A World Without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science - Softcover

Noble, David F.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0195084357 ISBN 13: 9780195084351

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1993

Synopsis

Why is it that Western science evolved as a thoroughly male-dominated enterprise? As philosopher Sandra Harding has noted, "women have been more systematically excluded from doing serious science than performing any other social activity except, perhaps, frontline warfare." In A World Without Women, David F. Noble provides the first full-scale investigation of the origins and implications of the masculine culture of Western science and technology, and in the process offers some surprising revelations.
Noble begins by showing that, contrary to the widely held notion that the culture of learning in the West has always excluded women--an assumption that rests largely upon the supposed legacy of ancient Greece--men did not thoroughly dominate intellectual life until the beginning of the second millennium of the Christian era. At this time science and the practices of higher learning became the exclusive province of the newly celibate Christian clergy, whose ascetic culture denied women a place in any scholarly enterprise. By the twelfth century, papal reform movements had all but swept away the material and ideological supports of future female participation in the world of learning; as never before, women were on the outside looking in. Noble further demonstrates that the clerical legacy of a world without women remained more or less intact through the Reformation, and permeated the emergant culture of science.
A World Without Women finally points to a dread of women at the core of modern scientific and technological enterprise, as these disciplines work to deprive one-half of humanity of its role in production (as seen in the Industrial Revolution's male appropriation of labor) and reproduction as well (the age-old quest for an artificial womb). It also makes plain the hypocrisy of a community that can honor a female scientist with a bronze bust, as England's Royal Society did for Mary Somerville in the mid-nineteenth century, yet deny her entry to the very meeting hall in which it enjoyed pride of place.
An important and often disturbing book, A World Without Women is essential reading for anyone concerned not only about the world of science, but about the world that science has made.

About this title

About the Author

About the Author:
David F. Noble is Professor of History at York University in Toronto. His previous books include America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism and Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation.

From Kirkus Reviews

Noble (History of Science and Technology/York Univ., Toronto; Forces of Production, 1984, etc.) challenges the commonly held assumption that modern science developed in opposition to an authoritarian Church, claiming instead that the celibate, male- dominated Catholic tradition provided both support and inspiration for the scientific tradition that would virtually supplant it--a provocative thesis backed by a painstakingly detailed history. Christianity originated as a potentially egalitarian religion, Noble says--but almost from the beginning, he explains, women were forced to struggle against political and cultural forces aimed at pushing them out of the spiritual mainstream and into the home. Though occasional early heretical movements supporting spiritual unity between the sexes--as well as the undeniable power of a wealthy, female, medieval elite--exerted some counterforce to the Church's generally anti-female development, the 12th century saw the virtual end of fully empowered female spiritual counselors and a great emphasis on male clerical celibacy. It was this male- dominated, misogynistic Church, then, that established the European colleges from which modern science sprang--colleges in which the pursuit of knowledge was considered a sacred act, scholars were treated as a kind of monk, celibacy was encouraged, and women were categorically excluded. These origins have led to today's curiously anomalous scientific priesthood in which, Noble says, women continue to be discriminated against, dismissed, and even supplanted as a species (through the development of artificial insemination, robot technology, and other forms of artificial creation)--an unnatural legacy in need of profound revision. Both Noble and Joseph Schwartz (The Creative Moment, reviewed below) describe the world of modern science as an insulated, priestly, and discriminatory culture--but their explanations of how and why it got that way (and particularly their antithetical depictions of Galileo and Newton) remain strikingly and intriguingly opposed. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1993
• ISBN 10: 0195084357
• ISBN 13: 9780195084351
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 352