Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural SciencesAuthor(s): Hilary RoseReviewed work(s):Source: Signs, Vol. 9, No. 1, Women and Religion (Autumn, 1983), pp. 73-90Published by: The University of Chicago PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3173664 .Accessed: 03/05/2012 12:17

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VIEWPOINT

Hand, Brain, and Heart: A Feminist Epistemology for the Natural Sciences

Hilary Rose

Science it would seem is not sexless; she is a man, a father and infected too. [Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas]

This paper starts from the position that the attitudes dominant within science and technology must be transformed, for their telos is nuclear annihilation. It first examines the achievements during the 1970s of those who sought to analyze and critique capitalist science's existing forms and systems of knowledge and goes on to argue that their critiques (which may well have been developed with a conscious opposition to sexism) are theoretically sex blind. Their analysis of the division of labor

stops short at the distinction between the manual and mental labor as- sociated with production. Indifferent to the second system of pro- duction-reproduction-the analysis excludes the relationship of sci- ence to patriarchy, to the sexual division of labor in which caring labor is

primarily allocated to women in both unpaid and paid work. Transcen- dence of this division of labor set up among hand, brain, and heart makes possible a new scientific knowledge and technology that will en- able humanity to live in harmony rather than in antagonism with nature,

I would like to thank the editorial collective of donnawomanfemme for publishing an earlier version of this essay as "Dominio ed Esclusione" (see 17 [1981]: 9-28). Too many members of the invisible college of feminist scientists have provided encouragement and helpful comments for me to list them here.

[Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1983, vol. 9, no. 1] ? 1983 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0097-9740/84/0901-0008$01.00

73

Hand, Brain, and Heart

including human nature. The necessity and magnitude of the task must be recognized.

The Needfor a New Science

Over the past dozen years the critique of science and technology has focused attention on the ways in which existing science and technology are locked into capitalism and imperialism as a system of domination. This denunciation has served two functions. Negatively, it has facilitated the growth of an antipathy to science that rejects all scientific investiga- tion carried out under any conditions and at any historical time. More

positively, it has set itself the difficult task of constructing, in a

prefigurative way, both the forms and the content of a different, alternative science-one that anticipates the science and technology pos- sible in a new society and, at the same time, contributes through in-

novatory practice to the realization of that society. This paper aligns itself with such a venture, while recognizing that-with its false starts as well as real achievements, its perilous balancing between atheoretical activism and abstract theoreticism-the project is not without its con- tradictions and difficulties. Feminism is just beginning to recapture the full force of Virginia Woolf's insight: science it would seem-to rephrase her-is neither sexless nor classless; she is a man, bourgeois, and in- fected too.

The trouble with science and technology from a feminist perspec- tive is that they are integral not only to a system of capitalist domination but also to one of patriarchal domination; yet to try to discuss science under both these systems of domination is peculiarly difficult.1 Histori-

cally, it has been women outside science, such as the novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, or the ex-scientist, now writer, Ruth Wallsgrove, or the

sociologist Liliane Stehelin who have dared to speak of science as male, as part of a phallocentric culture.2 For women inside science, protest has

1. Since this paper was vwritten, the debate concerning the possibility of moving be-

yond dualism has sharpened wvith the publication of Lydia Sargent's edited collection Women and Revolution: A Discussion of the Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). While I am attracted to the theoretical project of a unified expla- nation, as elaborated within this collection, e.g., by Iris Young, the political and theoretical conditions for its achievement seem to me to be premature. The fruitful analysis of gender, class, and ethnic divisions of labor is likely to continue in both dualistic and unitary forms.

See, e.g., the special issue entitled "Development and the Sexual Division of Labor": Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 7, no. 2 (Winte- 1981).

2. Ruth Wallsgrove, "The Masculine Face of Science," in Alice through the Looking Glass, ed. Biighton Women and Science Group (London: Virago, 1980); Liliane Stehelin, "Sci- ences, Women and Ideology," in The Radicalisation of Science, ed. Hilary Rose and Steven Rose (London: Macmillan Publishers, 1976); also Hilary Rose and Steven Rose, eds., Ideol-

ogy oJfin the Sciences (Boston: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1979).

74 Rose

Autumn 1983 75

been much more difficult. Numbers are few and developing the network among isolated women is intractable work. Yet as we enter the eighties an invisible college of feminist scientists is beginning to assemble.3 One of the new voices breaking through from within the laboratory is that of Rita Arditti, who, having worked in the competitive and macho world of genetics, was radicalized by the antiwar movement.4 She became a feminist through this experience and now argues that nothing less than a new science will serve.

Apart from a handful who wrote pioneering papers, feminists in the early days of the movement avoided the discussion of science, often retreating into a total rejection of science as the monolithic enemy. Doing science became an activity in which no serious feminist would engage. But there arose a growing political threat as, during the 1970s, a new wave of biological determinism sought to renaturalize women. It has required women biologists-or women who will enter the terrain of biological knowledge-to contest its claims. Doing biology is thus no longer seen as hostile but as helpful to women's interests, and in- creasingly it is possible to go forward from this essentially defensive purpose to the much more positive goal of seeking to show how a feminist knowledge of the natural world offers an emancipatory rather than an exterminatory science. The task of developing a feminist cri- tique of existing science and of moving toward an as yet unrealized feminist natural science is at once more difficult and more exciting than the academically respectable activity of making descriptive reports on women's position within science. There is a watershed between work carried out within a transformative view of women's destiny and projects shaped by the main variants of structural functionalism still extant. For

3. See, e.g., Ann Arbor Science for the People Collective, eds., Sociobiology as a Social Weapon (Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Co., 1977); Susan Griffin, Woman and Nature: The Roaring inside Her (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1978); Lila Leibowitz, Females, Males and Families: A Biosocial Approach (North Scituate, Mass.: Duxbury Press, 1978); Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff, eds., Genes and Gender I: On Hereditarianism and Women (New York: Gordian Press, 1978); Ruth Hubbard and Marian Lowe, eds., Genes and Gender II: Pitfalls in Research on Sex and Gender (New York: Gordian Press, 1979); Ethel Tobach and Betty Rosoff, eds., Genes and Gender III: Genetic Determinism and Children (New York; Gordian Press, 1980); Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society (special issue enti- tled "Women, Science, and Society," esp. the papers by Donna Haraway, Adrienne Zihlman, Helen Lambert, Marian Lowe, and Ruth Bleier), vol. 4, no. 1 (Autumn 1978); Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper & Row Publishers, 1980); Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin, and Barbara Fried, eds., Women Look at Biology Looking at Women (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman Publishing Co., 1979); Janet Sayers, Biological Politics: Feminist and Anti-Feminist Perspectives (London: Tavistock Publications, 1982).

4. Rita Arditti, "Feminism and Science," in Science and Liberation, ed. Rita Arditti, Pat Brennan, and Steve Cavrak (Boston: South End Press, 1979); James Watson's The Double Helix (New York: Atheneum Publishers, 1968) was to provide an even more demystified account of how science really gets done-one more honest (not least in its acceptance of machismo) than perhaps he himself had intended.

Signs

Hand, Brain, and Heart

feminist analysis,