Reviews for Human biology and history

The average rating for Human biology and history based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-10-19 00:00:00 Scott Woodward How Men Defined ‘Nature’ to Oppress Women: Rutgers University Press (1993) Swedish botanist Carl Linneaus coined the term Mammalia (mammal). This was the only one of his zoological groups that highlighted a feature associated with women: the maternal breast. A few years prior he wrote a dissertation against the “evils of wet-nursing.” During this time, it was conventional for upper class women to have wet nurses for their babies. Linnaeus argued that this violated the “laws of nature,” but really he believed that the “character of the upper-class child could easily be corrupted by the milk of lower-class nurses” (68). Stanford Historian Dr. Schiebinger argues that there was no empirical reason for the name “mammal” and that instead Linnaeas paid homage to the maternal breast as part of a coordinated effort to undermine women’s public power and attach new value to women’s domestic roles. “The scientific fascination with the female breast helped to [reinforce] the sexual division of labor in European society by emphasizing how natural it was for females to rear their own children” (42). Naturalists used the breast to argue that it was “nature’s sign that women belonged only in the home.” By honoring the mammal as the highest class of animals “Linnaeus assigned a new value to the female: women’s unique role in reproduction” (53). European legislators politicized breasts to locate the power of women in “nurturing the future sons of the state” (64), rather than in the fields of knowledge production they had previously occupied (like midwifery and medicine). With the dawn of the Enlightenment men began to justify discrimination using the rhetoric of nature. In 1790 British naturalist William Smellie argued that social hierarchies came from natural hierarchies “independently of all political institutions” and that “nature herself has formed the human species into castes and ranks” (145). Male scientists argued that the natural, exclusive role for women in society was motherhood. French physician Julien-Joseph Virey argued that the word “femme” derived from “fetus” because women’s “natural destination” was to generate life. For 18th and 19th century scientists, the focus on sex was almost exclusively about white women, This is because women were thought to shape racial characteristics (the shape of noses, lips, and skulls, hair texture, and skin color). German physician Johann Blumenbach believed that Black features were different because babies’ heads pounded against their mother’s backs as they worked and “flattened their facial features.” Accordingly, white women were important insomuch as their behavior directly impacted the status of the future generation of white men. When Blumenbach divided the world into five major races (one of the first racial classification systems) he labeled the Caucasian skull “female” and did not mention sex for the other four skulls. (He selected the Georgian skull as representative of the white race because he believed its “great beauty revealed [Caucasians] as the archetype from which all other races had degenerated.”) This history illustrates the great lengths European men took to define nature in a way that allowed them to absolve themselves of responsibility: they weren’t disenfranchising women and people of color, they were just doing what “nature” entailed. We should always be skeptical of people using the rhetoric of “nature” to justify discrimination. Sexism is not science.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-08-02 00:00:00 Orlando Valdez An informative and informed history of the structural racism and sexism of science since the Enlightenment. Schienbinger excellently fleshes out the social and political contexts for her arguments, and reminds readers that science continues to be exclusionary (as most of my non-white and/or non-male scientist friends can attest to). Highly recommended to anyone who is interested in or is otherwise studying gender and race history in America, science, art history, anthropology, and philosophy (especially phenomenology, since the treatment of one's body is a large part of how one experiences the body, but obviously there are ethical philosophical issues raised in this book as well).