How can she call herself a feminist and dress like that?
Patricia Mather
Honorary Associate, Queensland Museum
Correspondents to a
recent AWISE Journal (Forum 7, p.9), under the heading "Vive la Difference",
refer to an implication that women's aspirations and attainments in science
are prejudiced by good manners. It is further implied that these are (a) the
exclusive prerogative of women; and (b) less conspicuous in those who are most
successful in a competitive world.
While the number of women in science is not impressive at any level, it does not follow that this is because their manners are good. There are more compelling explanations for the poor statistics than a negative correlation between good manners and success.
Although it is more important than ever that these persistent poor statistics should be reversed, it should not be done at the cost of women's right to be female and feminine. Women have as much right to be feminine as males have to be masculine. Their right and responsibility to aspire and to achieve in all those fields available to men, does not entail emulating the men. It is women's strength to be different from men.
What is it that has made a modern woman? How have they evolved, and what can be learnt from it? Forget survival of the fittest in the sense of the battle is to the strong and the race to the swift - that may be the Olympics - but it is not natural selection and evolution. Natural selection is about populations - and the way that genes for the inherited qualities that result in reproductive success exponentially increase. These inherited qualities include the ability to find better food and shelter, suffer less disease and produce more and healthier offspring, that in their turn find better food and shelter for their offspring.
The range of strategies for reproductive success reflects a trade-off between numbers of progeny and parental care. In many invertebrates, such as frogs, fish, and some reptiles, much energy is devoted to producing large numbers of offspring and little or no care is taken of them. Fertilisation usually is external, and selection acts on the gametes as well as on developing embryos and juveniles. Some are eaten, some get lost, some starve but the best do well and their genes will be passed on to their progeny and contribute to their increasing frequency in the population. At the other end of the scale are species that expend their energy in long term care of very few young. Birds lay few eggs and care for them and the hatchlings; mammals suckle and care for their young. These organisms usually are internally fertilised so there is no waste of reproductive material. There are powerful strategies for courtship for the same reason: so that the few eggs produced are not wasted on another species. Hormone regimes delay maturity and individuals are exposed to selective pressures before reproductive age. Only those with the necessary adaptations get to reproduce. Think of the battles in many wild mammal populations between males: only the dominant, the 'strongest', win the chance to mate. Then, after so much energy has been spent on so few progeny, it is not likely that evolution would see them wasted by a lack of care if that is what is needed. There is no adaptive value in careless parenthood - in fact there is heavy selection against it.
All sorts of combinations of these two opposite strategies exist, but the only one that concerns us here is the one at the end of the scale - those species that produce few embryos and care for them both in utero and after birth for long periods. All sorts of mammals (especially large ones - elephants, lions, horses, cows, whales) share this strategy with humans, but of them all, our young are born most helpless. The young of tetrapods and marine mammals can move independently, but Homo sapiens babies are helpless, born relatively early in their development, and they need care to bring them to adulthood.
Another big difference between us and most other large mammals is that females live past reproductive age. What an enormous load for a species to carry - all those apparently non-productive females to share the available resources. Only some whales and possibly elephants, long-lived animals, living in large kinship groups that teach their young, are like us in this regard. In these groups, genes for short-lived females who don't live past reproductive age were not selected, nor were genes for a longer reproductive life. Yet natural selection always is efficient.
So what is it about these aged whales and women that gave their communities an adaptive advantage? Non-reproductive whales continue lactating and feeding the young calves, allowing the young females to have more offspring: they are more fertile when not lactating. Post-reproductive women do not usually go on lactating, but they can and, in primitive societies, sometimes do. Historically, these older women cared for and taught the young. These 'tended' young were more successful than others, and the genes for long-lived post-reproductive females increased in frequency in populations. There they were, early hominids - females, erect on 2 limbs, babies held on one arm, and the other used to gather seeds and fruits, tend the baby, groom, hold onto things, manipulate objects with that very clever opposable thumb. While the male hunted and the grandmothers cared for and taught the infants, the young women had new babies, kept the cave clean and gathered food.
And here we are, most of us, 2,000,000 years later, still doing the same thing. Keeping the cave clean, having the children. Women still gather the food, but from the supermarket shelf, and with the other hand they push the trolley with the baby in it. Nevertheless its not a full time job - shopping; the grandmothers don't do much teaching either - the tricks children need to learn are often beyond even their mother's skills, let alone her mother's (and she probably lives in Perth). Now that we have child care and schools, refrigerators and vacuum cleaners, women have a lot of spare time. Meanwhile the men are out doing all that exciting hunting, although it is no longer the macho-masculine, heroic, mammoth-killing stuff it used to be. Women can do it too, yet many of us embrace it less than enthusiastically.
Late in the Year of the Older Person (1999) I was invited to a meeting of what were called elderly distinguished women scientists, convened by science historian Ann Moyal. A few were distinguished, others were or had been practicing scientists; there were also science teachers, science writers, and technicians.
Few of these women had held regular appointments with steady promotion such as a male academic would have experienced. Although many had achieved recognition in science, few had achieved high career status. As one young female science historian complained "Yet you all say 'how lucky you have been'!". Probably the same has happened in many other fields. Germaine Greer wrote a marvellous book, The Obstacle Race, about female artists; she concluded they were few because they had been busy looking after men - or the children, or the cave. I believe those women also would have said they were lucky, lucky to be able to practice their art in their spare time. Probably that has happened in my own field, biological science.
Biology, along with other sciences, is not a discipline for which there were many openings in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. From an early time universities had medical schools, as well as classical studies, philosophy, theological and law schools-but no science and especially no biology or natural science. From the 17th to 19th centuries, great exploring voyages increasingly took men to distant places, and strange and different plants and animals were brought back to Europe. People became aware of the enormous diversity of life and were curious about it. Great museums were established to house specimen collections: in London the Royal Society Museum (1681), then the British Museum (1753) when Sir Hans Sloane's collection of 80,000 rare and curious items was sold to the nation for 80,000 pounds.
Later, French, English and Dutch naval vessels surveying new lands carried naturalists, often but not always the ships surgeon, such as the great Thomas (Henry) Huxley, the first person to work toward the development of professional positions for scientists. There were the famous dedicated collecting expeditions of the 19th century. The specimens they brought back stimulated the curious and added to knowledge. Museums and universities began to employ professional biologists, but until the 20th century they were a mere handful. Those who advanced and practised natural history were largely amateurs -theologians, who may have had the time, or men of means like Joseph Banks and Erasmus Charles Darwin. Only men, apparently, shared the excitement of natural history; not even the occasional equivalent of a Jane Austen strays into the bibliographies of natural science.
In the 19th century this changed - women were often the painters, illustrators, collectors, and helpers. In Australia they included Elizabeth Gould, Ellis Rowan and Georgiana Molloy. They developed a profound knowledge of the biota, but they did not become scientists as did the men - the theologians and men of means, the amateurs. I believe these women also would have said they were lucky, lucky to have been doing something they were good at and enjoyed, and lucky to have served the patriarchy of science. But why, when so many of them must have had the time to devote to it (just as much time as theologians and men of means), did they not become the doers rather than the helpers?
Why do we think we were so lucky? I think it is because it is very difficult for a woman to have a career. It is difficult physically, but most of all it is difficult emotionally. There are all those years of selection to overcome. Being a woman endows you with a combination of hormones that emphasise reproduction - you are socially conditioned and biologically adapted to be courted, to mate, to conceive, give birth and give care - and why should you not?
In our society, the moment of truth that emphasises the difference between men and women is in the mid-twenties, when you have your foot on the first rung of the ladder. You've completed your graduate degree, you have pleased your supervisor, and you are ready for that exciting post-doctoral appointment in the laboratories of the leaders in the field. But in your mid 20s you would like to have children, so you do, and you lose your place in the queue. You become discouraged by the desperate struggle to spread your energies, seldom earning enough to pay the housekeepers, nannies, child care, schools and other professional helpers that are needed. Science may be even more difficult than other careers - there are relatively few positions for scientists, pay is relatively low, competition is keen, and it is difficult to compete when you take accouchement leave.
I think women themselves are the real reasons why our society developed as male-dominated and with a structure that appears to obstruct general female participation in activities usually pursued by men. Women created the patriarchy. We are not powerless, we have the vote, but we don't seem to influence the agendas that will effect our aspirations. Women must seek social and economic patterns that ensure effective female participation in the workplace - and this includes accommodating special emotional as well as physical needs that affect the welfare of children and families. The search for those patterns must begin with self-knowledge - knowing what the needs are; and making sure that men do too.
The extrasomatic selective pressures that caused the evolution of our innate physiological and behaviour systems, and intelligence, are now largely removed. Instead we are desperately dependent on that intelligence - to add to the inherited knowledge about ourselves and our environment, and to understand the new technologies that could wipe us off the planet if not used wisely. It is our history, both evolutionary and cultural, that has made us what we are - different from men - and we need to put that difference to work to complement the male contribution to knowledge and to the uses that can and should be made of it. Women must be in the workforce to add diversity to the way things are done, the questions that are asked, and the ways to set about answering them. We must base our social and cultural values, and our laws that enshrine those values, on an understanding of our own individual and biological needs and the needs of our communities.
So "Vive la Difference", and, especially, you can be a feminist and dress like that!
This is an edited version of a talk given to the Lyceum Club, Brisbane, at a meeting to celebrate the 82nd anniversary of its founding. WISENET invites readers to comment on the issues raised above.