In Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science, Londa Schiebinger explores “how gender – both the real relations between the sexes and ideological renderings of those relations – shaped European science in the eighteenth century, and natural history in particular. Crucial to [her] story is that, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans who described nature were almost exclusively male. Female naturalists were a rare breed, female taxonomists even rarer” (pg. 2). Schiebinger continues, “Gender was to become one potent principle organizing eighteenth-century revolutions in views of nature, a matter of consequence in an age that looked to nature as the guiding light for social reform” (pg. 4). Beyond gender, Schiebinger takes into account the roles of race and class and how Enlightenment scientists mirrored their own societies in their descriptions of the natural world.
Examining Linnaeus’ taxonomy of plants, Schiebinger writes, “Linnaeus simply brought traditional notions of gender hierarchy whole cloth into science. He read nature through the lens of social relations in such a way that the new language of botany incorporated fundamental aspects of the social world as much as those of the natural world” (pg. 17). Further, “differences between the two sexes were reflections of a set of dualistic principles which penetrated the cosmos as well as the bodies of men and women” (pg. 38). Examining the classification of mammalia, Schiebinger writes, “Linnaeus created his term Mammalia in response to the question of humans’ place in nature. In his quest to find an appropriate term for (what we would call) a taxon uniting humans and beasts, Linnaeus made the breast – and specifically the fully developed female breast – the icon of the highest class of animals” (pg. 53). Schiebinger continues, “Early accounts of anthropoid apes pouring into Europe in this period often told more about European customs than about the natural habits of apes” (pg. 76). She writes, “By and large, female sexual organs were studied in order to highlight the animal side of human life. In some instances woman’s sexual organs were said to link her directly to apes” (pg. 89). In terms of race, Schiebinger writes, “For European anatomists, blacks were exotic. But, as we shall see, to men of the academy, European women were in many ways just as exotic” (pg. 116). Much of their taxonomic studies took into account aesthetics, classifying race based on ideas of beauty. Schiebinger writes, “The consolidation of the (predominately male) medical profession coincided with a scientific revolution in definitions of sex and the development of a new image of women as essentially nonscientific. It also coincided with the revolution in definitions of race and the attempt to ground scientifically the exclusion of men of color from science” (pg. 142). Schiebinger further writes, “Scientific racism and scientific sexism both taught that proper social relations between the races and the sexes existed in nature. Many theorists failed to see, however, that their notions of racial and sexual relations rested on contradictory visions of nature” (pg. 146). Additionally, “Racial science interrogated males and male physiology, while sexual science scrutinized European subjects” (pg. 146). In this way, “Naturalists did not draw their research priorities and conclusions from a quiet contemplation of nature, but from political currents of their times” (pg. 183). ( )