Feminism and the History of Science

In recent decades, feminism has resurfaced as a considerable and widespread political movement throughout the world, devoted to obtaining equal rights and status for women in the economic and political spheres. Put more generally, feminism seeks a world where the biological, sexual difference between female and male does not entail an economic, social and political inequality between the lives of the two genders, feminine and masculine. In theoretical, scholarly terms, the focus of feminism is upon the term gender, the socially and culturally-produced difference of identities attributed to biologically female and male persons. Around these different gender identities is organised the phenomenon known as patriarchy, the system which embodies and assures the inequitable distribution of power between women and men, to the continuing advantage of men. Patriarchy, then, is the structure of social relations which ensures that men tend to have better access to career, salary, status and power in any given set of economic, social and political circumstances. It further ensures that in situations usually thought of as ‘private’ or ‘personal’, men also tend to occupy the most powerful position. The point of concentrating upon gender is therefore to discover, understand, criticise and overthrow the means by which feminine and masculine identities are made; are socially-constructed artefacts which support and produce a fundamental, systematic and arguably universal condition of inequality which holds across boundaries of class, culture and race.