Christa Kuljian is the author of the new book Our Science, Ourselves: How Gender, Race, and Social Movements Shaped the Study of Science. Her other books include Darwin's Hunch. She lives in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Q: What inspired you to write Our Science, Ourselves, and how did you choose the scientists you focused on in the book?
A: I grew up in the Boston area in the 1970s, and in high school, I had a copy of the revolutionary guide to women’s health, Our Bodies, Ourselves, which was published by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective.
In the early 1980s, I studied the history of science at Harvard and took a course with Ruth Hubbard called Bio 109: Biology and Women’s Issues. Hubbard was the first woman to achieve tenure in biology at Harvard in 1974, and she features in the book.
Her course taught about how scientists, including Charles Darwin, have upheld stereotypes and myths about women’s biology. The idea for Our Science, Ourselves grew from that formative experience in Hubbard’s course.
But it also had roots in another era. In 2016, I published Darwin’s Hunch: Science, Race and the Search for Human Origins about the history of paleoanthropology and scientific racism in South Africa.
The book explored questions that some of my history of science professors -- like Hubbard, Stephen Jay Gould, and Everett Mendelsohn -- might have asked. What influence did the social and political context have on the search for human origins? I immersed myself in research about the impact of racism and sexism in science in the 20th century.
After Darwin’s Hunch was published, I was struck by several stories that brought science and sexism into the popular media.
In July 2017, James Damore at Google wrote that “the gender gap in tech” likely exists because of biological differences between men and women.
In September 2018, Italian physicist Alessandro Strumia said that the low number of women in physics was proof that women were innately less capable than men and he suggested that male scientists were being discriminated against to give opportunities to women.
Why were these myths about women’s biology still having an impact in the 21st century? I decided to go back to my class notes and look more closely at Ruth Hubbard’s research. Who had she worked with at the time? What were other scientists with a feminist awareness saying in the 1970s and ‘80s? I discovered a fascinating network of women.
Our Science, Ourselves follows the lives of Ruth Hubbard, Rita Arditti, Evelyn Fox Keller, Evelynn Hammonds, Anne Fausto-Sterling, Banu Subramaniam, and Nancy Hopkins.
None of these women scientists were born in Boston, but they all moved there to take a job, conduct research, or network with other scientists. And they all were shaped by the women’s movement and began developing feminist critiques of their science.
There was something about what was happening in Boston that was interesting to me. Part of that was the critical mass of colleges, universities, and scientists, but also the presence of social movements including Science for the People, the Combahee River Collective, and others.
Q: Author and professor Jenna Tonn said of the book, “Writing in lucid and accessible prose, and with a primary source base that is extensive and offers a strong background for understanding the personal dimensions of this history, Kuljian has something important to tell us about the origins of feminist science studies.” What do you think of that description?
A: “Lucid and accessible prose” is what I’m striving for! Although the University of Massachusetts Press is an academic publisher, they are interested in narrative nonfiction, which is what I write.
While the book can be a resource for faculty and students, the life stories of a network of women are accessible to a broader audience. The stories are based on many interviews and research in the archives, with the hope of better understanding the origins of feminist science studies.
Shirley Malcom, who has worked at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for 50 years, and is the coauthor of the important report The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science(1976), says, “This is a remarkable book about a remarkable time when remarkable women began to change the landscape of science, as community and as field of study.”
Q: What impact did it have on you to write the book, and what do you hope readers take away from it?
A: I have lived in South Africa for the past 32 years and I’ve written two other books of nonfiction that take place in South Africa.
Writing Our Science, Ourselves about a group of women in the 1970s, ‘80s, and ‘90s in the greater Boston area, where I grew up, was a wonderful project for me. It has been an honor to get to know each of the women in the book, and to pay tribute to them and their contributions.
One of the things I realized while researching this book is how many scientific contributions by women have been erased. I hope that the book will delight readers with the story of a particular time and place, and pique the readers’ interest about the existence of so many “hidden figures.”
Q: What do you see looking forward when it comes to feminist science studies?
A: I am a historian of science, so I tend to look back at history rather than forward.
Feminist science studies has made important contributions by exploring how scientific institutions became exclusionary and how scientific research questions and analysis can be biased (rather than always neutral or objective), thereby affecting the knowledge they produce.
These contributions will continue to be important in the future. The tools that feminist science studies have developed are critical to the sciences because they bring in marginalized perspectives, ask new questions, and develop new methodologies that help science account for gender and racial bias.
The questions that feminist science studies asks are important for the future: Who is doing science? Who decides on the research questions? What language are we using? Who is paying for the scientific research, and who does it benefit?
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I will continue to look for stories to tell about science and society, always considering issues of race and gender.
However, at the moment, I am working on a writing project about my Armenian family history focusing on my great-grandmother Semma Marachlian. I am expanding on an article I wrote for the 100th anniversary of the Armenian genocide. https://mg.co.za/article/2015-04-29-armenian-genocide-relived/
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: Our Science, Ourselves would make a great holiday gift, and the University of Massachusetts Press is having a holiday sale, offering 40 percent off Our Science, Ourselves if you use the code HOLIDAY at check out. https://www.umasspress.com/9781625348197/our-science-ourselves/ After the holidays, you can use the code UMASS20 to save 20%.
Thanks so much for your interest!
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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