‘—

Skeletons in the Closet

In Skeletons in the Closet, Londa Schiebinger points out the ideas that scientists had about male and female anatomy differences during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Nature played and important role in those investigations based on the studies of male and female skeletons. Scientists used nature as their “law” in the rise of their political and social thoughts. They hid the social inequalities behind the natural law, basing women’s capacities in their physical aspect and using this as an excuse to exclude them from science or any other activity where men had the power and to continue justifying the exclusion.

The difference between the skeletons was used to indicate or impose a hierarchical order in society for men and women. Scientist such as Bidloo, Cowper and Vesalius created the concept that women were inferior to men just because of their external bodily shapes and reproductive organs. Women were catalogued as unqualified to participate in any other activity in the public sphere and they were condemned to be a reproductive machine and housewives. According to the theory of some anatomists, female skulls were smaller that men’s, and female pelvis were larger that men, for scientists, these supposed differences meant that women were less intelligence than men and their purpose in life was to be housewives and mothers as natural given, while men had been created to participate in other activities outside the home.

Schiebinger claim that the idea of anatomical comparison between the sexes was conceived in order to justify female subordination. The demand of intelligence increased every day, it was an essential part to participate in political movements and to gain social opportunities, but unfortunately for women the scientific community was conformed by male who use a the male anatomy as the standard to study female anatomy. All these ideas came as a result of those standards created by man in an attempt to dominate and subordinate everything he does not know and believes inferior to him.