Author: Cynthia Russett Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 0674043022 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
One scarcely knows whether to laugh or cry. The spectacle presented, in Cynthia Russett's splendid book, of nineteenth-century white male scientists and thinkers earnestly trying to prove women inferior to men--thereby providing, along with "savages" and "idiots," an evolutionary buffer between men and animals--is by turns appalling, amusing, and saddening. Surveying the work of real scientists as well as the products of more dubious minds, Russett has produced a learned yet immensely enjoyable chapter in the annals of human folly. At the turn of the century science was successfully challenging the social authority of religion; scientists wielded a power no other group commanded. Unfortunately, as Russett demonstrates, in Victorian sexual science, empiricism tangled with prior belief, and scientists' delineation of the mental and physical differences between men and women was directed to show how and why women were inferior to men. These men were not necessarily misogynists. This was an unsettling time, when the social order was threatened by wars, fierce economic competition, racial and industrial conflict, and the failure of society to ameliorate poverty, vice, crime, illnesses. Just when men needed the psychic lift an adoring dependent woman could give, she was demanding the vote, higher education, and the opportunity to become a wage earner! No other work has treated this provocative topic so completely, nor have the various scientific theories used to marshal evidence of women's inferiority been so thoroughly delineated and debunked. Erudite enough for scholars in the history of science, intellectual history, and the history of women, this book with its stylish presentation will also attract a large nonspecialist audience.
Author: Mary Maynard Publisher: Routledge ISBN: 0415637007 Category : Political Science Languages : en Pages : 203
Book Description
Science and the Construction of Womenis a multi-disciplinary exploration of the major questions currently challenging feminist scholars of science. The authors ask key questions: What constitutes science? How have feminists investigated it? How does science ‘construct’ women? How can we create a feminist discourse of science? Are the current developments to women’s advantage or disadvantage? Their answers draw on material from a wide range of natural scientific, humanities and social science sources, critically examining theoretical approaches from the postmodern to the materialist to the cyborgian. A key argument of the book is that there are strong intellectual and pragmatic reasons – the rapid development of information technology, advances in fertility treatment and genetic engineering, feminist concern for environmental issues – why feminism must rigorously engage with issues of a scientific and technological nature. Science and the Construction of Womenprovides an important contribution to the opening-up and broadening of debate in the field. This book will be an important text for students of gender and women’s studies, and science studies. It is also designed to be read by feminists both inside and outside the academy and to appeal to all those with interests in the sociology of knowledge and the history of ideas.
Author: Ian Hacking Publisher: Harvard University Press ISBN: 9780674812000 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 280
Book Description
Lost in the raging debate over the validity of social construction is the question of what, precisely, is being constructed. Facts, gender, quarks, reality? Ian Hacking’s book explores an array of examples to reveal the deep issues underlying contentious accounts of reality—especially regarding the status of the natural sciences.
Author: UNESCO Publisher: UNESCO Publishing ISBN: 9231002333 Category : Languages : en Pages : 82
Book Description
This report aims to 'crack the code' by deciphering the factors that hinder and facilitate girls' and women's participation, achievement and continuation in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education and, in particular, what the education sector can do to promote girls' and women's interest in and engagement with STEM education and ultimately STEM careers.
Author: Ann Mari May Publisher: Columbia University Press ISBN: 0231550049 Category : Business & Economics Languages : en Pages : 147
Book Description
The economics profession is belatedly confronting glaring gender inequality. Women are systematically underrepresented throughout the discipline, and those who do embark on careers in economics find themselves undermined in any number of ways. Women in the field report pervasive biases and barriers that hinder full and equal participation—and these obstacles take an even greater toll on women of color. How did economics become such a boys’ club, and what lessons does this history hold for attempts to achieve greater equality? Gender and the Dismal Science is a groundbreaking account of the role of women during the formative years of American economics, from the late nineteenth century into the postwar period. Blending rich historical detail with extensive empirical data, Ann Mari May examines the structural and institutional factors that excluded women, from graduate education to academic publishing to university hiring practices. Drawing on material from the archives of the American Economic Association along with novel data sets, she details the vicissitudes of women in economics, including their success in writing monographs and placing journal articles, their limitations in obtaining academic positions, their marginalization in professional associations, and other hurdles that the professionalization of the discipline placed in their path. May emphasizes the formation of a hierarchical culture of status seeking that stymied women’s participation and shaped what counts as knowledge in the field to the advantage of men. Revealing the historical roots of the homogeneity of economics, this book sheds new light on why biases against women persist today.
Author: Cyd Cipolla Publisher: University of Washington Press ISBN: 0295742593 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 352
Book Description
Queer Feminist Science Studies takes a transnational, trans-species, and intersectional approach to this cutting-edge area of inquiry between women’s, gender, and sexuality studies and science and technology studies (STS). The essays here “queer”—or denaturalize and make strange—ideas that are taken for granted in both areas of study. Reimagining the meanings of and relations among queer and feminist theories and a wide range of scientific disciplines, contributors foster new critical and creative knowledge-projects that attend to shifting and uneven operations of power, privilege, and dispossession, while also highlighting potentialities for uncertainty, subversion, transformation, and play. Theoretically and rhetorically powerful, these essays also take seriously the materiality of “natural” objects and phenomena: bones, voles, chromosomes, medical records and more all help substantiate answers to questions such as, What is sex? How are race, gender, sexuality, and other systems of differences co-constituted? The foundational essays and new writings collected here offer a generative resource for students and scholars alike, demonstrating the ingenuity and dynamism of queer feminist scholarship.
Author: Sandra G. Harding Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 9780801493638 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
Can science, steeped in Western, masculine, bourgeois endeavors, nevertheless be used for emancipatory ends? In this major contribution to the debate over the role gender plays in the scientific enterprise, Sandra Harding pursues that question, challenging the intellectual and social foundations of scientific thought.Harding provides the first comprehensive and critical survey of the feminist science critiques, and examines inquiries into the androcentricism that has endured since the birth of modern science. Harding critiques three epistemological approaches: feminist empiricism, which identifies only bad science as the problem; the feminist standpoint, which holds that women's social experience provides a unique starting point for discovering masculine bias in science; and feminist postmodernism, which disputes the most basic scientific assumptions. She points out the tensions among these stances and the inadequate concepts that inform their analyses, yet maintains that the critical discourse they foster is vital to the quest for a science informed by emancipatory morals and politics.
Author: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí Publisher: U of Minnesota Press ISBN: 1452903255 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 257
Book Description
The "woman question", this book asserts, is a Western one, and not a proper lens for viewing African society. A work that rethinks gender as a Western contruction, The Invention of Women offers a new way of understanding both Yoruban and Western cultures. Oyewumi traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. Her analysis shows the paradoxical nature of two fundamental assumptions of feminist theory: that gender is socially constructed in old Yoruba society, and that social organization was determined by relative age.
Author: Mary Wyer Publisher: Psychology Press ISBN: 9780415926065 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 408
Book Description
This reader provides an introduction to the gendering of science and the impact women are making in laboratories around the world. The republished essays included in this collection are both personal tales from women scientists and essays on the nature of science itself, covering such controversial issues like the under-representation of women in science, reproductive technology, sociobiology, evolutionary theory, and the notion of objective science.
Author: Cynthia Russett
Author: Mary Maynard
Author: Ian Hacking
Author: UNESCO
Author: Ann Mari May
Author: Cyd Cipolla
Author: Sandra G. Harding
Author: Judith Lorber
Author: Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí
Author: Mary Wyer