which "efforts to pin down the masculine nature of computing end up blurring the very lines they try to draw" (p. 173).

In "Medicine, Technology, and Gender in the History of Prenatal Diagnosis," Ruth Schwartz Cowan explains how feminism has influenced her research not only by suggesting a topic (history of prenatal diagnosis) but also by helping her to better understand its complexities and determinants: She realized that she would need to know the history of several medical professions and also realized that changes in abortion policy helped explain a pattern she perceived in the development of prenatal diagnosis. Cowan ends her essay on an ironic note, calling attention to the paradox that although feminism has helped present us with many more choices, they are not easy to make, nor to justify, using feminist principles.

Of particular interest to readers of this journal is Carroll Pursell's "Feminism and the Rethinking of the History of Technology." In 1997, Technology and Culture published a special issue on "Gender Analysis and the History of Technology," with guest editors Nina Lerman, Arwen Mohun, and Ruth Oldenziel, and Pursell outlines their ambitious goals in their own words: a "gender analysis of 'ways of making and doing things'" that "challenges conventional assumptions about what is and is not 'technology' and about which technologies are or are not important to study" (p. 119). In "Man the Maker and Woman the Consumer: The Consumption Junction Revisited," Ruth Oldenziel continues her investigations of women's agency in our histories of technology, revealing how "gender scripts are encoded in our technologies" (p. 143).

Nelly Oudshoorn ("On Bodies, Technologies, and Feminisms") learned from feminist scholars that "no unmediated natural truth of the body can be said to exist" and came to the radical realization that "medical technologies do not necessarily have to be the way they actually are" (pp. 201, 209). Scott Gilbert and Karen Rader ("Revisiting Women, Gender and Feminism in Developmental Biology") draw lessons from developmental biology that are equally important for feminist...