Abstract
Western feminist philosophies of science have pursued two critical directions in reevaluating the familiar contrast of modern with traditional societies. They have argued that women have made important contributions to pre-modern empirical knowledge of nature and social relations, and they have identified how modern ideals of scientific rationality, objectivity, and good method are shaped by a familiar stereotype of manliness. Yet there is a third strategy which is worth pursuing: interrogating the way gender stereotypes constitute the very project of the contrast between modernity and tradition.
In this third project, one can see that modern sciences and technologies become the ‘motor’ for transporting men from loyalties to their traditional social worlds into commitments to modernity and its projects, and for extracting economic and political systems from the (now labeled) private sphere of the household into the public sphere. Men and social institutions must be freed from women’s worlds. Yet from the standpoint of women’s experiences of modernity one can see that men’s modern worlds are assigned little or no responsibility for the flourishing of women’s supposedly traditional worlds. Thus modern sciences and technologies function as the one-way-only time-travel machines for externalizing men from women’s household responsibilities and excluding women from full participation in the direction and management of economic and political projects. The discussion here concludes with one suggestion – admittedly, a provocation – for research projects which can produce resources for blocking modernity’s commitments to male- and Western-supremacy. Such projects should start out conceptualizing their research designs – all of them – from the lives of women in households. Unreasonable as this may sound, it can be well-supported.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
This essay was written in 2006. It draws on themes in Sciences From Below: Feminisms, Postcolonialities and Modernities. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), especially in Chaps. 8 and 9.
For helpful comments on earlier drafts I thank Heidi Grasswick, Francoise Lionnet and Sharon Traweek, and audiences at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (April 2007) and the Western Political Science Association (March 2007).
- 2.
For the latter see, for example Hessen (1970) on the fit of Newtonian projects with the economic needs of the emerging modern European society, Forman (1987) on how U.S. physics was shaped by national security needs in the World War II era, and Mirowski (2005) on the fit between three generations of U.S. philosophy of science (Dewey, Reichenbach, and Kitcher) and dominant political/economic projects of the U.S. in global politics.
- 3.
- 4.
Their work predated all but the very earliest stirrings of feminist criticisms of modernization theory.
- 5.
Of course there have been and still are traditional societies where women have little power or status. But what is surprising to Westerners is that in both the pre-modern past of Western societies and in so many other societies today this is not the case.
- 6.
A confession: my Father worked briefly in the 1920s for one of the early founders of time-budget studies (Frank Gilbreth). I still have amusing memories from several decades later of my Mother’s frustration upon returning home to discover that he had once again rearranged the kitchen appliances and furniture in order to reduce by a few seconds or so the time she spent getting from the refrigerator to the stove or the table to the sink.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Of course we should recollect that the original modernization theorists were the great founders of sociology in the Nineteenth Century, before Freud’s theories had appeared. Moreover, the post-World War II era when modernization theory was resurrected and re-energized was an era in which formal colonial rule was beginning to end and in which the second women’s movement was about to gather steam in Europe and the U.S. The economic, political, social, and psychic pre-conditions for the rise of postcolonial and feminist criticisms of Western and male-supremacist ideals of social progress were already in place as women and soon-to-be ex-colonials began to imagine futures for themselves which had been virtually inconceivable in preceding decades.
- 10.
See, for example, the way in which an influential science studies scholar who is critical of modernity stumbles around in such a project: Latour (1993).
- 11.
This is the starting point of standpoint theory. See below.
- 12.
- 13.
Heidi Hartmann (1981) decades ago demonstrated that the time women spend in household work increases by about 9 hours per week if the household includes an adult (i.e., over 14) male, and that this is so regardless of whether the woman works outside the household, there are children in the household, or the man contributes to taking on household responsibilities. I know of no recent data which reveals improvement in such conditions.
- 14.
Nancy Folbre’s (2001) recent study argues that contemporary data shows that whomsoever has such household responsibilities will be handicapped in the public economy.
- 15.
In the past, labor was represented as locationally fixed or stable and industries traveled to take advantage of it. Hence the ‘runaway’ industries and the phenomenon of out-sourcing manufacturing parts and services. This kind of labor relation certainly continues today. Yet it is also the case that labor now travels to where the work is (Afshar and Barrientos 1999; Peterson 2003; Prugl 1999; Sassen 1998; Sparr 1994; Visvanathan et al. 1997).
- 16.
I follow the practice of feminists critically examining the lot of women in new forms of the global political economy to prefer the term ‘global restructuring’ to the more euphimistic ‘globalization.’ See the preceding note.
- 17.
I do not mean to suggest that the situations and resources available to immigrant low-paid workers are the same or equally desirable as are those available to professional women, but only that patterns of global restructuring are to be found in the organization of households and family relations no less than in economic, political, and public social relations.
- 18.
What about men? Good question. These global political economy processes creating today’s ‘new women’ also creating ‘new men.’ There have been at least some attempts to identify and understand diverse forms of transformations in masculinities, at least some of which are highly resistant to conventional male supremacist ideals (Connell 1995; Connell et al. 2005). I cannot here pursue this topic beyond noting that the field of masculinity studies needs to be as fully as possible integrated into feminist studies.
References
Afshar, Haleh, and Stephanie Barrientos (eds.). 1999. Women, globalization, and fragmentation in the developing world. New York: St. Martin’s Press.
Amin, Samir. 1998. Capitalism in the age of globalization. New York: Zed Books.
Appleton, Helen, et al. 1995. Claiming and using indigenous knowledge. In Missing links, ed. Gender Working Group, 55–82. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre.
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk society: Towards a new modernity. London: Sage Publishing Co.
Beck, Ulrich. 1997. The reinvention of politics: Rethinking modernity in the global social order. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Biagioli, Mario (ed.). 1999. The science studies reader. New York: Routledge.
Bordo, Susan. 1987. The flight to objectivity. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Braidotti, Rosi, et al. 1994. Women, the environment, and sustainable development. Atlantic Highlands: Zed.
Caulfield, Mina Davis. 1974. Imperialism, the family, and cultures of resistance. Socialist Review 4(2): 67–86.
Chodorow, Nancy. 1978. The reproduction of mothering. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Connell, R.W. 1995. Masculinities. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Connell, Robert, Ingeborg Breines, and Ingrid Eide (eds.). 2005. Male roles, masculinities, and violence. Paris: UNESCO.
Correll, Shelly J., Stephen Benard, and In Paik. 2007. Getting a job: Is there a motherhood penalty? The American Journal of Sociology 112: 1297–1338.
Cowan, Ruth Schwartz. 1983. More work for mother. New York: Basic Books.
Crittenden, Ann. 2001. The price of motherhood. New York: Basic Books.
Davis, Angela. 1971. The black woman’s role in the community of slaves. Black Scholar 2: 1–14.
Dinnerstein, Dorothy. 1976. The mermaid and the minotaur. New York: Harper and Row.
Eisenstadt, S.N. 2000. Multiple modernities. Daedalus 129(1): 1–30.
Felski, R. 1995. The gender of modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Flax, Jane. 1990. Thinking fragments: psychoanalysis, feminism and postmodernism in the contemporary west. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Folbre, Nancy. 2001. The invisible heart: Economics and family values. New York: New Press.
Forman, Paul. 1987. Behind quantum electronics: National security as bases for physical research in the U.S., 1940–1960. Historical Studies in Physical and Biological Sciences 18: 149–229.
Frank, Andre Gunther. 1969. Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Furtado, Celso. 1970. Development of Latin America: a survey from colonial times to the Cuban revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1994. Living in a post-traditional society. In Reflexive modernization, ed. Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hackett Edward, J., et al. 2008. The handbook of science and technology studies, 3rd ed. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspectives. In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, ed. Donna Haraway, 183–202. New York: Routledge.
Harding, Sandra. 1998. Is science multicultural? Postcolonialisms, feminisms, and epistemologies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Harding, Sandra (ed.). 2003. The feminist standpoint theory reader: Intellectual and political controversies. New York: Routledge.
Harding, Sandra. 2006. Science and social inequality: Feminist and postcolonial perspectives. Edwardsville: University of Illinois Press.
Harding, Sandra. 2008. Sciences from below: Feminisms, postcolonialities, and modernities. Durham: Duke University Press.
Hartmann, Heidi. 1981. The family as the locus of gender, class, and political struggle: The example of housework. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 8(4): 366–394.
Hartsock, Nancy. 2003 (1983). The Feminist Standpoint. In Discovering reality, 2nd ed, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Hessen, Paul. 1970. The economic roots of Newton’s principia. New York: Howard Fertig.
Jaggar, Alison. 1989. Love and knowledge: Emotion in feminist epistemology. In Gender, body, knowledge: Feminist reconstructions of being and knowing, ed. Alison Jaggar and Susan Bordo. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Jardine, Alice. 1985. Gynesis: Configurations of woman and modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1984. Reflections on gender and science. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Kelly Gadol, Joan. 1976. The social relation of the sexes: Methodological implications of women’s history. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 1(4): 810–823.
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We have never been modern (trans: Catherine Porter). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Lloyd, Genevieve. 1984. The man of reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in western philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
MacKinnon, Catherine. 1982. Feminism, marxism, method, and the state: An agenda for theory. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7(3): 515–544.
Martin, Emily. 1987. The woman in the body. Boston: Beacon.
Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchy and accumulation on a world scale: Women in the international division of labor. Atlantic Highlands: Zed.
Mirowski, Philip. 2005. How positivism made a pact with the postwar social sciences in the United States. In The politics of method in the human sciences: Positivism and its epistemological others, ed. George Steinmetz, 142–172. Durham: Duke University Press.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism without borders: Decolonizing theory, practicing solidarity. Durham: Duke University Press.
Murata, Junichi. 2003. Creativity of technology and the modernization process of Japan. In Science and other cultures: Issues in philosophies of science and technology, ed. Robert Figueroa and Sandra Harding. New York: Routledge.
Narayan, Uma. 1997. Dislocating cultures: Identities, traditions, and third world feminism. New York: Routledge.
Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons. 2001. Re-thinking science: Knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. (Cambridge: Polity Press)
Peterson, V.Spike. 2003. A critical rewriting of global political economy: Integrating reproductive, productive, and virtual economies. London: Routledge.
Prakash, Gyan. 1999. Another reason: Science and the imagination of modern India. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Prugl, Elisabeth. 1999. The global construction of gender: Home-based work in the political economy of the 20th century. New York: Columbia University Press.
Rose, Hilary. 1983. Hand, brain and heart: A feminist epistemology for the natural sciences. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 9(1): 73–90.
Rouse, Joe. 1987. Knowledge and power: Toward a political philosophy of science. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Rouse, Joe. 2002. How scientific practices matter: Reclaiming philosophical naturalism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Sardar, Ziauddin. 1997. Islamic science: The contemporary debate. In Encyclopedia of the history of science, technology, and medicine in non-western cultures, ed. Helaine Selin, 455–458. Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Sassen, Saskia. 1998. Globalization and its discontents. New York: The New Press.
Scott, Hilda. 1974. Does socialism liberate women? Boston: Beacon.
Scott, Catherine V. 1995. Gender and development: Rethinking modernization and dependency theory. Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers.
Shiva, Vandana. 1989. Staying alive: Women, ecology and development. London: Zed.
Shiva, Vandana. 1993. Monocultures of the mind: Perspectives on biodiversity and biotechnology. New York/Penang: Zed Books and Third World Network.
Shiva, Vandana. 1994. Close to home: Women reconnect ecology, health, and development worldwide. Philadelphia: New Society.
Smith, Dorothy. 1987. The everyday world as problematic: A sociology for women. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Smith, D. 2005. Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield.
Sparr, Pamela (ed.). 1994. Mortgaging women’s lives: Feminist critiques of structural adjustment. London: Zed.
Spivak, Gayatri. 1988. Can the subaltern speak. In Marxism and the interpretation of culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, 271–313. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Stepan Nancy, Leys. 1986. Race and gender: The role of analogy in science. Isis 77: 261–277.
Third World Network. 1988. Modern science in crisis: A third world response. Penang: Third World Network.
Visvanathan, Nalini et al. (eds.). 1997. The women, gender, and development reader. London: Zed Books.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The modern world system, 1st ed. New York: Academic.
Watford, Tara. 2007. Looking Beyond Equal Representation: Perspectives of Gender Equity from the New Majority in Doctoral Education, Ph.D. Thesis, University of California at Los Angeles.
Yoon, Soon-Young. 1995. Looking at health through women’s eyes. In Missing links, ed. Gender Working Group, 129–158. Ottawa: International Development Research Centre.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Harding, S. (2011). Interrogating the Modernity vs. Tradition Contrast: Whose Science and Technology for Whose Social Progress?. In: Grasswick, H. (eds) Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6835-5_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-6835-5_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-1-4020-6834-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-4020-6835-5
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)