Technology Is to Science as Female Is to Male: Musings on the History and Character of Our Discipline

Abstract

Presidential Address TECHNOLOGY IS TO SCIENCE AS FEMALE IS TO MALE: MUSINGS ON THE HISTORY AND CHARACTER OF OUR DISCIPLINE RUTH SCHWARTZ COWAN The analogy in my title—technology is to science as female is to male—will no doubt strike some members of SHOT as faintly bi­ zarre. This is a presidential address, however, not a scholarly paper: an occasion to have a bit of fun, to play with slightly crazy ideas, hoping to learn something in the process. “Technology is to science as female is to male” is not the sort of analogy that will ever be used to test scholastic aptitude, but it is not as bizarre as it may seem at first glance—and might even have something salient to say about the history and character of our discipline, about the history and character of technology. I need to begin by explaining how the anal­ ogy first occurred to me. I earned a Ph.D. in the history of science in the late 1960s. Soon after I began teaching I created the syllabus for a course called “Sci­ ence in Western Civilization.” About a decade later, having broad­ ened my outlook considerably, a colleague and I changed the course title and contents to “Science, Technology and Medicine in Western Civilization.” One day, probably in 1980 or 1981, an assistant dean came to one of our regular department meetings. His task: to help us develop ways to mainstream women’s history into our courses. As I was well known on campus as a champion ofwomen’s studies I was not personally worried about what he, or anyone else, would have to say about my courses. But then I noticed that our “Sci-Tech-Med” course was on his hit list. “We have all we can do to cover science, technology and medicine,” I must have wailed. A colleague immedi­ ately came to my defense, asserting, albeit with some asperity, that “anyone could see that when they added technology to science they added a woman’s perspective.” For some reason which I did not Dr. Cowan is professor of history and formerly director ofwomen’s studies at the State University of New York, Stony Brook. She delivered this address at the Society for the History ofTechnology meeting in Lowell, Massachusetts, on October 7,1994.© 1996 by the Society for the History of Technology. All rights reserved. 0040-165X/96/3703-0005$01.00 572 Technology Is to Science as Female Is to Male 573 understand the assistant dean was mollified by that notion and we went on to skewer someone else’s course. For years I mulled over that remark: adding technology to science means adding a woman’s perspective? What an odd thing to have said! Given the general cultural alliance between masculinity and technol­ ogy, I could not imagine what my colleague might have meant. (For reasons that had to do with other departmental arguments I didn’t feel particularly inclined to ask right away; when I finally did ask, my colleague could not remember having said it.) About four years ago, however, I started to do some reading in feminist theory and, as a result, began to understand, not only why the remark might have been made, but also why it might have satisfied the assistant dean. * * * Feminist theory is, today, a very complex and contested enterprise. In a recent comprehensive introduction to the subject, the philoso­ pher Rosemarie Tong has identified seven differentvarieties offemi­ nist thought: liberal, marxist, radical, psychoanalytic, socialist, exis­ tentialist, and postmodern feminisms.1 Disciples of these various feminisms share a common commitment, first, to analyzing the causes of women’s oppression, second, to recommending paths to­ wards women’s liberation and, third, to travelling those paths. None­ theless, they disagree with each other on so many issues, on so many different levels of analysis, that their arguments have become quite acrimonious in the last decade or so. While I was reading Tong’s discussion of existential and postmod­ ern feminism my mind kept wandering. I had participated in a femi­ nist reading group a few years earlier and had read the work ofsome existential and postmodern feminists, the so-called...