Schiebinger, Londa 1952- (Londa L. Schiebinger)

PERSONAL:

Born May 13, 1952, in Lincoln, NE; daughter of Robert and Dolores Schiebinger; partner of Robert N. Proctor; children: Geoffrey, Jonathan. Education: University of Nebraska, B.A., 1974; Harvard University, M.A., 1977, Ph.D., 1984. Hobbies and other interests: Classical pianist, hiking, travel.

ADDRESSES:

Office—Department of History, 450 Serra Mall, Bldg. 200, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-2024. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Edwin E. Sparks Professor of the History of Science and Women's Studies; Stanford University, Stanford, CA, John L. Hinds Professor of the History of Science and Barbara D. Finberg Director of Michelle R. Clayman Institute for Gender Research.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fulbright scholar in Germany, 1980-81; Marion and Jasper Whiting fellow in France, 1982; Roy C. Buck Essay Prize, Pennsylvania State University, 1990, for "The Anatomy of Difference: Race and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Science," Eighteenth-Century Studies; Guggenheim fellow, 1991-92; History of Women in Science Prize, History of Science Society, 1994, for "Why Mammals Are Called Mammals," in American Historical Review; award from Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1995; Ludwik Fleck Book Prize, Society for Social Studies of Science, 1995, for Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science; Alexander von Humboldt-Forschungspreis, 1999-2000; J. Worth Estes Prize for the History of Pharmacology, American Association for the History of Medicine, 2005, for "Feminist History of Colonial Science," Hypatia; Alf Andrew Heggoy Book Prize, French Colonial History Society, and Prize in Atlantic History, American Historical Society, both 2005, for Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World.

WRITINGS:

The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1989.

Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1993, 2nd edition, Rutgers University Press (New Brunswick, NJ), 2004.

Has Feminism Changed Science?, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1999.

(Editor) Feminism and the Body, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

(Coeditor) Oxford Companion to the Body, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 2000.

(Coeditor) Science, Technology, and Medicine in the Twentieth Century: What Difference Has Feminism Made?, University of Chicago Press (Chicago, IL), 2001.

Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2004.

(Editor, with Claudia Swan) Colonial Botany: Science, Commerce, and Politics in the Early Modern World, University of Pennsylvania Press (Philadelphia, PA), 2005.

Contributor to books, including Concepts and Symbols of the Eighteenth Century in Europe; Regimes of Description: In the Archive of the Eighteenth Century; Science and Sensibility: Gender and Scientific Inquiry 1780-1945; A Question of Identity: Women, Science, and Literature; and Cultures of Natural History: From Curiosity to Crisis. Contributor to periodicals, including Science, Technology, and Human Values, Scientific American, American Historical Review, Eighteenth-Century Studies, Critical Inquiry, and Representations. Editor of special sections, Science in Context, 2002; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2003; and Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society, 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian Londa Schiebinger's The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science is a study of women in science and medicine from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Noblewomen of the sixteenth century actively participated in philosophical and scientific discussions in salons. They worked alongside their artisan husbands and fathers and contributed to research and discovery. Schiebinger points out that between 1650 and 1710, fourteen percent of German astronomers were women.

Among the women of notable achievement was Maria Margaretha Winkelmann, who worked with her husband, Gottfried Kirch. Winkelmann discovered comets and created the celestial calendar for the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Caroline Herschel identified eight new comets and three nebulae and wrote the Catalogue of Stars for the Royal Society of Great Britain. Artist Matthaus Merian trained his daughter, naturalist Maria Sibylla Me- rian, who went on to collect and draw insects. The standard French version of Newton's Principia was translated by Emilie du Châtelet. Lorraine Daston wrote in Science that "valuable as those neglected cases are as counterexamples to hasty generalizations about the absence of women in early modern science, neither aristocratic salon nor artisan's workshop produced more than a handful of prominent women scientists." Daston said that Schiebinger is, however, "surely correct to indict learned institutions, first the universities and then the scientific academies, as the chief culprits in the exclusion and hindrance of women scientists during this period."

As professional institutions assumed the responsibilities of science and mathematics, the scientific amateurs were edged out of that community. Women, who were barred from entering these professions, were most affected. Even areas traditionally dominated by women, including midwifery, were absorbed by male-dominated fields. Women's exclusion resulted from a combination of social, economic, and political forces. Rosalind Williams wrote in Technology Review that Schiebinger "also shows how, in a triumph for circular reasoning, the progressive exclusion of women from the practice of science was rationalized by the content of science…. She examines drawings of skeletons made between about 1730 and 1970…. In many of them, the sexual differences are exaggerated. The ribs are portrayed as narrow and confining, the skull as small, the pelvis as large. To our eyes, these drawings obviously distort female anatomy. In the eighteenth century, however, they were considered objective representations, solid empirical evidence that the female body was unfit for mental pursuits and most fit for child-bearing." In the nineteenth century it was believed that overuse of a woman's brain would cause her ovaries to shrink. The philosopher Hegel felt that because a woman's mind, like a plant, is placid, she should be limited to the study of botany.

Madeleine Pelner Cosman and Sandra Beth Katz said in JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association that "beyond comedic virtues, this book's true power lies in its revelation of women's scientific achievements and its recasting of the question at hand: why are there so few women scientists that we know about? The author's trained eye discovers spectacular women practitioners in astronomy, botany, entomology, physics, medicine, and other sciences whose works have disappeared from neglect, forgetfulness, prejudice, deceit, disbelief, and man's occasional inhumanity to women." In Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science Schiebinger documents that seventeenth-and eighteenth-century descriptions of nature were provided by European males who defined the animal and plant kingdoms with sexual characteristics. Booklist reviewer William Beatty called it "a fascinating, informative, and well-argued book." Marina Benjamin wrote in New Statesman and Society that Schiebinger "uses an easy language, at times almost confiding, as chapter by chapter she tells stories of how distinctions of gender and race have been woven into the fabric of natural history." Linnaeus classified plants based on their parts, such as stamens and pistils, which he deemed sexual. He designated our class as mammals, using lactating breasts as our distinguishing feature. Margaret Rogers noted in Women's Review of Books that Linnaeus's decisions follow the preoccupation of eighteenth-century scientists to define the differences between the sexes of humans, plants, and animals. "These scientists were looking for justifications in nature for the places assigned to the sexes by society," wrote Rogers. "And they were motivated in part by the desire to exclude women from political and cultural life, but also by the desire to encourage motherhood and breast-feeding at a time when Europe needed a growing population to support its military and economic expansion."

"More shocking," wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor, "was the scholars' concern with female genitalia and sexual characteristics. The ideal breast was the pointed hemisphere of the European female…. Pendulous breasts were inferior—and African; so were enlarged labia." The white race was labeled Caucasian based on German anatomist Johann Bluemenbach's opinion that the most beautiful Homo Sapiens were the Georgian women in the Caucasus Mountains. Science identified women by sexual traits, while men's bodies, and particularly skull characteristics, were used to compare races. By coming to the necessary conclusions, scientists were able to continue to withhold the power to vote from these groups and exclude women from science. Schiebinger notes that the absence of women and blacks in science had a critical impact on the subjects and questions upon which it focused. A Publishers Weekly reviewer said Schiebinger "establishes a deconstructionist thesis … that … science is affected by the gender of those practicing the science."

Choice reviewer M.H. Chaplin wrote that in Has Feminism Changed Science?, never has the subject been "so comprehensively treated, nor with such a command of the literature in medicine, primatology, archaeology, biology, physics, and mathematics." The book contains three sections, "Women in Science," "Gender in the Culture of Science," and "Gender in the Substance of Science." Schiebinger opens the third section with a discussion of medicine. Bonnie B. Spanier wrote in JAMA: Journal of the American Association that Schiebinger "uses her expertise in the history of European medicine to show how biomedical science defined sex differences to match the conservative political forces delimiting women's roles in society. In medicine, with the (white) male as the norm and women's health issues defined mainly in terms of reproduction. Women have, until the last decade, been left out of most medical studies including drug trials, even though United States women, including pregnant ones, consume the vast majority of pharmaceutical products." Schiebinger concludes this chapter by noting that increased concentration on women's health issues has not come about entirely because of the entry of more women into medicine, but rather that it took women and men lobbying for issues such as breast cancer awareness to implement reforms. Spanier said Has Feminism Changed Science? "is a worthy compendium that should promote more reading and more writing about the complex relationship of the sciences with power inequities in our society."

Sharon Begley and Thomas Hayden wrote in Newsday that "although most scientists dismiss the idea that there is a female ‘way of knowing’—holistic, nondominating, and cooperative—many recognize that the different experiences men and women bring to the lab lead them to scrutinize different aspects of nature." Begley and Hayden noted a classic story of biologists who studied herds of mustangs with the assumption that the dominant stallion was the only male breeding the mares. When DNA tests were performed on the foals, it was found that more than two-thirds had been sired by other males. "Blinded by the ‘harem’ metaphor of mustang social structure, researchers had not even looked for such female behavior." In a study of savanna baboons, a species noted for its aggressive males, that began in the 1950s, the mostly male scientists concluded that aggression and dominance by males in primate societies, including our own, was normal and necessary. When women became involved with the study in the 1970s, their perspective showed that it was the elderly females who determined the group's activities, and the male's success with the females was based more on the relationship that develops between them than on his dominance. "And when women began studying primates other than baboons," wrote Begley and Hayden, "they found that females actively pursue males and have loads of extramarital affairs—apparently to get more males to provide and care for the babies. Now females are no longer considered peripheral to primate evolution."

American Scientist reviewer Joan Mason noted that feminist efforts have initiated change in the practice of science in America. When the Association of Women in Science, founded in 1971, lobbied for equal opportunity for women and minorities in science and technology, Congress responded by ordering that the National Science Foundation (NSF) follow progress. The NSF and the National Institutes of Health eventually began to offer awards through the Professional Opportunities for Women in Research and Education program. In addition, Congress passed the Commission on the Advancement of Women in Science, Engineering and Technology Development Act, which broadened the legislation. Mason said that "gender analysis of the practice of science, as well as its content, is penetrating a variety of fields in the United States. Institutional arrangements are questioned and are beginning to improve." A Publishers Weekly reviewer wrote that Schiebinger proposes "realistic changes for science, such as a reconsideration of science's definitions, that would correct many imbalances and sweep away the cobwebs of science's gender biases."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, December, 1991, Diana E. Long, review of The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science, p. 1500; April, 1995, Richard W. Burkhardt, Jr., review of Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, p. 510; June, 2005, Mark Harrison review of Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World.

American Scientist, September-October, 1994, Sara Miles, review of Nature's Body, p. 493; January, 2000, Joan Mason, review of Has Feminism Changed Science?, p. 91.

Booklist, October 1, 1993, William Beatty, review of Nature's Body, p. 229.

Chemical and Engineering News, June 4, 1990, Lilli E. Horing, review of The Mind Has No Sex?, p. 41.

Choice, March, 1994, M.H. Chaplin, review of Nature's Body, p. 1153; November, 1999, M.H. Chaplin, review of Has Feminism Changed Science?, p. 560.

Eighteenth-Century Studies, summer, 1995, Jennifer M. Jones, review of Nature's Body, p. 441.

Isis: Journal of the History of Science Society, December, 1996, Ann B. Shteir, review of Nature's Body, p. 730.

Issues in Science and Technology, winter, 1989, Harriet Ritvo, review of The Mind Has No Sex?, p. 93.

JAMA: Journal of the American Medical Association, October 14, 1992, Madeleine Perner Cosman and Sandra Beth Katz, review of The Mind has No Sex?, p. 1940; February 9, 2000, Bonnie B. Spanier, "Science and Feminism," p. 807.

Journal of Modern History, September, 1997, John Henry, review of Nature's Body, p. 563.

Kirkus Reviews, April 15, 1999, review of Nature's Body.

Library Journal, November 1, 1989, Judith Overmier, review of The Mind has No Sex?, p. 110; October 1, 1993, Eric D. Albright, review of Nature's Body, p. 124.

Nature, November 25, 1993, Roy Porter, review of Nature's Body, p. 387.

New Statesman and Society, December 9, 1994, Marina Benjamin, review of Nature's Body, p. 37.

Publishers Weekly, August 23, 1993, review of Nature's Body, p. 54; April 26, 1999, review of Has Feminism Changed Science? p. 68.

Science, December 15, 1989, Lorraine Daston, review of The Mind Has No Sex?, p. 1502; July 23, 1999, Florence P. Haseltine, review of Has Feminism Changed Science? p. 538; January 14, 2005, Stuart McCook, review of Plants and Empire, pp. 210-211.

Science, Technology, and Human Values, winter, 2000, Sarah Mitchell, review of Has Feminism Changed Science?, p. 130.

Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, autumn, 1995, Anne Fausto-Sterling, review of Nature's Body, p. 172.

Technology Review, April, 1990, Rosalind Williams, review of The Mind Has No Sex?, p. 75.

Times Literary Supplement, April 15, 1994, Gillian Beer, review of Nature's Body, p. 30.

Women's Review of Books, April, 1994, Margaret Rogers, review of Nature's Body, pp. 8-9; December, 1999, Margaret Nichols, "Half Empty, Half Full," p. 21.