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Assignment 2 – Skeletons in the Closet

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a focus on the anatomy of women in comparison to white men had risen to the surface. Early in the passage, Schiebinger makes it clear that it is not her intention to simply explain physical difference between men and women but to closely inspect the social and political concerns that were present in this time due to sex differences. The main focus of the piece is to bring to light the roles of men and women at the time in order to define and preserve the social hierarchy among the two. The method used for analyzing the two was a scientific, logical approach. Simply based on anatomy, philosophers and scientists determined the capability of a woman in comparison to a man, as well as their purpose in the world. An example of this is the most prominent observation in the text; that a woman’s purpose in life is motherhood, due to the fact that women have a wider pelvis than men, thus deeming them destined for childbirth. Although we can’t deny the fact that women can indeed bear children, it does not mean that it is their sole purpose in life. It is studies such as these that insinuate that women are inferior to men. Also, the fact that it is deemed as scientific evidence leads one to believe that it is something that cannot be argued with. However, for many others it was not the case. Some also claimed that there is no difference in men and women besides their exterior structure and their sex organs. This claimed that, essentially, every other aspect of a woman was equal to a man. Yet, as the years progressed, anatomists began to claim that the differences between the body of a man and a woman were so dramatic that a woman’s growth had been stifled at a much earlier stage. Due to the fact that a woman’s head was much larger than her body, similar to children, it signaled incomplete growth. Based on their studies, not only is a woman’s structure different, it is also underdeveloped. Observations such as these only further create a role for women that does not allow them to be equal, or even remotely close, to the power of a white man.

Another trend that was widely discussed at the time was the opposition of nurture vs nature. The ‘nurture’ standpoint believed that social and educational change could lead to a path of equality between sexes. Whereas the nature standpoint claimed that whatever it is, is right. An example of the ‘nature’ standpoint is the idea that a boy will always have power of a girl in the sense that he is stronger, based on his physique; that no matter what type of nourishment a girl receives it will never make her equivalent to a boy, simply because she is not built that way. The reading then proceeds to discuss the many reasons that a woman is incapable of working scientifically due to the fact that their physical weakness leads to intellectual weakness. I believe that Schiebinger sheds light on all these various studies and observations from various philosophers and anatomists in order to prove that the main focus is simply to make women feel inferior to men. Each individual carried their own study that, ultimately, fed into the same main idea. At the time, there was no better individual than the white man and in order to keep this belief intact there had to be a comparison to the leading competition, the white woman. It is all a process of keeping those specific roles intact and carrying out social hierarchy in society.