The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England 1800-1929, and: Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood, and: Nature's Body: Gender and the Making of Modern Science

In 1789 Erasmus Darwin, well-respected physician and scientist, anonymously published a voluminous poem entitled Loves of the Plants. Its descriptions of plant reproduction, were heavily anthropomorphic and, some might say, preoccupied with male sexuality—a sort of literary precursor to the flower paintings of Georgia O’Keefe. Although the theory that plants were sexual beings, similar to people, developed in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and was employed by many scientists, including Carolus Linnaeus and Julien Offray de La Mettrie, it is not clear that Darwin wrote this poem as an act of science. He wrote it for money, according to Londa Schiebinger, who uses Darwin’s work to support the thesis of Nature’s Body, that sexual and racial themes infused science as they did contemporary European politics in the eighteenth century. Her presentation of selected scientific theories and their creators forces the issue of what it means to “do science,” as do the two other works on gender and science considered here.

As discussed in Nature’s Body, sexualized descriptions of plant reproduction, including references to “male” and “female” parts as husbands and wives which (who?) “celebrate[d] their nuptials” on beds made up of the “flowers’ leaves,” were not unusual in the eighteenth century. Sexuality was also used as a classificatory tool, for animals as well as plants. The Linnaean system of taxonomy, still widely used throughout the world today, separates the animal world into six major classes, with one of those classes based on a sex-linked characteristic possessed by only half of the group—namely, milk-producing breasts. While Linnaeus had his pick from several other anatomical features, such as four-chambered hearts, hair, or suckling young, Schiebinger argues that he chose the breast, specifically the female breast, because of the influence of contemporary politics involving breast-feeding and the raising of healthy children (of which Linnaeus had many).

Political currents infused other scientific theories of the eighteenth century. Schiebinger insightfully and entertainingly offers debates on the theories of sexual and racial differences, and she questions why racial delineations hinged on a sex-linked trait, the beard, and why sexual boundaries were studied within the confines of the Caucasian race. She suggests it was because European males needed to distinguish themselves in their new world of equality from their major competitors, white women and black males. According to the prevailing political theory, equality was found in nature. So, too, according to Schiebinger’s scientists, was inequality: men of color, and Caucasian women, by their very nature, were just not as fully developed as European men, and never could be.

Nature’s Body presents science as a “white males only” exercise. Schiebinger sees women’s participation as being limited to those few who published books—and even for them, she believes, science was no more than a fringe activity. Had they been more involved, the prevailing scientific theories might very well have been different. But this defines participation narrowly, and limits science to creating theories, publishing books, and belonging to prestigious academies. However (to put the issue in the most basic terms), science has makers and users, those who develop theories and those who accept and employ them. While Schiebinger has examined the prominent theories and those who developed them, she has given us little information about those who employed them and how they did so. For example, during the eighteenth century, collecting fauna and flora was a very popular scientific pursuit among both men and women. Many women created huge collections; Lady Margaret Cavendish Bentinck, Duchess of Portland, accumulated...