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Under The Microscope

KINDRED NATURE: VICTORIAN AND EDWARDIAN WOMEN EMBRACE THE LIVING WORLD, by Barbara T Gates; University of Chicago Press, 1998; 293 pp; $40.00
WOMEN'S SCIENCE, by Margaret Eisenhart and Elizabeth Finkel; University of Chicago Press, 1998; 272 pp; $30.00

Reviewed by Barbara Nicholas

Science has been a male profession, celebrating those attributes (objectivity, detachment, rational thought) that Western culture has traditionally ascribed to men. Not only that, but for many years women were explicitly excluded from the professional associations of men, and regarded as unable to make a contribution. There is strong evidence that women continue to encounter barriers to advancement within the sciences, and must struggle to have their work recognised.

These two books are each, in their own ways, subversions of the male stories of science and celebrations of the ways in which women have responded to their marginalisation within "mainstream" science, and continued to make their contribution in significant ways.

Kindred Nature explores the variety of ways in which women in Victorian and Edwardian (British) society found ways to explore the natural world, and spread their knowledge. Some explored the world, led their own expeditions, and brought home collections of animals and plants. Others found ways for their papers to be read at learned societies, or to be recognised for their contribution to entomology and farming.

But direct recognition within the male world of science was rare. Women needed to find others ways to be heard. They wrote children's books to educate young people about the delights of the natural world and the precision of the scientific method; they wrote books that popularised science; they published journals of their expeditions; some led movements to protest the slaughter of animals, while others participated in the hunting and wrote detailed accounts; and yet more women drew on their detailed knowledge of the natural world to tell stories of animals and to re-think the relationship between natural and humans.

Frequently their work was not validated by the scientific authorities as "science", but in many ways women participated in shaping the understanding of the natural world. This book is a scholarly but readable story of how women contributed to the intellectual construction of nature in a critical period of scientific history.

Women's Science examines women's participation in science in a different period -- contemporary experience of women in science in the American context. It examines the position of women in science and engineering, and the ways in which they are under-represented in high status sites of scientific practice, but much better represented in sites that are "on the margins" of established communities of scientific and technical practice. The authors discuss the influence of science education on the choices that women make, and the dynamics of social power that shape the career structures that they follow.

While I am sympathetic to the analysis offered here, I did not find this an easy book to read - the argument was too laboured, the style at times pedantic. But that said, read alongside Kindred Nature it raises some great questions about what has actually changed in science since the nineteenth century -- why are women still working on the margins of powerful institutions of science.

Or put the other way, why is it that the institutions in which women choose to practice science are not seen as powerful? Is science significantly less gendered than it was 100 years ago? Maybe not!

Dr Barbara Nicholas teaches bioethics at Otago Medical School