‘—

Assignment 02

Londa Schiebinger’s essay, “Skeletons In The Closet”, asked an important question, why did the comparing of the anatomy of white women and men become such a critical project for the medical community in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth century? And Schiebinger was able to fully answer this question in her essay. In the beginning of the 1750s was when doctors in Europe began to look for the sex differences in the human body, and during this time was when the first drawings of female skeletons appeared (Schiebinger, page 42).  Londa Schiebinger believed that the first representations of the female skeletons came forth to help define the position of women in the European society. The fact that a woman’s skull was shown to be smaller than a man’s skull was evidence to the statement that a woman’s intellectual capabilities were inferior to a man’s. On top of that, a female’s large pelvis added more to the reason as to why she should be confined in the sphere of her home, it showed that she was naturally designed for motherhood and the role of a nurturer (Schiebinger, page 43). Anatomists used the research they did on the skeletons to make visible the separate roles of a man and woman in the social hierarchy, and in the eighteenth century, they began to believe that women held a low ranking in the natural hierarchy (Schiebinger, page 46). Londa Schiebinger explains in her essay that the reason why comparing the anatomy of white women and men became such a big issue was so it can be used to further show the inequality between the both sexes. Basically, it was more of a political reason than anything else. This conveniently happened during the time when women began to raise their voices against the denial of their civil rights, but it only made them fight harder for their freedom.