06.08.97

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Healing our World

June 8th, 1997

HAVE YOU COME A LONG WAY, BABY?
By Jackie Giuliano


We have forgotten who we are. We have sought only our own security We have exploited simply for our own ends We have distorted our knowledge We have abused our power.
-- United Nations Environmental Sabbath Program

The ecological crisis is related to the systems of hatred of all that is natural and female by the white, male, Western formulators of philosophy, technology, and death inventions.

-- Ynestra King

These powerful, radical words suggest something that must be considered. Have women really come so far in the way our culture perceives them? Is involving more women and people of color in the workforce enough to insure equality? Or have the very ways we have been taught to think and learn been affected by the lack of participation of these marginalized people? Looking at how science has evolved without the full representation of women is revealing.

King proposes that the systematic denigration of so many people in the world including working-class people, people of color, women, and animals is the result of the basic dualism that lies at the root of Western culture. Is this too extreme a view? History can be interpreted to support this view. Our separation from nature is clear and easily observable. The dualism between nature and culture is the foundation of the Western world. It is not too great a leap to suggest that this dualism has as its model the domination of men over women and other oppressed peoples.

Modern science represents itself as universal, value-free and able to arrive at objective conclusions about life. Yet how can any endeavor be free of judgement and completely objective? Studies have shown that a researcher will nearly always observe data and draw conclusions that fit within the boundaries of her or his expectations. After all, humans are thinking, feeling, subjective beings.

Vandana Shiva, a theoretical physicist and feminist scholar from India, observes that modern science claims to be a liberating force for humanity as a whole. Yet worldwide experiences do not support this claim. Science and technology are used throughout the globe as a political and economic force to bring "third-world" countries up to North American "standards." In these developing countries, in order to support this new set of values brought about by these "improvements," the separation from the natural world must, sadly, increase. Healthy, productive land is cleared for cattle ranches, the consumption of meat increases, and the production of local food ceases as production efforts are deflected to exportable goods.

Cancers that have been unknown until now in the lesser-developed countries are on the rise as people's lifestyles shift towards high animal protein diets and substance abuse (caffeine and tobacco). The increase in stress that accompanies a more consumer-oriented lifestyle, the quest for the "American Dream," results in higher blood pressure and an increase in circulatory diseases such as heart attacks and strokes which, together, kill 15.3 million people a year. In a report released on May 2, 1997, the World Health Organization (WHO) confirms that shifts in the lifestyles of the industrialized world, made possible by scientific and technological advances, have dramatically impacted the health of the world. Diseases of affluence are now rampant in developing countries, as they are in the West, and WHO estimates that cancers from these diseases will rise a remarkable 40% by the year 2020.

Scholar Sandra Harding wonders if science as practiced today is the liberator or the subjugator, or is it a "Western, male-oriented and patriarchal projection that necessarily entailed the subjugation of both nature and women?" These are important questions to ask and they must be considered if learning about our world, in or out of the classroom, is to be conducted in a connected and inclusive manner.

Have Women Been Excluded?

Have the fields of science been dominated by men and has the male or patriarchal mindset influenced our culture and our connection to the natural world? The answer is clearly "yes." The U.S. National Science Foundation's collection of data on the presence of women in science says so much, just in the title. The volume is called "Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering." Women continued to be classified as "other" along with the numerous disenfranchised groups of our society.

The numbers below (from the 1994 report) are very revealing.

  • Males are three times more likely to pursue a career in science, math, or engineering than females.

  • Although women constitute 51.2% of the population and about 46% of the workforce in all occupations, only 22% are in science and engineering occupations.

  • Women earned 29% of the science and engineering doctorates, yet the majority were in positions that have been traditionally accepted as "appropriate" for women. Fifty nine percent were awarded in psychology, 38% in biological sciences, 35% in social sciences, 19% in mathematics, and 9% in engineering.

Why is this so? The report has clues:

  • Higher percentages of females than males reported having been advised not to take senior mathematics in high school.

  • Faculty who teach undergraduates are overwhelmingly male in civil, mechanical, and electrical engineering, and sociology, geology, and physics. Female students find very few role models.

  • Math and science teachers treat girls and boys differently in the classroom. Boys get more eye contact and attention from teachers than girls. When boys give the wrong answers, teachers challenge them to find the correct one. Girls get sympathy. When there are lab experiments, boys tend to operate the equipment and girls take data and write reports.

  • Loss of self-confidence in girls seems to begin around the 7th grade and continue through high school. Although males and females performed comparably in science and math courses, females tended to underestimate their abilities. This lack of confidence accelerates and females begin taking fewer and fewer math and science courses.

It is evident that women have not had a full role either in participating in the practice of science or, as history shows, in the development of its methods and ideologies. The worldview that provides the basis for science as it is practiced today is a male one. How science might have evolved if there had been full female participation is unknown. However, it is vital to realize that science, and our view of the natural world, has been formed with a male perspective and is based on the male experience.

Whether or not the dominance of a male perspective in science has been a negative influence is more difficult to "prove," at least by traditional, patriarchal methodologies. Certain factors do suggest that the disconnected worldview may have come from the patriarchal influence.

Can We Really Be "Objective"

Speculation abounds about the affect that the lack of participation of women in the development and practice of science has had. Since so many of our behaviors have evolved in an atmosphere of cultural influences, it is difficult to say what is really male and what is really female. This is an important context to understand, since our subjugation of nature and the parallel to the treatment of women can illuminate the path toward healing. The challenge may be to demonstrate that the way we treat nature and women are really, as feminist scholars Alison Jaggar and Paula Rothenberg have said, acts of systematic subordination and not just the results of coincidental misfortune.

If one assumes that the experiences of women are different from the experiences of men and that the major systems of thought in our culture are based on men's experiences, then the fundamental assumptions that have been made about how the world works should be challenged.

In general, modern culture assumes that males possess natural intelligence, are logical, objective, active, independent, forceful, and courageous. Women have been assumed to be emotionally responsive, obedient, kind, dependent, timid, self-sacrificing, and incapable of abstract thought.

These assumptions are so ingrained in culture that it is difficult for children and their parents to escape the subtle and insidious indoctrination from film, literature, television, advertising, and the very language we use every day.

Modern science was founded those traits assumed to be male. It claims to be dispassionate and objective. While those who practice this form of science see these traits as admirable, others feel that objectification is a root cause of our disconnection from the natural world and each other.

Shiva classifies modern science as "fragmented" and "reductionist" because it allows us to know nature only by excluding other "knowers and other ways of knowing" and it removes nature's capacity for creative regeneration and renewal by speaking of it only in terms of fragmented and inert matter. The very terminology we use to speak of our "use" of the natural world is revealing. We enter "virgin territory" and "rape" the land.

Francis Bacon, an instrumental leader in the Scientific Revolution, said that nature had to be "hounded in her wanderings" and "bound into service" and made a "slave." She was to be "put in constraint" and it was the job of the scientist to "torture nature's secrets from her."

This field of study is enormous, but the presentation of some key principles will help provide clues as to how environmental education must be adjusted to take these biases into account. No one idea is probably the cause for the oppression of either women or nature, but provocative insights can come from an examination of these thoughts. Below are some of these key principles.

Women are often identified with nature. Feminists who believe that the fundamental cause of oppression is the biologically based domination of women by men feel that men have sought to enlist women and nature in the service of, as Ynestra King says, "male projects designed to make men safe from feared nature and mortality."

The "women's spirituality" movement embraces the concept of the Earth as a living system where cooperation was a stronger force in evolution than competition. This is a very different view of the world than that offered by mainstream "modern" biology. Competition for resources is usually the main theme in discussions of the evolution of life. Virtually all species are discussed in terms of the "survival of the fittest." Our language is filled with references to this belief, such as "only the strong survive" and "it's a dog-eat-dog world." Nature films on the Public Broadcasting Service, a very popular form of entertainment in the 1990's, invariably will show animals fighting, eating each other, or suffering from lack of resources. Rarely do they show the cooperation and compassion that takes place in the system. Here are some examples:

  • The many forms of plants whose seeds cannot germinate unless they first pass through the digestive tract of an animal who eats them.

  • The powerful social forces at work in an elephant herd, including the way that the young are cared for and the concern for the individual. Entire herds of elephants will slow down for an ailing youngster and they will all grieve for a dead comrade.

  • The anguished cry of a female harp seal that watches as her baby is clubbed by a fur hunter with a spiked stick and skinned alive on the ice flows of the Arctic. The mother will cry over the skinned carcass for hours. Ecological feminism calls for a dynamic theory of the person, both for males and females, where the self is a larger entity that includes the non-human and natural world. If one defines one's self as being part of the non-human world as well as the human one, then the thought of harming an ecosystem or a river or even a tree would be as unthinkable as cutting off one's own limb. Women have been at the forefront of virtually every political and social movement to reclaim the Earth. Women will often feel the effects of degradation of the Earth before men. This connection is seen most dramatically in the lesser-developed countries, but the phenomenon exists worldwide.

  • Women do almost all of the world's domestic work and child care, mostly without pay.

  • Women do more than half the work associated with growing food, gathering fuelwood, and hauling water.

  • Women provide more health care with little or no pay than all the world's organized health services combined (they also do 60% of the world's work in general, yet own only 10% of the world's property and earn 1% of the world's income).

The worldwide economic value of women's domestic work is estimated at $4 trillion annually, an amount which is not figured into any country's gross national product. Women are most likely to come into contact with toxins in the form of pesticides and toxic wastes than men. Even in Southern California, I have witnessed this spectacle unfold. In Beverly Hills and Sherman Oaks, two very affluent areas, a veritable "army" of nannies, usually always Hispanic females, take the rich, white babies out for walks in their strollers. At the same time, hundreds of gardeners, usually always Hispanic (or sometimes Asian) males, are gardening using gasoline-powered leaf-blowers, cutting lawns with gas-powered lawn mowers, and spraying pesticides on lawns. These women, and the children in their care, are exposed to this onslaught of toxic pollution every day.

We must stop allowing women's voice to go unheard. We must all accept the responsibility to invite women to tell of their experience in the world. We all have to learn of the female experience and create a new experience that includes women. Inclusive programs must be developed that invite women to participate and that heal the breach that has been created. If science continues to speak in terms of "mankind's" quest for dispassionate, objective views of the universe that remove all sensory expression, then the world will continue to appear as a separate, isolated place. Neither men nor women will feel wholly included in the discussion or the analysis. We must insist that all fields include women in discussions from which they have been excluded for far too long.

And we must stop accepting the propaganda that suggests that "you have come a long way, baby."

RESOURCES

1. Check out the work of Vandana Shiva in her new book, Biopiracy.

2. For an ecofeminism bibliography, visit http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~jdingler/ecofem.html

3. Check out the ecofeminism web site at http://envirolink.org/orgs/eve/

4. Read definitions of ecofeminism at http://envirolink.org/elib/enviroethics/ecofemindex.html

5. You can see the statistics for yourself in the National Science Foundation document called Women, Minorities, and Persons With Disabilities in Science and Engineering at http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf96311/start.htm

6. The World Health Organization can be found at http://www.who.ch/

7. Visit a women's bookstore in your town. You will find amazing resources.

8. For a comprehensive list of links to "women and science" sites, visit http://www.ai.mit.edu/people/ellens/Gender/wom_and_min.html

9. For a good list of feminist and woman's resources, check out http://www.ocs.mq.edu.au/~korman/feminism/general.html

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Copyright (c) 1998, Jackie A. Giuliano Ph.D.

jackie@deepteaching.com