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This course will examine history of science, both in the West and in India, from a women’s perspective.
Women have been conspicuous in the enterprise of science by their absence: a handful of notable exceptions prove the rule of their exclusion from the professional world of science.
The course will ask the question: Why? Why has the world of science been a world without women, for most of its history? What is the extent of progress that women have made over the last 100 years of so? And what structural obstacles still remain?
- The historical question: Through their work as care-givers and producers of food, fabric and other sources of sustenance, women have been knowledge-producers from the very beginning of history. Why, then, we dont find them within the ranks of astronomers, mathematicians, engineers and medical doctors whose work we acknowledge as milestones in science? What kinds of barriers patriarchy created against the recognition of women’s work and their inclusion in the circle of knowledge-producers and intellectuals?
- The contemporary situation: What is the situation today? Where does India stand with respect to the rest of the world when it comes to the women’s question in science? What kinds of structural barriers still prevent a full flowering of women’s potential?
- The philosophical question: Is there is a women’s way of knowing? Are men and women’s style of scholarship different, or are their research interests, priorities and ways of looking at problems interchangeable with those of men? This issue has been a subject of a lot of debate within the feminist philosophy of science and we will look at the central issues.
- Fox Keller, Evelyn., Reflections on Gender and Science, Yale University Press., 1985.
- Harding, Sandra., The Science Question in Feminism, Cornell University Press, 1989.
- Haraway, Donna. , Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science, Routdedge, 1989.
- Merchant, Carolyn., The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution, Harper and Row, 1980
- Schiebinger, Londa, Has Feminism changed Science? , Harvard University Press. 2001.
- Shiebinger, Londa, The Mind has no Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science., Harvard University Press, 1989.
- Woolf, Virgina, A Room of Ones Own. (a classic novel)
