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A Feminist Critique of Scientific Objectivity
By Elizabeth Fee
‘Science for the People’ Vol. 14, No. 4, July 1982, p. 5-8, 30-32
Elizabeth Fee is an Assistant Professor in the School of Hygiene and Public Health in the Johns Hopkins University. She has published a number o f articles on Women and Science and is the editor of a forthcoming book, Women and Health: The Politics of Sex in Medicine. (Baywood, 1982) She is currently working on the history of public health and is particularly interested in the ethical and political conflicts in public health research and practice.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AAAS in Toronto, January 1981. Other versions have appeared in the International Journal of Women’s Studies, Science and Nature, and the Journal of College Science Teaching.
Is there a conflict of interest between women’s values and the values of science? If so, how will it be affected by the entrance of increasing numbers of women into the professions? If we are to accept the dominant liberal ideology of science, this question makes little sense. Science, we are told, is characterized by its objectivity, by its very lack of values.
Women, as a group, have been unable to set priorities for research. This is not simply because scientists are male, but because women have little economic or political power. We argue here that some of the notions of “scientific objectivity” are effectively used to mask those relationships of power. We must reexamine the notion of scientific objectivity and the role it plays in our society.
We begin by considering the dominant liberal ideo-logy of science (including the ideology of gender) and the specific challenge posed by feminist critiques. To carefully consider these challenges, we first study the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity which is built into science at many levels. We see how these distinctions reinforce the structure of social and economic power in our society. Finally, we consider the possibilities for a feminist science, and look at two examples to suggest ways in which an attack on the subject/object distinction could lead to a radically transformed science in the future.
The Liberal Ideology of Science
The liberal ideology of science posits man as a rational individual. “Man” is capable of creating a rational knowledge of the world through a process of testing and discarding hypotheses. The techniques of a scientific discipline, such as controlled experimentation, the use of specific quantitative and statistical techniques, the replication of findings, and the submission of results to the collective criticism of the scientific community, are specifically intended to root out any individual eccentricities, biases, or other sources of error. Subjectivity is regarded with suspicion, as possible contaminant of the process of knowledge production, and one which must be subjected to stringent controls.
In this view, it should not matter in the least whether scientists are male or female; any potential sources of error which might arise from the sexual identity and experience of the scientists would be eliminated in the rigorous procedures of scientific testing and confirmation of results. If we see scientific procedures as objective, then we cannot argue that women would bring anything new to the production of science.
This view appears admirably reasonable and non-controversial. There are, however, certain rather insistent and recurring problems. In the first place, there is the ambiguity about the identity of “man” within the liberal traditions of politics as well as science. According to liberal political theory, all men are in some way equivalent social atoms, and all men are variants of the abstraction “man.” The liberal ideology of rational man depends on an unstated assumption: the characteristics of “man” are actually the characteristics of males, and rational man is counterposed to his less visible partner, emotional woman. Our political philosophies and views of human nature depend on the sexual dichotomies involved in the construction of gender differences. We thus construct rationality in opposition to emotionality, objectivity in opposition to subjectivity, culture in opposition to nature, and the public realm in opposition to the private realm. Man is seen as the maker of history but woman provides his connection with nature. Whether we read Kant, Rousseau, Hegel, or Darwin, we find that male and female are contrasted in terms of opposing characters: men love truth, women, beauty; men are active, women, passive; men are selfish, women, self- less-and so on, and on, through the history of western philosophy.1
These ideas had long been an integral part of western philosophy, but they were rarely formulated as an explicit part of scientific theory until the mid-nineteenth century, when the first wave of the feminist movement challenged traditionally accepted ideas of male and female differences. The old philosophical constructions of gender provided the program for a variety of special scientific subdisciplines which attempted to reconstruct these sex differnces in terms of natural law. The distinctions between male and female were weighed and measured, explained and interpreted; scientists took over from philosophers the task of assigning to women their proper place in the social order.2
The uneasy relationship between liberal political theory and the establishment of gender as a fundamental division between humans was then reproduced within the sciences. For example, Darwin’s Origin of Species was modelled on classical political economy and thus treated all animal species as made up of equivalent individuals struggling with each other for survival.3 Sex played no role in the theory of natural selection. Darwin, however, later developed a special theory of sexual selection in order to explain sex and race differences in his Descent of Man. 4 Although the theory of sexual selection was never well integrated with natural selection, and although the genetic theory on which it was based was quickly discarded, it did provide a model for those who wanted to argue that sexual differences were fundamental to the process of human evolution. Sexual selection became the forerunner of more recent varieties of sociobiology which have sought to root the social inequality of the sexes in genetic structure. Many other scientific subdisciplines, such as physical anthropology, metabolic theory, neurology, psychological testing, genetics, social anthropology, psychoanalysis, endocrinology, ethology, and sociobiology, have offered different ways of structuring sexual dichotomies into nature, and thus different programs for interpretation of human relationships through natural law.5
Thus, within the tradition of liberal philosophy there are created two distinct and opposing categories of experience-male and female. Science itself is perceived as masculine, not simply because the majority of scientists have historically been men, but also because the characteristics of science are perceived as sex-linked. The objectivity said to be characteristic of the production of scientific knowledge is specifically identified as a male way of relating to the world. Even the hierarchy of the sciences is a hierarchy of masculinity; as the language suggests, the “hard” sciences at the top of the hierarchy are seen as more male than the “soft” sciences at the bottom. Because science as a whole is perceived as male, women in science are perceived as unfeminine. J.H. Mozans, who celebrated the achievements of hundreds of scientific women in his historical survey of Women in Science, found it necessary to defend the womanhood of this heroines, repeatedly assuring us that these scientific women could be graceful and feminine, good housekeepers and mothers.6 Laura Bassi was a good example; while Professor of Physics at the University of Bologna, she managed to raise twelve children. There are several possible responses to the long tradition which states that the characteristics of the sexes constitute a natural polarity, that male and female are fundamentally different, and that science is essentially masculine. One is to claim, like Mozans, that women can be both male and female, physicists and mothers. A second response (that of liberal feminism) is to assert that women must be included within the definition of “man” and thus that males and females must be accorded the same individual rights and freedoms. This view denies that there are any significant sexual differences and discounts any apparent differences as a result of either discrimination or socialization. A third possibility is to accept the existing dichotomy between male and female, to promote female values as an essential aspect of human experience, and therefore to seek a new vision of science that would incorporate these values. Some recent critiques of science accept and build on the sexual dichotomies reproduced within western philosophy. In different ways, the radical feminists Susan Griffin (Women and Nature7) and Carolyn Merchant (The Death of Nature8)play with the identification of scientific and masculine ways of thinking; both are seen as analytic, mechanistic, controlling, exploitive, and ultimately destructive. In a similar view, Russell Means, a major figure in the American Indian Movement, has denounced all forms of “European” thought as devoid of spiritual appreciation of the natural world, and as therefore leading merely to different forms of exploitation of the earth and natural resources.9
According to Jean Baker Miller and other feminists psychologists, the male psyche, as it has been socially created in the western capitalist world, is peculiarly unable to integrate self-creative activity with a primary concern for others, having assigned to women the primary responsibility for affiliative ties and emotional expression.10 The radical feminist critique of science and technology locates the problems not in women, but in the particular character of our production of scientific knowledge. The problem is not one of making women more scientific, but of making science less masculine. When masculinity is seen as an incomplete and thus distorted form of humanity, the issue of making science and technology less masculine is also the issue of making it more completely human. These critiques confront us with specific challenges to the prevailing notions of scientific authority and of scientific objectivity. The radical feminist view of science is one of the forms in which growing popular distrust of scientific institutions and authority is expressed. Others include the anti-nuclear and environmental movements, the radical science movements, the alternative technology groups on the one hand, and fundamentalist religious and creationist organizations on the other.11 Whether identified with left or right political groupings, they perceive scientific authority more as a form of power than a source of truth. While there is a great deal of substance in these challenges to scientific authority, there is also a danger. Because science has been presented as an objective force above and beyond society, it may appear that the claim of science to be the arbitrator of truth must be accepted or rejected wholesale. If rejected, we seem to be left without mutually agreed criteria of validity. Decisions between different theories (for example, evolution vs. creationism, or feminist vs. sexist interpretations of social arrangements) would be quite simply a matter of political power.12
We need not, however, go so far as to reject the whole human effort to comprehend the world in rational terms, nor the idea that forms of knowledge can be subjected to critical evaluation and empirical testing. The concept of creating knowledge through a constant process of practical interactions with nature, the willingness to consider all assumptions and methods as open to question, the expectation that ideas will be tested and refined in practice, and that results and conclusions of research will be subjected to the most unfettered critical evaluation-all these are aspects of scientific objectivity which should be preserved and defended. The hope of learning more about the world and ourselves by such collective process is not one to be abandoned. The ideal of individual creativity subjected to the constraints of community validation through a set of recognized procedures preserves the promise of progress. There are, however, many forms of the idea of objectivity which do deserve to be questioned. The concept of scientific objectivity carries with it a multitude of meanings; some of these are more closely tied to the ideology of science, and serve mainly to mystify scientific reality, while others are more closely tied to the actual practices of scientific work. The distinction between objectivity and subjectivity is built into science at many levels. We will briefly examine how it is reproduced in the following dichotomies: knowledge/social uses, thinking/feeling, expert/nonexpert, and subject/object. Production of knowledge/social uses. The idea of objectivity can be used to create a distance between the production of pure science, as seen as the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, an abstract and value-free ideal, involving purely intellectual and technical decisions-and the uses of sciences, seen as involving purely political and economic considerations. If the production of knowledge is isolated from the uses to which that knowledge is put, then the scientist is freed from any social or moral responsibility. Even the scientist who accepts funding from military sources is therefore free to insist that the use of “his” research is outside of “his” control, and not part of “his” responsibility; the researcher in a corporate laboratory is free to consider “his” work as purely objective and unfettered by any economic considerations. Thinking/feeling. The claim of “objectivity” may be taken as requiring a divorce between scientific rationality and any emotional or social commitment. Thinking is supposedly divorced from feeling, and feeling is said to be outside the realm of objectivity. Indeed, the concept of scientific objectivity may be used to devalue any positons expressed with emotional intensity or conviction; feeling becomes inherently suspicious, the mark of an inferior form of consciousness. Once this hierarchy between thinking and feeling has become internalized, it is axiomatic that those who identify with “thought” can justify their dominance over those identified with “feeling.” Women are very used to the separation between thought and feeling and the ways in which it can be used to reproduce relations of dominance and subordination between the sexes; it is a familiar aspect of intimate relationships. If a man can present his position in an argument as the point of view of rationality and define the woman’s position as an emotional one, then we know that she has already lost the struggle to be heard; he has already won. Expert/nonexpert. This dichotomy reproduces a similar power relationship on a social scale. Everyone lacking scientific credentials can be made to feel uninformed, unintelligent, and lacking in the skills required for successful debate over matters of public policy. Those with sufficient wealth can afford to hire the scientific expertise needed to give their positions public validation; those without wealth are made to feel that they must bow to the superior knowledge of the experts. Knowledge can, in this system, flow in only one direction, from expert to nonexpert. There is no dialogue; the voice of the scientific authority is like the male voiceover in commercials, a disembodied knowledge which cannot be questioned, whose author is inaccessible. Subject/object. This relationship is again one of domination; the knowing mind is active, the object of knowledge passive. This attitude toward nature has been immensely productive in allowing the manipulation and transformation of natural processes to serve human ends. Women, who have already been defined as natural objects in relation to man, and who have traditionally been viewed as passive, have special reason to question the political power relation expressed in this epistemological distancing. The subject/object split legitimizes the logic of domination of nature; it can also legitimize the logic of domination of man by man, and woman by man. Just as the ecological crisis requires that we see “man” as part of nature and not as a superior being above and beyond natural processes, so too the task of human liberation requires us to see science as a part of human society, determined by particular aims and values, and not as the depersonalized voice of abstract authority. Rejecting the efforts made (in the name of scientific objectivity) to deny the social content of scientific knowledge will enable us to concretely debate the values and intentions of scientific practice. This raises another set of problems with the theme of scientific objectivity, the question of the social position of scientists. Those scientists who choose to become actively involved in questioning the social uses of science or the power relations which determine its direction, risk being seen as no longer “objective.” Here, the notion of “objectivity” merely a code word for the political passivity of those scientists who have tacitly agreed to accept a privileged social position and freedom of inquiry within the laboratory in return for their political silence. If scientists take no responsibility for the uses of science, then it is supposedly up to the general public to monitor the social application of scientific research. But when community groups do become alarmed (as in the case of recombinant DNA research) they may be readily discounted as uninformed, and even as “hysterical.” As in the case of Three Mile Island, the problem may be formulated in terms of popular “anxiety” instead of in terms of social responsibility. The “experts” are more often called upon to quiet public distress than to articulate the grounds for concern. We are told that the production of scientific knowledge must be independent of politically motivated interference or direction. Yet we see scientists testifying before congressional committees, we find scientists in law courts, we find scientists involved in disputes at every level of public policy, and it is obvious that the experts take sides. It is also obvious that these “experts” are very often funded by corporate interests and that there are few penalties for those who find that their research supports the positions of these powerful lobbies. We may still treasure the mythology of the individual scientist, alone in “his” laboratory and isolated from mere daily concerns, wrestling with fundamental problems of the physical universe. In reality, the scientist today is a salaried worker, part of an institutional hierarchy-perhaps a small cog in a corporate research team-working on some small aspect of a problem which has probably been formulated by others. Her or his survival depends in a very concrete way on the structure of funding decisions made far from the laboratory; she or he is usually dependent on economic and political decisions beyond her or his control or influence. In what way is the average scientific worker independent of the larger political process, and how can we say that science as a whole is autonomous of social organization? A moment’s reflection shows us that the production of scientific knowledge is highly structured and organized, and is closely integrated with structures of political and economic power. It is naive to present the idea of scientific objectivity as though science itself were above or beyond politics. The assertion of objectivity is, however, used to mask the actual conditions of scientific work. Any society will attempt to generate the kinds of scientific knowledge which best fulfill its social, economic and political needs. Determines the kinds of questions which can be posed, and the tools available for answering them. Greek philosophy, or scientia, the production of natural knowledge, was divorced from the practice problems of technological production because in a slave society, the citizen-philosopher had no need to be concerned with manual labor, and the slave had no social possibility for producing formally articulated knowledge. What we know as modern science developed only with the capitalist mode of production and its new kind of practical activities and economic needs.13Mercantile capitalism required accurate methods of navigation; the Italian city states required the talents of engineers to develop the science of ballistics. The effort to develop more accurate cannons spurred the investigation of the laws of motion of a moving object and required the construction of a new mechanics. Mechanics, the science of moving objects, satisfied very concrete social needs, just as a new astronomy allowed the construction of new navigational tools. As capitalism matured and became concerned with techniques of production, transformations of matter became more important and the appropriate sciences were developed to deal with this new set of concerns: chemistry, metallurgy, and later, thermodynamics. Thermodynamics made possible the deliberate construction of a more efficient machinery, just as the study of chemistry permitted the production of new compounds and more efficient methods of extracting raw materials for production. Even in the early stages of industrial producton, the production of scientific knowledge was itself only minimally organized; not until the late nineteenth century with the accumulation of capital in large industrial enterprises were scientists deliberately and systematically employed to develop their knowledge in the direct service of production. The eary German chemical and electrical industries began the employment of scientists as salaried workers, whose research led directly to new methods of production in the service of capital accumulation. At the same time, the German research effort showed that pure research could be even more productive in terms of new industrial and military technologies than research too closely tied to immediate utilitarian ends. Science became a major social investment, to be funded by the state, and reproduced in universities as well as in private corporations. To understand the social position of scientists, then, we must study social organization and its to production at various levels. At one level, the identity of the scientist is a secondary question, not because he or she is above politics, but because scientists must fit into an existing political reality. The funding and organization of science follows social priorities as established by existing relations of power. At another level, we must recognize that scientists have a certain autonomy within these structures, and therefore have a special responsibility to examine the ways in which particular forms of research may help or hinder the goal of human liberation. If we are to move in the direction of a more fully human understanding of science, we should resist rigid separations between the production and uses of knowledge, subject and object, thinking and feeling, expert and nonexpert. This requires readmitting the human subject into the production of scientific knowledge, accepting science as a historically determined human activity, and not as an abstract autonomous force. If we admit that scientific activity is not neutral, but responds to specific social agenda and needs, then we can in turn begin to see how science, and scientists, might relate in a different way to social, including feminist, questions. It follows from what has been said about the relationship of science to society that we should expect a sexist society to develop a sexist science. The modern context of the production of scientific knowledge demonstrates the difficulty of developing a specifically feminist science within our existing economic and political system. At the moment, the production of feminist knowledge is a cottage industry; it depends on the energy and ideas of a small number of women, working individually, in response to a collective social movement, but without any significant institutional or financial base. This material reality does not allow for the production of any fully elaborated scientific theory. Because scientific research necessarily requires significant capital investment it is closely integrated with the reproduction of social and economic power. At this historical moment, what we are developing is not a feminist science, but a feminist critique of existing science. For us to imagine a feminist science in a feminist society is like asking a medieval peasant to imagine the theory of genetics or the production of a space capsule. Although our images are, at best, likely to be sketchy and insubstantial, we are free to consider the criteria a feminist science should fulfill. We should neither confuse this with the actual production of a scientific theory, nor should we take our inability to imagine a fully developed feminist science as evidence that a feminist science is itself impossible. Let us then begin to imagine what it might mean to readmit the human subject into the production of scientific knowledge. As a simple example, we can look at the doctor-patient relationship. We are familiar with the situation in which the patient complains, “doctor, it hurts here,” and the doctor says, “nonsense, it can’t possibly.” If the patient’s subjective experience does not fit readily into the doctor’s trained perception of objective reality, then that experience must be discounted. There is really “nothing wrong.” The women’s health movement has given a new visibility to women’s actual experiences, and thus offers the possibility of opening up new questions which can potentially expand the boundaries of scientific knowledge. This may require changes in our understanding of what is “real”-a shift in our perceptions of objective and subjective phenomena. Such a shift lays the groundwork for consideration of illnesses previously discounted as psychosomatic, or for the study of kinds of healing attributed to the placebo effect. These changes do not mean the collapse of medical science or the denial of everything that has been achieved by the previous paradigm; rather, they offer the possibility of moving towards a more complete form of knowledge. The recent history of occupational health research in the Italian factories offers an important model for the development of new forms of scientific investigation.14 Prior to 1969, occupational health research was done by specialists who would be asked by management to investigate a potential problem in the factory. The expert collected individual, quantifiable, information from each worker by means of questionnaires, interviews and medical records, and then statistically combined and manipulated the data to test hypotheses about the causes of the problem. The procedure was rigorously objective; the results were submitted to management. The workers were the individualized and passive objects of this kind of research. In 1969, however, when workers’ committees were established in the factories, they refused to allow this type of investigation. Instead, workers would collectively produce the information needed to define and solve a problem. Occupational health specialists had to discuss the ideas and procedures of research with worker’s assemblies and see their “objective” expertise measured against the “subjective” experience of the workers. The mutual validation of the data took place by testing in terms of the workers’ experience of reality, and not simply by statistical methods; the subjectivity of the workers’ experience was involved at each level in the definition of the problem, the method of research, and the evaluation of solutions. The workers had become the active subjects of research, involved in the production, evaluation, and uses of the knowledge relating to their own experience. This example shows us what overcoming the distance between subjectivity and objectivity might mean in practice. In principle, the same kind of process could be established between scientists and any sector of the population whose experience raises specific problems for investigation. Historical investigations of the ”woman problem” have considered women as natural objects and as passive in relation to the creation of knowledge; at this stage, we can only imagine what it might mean to be the active subjects in the creation of knowledge about ourselves and the world around us. At this point, while it is necessary to argue the case for the entrance of women into the scientific professions as presently constituted, it is also important to push the epistemological critique of science to the point where we can begin to construct a clear vision of alternate ways of creating knowledge. The feminist critique should be used as a tool for seeing what it might mean in practice to liberate science from the inherited habits of thought resulting from the previous separation of human experience into mutually contradictory realms. Overcoming the dualisms that feminists have identified as being associated with sexual dichotomies may offer the prospect of a radically transformed science, one that is as yet only faintly visible as a possibility for the future.Responses to the Ideology of Gender in Science
Challenges to Existing Conceptions of Science
The Concept of Objectivity
Social Position of Scientists
Prospects for a Feminist Science
References
For critiques of specific fields within science, see, for example, Donna Haraway, “Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic.” Signs, 4, 1978, pp. 21-60; Diana Long Hall, “Biology, Sex Hormones and Sexism in the 1920s.”The Philosophical Forum, 5, 1973-74, pp. 81-96; Elizabeth Fee, “Nineteenth Century Craniology; The Study of the Female Skull.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 53, 1980, pp. 415-433; Jill Conway, “Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Evolution.” in Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age. edited by Martha Vicinus, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1973, pp. 140-154; Elizabeth Fee, “The Sexual Politics of Victorian Social Anthropology.” Feminist Studies, I, 1973, pp. 23-29; Toward an Anthropology of Women, edited by Rayna R. Reiter, New York: Monthy Review Press, 1975; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenber, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and her Role in Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of American History, 60, 1973, pp. 332-356; Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women, New York: Doubleday 1979; and Richard C. Lewontin, “Sociobiology: Another Biological Determinism.” International Journal o f Health Services, 10, 1980, pp. 347-363. For a more detailed examination of the genderization of science and its relationship to psychic structures, see Evelyn Fox Keller, “Gender and Science.” Psychoanalysis and Contemporary Thought, 1, 1978, pp. 409-433.
