fDiana has 12 post(s)

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.

I believe Davis is trying to tell us that the Seneca Falls Convention was made with the target of recognizing the electoral power for women, but instead one its primary focus was the institution of marriage which resulted in many adverse effects on woman. Also the Seneca Falls Convention focused the attention meanly in middle class white woman, letting out the situation of white working class women. They had to work long shift in very bad conditions, exposed to many diseases and other risks, as an example of this were women who worked in the textile mills in the Northeast. What was thought would be a fair movement for all female gender and the culmination of years of injustice, insecurity and even domestic abuses, became a convention that took into account a single group of women; Middle-class white women. Black women were entirely ignored in all the convention documents. No document made any reference about their participation in the abolitionist movement. Another contradictory fact that could be even ironic is the fact that in a convention in favor of women’s rights, where most of the assistants were women, women were not allowed to speak. Also, do not forget Prudence Crandall, who defied her white townspeople by accepting a Black girl in her school to create an equality in education among white and Black women, but during Seneca Falls Convention white women forgot the common desire for education that they once shared with Black women. White women wanted to be free in many legal aspects, but they were not ready to put away the prejudices and renounce racism. This makes clear that the major weakness in the Seneca Falls Convention was racism. Middle class white women did not see this convention as a fight for the gender since they only sought their own benefits. I think Davis also makes a difference when he mentions to Sojourner Truth, a black abolitionist who fought for Black women were considered into the abolitionist movement, something that Seneca Falls Convention did not do.