The Science of Feminism: Hubbard and Weasel

Science, as it is understood by Western cultures, has a distant and authoritative connotation. The average non-scientist citizen is ready to accept the facts spewed forth by "reputable" scientists and scientific institutions, often neglecting the relevance of these facts to the community in which they are members. It is an intimidating task to question the relevance and fallibility of scientific "discovery", as the average non-scientist is alienated from the scientific community due to its exclusive and elitist "rules of membership" (Hubbard 119) and the lack of precedent of community involvement in scientific research. Both Ruth Hubbard and Lisa Weasel tackle this task of questioning science's democratic value from the vantage points of both scientists and feminists. These seemingly conflicting perspectives allow both these women to speak from a unique authority inside academia and provides an insight behind the motivation of each authors' plight to change the face of Western science today.

Ruth Hubbard, as a biologist and as a feminist, concerns herself with the ways that science has precluded marginalized knowledge, specifically the knowledge that women have gathered over centuries in "the home, garden, and sickroom", from its esoteric boundaries. She argues that in order to democratize the science that society accepts as a legitimate, fact-making enterprise "A wider range of people would have to have access to making scientific facts and to understanding and using them" (129). She also writes that the public would have to enlist itself in critiquing that which the scientific community does research on and commits as fact, as to ensure that is does not only benefit "…a small elite while oppressing large segments of the population" (129). Ruth Hubbard arrives at this point in her argument of how to democratize science by asking the question, who are the fact makers? As she establishes, in Western society the fact-makers, that is the scientists, have traditionally been white upper-middle to upper-class men who have subscribed to a certain way of thinking, talking, and expressing their findings in order to be recognized as legitimate fact-makers. As the NAS pamphlet, On Being a Scientist, points out that the credibility of one's research is based heavily on one's reputation among one's peers (Committee on the Conduct of Sciences 10). In order to retain a respectable reputation one has to play by the rules of the scientific community's standards. The very few individuals outside the white, male, upper-middle to upper class group that are allowed into the scientific community must still surrender to the fixated standards of conformity that the scientific community has set for itself. Therefore, Hubbard concludes that "science is made, by and large, by a self-perpetuating, self-reflexive group: by the chosen, for the chosen" (120).

Hubbard begins to deconstruct the exclusionary practice of science by arguing that although it may not be for the people, science, and more specifically fact-making, could not exist without "the people". Technicians, secretaries, the janitorial staff, etc.; these are the people, people from different classes and ethnicities, who enable scientific research to continue. However, since our society values mental labor over manual, they are not allotted credit for their integral role in the fact-making enterprise. (120-121) A step in the direction of a democratic science would be to acknowledge the countless contributions these people make to scientific research.

As aforementioned, Hubbard believes that in order to make a science for the people, the scientific community "must broaden the base of experience and knowledge on which scientists draw by making it possible for a wider range of people to do science, and to do it in different ways. We [the scientific community] must also provide kinds of understanding that are useful and useable by a broad range of people" (129). Scientists need to reevaluate the kind of knowledge that is deemed scientific. Hubbard specifically refers to the knowledge that women have gained from their specific vantage points. The knowledge that women have produced is effective and has been handed down from generation to generation, yet it is not legitimized as scientific because society degrades knowledge that is not gained from a professional setting. (128) One such example would be midwifery. Women for centuries have been delivering babies of other women with no intervention from men or the medical sciences. Today, child delivery is primarily a medicalized procedure performed in hospitals, often by men, who have ignored the ways which women have been delivering babies for generations (i.e. the squatting position vs. laying in a hospital bed). However, this also extends beyond just the knowledge of women; knowledge from different cultures (i.e. Chinese medicine) that have been effective and legitimized within its own culture for thousands of years is also ignored or not given any "scientific" validation. A democratized science would have to look at what has been working thus far for the people because of localized knowledge. Localized knowledge, in localized terminology, could then convey to the larger scientific community the problems that particular community had been dealt and how they, as a community, sought to respond.

Although Ruth Hubbard suggests the way science would have to change ideally in order to be democratic, she does not set into action a specific plan for change. Lisa Weasel, another feminist scientist, takes up where Hubbard left off prescribing the "science shop" as a potential cure to the ills of the undemocratic science of today. Weasel, like Hubbard, confronts the duality of her experience as a scientist and as a feminist. These two passions in her educational experience seemed wholly at odds. Hubbard writes that feminist scientist often feel like they lead "double-lives" (129), and this is exactly what Weasel describes as her experience thus far in her introduction. The discord between feminist theory and Western scientific practice that both Hubbard and Weasel feel as scientist/feminist is where their motivation for a democratic science stems. It is an attempt to blend the best of both worlds: the interdisciplinary goals of feminist theory and knowledge gaining power of science. Weasel argues that the blending of these two ideals can lead to a democratic science which when made manifest can be seen in the science shop model. Weasel writes:

The science shop model provides a structure through which voices outside of the dominant discourse of science can bring their own questions into the laboratory, and through which dominant scientific practices can be critically scrutinized and reformulated by outsiders in the interest of pursuing marginalized and socially relevant knowledges. (310)

Weasel's concept of how the science shop functions as a model of democratic science is similar to Hubbard's conception of a democratic science. Both require public scrutiny to make sure that the science being conducted is not for the elite few, but socially relevant to a marginalized population. Hubbard contends that scientific knowledge should be opened up to include other marginalized knowledges, whereas the science shop would call for the questions and areas of research to be dictated by the marginalized community.

Lisa Weasel argues that the science shop, the socially based scientific research center that conducts research for and by specific communities, is not only a socially relevant form of science but also a forum for new questions and "innovative methodologies" (311). It can serve as an agent in blurring "the false dichotomy separating observer and object of study…and can help disseminate scientific literacy within an applied context" (311). With the people in the community serving as an agent in the scientific research that concerns their own community, perhaps Hubbard's agenda can be realized through the science shops as well. With the elite tower of scientific fact-makers tumbling to the ground to make way for the new science shops, there is room for undiagnosed localized knowledges to gain legitimacy. If the community is given power to pose research questions that are akin to their needs as a community and are given agency in these research projects, then they could have to power to insist upon their own knowledges and practices to be an object of such research; thereby legitimizing their marginalized knowledge as scientific, valid, etc. However, it is important to note that if the science shop is to be an effective answer to the democratic science question, the science shop community base must be a primarily homogenous group, with a similar ethnic make-up and social status, as to guard against further marginalization within small community groups.

Works Cited:

Committee on the Conduct of Sciences, National Academy of Sciences, On Being a Scientist (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1995).

Hubbard, Ruth, "Science, Facts, and Feminism," from Feminism and Science, ed. Nancy Tuana (Indiana University Press, 1989), 119-131

Weasel, Lisa H., "Laboratories Without Walls: The Science Shop as a Model for Feminist Community Science in Action", in Feminist Science Studies: The Next Generation, ed. Maralee Mayberry, Banu Subramaniam, and Lisa H. Weasel (Routledge, 2001), 305-320