Engendering Science

Early feminist scholars argued that the early modern Scientific Revolution irrevocably destroyed women’s authority over nature and natural knowledge. The most polemical works from the 1970s linked the rise of modern science and medicine to a sort of gynocide, from witch-hunts to hysterectomies, arguing that modern science was inherently masculine and therefore driven to conquer nature and women’s bodies simultaneously. Explicit in many early works, such as Carolyn Merchant’s The Death of Nature (1980), was the proposition that women, once before natural knowledge was wrested from their control, did the work of science differently than men did. Women were holistic, nurturing, and ecological; men were categorical, objectifying, and eager to blow things up or rip them apart.

Such catastrophic versions of women’s relationship to science have informed many assumptions about the field, even though some (albeit inspiring) works, such as Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English’s Witches, Midwives, and Nurses (1977), have been shown to be historically inaccurate.¹ Yet, the iconic connection in the history of science and gender continues to be that of woman subordinated by male authorities. Whether in the case of female midwives denigrated by male obstetricians, or that of “Dora,” Sigmund Freud’s unfortunate analysand bullied into being told how she lusted after the dear doctor himself, or that of Rosalind Franklin whose x-ray diffraction photographs of DNA gave James Watson and Francis Crick the breakthrough insight into the double-helical structure of DNA, but whose work was never acknowledged by them as providing the essential clue, women’s authority has been invalidated by male scientists. At the same time, as feminist scholars have argued, the putative “problem” of woman has been placed at the center of several modern disciplines, whether in gynecology, Freudian psychoanalysis, Malthusian demographics, or Linnean taxonomy.² In short, women did not serve as powerful makers of knowledge, but rather as the problem to be solved. Early feminist work on this unhappy paradox sometimes described a male conspiracy with forceps-wielding ob’s, cigar-smoking psychoanalysts, and sexist scientists consciously, happily overpowering women. Recent work pushes further to understand the paradoxical absence-presence of women in science and the power differential between the sexes as not resulting so much or only from individual conspiracies, but instead reflecting and constituting social relationships in culture more broadly.³ Because the newer tack has been to view gender as cultural rather than a biological given, many recent works position gender as one of several interconnected categories of identity and power formation including race, ethnicity, class, religion, and sexuality.

Julia Rodriguez’s Civilizing Argentina: Science, Medicine, and the Modern State represents the best of this new approach. Rodriguez illuminates how fin-de-siècle scientific and medical disciplines, working hand-in-hand with the state, grappled with an apparent upsurge in criminality, violence, poverty, and a growing dissolute population. Argentine problem solvers did not intervene so much in the economy or other possible arenas of reform, but rather in the...