Feminist Theory and Historical Practice: Rereading Elizabeth Blackwell
Author(s)
Morantz-Sanchez, Regina
Abstract
Drawing on the insights of contemporary feminist and critical theory, submerged and marginalized alternatives to dominant modes of scientific discourse are explored, focusing on how past medical science became a gendered enterprise. A critical rereading of the writings of Elizabeth Blackwell, a significant nineteenth-century physician, demonstrates that Blackwell, faced with rapidly changing definitions of science in medicine, remained critical of objectivity as the preferred form of knowing, and suspicious of the laboratory medicine that promoted it. In assessing the value of social-constructivist theories of science to the history of medicine, highlighted are the ways in which feminist theorists have turned their attention to gender as a category of analysis in scientific thinking. This new approach to modern science questions its identification with “male” objectivity, reason, and mind, set in opposition to “female” subjectivity, feeling, and nature.
