Book Review: For Her Own Good

The relationship between the women's movement and science is a complex one. Many feminists are distrustful of science, viewing it as a bastion of male prerogative and a source of male power. Women who reject male domination over their personal lives frequently also reject what they see as male domination over their ways of understanding and relating to the world. The infatuation with science which characterizes modern technological society is viewed as a part of a cultural pattern which is essentially masculine in form--aggressive and unfeeling, which fragments and dissects our physical environment, disregarding its essential wholeness and balance. Because of this many women have been drawn to alternative modes of comprehending and interacting with the world which stand in contrast to mainstream scientific thought and practice: lay healing, organic nutrition, astrology, spirituality, and the like.

Fortunately for the women's movement, we have some important thinkers who have the intellectual depth and the political insight to help us tread through this most murky area. In their two pam. phlets on women and the medical professional published several years ago, Witches, Midwives and Nurses and Complaints and Disorders, Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English effectively exposed the ways that scientific "wisdom" was used to control women. In their new book, For Her Own Good (Anchor/Doubleday, N.Y., 1978), Ehrenreich (herself a scientist) and English probe further into the same territory, examining the content and effects of one hundred and fifty years of advice to women by "scientific experts" in the fields of medicine, child-rearing and homemaking. Their basic contention is that it is not science itself which has betrayed women, but rather individuals and institutions who have used the name of science to foster their own bias and to further their own advantage. In so doing, they have not only betrayed women, but they have betrayed science as well.

The basic historical premise of For Her Own Good is that the scientific and technological revolution which ushered in the industrial era was at once the liberator of woman and the agency of her further oppression. Ehrenreich and English describe the pre-industrial Old Order as a fixed, static society in which patriarchy "was reinforced at every level of social organization and belief" and therefore "was totally inescapable." Yet at the same time, this Old Order was gynocentric: the skills and work of women were indispensable for the survival of the family and the community. Although a woman of that time was "always subordinate, she [was] far from being a helpless dependent" as she was later to become, uncertain of her contribution and role. The industrial revolution shattered the foundations of this Old Order; impersonal economic forces came to replace the authority of tradition and the personal power of the male as head of the family. But as women were freed from the shackles of household productive labor and their fathers' and husbands' domination, they also found that their special skills and activities were expropriated by these very same market forces. Whereas women had once been the caretakers of life within the family and community, passing down from generation to generation the secrets of how to mend a broken leg or slaughter and dress a pig, they now found themselves relegated to a far more peripheral role. The household ceased to be a productive workshop central to the life of the community, but instead was "left with only the most personal biological activities eating, sex, sleeping, the care of small children. Furthermore, female nurturance came to stand in contrast to the more impersonal "masculine" qualities of the public world, where the "greatest dramas of the marketplace .. profits, losses, bankruptcies, investments, sales can be recounted quite adequately as a series

Page 4/What She Wants/November, 10-2

of numbers.

and the human costs make no difference on the 'bottom line'."

And so arose "the Woman Question": How were women to relate to this new social order? Ehrenreich and English maintain that there have been essentially two responses to that question, the rationalist solution, which would integrate women into society on an equal footing with men, and the romantic solution, which would preserve for women a more "natural" sphere, apart from the activities of men. The romantic solution has until recently been the more dominant one, and it is the purpose of this book to explain how and why scientific expertise was used in its behalf.

subordination

The fact the scientists in the last century and the first half of this century gave their support to female which is, of course, what the romantic solution entails should not surprise us. After all, we know that scientific "wisdom" of this same period supported theories of white supremacy .. and to some extent still does, if we consider the implications of Arthur Jensen's ideas about race and IQ. What is more surprising is the extent to which feminists of that period went along with these so-called scientific conclusions about women's nature. Ehrenreich and English point out that

the experts could not have triumphed had not so many women welcomed them, sought them out. and even organized to promote their inThe experts were "scientific" and

fluence.

•

it seemed that only science could vanquish ignorance and injustice. Had not science opposed the patriarchal authorities of the Old Order, and by implication, the entire web of constraints which had bound women for centuries? This was the basis of the "romance" between women and the new experts: science had been on the side of progress and freedom.

What happened, then, was that a naive and uncritical faith in science allowed male authority to expand its areas of control and domination. The

from Complaints and Disorders by Ehrenreich and English

problem with the "experts" that this book exposes is that, at least when it came to their statements about women, they were not scientific. They used the aura of science to secure their own professional advantage, and in so doing, they repeatedly violated the principles of scientific discovery and reason. The early doctors who drove out female healers in order to establish their control over "the medical business' knew very little about illness and health. Indeed, the interventions of midwives and other female practitioners were typically, according to this book, less harmful if not more therapeutic than the ministrations of the early doctors. But the men had something the women didn't: the trappings -if not the method of science. When physicians of the early 1900's warned young women to avoid all exertion during their menstrual periods lest they fall drastically ill, they had no scientific evidence which pointed to the necessity of such precautions. Female

frailty was a socially determined conclusion, not a scientifically investigated hypothesis-but once it was pronounced by a man in a white coat, it achieved a special kind of legitimacy. In an ear when the rapid development of technological know-how kept the general public in awe of the powers of science, scientists themselves became the new high priests, and their utterances took on the character of a new dogma.

The reign of the experts was long and profitable; it filled the bank accounts of marriage counsellors and therapists and gynecologists while it diminished the lives of countless numbers of women. But Ehrenreich and English argue that the emergence of the current women's movement has ushered in a new era:

The collapse of the authorities who had upheld sexual romanticism was sudden and catastrophic. Within less than a decade, the entire edifice of romantic theory with its foundations of biological metaphors, its pillars of Freudian dogma, its embellishments of gynecological wisdom tumbled down like an ornate Victorian mansion in the face of a hurricane. It had no grounds moral or scientific from which to resist the feminist assault.

Having so easily disposed of the experts though I question whether their remaining influence is really so minimal the authors come back to the original question: How are women to lead their lives in this society? They argue that the two poles of rationalism and romanticism have been shown to be inadequate. For while the romantics would deny women the opportunity to participate fully in any society, the rationalists have been unwilling to acknowledge that our present social system is in many ways antagonistic to the needs of women. Unlike many feminists who simply dismiss the romantic position, Ehrenreich and English recognize its appeal in its rejection of some of the basic aspects of life under capitalism. They point out that

the world opening up to women today is not exactly the halcyon vista of careers, options, relationships portrayed by our more positive-thinking feminist leaders. .. For every careerwoman, there are dozens of low-paid jobholders. For every divorce that frees a woman, there are others that throw women into poverty and loneliness. The alternative to the suffocation of domesticity turns out to be the old rationalist nightmare: a world dominated by the Market. socially atomized, bereft of "human" values.

The Woman Question, then, is ultimately the Human Question: How are we to organize a society so that the fullest range of human needs are met? The challenge put forth by these authors to the women's movement is "to frame a moral outlook which proceeds from women's needs and experien ces but which cannot be trivialized, sentimentalized. or domesticated." They call for a synthesis which goes beyond rationalism and romanticism by insisting that "the human values that women were assigned to preserve expand out of the confines of private life and become the organizing principles of society. This suggests a far more radical step than many feminists have been willing to consider, a step which would transform the most basic arrangements and assumptions of our social system. This does not require that we abandon science and technology, hut rather than we recognize these as necessary tools which can be brought into service for any sort of purpose: to dominate or destroy, or to liberate and humanize. Most importantly, we must be careful not to resurrect or create any new dogmas or ideas which are accepted solely on faith. Instead. we must use our critical ability of which scientific thought is the highest expression to evaluate and direct our goals and actions. This is the invaluable historical lesson which For Her Own Good provides us, and from which we can proceed.

Y-

..Beth Cagan