A World Without Women
The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
In this groundbreaking work of history, David Noble examines the origins and implications of the masculine culture of Western science and technology. He begins by asking why women have figure so little in the development of science, and then proceeds—in a fascinating and radical analysis—to trace their absence to a deep-rooted legacy of the male-dominated Western religious community. He shows how over the last thousand years science and the practice and institutions of higher learning were dominated by Christian clerics, whose ascetic culture from the late medieval period militated against the inclusion of women in scientific enterprise. He further demonstrates how the attitudes that took hold then remained more or less intact through the Reformation, and still subtly permeate out thinking despite the secularization of learning.
Noble also describes how during the first millennium and after, women at times gained amazingly broad intellectual freedom and participated both in clerical activities and in scholarly pursuits. But, as Noble shows, these episodic forays occurred only in the wake of anticlerical movements within the church and without.
He suggest finally an impulse toward “defeminization” at the core of the modern scientific and technological enterprise as it work to wrest from one-half of humanity its part in production (the Industrial Revolution’s male appropriation of labor) and reproduction (the millennium-old quest for the artificial womb).
An important book that profoundly examine how the culture of Western Science came to be a world without women.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Isaac Newton identified women with the devil. The male-dominated culture of Western science, writes Noble, has systematically excluded women from doing serious research, and even today female scientists face discrimination and marginalization. In a pioneering study, Noble, who teaches the history of science at York University in Toronto, argues that Western science took shape within the clerical, ascetic culture of the medieval Latin Church, in revolt against the very different situation for women that existed during the first millennium, when an androgynous Christian ideal was taken seriously and aristocratic women gained significant control over property. Noble overstates his case in maintaining that science is in essence a religious calling, more a continuation of than a departure from the Christian tradition. Nevertheless, his exciting history draws vital links between the origins of the scientific enterprise, the way basic research is conducted, the tenor of modern scientific thought and the longstanding effort to subdue the feminine in society and nature.
