What do you think?
Rate this book
The Politics of Women's Biology
For a range of historical and contemporary issues in eugenics, human evolution, and procreative technology, Ruth Hubbard explains why scientific descriptions and choices should not generalize human, or female, attributes without acknowledging the realities of people's lives. Sophisticated in its analysis, yet not at all technical in its exposition, this book will find a wide readership among feminists, the general public, and the scientific community.
240 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
1 person is currently reading
278 people want to read
About the author
Ruth Hubbard
38 books4 followersRuth Hubbard was a professor of biology at Harvard University, where she was the first woman to hold a tenured professorship position in biology. She authored several books challenging the male model of science.
Born Ruth Hoffmann in Vienna, Austria, she escaped Nazism as a teenager, moving with with her family to the United States. Hubbard graduated from Radcliffe College in 1944, earning an A.B. in biochemical sciences.
Born Ruth Hoffmann in Vienna, Austria, she escaped Nazism as a teenager, moving with with her family to the United States. Hubbard graduated from Radcliffe College in 1944, earning an A.B. in biochemical sciences.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
November 7, 2024
Occasionally I come across a book where there is much to both love and hate. This is one of them.
The rating is to be read as a 3.5, as an average of an oscillating wave of wire-chewing critique.
Ruth Hubbard (1924-2016)'s The Politics of Women's Biology is an insightful, broad look of androcentrism in science and the scientific process, as well as the way scientific institutions interact with the public. It is also, especially in its early chapters (pertaining to systemic bias in scientific process and institutions, under the overarching heading of How Do We Know?) needlessly obtusely argued.
The questions of social power and problematized consent in matters of reproductive rights, childrearing, prenatal tasting, disability and the legal framework around them, which Hubbard raises in the latter chapters of the books, are still acutely relevant in their broad strokes and insightfully argued.
Hubbard's suggestion, expressed in the essay Have Only Men Evolved?, that evolution as a discovery was in some way enabled by contradictions within culturally and religiously defined and conditional ways of thinking about living beings, thrown into sharp relief by Linnaeus's classification, is altogether fascinating.
Less so with her criticisms of the Human Genome Project as a foolishly gene-centric endeavour and perhaps a misallocation of the tremendous amount of resources it require(d.) We live in. Sequencing has become vastly more affordable in part because of the HGP. It is, as is often the case with such massive endeavours, impossible to imagine the could-have-been world without the HGP, or hope to objectively quantify its impact, whether it was worth. I, being of a generation that learned of it a momentous triumph of the life sciences at the turn of the century, can't help but feel defensive. Though perhaps, as recent discoveries concerning how sample DNA was sourced, Hubbard's caution had the right of it, and we should be weary of "the mythic importance our culture assigns to genes and genetic inheritance."
Hubbard's framing of the politically problematic groundings of science and scientific view leave something to be desired. In my mind, they are incomplete and even self-defeating:
i) For someone whose arguments are as grounded in the contingency of material and historical condition, Hubbard's scope is shallow and tacitly casts back the mythic self-perception of Science.
i.i.) Until sometimes way into the 19th century science was decoupled from and often playing theory catch-up to the practical technology which armed modern empire and capitalism. This is not to say that technology didn't have its own inequality-engendering condition — but these were certainly different than the particular incentive structure peculiar to 20th century academia and research proliferation (which is Hubbard's narrow focus, sometimes sloppily extended in time.)
i.ii.) The construction of race as a category doesn't get nearly as big of a mention as it should when talking about how science stepped up to reify the prejudice necessary to the historical hierarchical order.
ii) In describing institutional bias, Hubbard's account is persistently individualizing, ascribing self-serving intent not only to the specific cases of Darwin's pervasive parochialism or James Watson's egotistical misogyny, but to the whole institutional forces that have undermined and gatekept women's bodily autonomy. This, I believe, is an inaccurate and actively unhelpful framing: it is the unconscious, ubiquitous, unseen character of ideology that enables it to perpetuate itself.
(I say "self-defeating" not to mean "self-contradictory", but rather (rhetorically, analytically) "self-sabotaging" — they undermine the power of her statements, and in some ways are erroneous, reflecting of the same historically ingrained bias which Hubbard seeks to critique. Her conclusions hold water, I'll stand by that. Something something an argument can't be both true and not valid and vice versa. Something something we are all not immune to propaganda.)
Having come back around to discussing rhetoric and effectives, I have to point out that Hubbard sounds quite alienated from and and alienating to scientists.
(In my preliminary notes for this review, when I hadn't finished half the book yet, I went so far as to call it "rhetorically shit.")
Some of that comes from the troubles of individualization. The rest is in her apparent leaps of logic in condemning science and its practices as indelibly linked to capitalism and colonialism. I happen to be generally familiar with her course of argumentation, including from the strides done in methodological critique in the past three decades and some. The essayistic character of the text seems aimed at a feminist in-group and doesn't bother much in elucidating genealogy. This is made to seem greater an intellectual flaw by the idiotic way the bibliography is formatted: the bibliography is just an unorganized alphabetic text block and makes my eyes bleed and my brain cry. There is an in-line reference in case of direct quotation, which is a) still a godawful way to format your citations (don't do that, please, i beg you), because b) it makes you cross-reference by searching for a name (and maybe year) in the massive dyslexia-inducing textblock of a bibliography, which c) is not going to apply to the really important cases, from which Hubbard derives the body of her reasoning, which d) would only exacerbate STEM-ish defensiveness, as no one could know that there is explanation somewhere and where the where is.
Is R. Hubbard projecting/exemplifying the elitism and biased sensibility for communication that she is so keen to draw attention to in the broader scientific establishment?
Was 1980-90s feminism just... that much up its own ass?
Or, like, really enamoured with political inefficacy for the sake of a moral high ground of self-righteous suffering?
(*looks at political lesbianism* ...I cannot not not say 'no'.)
(No, this not a typo.)
The rating is to be read as a 3.5, as an average of an oscillating wave of wire-chewing critique.
Ruth Hubbard (1924-2016)'s The Politics of Women's Biology is an insightful, broad look of androcentrism in science and the scientific process, as well as the way scientific institutions interact with the public. It is also, especially in its early chapters (pertaining to systemic bias in scientific process and institutions, under the overarching heading of How Do We Know?) needlessly obtusely argued.
The questions of social power and problematized consent in matters of reproductive rights, childrearing, prenatal tasting, disability and the legal framework around them, which Hubbard raises in the latter chapters of the books, are still acutely relevant in their broad strokes and insightfully argued.
[The] public—the women and men who must live in the world that the scientific/medical/industrial complex constructs—must be able to take part in the process by which such decisions are made. Until mechanisms exist that give people a decisive voice in setting the relevant scientific and technical agendas and until scientist and physicians are made accountable to people whose lives they change, technical innovations do not constitute new choices. They merely replace previous social constraints with new ones.
– p.198, from Ch. 14: Who Should and Who Should Not Inhabit the World? (Emphasis in bold mine.)
Hubbard's suggestion, expressed in the essay Have Only Men Evolved?, that evolution as a discovery was in some way enabled by contradictions within culturally and religiously defined and conditional ways of thinking about living beings, thrown into sharp relief by Linnaeus's classification, is altogether fascinating.
Less so with her criticisms of the Human Genome Project as a foolishly gene-centric endeavour and perhaps a misallocation of the tremendous amount of resources it require(d.) We live in. Sequencing has become vastly more affordable in part because of the HGP. It is, as is often the case with such massive endeavours, impossible to imagine the could-have-been world without the HGP, or hope to objectively quantify its impact, whether it was worth. I, being of a generation that learned of it a momentous triumph of the life sciences at the turn of the century, can't help but feel defensive. Though perhaps, as recent discoveries concerning how sample DNA was sourced, Hubbard's caution had the right of it, and we should be weary of "the mythic importance our culture assigns to genes and genetic inheritance."
Hubbard's framing of the politically problematic groundings of science and scientific view leave something to be desired. In my mind, they are incomplete and even self-defeating:
i) For someone whose arguments are as grounded in the contingency of material and historical condition, Hubbard's scope is shallow and tacitly casts back the mythic self-perception of Science.
i.i.) Until sometimes way into the 19th century science was decoupled from and often playing theory catch-up to the practical technology which armed modern empire and capitalism. This is not to say that technology didn't have its own inequality-engendering condition — but these were certainly different than the particular incentive structure peculiar to 20th century academia and research proliferation (which is Hubbard's narrow focus, sometimes sloppily extended in time.)
i.ii.) The construction of race as a category doesn't get nearly as big of a mention as it should when talking about how science stepped up to reify the prejudice necessary to the historical hierarchical order.
ii) In describing institutional bias, Hubbard's account is persistently individualizing, ascribing self-serving intent not only to the specific cases of Darwin's pervasive parochialism or James Watson's egotistical misogyny, but to the whole institutional forces that have undermined and gatekept women's bodily autonomy. This, I believe, is an inaccurate and actively unhelpful framing: it is the unconscious, ubiquitous, unseen character of ideology that enables it to perpetuate itself.
(I say "self-defeating" not to mean "self-contradictory", but rather (rhetorically, analytically) "self-sabotaging" — they undermine the power of her statements, and in some ways are erroneous, reflecting of the same historically ingrained bias which Hubbard seeks to critique. Her conclusions hold water, I'll stand by that. Something something an argument can't be both true and not valid and vice versa. Something something we are all not immune to propaganda.)
By the time we are educated (literally, "led out"), we cannot remember how we saw the world before we leaned what it was "really" like.
– p.51, from Ch. 5: The Double Helix: A Study of Science in Context
Having come back around to discussing rhetoric and effectives, I have to point out that Hubbard sounds quite alienated from and and alienating to scientists.
(In my preliminary notes for this review, when I hadn't finished half the book yet, I went so far as to call it "rhetorically shit.")
Some of that comes from the troubles of individualization. The rest is in her apparent leaps of logic in condemning science and its practices as indelibly linked to capitalism and colonialism. I happen to be generally familiar with her course of argumentation, including from the strides done in methodological critique in the past three decades and some. The essayistic character of the text seems aimed at a feminist in-group and doesn't bother much in elucidating genealogy. This is made to seem greater an intellectual flaw by the idiotic way the bibliography is formatted: the bibliography is just an unorganized alphabetic text block and makes my eyes bleed and my brain cry. There is an in-line reference in case of direct quotation, which is a) still a godawful way to format your citations (don't do that, please, i beg you), because b) it makes you cross-reference by searching for a name (and maybe year) in the massive dyslexia-inducing textblock of a bibliography, which c) is not going to apply to the really important cases, from which Hubbard derives the body of her reasoning, which d) would only exacerbate STEM-ish defensiveness, as no one could know that there is explanation somewhere and where the where is.
Is R. Hubbard projecting/exemplifying the elitism and biased sensibility for communication that she is so keen to draw attention to in the broader scientific establishment?
Was 1980-90s feminism just... that much up its own ass?
Or, like, really enamoured with political inefficacy for the sake of a moral high ground of self-righteous suffering?
(*looks at political lesbianism* ...I cannot not not say 'no'.)
(No, this not a typo.)
August 9, 2024
A HARVARD BIOLOGIST PROVIDES A FEMINIST CRITICISM OF THE APPLICATIONS OF BIOLOGY
Ruth Hubbard (born 1924) is Professor Emerita of Biology at Harvard University, where she was the first woman to hold a tenured professorship position in biology. She has also written 'Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information Is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers,' 'The Shape of Red: Insider/Outsider Reflections,' 'Genes and Gender: II Pitfalls in Research on Sex and Gender,' etc.
She wrote in the Introduction to this 1990 book, "This book describes my journey from observing nature to observing science, from doing science to studying it. The book is divided into three parts: 'How do we know?' 'What do we know?' 'How do we use it?' The first is concerned primarily with feminist issues in the sociology of science, the second with feminist criticisms of subject matter, the third with current applications of biological knowledge in procreative technologies... The question I want to ask here is, Can feminists hope to improve science by bringing into consciousness the implicit assumptions that underlie standard scientific descriptions and interpretations? I believe we can..." (Pg. 2, 4)
She notes, "It seems contradictory that as our political awareness has increased, many of us scientists who are feminists have turned from doing scientific experiments to the social studies of science and science criticism. Feminist poets, novelists, and artists by and large have not needed to make such a change. They have been more able to incorporate their political consciousness into their work than we have." (Pg. 5)
She asserts, "One thing is clear: Making facts is a social enterprise." (Pg. 22) She adds, "to be believed scientific facts must fit the world-view of the times." (Pg. 25) She suggests, "The concept of women's biology is socially constructed, and political, in a second way because it is not simply women's description of our experience of our biology. We have seen that women's biology has been described by physicians and scientists who, for historical reasons, have been mostly economically privileged, university-educated men with strong personal and political interests in describing women in ways that make it appear 'natural' for us to fulfill roles that are important for their well-being." (Pg. 119)
She says, "We need to pay attention to the obvious contradictions between stereotypic descriptions of women's biology and the realities of women's lives." (Pg. 127) Later, she adds, "A woman must have the right to abort a fetus, whatever her reasons, precisely because it is a decision about her body and about how she will live her life. But decisions about what kind of baby to bear inevitably are bedeviled by overt and unspoken judgments about which lives are 'worth living.'" (Pg. 197)
She notes in conclusion, "I want to emphasize once more that biology is profoundly political. Biologists have the authority to tell us what is natural and what is human. They sort nature from culture, and what is more political than that? Biologists have been able to wrap the mantle of science around racism and sexism by inventing significant characteristics to describe and sort different groups of people, and have performed the measurements that made the answers come out the way political prejudices predicted they would." (Pg. 209)
Provocative but engaging, this book will not be "liked" by everyone, but its ideas are well worth considering for people on all sides of the debate.
Ruth Hubbard (born 1924) is Professor Emerita of Biology at Harvard University, where she was the first woman to hold a tenured professorship position in biology. She has also written 'Exploding the Gene Myth: How Genetic Information Is Produced and Manipulated by Scientists, Physicians, Employers, Insurance Companies, Educators, and Law Enforcers,' 'The Shape of Red: Insider/Outsider Reflections,' 'Genes and Gender: II Pitfalls in Research on Sex and Gender,' etc.
She wrote in the Introduction to this 1990 book, "This book describes my journey from observing nature to observing science, from doing science to studying it. The book is divided into three parts: 'How do we know?' 'What do we know?' 'How do we use it?' The first is concerned primarily with feminist issues in the sociology of science, the second with feminist criticisms of subject matter, the third with current applications of biological knowledge in procreative technologies... The question I want to ask here is, Can feminists hope to improve science by bringing into consciousness the implicit assumptions that underlie standard scientific descriptions and interpretations? I believe we can..." (Pg. 2, 4)
She notes, "It seems contradictory that as our political awareness has increased, many of us scientists who are feminists have turned from doing scientific experiments to the social studies of science and science criticism. Feminist poets, novelists, and artists by and large have not needed to make such a change. They have been more able to incorporate their political consciousness into their work than we have." (Pg. 5)
She asserts, "One thing is clear: Making facts is a social enterprise." (Pg. 22) She adds, "to be believed scientific facts must fit the world-view of the times." (Pg. 25) She suggests, "The concept of women's biology is socially constructed, and political, in a second way because it is not simply women's description of our experience of our biology. We have seen that women's biology has been described by physicians and scientists who, for historical reasons, have been mostly economically privileged, university-educated men with strong personal and political interests in describing women in ways that make it appear 'natural' for us to fulfill roles that are important for their well-being." (Pg. 119)
She says, "We need to pay attention to the obvious contradictions between stereotypic descriptions of women's biology and the realities of women's lives." (Pg. 127) Later, she adds, "A woman must have the right to abort a fetus, whatever her reasons, precisely because it is a decision about her body and about how she will live her life. But decisions about what kind of baby to bear inevitably are bedeviled by overt and unspoken judgments about which lives are 'worth living.'" (Pg. 197)
She notes in conclusion, "I want to emphasize once more that biology is profoundly political. Biologists have the authority to tell us what is natural and what is human. They sort nature from culture, and what is more political than that? Biologists have been able to wrap the mantle of science around racism and sexism by inventing significant characteristics to describe and sort different groups of people, and have performed the measurements that made the answers come out the way political prejudices predicted they would." (Pg. 209)
Provocative but engaging, this book will not be "liked" by everyone, but its ideas are well worth considering for people on all sides of the debate.
March 6, 2017
didn't address the questions I was wondering about, and also has an outdated attitude
December 31, 2014
It is interesting because Hubbard shows how science has in the past influenced prejudices against women and minorities, but I find it hard to agree with most of Hubbard's analysis of how science is done.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews