Volume 37, Number 17 · November 8, 1990
A Lab of One's Own
By Clifford Geertz
Feminism and Science
edited by Nancy Tuana
Indiana University Press, 249 pp., $10.95 (paper)
The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science
by Londa Schiebinger
Harvard University Press, 355 pp., $29.50
Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science
by Donna Haraway
Routledge, 486 pp., $35.00
The intrusion, advance, spread, import, insinuation—word choice is important here, exposing world views, projecting fears—of feminist thought into just about every aspect of contemporary cultural life is by now entirely general. Literature, philosophy, sociology, history, economics, law, even linguistics and theology, are engulfed in fierce and multisided debates over the relevance of gender difference, gender interest, and gender prejudice to this or that issue or to the shape of the enterprise overall. But nowhere has the reaction to efforts to move such concerns to the center of attention stirred deeper disquiet than in that last redoubt of impersonal reason, natural science. Sexing science, or even scientists, makes everyone, even those most passionate to accomplish it, extremely nervous.
Review, 4323 words
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