INHERENT GENDER BIAS: A LITERATURE REVIEW
Editor’s Note: In this review of literature, Lucy F. (‘17) analyzes several pieces about biology and gender biases.
Throughout human history, scientists have used their position to justify claims that women are inherently inferior. Scientists are unavoidably influenced by the historical, cultural, and social contexts in which they are living. This makes it abundantly clear why such misguided science took place (and takes place) for so long. Aristotle was an early advocate for inherent inferiority of women and since them, Cordelia Fine, Eleanor Burke Leacock, Clifford D. Conner, Londa Schiebinger, Lesley Dean-Jones and numerous others, have given insights into the issues surrounding gender. Through talking about historical excuses like religious views, inherent roles defined by nature, and a woman’s incapability to control her own body prompting a man’s interference and supervision, these authors investigate how it is, that for centuries, women have been systemically oppressed for being lesser.
Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Myths of Male Dominance is about the accounts of the Christianization of the native people who were involved in the fur trade with Europe from the perspectives of both merchants and missionaries. Jesuit missionary, Paul Le Jeune, went to Canada on behalf of the French to Christianize the Montagnais-Naskapi people. He went to the Montagnais-Naskapi people “to change… the Montagnais-Naskapi through what became a fourfold program… Le Jeune stressed the necessity of introducing the principle of punishment into Montagnais social relations… Essential to Le Jeune’s program was the introduction of European family structure, with male authority, female fidelity, and the elimination of the right to divorce” (Leacock p 46-47). Le Jeune wanted to change the way that the whole society thought about gender roles for the sake of bringing enlightenment to the savage natives. Le Jeune used his God-given responsibility to revoke any rights women enjoyed in their daily lives, forcing them into unnatural servitude to their husbands under a Christian, European family structure. Another widespread example of using religious grounds to oppress and kill women was the witch hunts in Europe. Clifford D. Conner wrote about the witch craze in A People’s History of Science. Women were targeted as witches to push them out of the world of medicine because their natural methods echoed beliefs of the Pagans. The church reacted with “Massive persecutions on political grounds but by charges that the old woman had gained dangerous supernatural powers from an alliance with Satan. This accusation… was ‘the product of a cold-blooded campaign launched by self-interested clerics and inquisitors’… A new ‘science’ of demonology–was provided by the elite intellectual leaders… who ‘devoted their genius to its propagation.’” (Conner p 366). Elite scientists created a science to justify the killing of women unjustly to show their loyalty to the church. Religion was used to dismantle the rights and freedoms of women to be completely.
Concepts like human nature and hardwiring are static, leaveing no room for interpretation when discussing gender roles and traits. What human nature and hardwiring have in common is their unchangeable biological nature. Aristotle was one of the earliest thinkers to express his ideas about where people fit in society based solely on nature. Aristotle was early to present his thoughts about the natural way of things in his work The Politics. He believed that people had a specific, pre-determined place in the world. He writes, “There must necessarily be a union of the naturally ruling element with the element which is naturally ruled… The female and the slave occupy the same position–the reason being that no naturally ruling element exists among them” (Aristotle p 3). To Aristotle’s, women and slaves were naturally meant to be ruled not because of systemic oppression and lack of opportunity, but because they just weren’t born with a “ruling element,” whereas men were. Because Aristotle used the reasoning that women and slaves were inferior by nature of being women and slaves, there was no way to oppose his reasoning. A more modern approach to justify this claim is hardwiring. Cordelia Fine gives the example of Dr. Luann Brizendine’s work in her own writing, Delusions of Gender, to talk about hardwiring, the fixed pathways that dictate behavior, characteristics, and ability in a person’s brain. Hardwiring explains why women to have lesser inherent capabilities than to men. Fine writes, “Brizendine is content to merely state the effect of prenatal testosterone on the brain ‘defines our innate biological destiny’” (p XXII). Although no one could counter Aristotle because nature is fundamentally unable to be confronted, modern behavioral science has discovered neuroplasticity, which directly contradicts his theory. Neuroplasticity dictates that new pathways are formed and reinforced daily, but also can be broken and rerouted. Using modern science, the idea of human nature doesn’t hold up.
Historically, scientists argued that women were inferior because they couldn’t control their own bodies or urges, making them inherently lesser because without men, women would be helpless. In “The Cultural Construct of the Female Body in Classical Greek Science”, Lesley Dean-Jones uses baselessness of Aristotle’s claims about the wandering womb to talk about early misogyny. Aristotle writes, “The wandering womb… simultaneously deprived a woman of independent control over her own sexuality …without the intervention of a man (husband or doctor), is in danger of subjugating the women’s own life force (psychē) if it does not have its own wants satisfied” (Dean-Jones p 9). Dean-Jones uses Aristotle as an example of how early science lacking proof to claims or evidences, supports the impact on how women’s bodies continue to be been negatively impacted. Aristotle’s ideas that a woman had no control over her body and it in fact had a mind and needs of its own created a demand for experienced doctors to interfere. Along with being incapable of controlling their own bodies, in Linnaeus’ mind, women couldn’t do the things that they were naturally responsible for, like breastfeeding, without male supervision. In Nature’s Body, Londa Schiebinger uses Carolus Linnaeus to talk about the oppression of women through breastfeeding by limiting where they could go and what they could do. He believed that women shouldn’t uses wet nurses because the women who were wet nurses carried poor and diseased and passed their class inferiority onto the child. Linnaeus, “Himself a practicing physician–prepared a dissertation against the evils of wet-nursing in 1752, just a few years before coining the term Mammalia and while watching his own children suckle” (Schiebinger p 66-67). Though he didn’t approve of women outsourcing their biological responsibilities, he also believed that he needed to oversee his own wife breastfeed because she was incapable of doing it without him being there.
Scientists and thinkers have given countless reasons for why women are inferior to men in order to back bias rhetoric and oppression throughout history. Contemporary authors like Fine, Leacock, Conner, Schiebinger and Dean-Jones, draw on the antiquated, yet perpetuated ideas of Carolus Linnaeus and Aristotle surrounding gender roles. These authors also look at common themes and excuses for oppression based on gender including religious authority, capabilities determined by nature and what is natural, and women’s incapability to control their own bodies or biological functions. When there is baseless bias, there is pressure to find evidence for that bias, and scientists that try to provide that evidence do far more lasting damage than good.
Bibliography
Aristotle (Ernest Barker, transl). (1977). The politics of Aristotle. London: Oxford University Press.
Conner, C. D. (2005). A people's history of science: Miners, midwives, and "low mechanicks" New York, NY: Nation Books.
Dean-Jones, L. (2003, March 12). The Cultural Construct of the Female Body in Classical Greek Science.
Fine, C. (2010). Delusions of gender: How our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. New York: W.W. Norton.
Leacock, E. B. (1981). Myths of male dominance: Collected articles on women cross-culturally. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Schiebinger, L. (2010). Nature's body. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
Eleanor Burke Leacock’s Myths of Male Dominance is about the accounts of the Christianization of the native people who were involved in the fur trade with Europe from the perspectives of both merchants and missionaries. Jesuit missionary, Paul Le Jeune, went to Canada on behalf of the French to Christianize the Montagnais-Naskapi people. He went to the Montagnais-Naskapi people “to change… the Montagnais-Naskapi through what became a fourfold program… Le Jeune stressed the necessity of introducing the principle of punishment into Montagnais social relations… Essential to Le Jeune’s program was the introduction of European family structure, with male authority, female fidelity, and the elimination of the right to divorce” (Leacock p 46-47). Le Jeune wanted to change the way that the whole society thought about gender roles for the sake of bringing enlightenment to the savage natives. Le Jeune used his God-given responsibility to revoke any rights women enjoyed in their daily lives, forcing them into unnatural servitude to their husbands under a Christian, European family structure. Another widespread example of using religious grounds to oppress and kill women was the witch hunts in Europe. Clifford D. Conner wrote about the witch craze in A People’s History of Science. Women were targeted as witches to push them out of the world of medicine because their natural methods echoed beliefs of the Pagans. The church reacted with “Massive persecutions on political grounds but by charges that the old woman had gained dangerous supernatural powers from an alliance with Satan. This accusation… was ‘the product of a cold-blooded campaign launched by self-interested clerics and inquisitors’… A new ‘science’ of demonology–was provided by the elite intellectual leaders… who ‘devoted their genius to its propagation.’” (Conner p 366). Elite scientists created a science to justify the killing of women unjustly to show their loyalty to the church. Religion was used to dismantle the rights and freedoms of women to be completely.
Concepts like human nature and hardwiring are static, leaveing no room for interpretation when discussing gender roles and traits. What human nature and hardwiring have in common is their unchangeable biological nature. Aristotle was one of the earliest thinkers to express his ideas about where people fit in society based solely on nature. Aristotle was early to present his thoughts about the natural way of things in his work The Politics. He believed that people had a specific, pre-determined place in the world. He writes, “There must necessarily be a union of the naturally ruling element with the element which is naturally ruled… The female and the slave occupy the same position–the reason being that no naturally ruling element exists among them” (Aristotle p 3). To Aristotle’s, women and slaves were naturally meant to be ruled not because of systemic oppression and lack of opportunity, but because they just weren’t born with a “ruling element,” whereas men were. Because Aristotle used the reasoning that women and slaves were inferior by nature of being women and slaves, there was no way to oppose his reasoning. A more modern approach to justify this claim is hardwiring. Cordelia Fine gives the example of Dr. Luann Brizendine’s work in her own writing, Delusions of Gender, to talk about hardwiring, the fixed pathways that dictate behavior, characteristics, and ability in a person’s brain. Hardwiring explains why women to have lesser inherent capabilities than to men. Fine writes, “Brizendine is content to merely state the effect of prenatal testosterone on the brain ‘defines our innate biological destiny’” (p XXII). Although no one could counter Aristotle because nature is fundamentally unable to be confronted, modern behavioral science has discovered neuroplasticity, which directly contradicts his theory. Neuroplasticity dictates that new pathways are formed and reinforced daily, but also can be broken and rerouted. Using modern science, the idea of human nature doesn’t hold up.
Historically, scientists argued that women were inferior because they couldn’t control their own bodies or urges, making them inherently lesser because without men, women would be helpless. In “The Cultural Construct of the Female Body in Classical Greek Science”, Lesley Dean-Jones uses baselessness of Aristotle’s claims about the wandering womb to talk about early misogyny. Aristotle writes, “The wandering womb… simultaneously deprived a woman of independent control over her own sexuality …without the intervention of a man (husband or doctor), is in danger of subjugating the women’s own life force (psychē) if it does not have its own wants satisfied” (Dean-Jones p 9). Dean-Jones uses Aristotle as an example of how early science lacking proof to claims or evidences, supports the impact on how women’s bodies continue to be been negatively impacted. Aristotle’s ideas that a woman had no control over her body and it in fact had a mind and needs of its own created a demand for experienced doctors to interfere. Along with being incapable of controlling their own bodies, in Linnaeus’ mind, women couldn’t do the things that they were naturally responsible for, like breastfeeding, without male supervision. In Nature’s Body, Londa Schiebinger uses Carolus Linnaeus to talk about the oppression of women through breastfeeding by limiting where they could go and what they could do. He believed that women shouldn’t uses wet nurses because the women who were wet nurses carried poor and diseased and passed their class inferiority onto the child. Linnaeus, “Himself a practicing physician–prepared a dissertation against the evils of wet-nursing in 1752, just a few years before coining the term Mammalia and while watching his own children suckle” (Schiebinger p 66-67). Though he didn’t approve of women outsourcing their biological responsibilities, he also believed that he needed to oversee his own wife breastfeed because she was incapable of doing it without him being there.
Scientists and thinkers have given countless reasons for why women are inferior to men in order to back bias rhetoric and oppression throughout history. Contemporary authors like Fine, Leacock, Conner, Schiebinger and Dean-Jones, draw on the antiquated, yet perpetuated ideas of Carolus Linnaeus and Aristotle surrounding gender roles. These authors also look at common themes and excuses for oppression based on gender including religious authority, capabilities determined by nature and what is natural, and women’s incapability to control their own bodies or biological functions. When there is baseless bias, there is pressure to find evidence for that bias, and scientists that try to provide that evidence do far more lasting damage than good.
Bibliography
Aristotle (Ernest Barker, transl). (1977). The politics of Aristotle. London: Oxford University Press.
Conner, C. D. (2005). A people's history of science: Miners, midwives, and "low mechanicks" New York, NY: Nation Books.
Dean-Jones, L. (2003, March 12). The Cultural Construct of the Female Body in Classical Greek Science.
Fine, C. (2010). Delusions of gender: How our minds, society, and neurosexism create difference. New York: W.W. Norton.
Leacock, E. B. (1981). Myths of male dominance: Collected articles on women cross-culturally. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Schiebinger, L. (2010). Nature's body. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.
