The Madame Curie Complex: The Hidden History of Women in Science

Conclusion: Apes, Corn, and Silent Springs: A Women’s Tradition of Science?

the rise of the feminist movement and new ideas about scientific epistemology turned the 1960s into years of flux and contradiction for women in science. The change caused discomfort for some women, since it threatened their professional identities; the men who had trained them had also convinced them that their teachers’ perspectives of both nature and scientific practice were disinterested and ultimately authoritative. Both women and men believed that there was no place in Western science for thoughts of ulterior or relative notions of truth, let alone that women could uniquely achieve them. Nobelists such as Maria Mayer and Rosalyn Yalow believed that they were scientific achievers because they operated exactly like the men around them. To mentor other women or to support affirmative action too vigorously might have made them appear to male colleagues to be a different kind of scientist. In the end Mayer never took on female students. Yalow took on female students early in her career, but eventually rebuked women of the feminist movement. She decided that it was to her disadvantage to try to change the scientific culture and practices she had grown to accept and navigate skillfully. Meanwhile, other scientists, generally younger, felt that they had much less to lose by being skeptical of the traditions handed down to them. They began to wonder if the professional ideal of scientific objectivity was even achievable, and some determined objectivity to be nothing more than a male epistemological stance. As for the vast majority of women scientists, they fell between the extremes: they sought to be scientifically disinterested and newly self-aware; to accept the androcentric culture of science to a degree, yet to question its traditions; to be masculine investigators, but also human beings with empathy for living things. A life of science was a balancing act, whether consciously perceived as such or not. Conclusion: Apes, Corn, and Silent Springs: A Women’s Tradition of Science? 285 286 The mixed messages could have created a beleaguering crisis of identity in a woman scientist, yet for the Trimates the contradictions made it easier to conceive and practice science on new terms, to question traditional boundaries between science and domesticity, objectivity and subjectivity, nature versus human culture. They never set out to overturn gender stereotypes, yet their work challenged accepted theories about nature and the alleged naturalness of sex-typed behavior. They abjured the mechanistic mindset of Western science, believing that they could achieve understanding only by interacting with living things and observing them relating to one another in their natural habitats . Connectedness best characterized the Trimates’ scientific philosophy , as it did Barbara McClintock’s “feeling for the organism.” Rachel Carson, too, was a kindred spirit, writing of the “essential unity that binds life to the earth.” Within institutional science such talk of balance with nature sounded nostalgic and quaint in the early 1960s. One reviewer of Silent Spring was patronizing of “Miss Carson” in 1962: “[She] maintains that the balance of nature is a major force in the survival of man, whereas the modern chemist, the modern biologist and scientist, believes that man is steadily controlling nature.” Thirty years later, the environmentalist Al Gore argued that the seeming absurdity of this reviewer’s worldview showed just how revolutionary Carson was; in his eyes, she was no throwback, but a visionary. As we seek green technologies and solutions forglobal warming and climatechange in the twenty-firstcentury , her message undoubtedly rings louder and truer than ever before. Academics once scoffed at Carson’s writings for their literary (hence unscientific ) qualities, but such critiques were misplaced, if for no other reason than because she brought thousands of scholarly sources to bear on her popular narratives about the environment. Today critics view her ability to give literary representation to scientific fact as one of her greatest legacies. She refused to see science as something to rarify and box off from nature, art, women, and the rest of society.1 Eventually few primatologists disagreed with the scientific claims the Trimates also made in their writings, although their very popularity made them suspect in the eyes of academics, much like Carson’s were in the early 1960s. How could “experts” communicate so clearly to so many? Specialists scoffed, as if impermeability and truth were related. One of the greatest fictions perpetuated by the professional scientist is apes, corn, and silent springs 287 that his research is necessarily off limits—that...