Can There Be A Feminist Science Longino

Can There Be A Feminist Science?
Author(s): Helen E. Longino

Source: Hypatia , Autumn, 1987, Vol. 2, No. 3, Feminism & Science, 1 (Autumn, 1987),
pp. 51-64
Published by: Wiley on behalf of Hypatia, Inc.
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helen e. Iongino
Can There Be A Feminist Science?
This paper explores a number of recent proposals regarding "femini

science" and rejects a content-based approach in favor of a proc
based approach to characterizing feminist science. Philosophy of sc
can yield models of scientific reasoning that illuminate the interac
between cultural values and ideology and scientific inquiry. While
can use these models to expose masculine and other forms of bias
can also use them to defend the introduction of assumptions groun
in feminist political values.
T he question of this title conceals multiple ambiguities

do the sciences consist of many distinct fields, but the term
can be used to refer to a method of inquiry, a historica
collection of practices, a body of knowledge, a set of claims
sion, a set of social groups, etc. And as the sciences are m
the scholarly disciplines that seek to understand them:
history, sociology, anthropology, psychology. Any answe
perspective of some one of these disciplines will, then, of n
partial. In this essay, I shall be asking about the possibility of
natural science that is feminist and I shall ask from the per
a philosopher. Before beginning to develop my answer, how
to review some of the questions that could be meant, in ord
at the formulation I wish to address.
The question could be interpreted as factual, one to be answered b
pointing to what feminists in the sciences are doing and saying: "Yes,
and this is what it is." Such a response can be perceived as question
begging, however. Even such a friend of feminism as Stephen Goul
dismisses the idea of a distinctively feminist or even female contribu-
tion to the sciences. In a generally positive review of Ruth Bleier's book
Science and Gender, Gould (1984) brushes aside her connection between
women's attitudes and values and the interactionist science she calls
for. Scientists (male, of course) are already proceeding with wholis
and interactionist research programs. Why, he implied, should women
or feminists have any particular, distinctive, contributions to make
There is not masculinist and feminist science, just good and bad science
Hypatia vol. 2, no. 3 (Fall 1987). ? by Helen E. Longino.
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The question of a feminist science cannot be settled by pointing, but

involves a deeper, subtler investigation.
The deeper question can itself have several meanings. One set of
meanings is sociological, the other conceptual. The sociological mean-
ing proceeds as follows. We know what sorts of social conditions make
misogynist science possible. The work of Margaret Rossiter (1982) on
the history of women scientists in the United States and the work of
Kathryn Addelson (1983) on the social structure of professional science
detail the relations between a particular social structure for science and
the kinds of science produced. What sorts of social conditions would
make feminist science possible? This is an important question, one I
am not equipped directly to investigate, although what I can investigate
is, I believe, relevant to it. This is the second, conceptual, interpreta-
tion of the question: what sort of sense does it make to talk about a
feminist science? Why is the question itself not an oxymoron, linking,
as it does, values and ideological commitment with the idea of imper-
sonal, objective, value-free, inquiry? This is the problem I wish to ad-
dress in this essay.
The hope for a feminist theoretical natural science has concealed an
ambiguity between content and practice. In the content sense the idea
of a feminist science involves a number of assumptions and calls a
number of visions to mind. Some theorists have written as though a
feminist science is one the theories of which encode a particular world
view, characterized by complexity, interaction and wholism. Such a
science is said to be feminist because it is the expression and valoriza-
tion of a female sensibility or cognitive temperament. Alternatively,
it is claimed that women have certain traits (dispositions to attend to
particulars, interactive rather than individualist and controlling social
attitudes and behaviors) that enable them to understand the true
character of natural processes (which are complex and interactive).'
While proponents of this interactionist view see it as an improvement
over most contemporary science, it has also been branded as soft-
misdescribed as non-mathematical. Women in the sciences who feel they
are being asked to do not better science, but inferior science, have
responded angrily to this characterization of feminist science, thinking
that it is simply new clothing for the old idea that women can't do
science. I think that the interactionist view can be defended against this
response, although that requires rescuing it from some of its proponents
as well. However, I also think that the characterization of feminist
science as the expression of a distinctive female cognitive temperament
has other drawbacks. It first conflates feminine with feminist. While
it is important to reject the traditional derogation of the virtues assigned
to women, it is also important to remember that women are constructed
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to occupy positions of social subordinates. We should not uncritically

embrace the feminine.
This characterization of feminist science is also a version of recently
propounded notions of a 'women's standpoint' or a 'feminist stand-
point' and suffers from the same suspect universalization that these
ideas suffer from. If there is one such standpoint, there are many: as
Maria Lugones and Elizabeth Spelman spell out in their tellingly en-
titled article, "Have We Got a Theory for You: Feminist Theory,
Cultural Imperialism, and the Demand for 'The Woman's Voice,"'
women are too diverse in our experiences to generate a single cognitive
framework (Lugones and Spelman 1983). In addition, the sciences are
themselves too diverse for me to think that they might be equally
transformed by such a framework. To reject this concept of a feminist
science, however, is not to disengage science from feminism. I want
to suggest that we focus on science as practice rather than content, as
process rather than product; hence, not on feminist science, but on do-
ing science as a feminist.
The doing of science involves many practices: how one structures
a laboratory (hierarchically or collectively), how one relates to other
scientists (competitively or cooperatively), how and whether one engages
in political struggles over affirmative action. It extends also to intellec-
tual practices, to the activities of scientific inquiry, such as observa-
tion and reasoning. Can there be a feminist scientific inquiry? This
possibility is seen to be problematic against the background of certain
standard presuppositions about science. The claim that there could be
a feminist science in the sense of an intellectual practice is either
nonsense because oxymoronic as suggested above or the claim is inter-
preted to mean that established science (science as done and dominated
by men) is wrong about the world. Feminist science in this latter inter-
pretation is presented as correcting the errors of masculine, standard
science and as revealing the truth that is hidden by masculine 'bad'
science, as taking the sex out of science.
Both of these interpretations involve the rejection of one approach
as incorrect and the embracing of the other as the way to a truer
understanding of the natural world. Both trade one absolutism for
another. Each is a side of the same coin, and that coin, I think, is the
idea of a value-free science. This is the idea that scientific methodology
guarantees the independence of scientific inquiry from values of value-
related considerations. A science or a scientific research program in-
formed by values is ipso facto "bad science." "Good science" is in-
quiry protected by methodology from values and ideology. This same
idea underlies Gould's response to Bleier, so it bears closer scrutiny.
In the pages that follow, I shall examine the idea of value-free science
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and then apply the results of that examination to the idea of feminist
scientific inquiry.
II
I distinguish two kinds of values relevant to the sciences. Constitutive
values, internal to the sciences, are the source of the rules determining
what constitutes acceptable scientific practice or scientific method. The
personal, social and cultural values, those group or individual
preferences about what ought to be I call contextual values, to indicate
that they belong to the social and cultural context in which science is
done (Longino 1983c). The traditional interpretation of the value-
freedom of modern natural science amounts to a claim that its con-
stitutive and contextual features are clearly distinct from and indepen-
dent of one another, that contextual values play no role in the inner
workings of scientific inquiry, in reasoning and observation. I shall
argue that this construal of the distinction cannot be maintained.
There are several ways to develop such an argument. One scholar
is fond of inviting her audience to visit any science library and peruse
the titles on the shelves. Observe how subservient to social and cultural
interests are the inquiries represented by the book titles alone! Her
listeners would soon abandon their ideas about the value-neutrality o
the sciences, she suggests. This exercise may indeed show the influence
of external, contextual considerations on what research gets done/sup-
ported (i.e., on problem selection). It does not show that such considera-
tions affect reasoning or hypothesis acceptance. The latter would re
quire detailed investigation of particular cases or a general conceptua
argument. The conceptual arguments involve developing some version
of what is known in philosophy of science as the underdetermination
thesis, i.e., the thesis that a theory is always underdetermined by the
evidence adduced in its support, with the consequence that differen
or incompatible theories are supported by or at least compatible with
the same body of evidence. I shall sketch a version of the argument
that appeals to features of scientific inference.
One of the rocks on which the logical positivist program foundered
was the distinction between theoretical and observational language.
Theoretical statements contain, as fundamental descriptive terms, terms
that do not occur in the description of data. Thus, hypotheses in parti-
cle physics contain terms like "electron," "pion," "muon," "electron
spin," etc. The evidence for a hypothesis such as "A pion decays se-
quentially into a muon, then a positron" is obviously not direct obser-
vations of pions, muons and positrons, but consists largely in
photographs taken in large and complex experimental apparati: ac-
celerators, cloud chambers, bubble chambers. The photographs show
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all sorts of squiggly lines and spirals. Evidence for the hypotheses of
particle physics is presented as statements that describe these
photographs. Eventually, of course, particle physicists point to a spot
on a photograph and say things like "Here a neutrino hits a neutron."
Such an assertion, however, is an interpretive achievement which in-
volves collapsing theoretical and observational moments. A skeptic
would have to be supplied a complicated argument linking the elements
of the photograph to traces left by particles and these to particles
themselves. What counts as theory and what as data in a pragmatic
sense change over time, as some ideas and experimental procedures come
to be securely embedded in a particular framework and others take their
place on the horizons. As the history of physics shows, however, secure
embeddedness is no guarantee against overthrow.
Logical positivists and their successors hoped to model scientific in-
ference formally. Evidence for hypotheses, data, were to be represented
as logical consequences of hypotheses. When we try to map this logical
structure onto the sciences, however, we find that hypotheses are, for
the most part, not just generalizations of data statements. The links
between data and theory, therefore, cannot be adequately represented
as formal or syntactic, but are established by means of assumptions
that make or imply substantive claims about the field over which one
theorizes. Theories are confirmed via the confirmation of their con-
stituent hypotheses, so the confirmation of hypotheses and theories is
relative to the assumptions relied upon in asserting the evidential con-
nection. Conformation of such assumptions, which are often unar-
ticulated, is itself subject to similar relativization. And it is these assump
tions that can be the vehicle for the involvement of considerations
motivated primarily by contextual values (Longino 1979, 1983a).
The point of this extremely telescoped argument is that one can
give an a priori specification of confirmation that effectively eliminat
the role of value-laden assumptions in legitimate scientific inquir
without eliminating auxiliary hypotheses (assumptions) altogether. This
is not to say that all scientific reasoning involves value-related assump-
tions. Sometimes auxiliary assumptions will be supported by mundan
inductive reasoning. But sometimes they will not be. In any given case,
they may be metaphysical in character; they may be untestable wit
present investigative techniques; they may be rooted in contextual
value-related considerations. If, however, there is no a priori way t
eliminate such assumptions from evidential reasoning generally, and
hence, no way to rule out value-laden assumptions, then there is n
formal basis for arguing that an inference mediated by contextual values
is thereby bad science.
A comparable point is made by some historians investigating the
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origins of modern science. James Jacob (1977) and Margaret Jacob

(1976) have, in a series of articles and books, argued that the adoption
of conceptions of matter by 17th century scientists like Robert Boyle
was inextricably intertwined with political considerations. Conceptions
of matter provided the foundation on which physical theories were
developed and Boyle's science, regardless of his reasons for it, has been
fruitful in ways that far exceed his imaginings. If the presence of con-
textual influences were grounds for disallowing a line of inquiry, then
early modern science would not have gotten off the ground.
The conclusion of this line of argument is that constitutive values
conceived as epistemological (i.e., truth-seeking) are not adequate to
screen out the influence of contextual values in the very structuring of
scientific knowledge. Now the ways in which contextual values do, if
they do, influence this structuring and interact, if they do, with con-
stitutive values has to be determined separately for different theories
and fields of science. But this argument, if it's sound, tells us that this
sort of inquiry is perfectly respectable and involves no shady assump-
tions or unargued intuitively based rejections of positivism. It also opens
the possibility that one can make explicit value commitments and still
do "good" science. The conceptual argument doesn't show that all
science is value-laden (as opposed to metaphysics-laden)-that must be
established on a case-by-case basis, using the tools not just of logic and
philosophy but of history and sociology as well. It does show that not
all science is value-free and, more importantly, that it is not necessari-
ly in the nature of science to be value-free. If we reject that idea we're
in a better position to talk about the possibilities of feminist science.
111
In earlier articles (Longino 1981, 1983b; Longino and Doell 1983),

I've used similar considerations to argue that scientific objectivity has
to be reconceived as a function of the communal structure of scientific
inquiry rather than as a property of individual scientists. I've then used
these notions about scientific methodology to show that science display-
ing masculine bias is not ipso facto improper or 'bad' science; that the
fabric of science can neither rule out the expression of bias nor legitimate
it. So I've argued that both the expression of masculine bias in the
sciences and feminist criticism of research exhibiting that bias are-
shall we say-business as usual; that scientific inquiry should be ex-
pected to display the deep metaphysical and normative commitments
of the culture in which it flourishes; and finally that criticism of the
deep assumptions that guide scientific reasoning about data is a pro-
per part of science.
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The argument I've just offered about the idea of a value-free science
is similar in spirit to those earlier arguments. I think it makes it possi-
ble to see these questions from a slightly different angle.
There is a tradition of viewing scientific inquiry as somehow inex-
orable. This involves supposing that the phenomena of the natural world
are fixed in determinate relations with each other, that these relations
can be known and formulated in a consistent and unified way. This
is not the old "unified science" idea of the logical positivists, with its
privileging of physics. In its "unexplicated" or "pre-analytic" state,
it is simply the idea that there is one consistent, integrated or coherent,
true theoretical treatment of all natural phenomena. (The indeterminacy
principle of quantum physics is restricted to our understanding of the
behavior of certain particles which themselves underlie the fixities of
the natural world. Stochastic theories reveal fixities, but fixities among
ensembles rather than fixed relations among individual objects or
events.) The scientific inquirer's job is to discover those fixed relations.
Just as the task of Plato's philosophers was to discover the fixed rela-
tions among forms and the task of Galileo's scientists was to discover
the laws written in the language of the grand book of nature, geometry,
so the scientist's task in this tradition remains the discovery of fixed
relations however conceived. These ideas are part of the realist tradi-
tion in the philosophy of science.
It's no longer possible, in a century that has seen the splintering of
the scientific disciplines, to give such a unified description of the ob-
jects of inquiry. But the belief that the job is to discover fixed relations
of some sort, and that the application of observation, experiment and
reason leads ineluctably to unifiable, if not unified, knowledge of an
independent reality, is still with us. It is evidenced most clearly in two
features of scientific rhetoric: the use of the passive voice as in "it is
concluded that . . ." or "it has been discovered that . . ." and the at-
tribution of agency to the data, as in "the data suggest. .. ." Such
language has been criticized for the abdication of responsibility it in
dicates. Even more, the scientific inquirer, and we with her, becom
passive observers, victims of the truth. The idea of a value-free science
is integral to this view of scientific inquiry. And if we reject that idea
we can also reject our roles as passive onlookers, helpless to affect the
course of knowledge.
Let me develop this point somewhat more concretely and
autobiographically. Biologist Ruth Doell and I have been examining
studies in three areas of research on the influence of sex hormones on
human behavior and cognitive performance: research on the influence
of pre-natal, in utero, exposure to higher or lower than normal levels
of androgens and estrogens on so-called 'gender-role' behavior in
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children, influence of androgens (pre- and post-natal) on homosexuality

in women, and influence of lower than normal (for men) levels of an-
drogen at puberty on spatial abilities (Doell and Longino, forthcoming).
The studies we looked at are vulnerable to criticism of their data and
their observation methodologies. They also show clear evidence of an-
drocentric bias-in the assumption that there are just two sexes and
two genders (us and them), in the designation of appropriate and inap-
propriate behaviors for male and female children, in the caricature of
lesbianism, in the assumption of male mathematical superiority. We
did not find, however, that these assumptions mediated the inferences
from data to theory that we found objectionable. These sexist assump-
tions did affect the way the data were described. What mediated the
inferences from the alleged data (i.e., what functioned as auxiliary
hypotheses or what provided auxiliary hypotheses) was what we called
the linear model-the assumption that there is a direct one-way causal
relationship between pre- or post-natal hormone levels and later
behavior or cognitive performance. To put it crudely, fetal gonadal hor-
mones organize the brain at critical periods of development. The
organism is thereby disposed to respond in a range of ways to a range
of environmental stimuli. The assumption of unidirectional program-
ming is supposedly supported by the finding of such a relationship in
other mammals; in particular, by experiments demonstrating the
dependence of sexual behaviors-mounting and lordosis-on peri-natal
hormone exposure and the finding of effects of sex hormones on the
development of rodent brains. To bring it to bear on humans is to ig-
nore, among other things, some important differences between human
brains and those of other species. It also implies a willingness to regard
humans in a particular way-to see us as produced by factors over which
we have no control. Not only are we, as scientists, victims of the truth,
but we are the prisoners of our physiology.2 In the name of extending
an explanatory model, human capacities for self-knowledge, self-
reflection, self-determination are eliminated from any role in human
action (at least in the behaviors studied).
Doell and I have therefore argued for the replacement of that linear
model of the role of the brain in behavior by one of much greater com-
plexity that includes physiological, environmental, historical and
psychological elements. Such a model allows not only for the interac-
tion of physiological and environmental factors but also for the interac-
tion of these with a continuously self-modifying, self-representational
(and self-organizing) central processing system. In contemporary
neurobiology, the closest model is that being developed in the group
selectionist approach to higher brain function of Gerald Edelman and
other researchers (Edelman and Mountcastle 1978). We argue that a
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model of at least that degree of complexity is necessary to account for

the human behaviors studies in the sex hormones and behavior research
and that if gonadal hormones function at all at these levels, they will
probably be found at most to facilitate or inhibit neural processing in
general. The strategy we take in our argument is to show that the degree
of intentionality involved in the behaviors in question is greater than
is presupposed by the hormonal influence researchers and to argue that
this degree of intentionality implicates the higher brain processes.
To this point Ruth Doell and I agree. I want to go further and describe
what we've done from the perspective of the above philosophical discus-
sion of scientific methodology.
Abandoning my polemical mood for a more reflective one, I want
to say that, in the end, commitment to one or another model is strong-
ly influenced by values or other contextual features. The models
themselves determine the relevance and interpretation of data. The linear
or complex models are not in turn independently or conclusively sup-
ported by data. I doubt for instance that value-free inquiry will reveal
the efficacy or inefficacy of intentional states or of physiological fac-
tors like hormone exposure in human action. I think instead that a
research program in neuro-science that assumes the linear model and
sex-gender dualism will show the influence of hormone exposure on
gender-role behavior. And I think that a research program in neuro-
science and psychology proceeding on the assumption that humans do
possess the capacities for self-consciousness, self-reflection, and self-
determination, and which then asks how the structure of the human
brain and nervous system enables the expression of these capacities,
will reveal the efficacy of intentional states (understood as very com-
plex sorts of brain states).
While this latter assumption does not itself contain normative terms,
I think that the decision to adopt it is motivated by value-laden
considerations-by the desire to understand ourselves and others as self-
determining (at least some of the time), that is, as capable of acting
on the basis of concepts or representations of ourselves and the world
in which we act. (Such representations are not necessarily correct, they
are surely mediated by our cultures; all we wish to claim is that they
are efficacious.) I think further that this desire on Ruth Doell's and
my part is, in several ways, an aspect of our feminism. Our preference
for a neurobiological model that allows for agency, for the efficacy
of intentionality is partly a validation of our (and everyone's) subjec-
tive experience of thought, deliberation, and choice. One of the tenets
of feminist research is the valorization of subjective experience, and
so our preference in this regard conforms to feminist research patterns.
There is, however, a more direct way in which our feminism is expressed
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in this preference. Feminism is many things to many people, but it is

at its core in part about the expansion of human potentiality. When
feminists talk of breaking out and do break out of socially prescribed
sex-roles, when feminists criticize the institutions of domination, we
are thereby insisting on the capacity of humans-male and female-to
act on perceptions of self and society and to act to bring about changes
in self and society on the basis of those perceptions. (Not overnight
and not by a mere act of will. The point is that we act.) And so our
criticism of theories of the hormonal influence or determination of so-
called gender-role behavior is not just a rejection of the sexist bias in
the description of the phenomena-the behavior of the children studied,
the sexual lives of lesbians, etc.-but of the limitations on human
capacity imposed by the analytic model underlying such research.3
While the argument strategy we adopt against the linear model rests
on a certain understanding of intention, the values motivating our adop-
tion of that understanding remain hidden in that polemical context.
Our political commitments, however, presuppose a certain understand-
ing of human action, so that when faced with a conflict between these
commitments and a particular model of brain-behavior relationships
we allow the political commitments to guide the choice.
The relevance of my argument about value-free science should be
becoming clear. Feminists-in and out of science-often condemn
masculine bias in the sciences from the vantage point of commitment
to a value-free science. Androcentric bias, once identified, can then be
seen as a violation of the rules, as "bad" science. Feminist science,
by contrast, can eliminate that bias and produce better, good, more
true or gender free science. From that perspective the process I've just
described is anathema. But if scientific methods generated by con-
stitutive values cannot guarantee independent from contextual values,
then that approach to sexist science won't work. We cannot restrict
ourselves simply to the elimination of bias, but must expand our scope
to include the detection of limiting and interpretive frameworks and
the finding or construction of more appropriate frameworks. We need
not, indeed should not, wait for such a framework to emerge from the
data. In waiting, if my argument is correct, we run the danger of work-
ing unconsciously with assumptions still laden with values from the con-
text we seek to change. Instead of remaining passive with respect to
the data and what the data suggest, we can acknowledge our ability
to affect the course of knowledge and fashion or favor research pro-
grams that are consistent with the values and commitments we express
in the rest of our lives. From this perspective, the idea of a value-free
science is not just empty, but pernicious.
Accepting the relevance to our practice as scientists of our political
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commitments does not imply simple and crude impositions of those

ideas onto the corner of the natural world under study. If we recognize,
however, that knowledge is shaped by the assumptions, values and in-
terests of a culture and that, within limits, one can choose one's culture,
then it's clear that as scientists/theorists we have a choice. We can con-
tinue to do establishment science, comfortably wrapped in the myths
of scientific rhetoric or we can alter our intellectual allegiances. While
remaining committed to an abstract goal of understanding, we can
choose to whom, socially and politically, we are accountable in our
pursuit of that goal. In particular we can choose between being accoun-
table to the traditional establishment or to our political comrades.
Such accountability does not demand a radical break with the science
one has learned and practiced. The development of a "new" science
involves a more dialectical evolution and more continuity with estab-
lished science than the familiar language of scientific revolutions implies.
In focusing on accountability and choice, this conception of feminist
science differs from those that proceed from the assumption of a con-
gruence between certain models of natural processes and women's in-
herent modes of understanding.4 I am arguing instead for the deliberate
and active choice of an interpretive model and for the legitimacy of
basing that choice on political considerations in this case. Obviously
model choice is also constrained by (what we know of) reality, that is,
by the data. But reality (what we know of it) is, I have already argued,
inadequate to uniquely determine model choice. The feminist theorists
mentioned above have focused on the relation between the content of
a theory and female values or experiences, in particular on the perceived
congruence between interactionist, wholist visions of nature and a form
of understanding and set of values widely attributed to women. In con-
trast, I am suggesting that a feminist scientific practice admits political
considerations as relevant constraints on reasoning, which, through their
influence on reasoning and interpretation, shape content. In this specific
case, those considerations in combination with the phenomena support
an explanatory model that is highly interactionist, highly complex. This
argument is so far, however, neutral on the issue of whether an interac-
tionist and complex account of natural processes will always be the
preferred one. If it is preferred, however, this will be because of ex-
plicitly political considerations and not because interactionism is the
expression of "women's nature."
The integration of a political commitment with scientific work will
be expressed differently in different fields. In some, such as the com-
plex of research programs having a bearing on the understanding of
human behavior, certain moves, such as the one described above, seem
quite obvious. In others it may not be clear how to express an alternate
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set of values in inquiry, or what values would be appropriate. The first

step, however, is to abandon the idea that scrutiny of the data yields
a seamless web of knowledge. The second is to think through a par-
ticular field and try to understand just what its unstated and fundamen-
tal assumptions are and how they influence the course of inquiry. Know-
ing something of the history of a field is necessary to this process, as
is continued conversation with other feminists.
The feminist interventions I imagine will be local (i.e., specific to
a particular area of research); they may not be exclusive (i.e., different
feminist perspectives may be represented in theorizing); and they will
be in some way continuous with existing scientific work. The accretion
of such interventions, of science done by feminists as feminists, and
by members of other disenfranchised groups, has the potential, never-
theless, ultimately to transform the character of scientific discourse.
Doing science differently requires more than just the will to do so
and it would be disingenuous to pretend that our philosophies of science
are the only barrier. Scientific inquiry takes place in a social, political
and economic context which imposes a variety of institutional obstacles
to innovation, let alone to the intellectual working out of oppositional
and political commitments. The nature of university career ladders
means that one's work must be recognized as meeting certain standards
of quality in order that one be able to continue it. If those standards
are intimately bound up with values and assumptions one rejects, in-
comprehension rather than conversion is likely. Success requires that
we present our work in a way that satisfies those standards and it is
easier to do work that looks just like work known to satisfy them than
to strike out in a new direction. Another push to conformity comes
from the structure of support for science. Many of the scientific ideas
argued to be consistent with a feminist politics have a distinctively non-
production orientation.5 In the example discussed above, thinking of
the brain as hormonally programmed makes intervention and control
more likely than does thinking of it as a self-organizing complexly in-
teractive system. The doing of science, however, requires financial sup-
port and those who provide that support are increasingly industry and
the military. As might be expected they support research projects like-
ly to meet their needs, projects which promise even greater possibilities
for intervention in and manipulation of natural processes. Our sciences
are being harnessed to the making of money and the waging of war.
The possibility of alternate understandings of the natural world is ir-
relevant to a culture driven by those interests. To do feminist science
we must change the social and political context in which science is done.
So: can there be a feminist science? If this means: is it in principle
possible to do science as a feminist?, the answer must be: yes. If this
62

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helen e. longino
means: can we in practice do science as feminists?, the answer must

be: not until we change present conditions.
notes
I am grateful to the Wellesley Center for Research on Women for the Mellon Sch
ship during which I worked on the ideas in this essay. I am also grateful to aud
at UC Berkeley, Northeastern University, Brandeis University and Rice University
their comments and to the anonymous reviewers for Hypatia for their suggestion
earlier version appeared as Wellesley Center for Research on Women Working Paper
1. This seems to be suggested in Bleier (1984), Rose (1983) and in Sandra Hardi
(1980) early work.
2. For a striking expression of this point of view see Witelson (1985).
3. Ideological commitments other than feminist ones may lead to the same assu
tions and the variety of feminisms means that feminist commitments can lead to
ferent and incompatible assumptions.
4. Cf. note 1, above.
5. This is not to say that interactionist ideas may not be applied in productive con-
texts, but that, unlike linear causal models, they are several steps away from the manipula-
tion of natural processes immediately suggested by the latter. See Keller (1985), especial-
ly Chapter 10.
references
Addelson, Kathryn Pine. 1983. The man of professional wisdom. In

Discovering reality, ed. Sandra Harding and Merrill Hintikka. Dor-
drecht: Reidel.
Bleier, Ruth. 1984. Science and gender. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon.
Doell, Ruth, and Helen E. Longino. N.d. Journal of Homosexuality.
Forthcoming.
Edelman, Gerald and Vernon Mountcastle. 1978. The mindful brain.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Gould, Stephen J. 1984. Review of Ruth Bleier, Science and gender.
New York Times Book Review, VVI, 7 (August 12): 1.
Harding, Sandra. 1980. The norms of inquiry and masculine experience.
In PSA 1980, Vol. 2, ed. Peter Asquith and Ronald Giere. East
Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association.
Jacob, James R. 1977. Robert Boyle and the English Revolution, A
study in social and intellectual change. New York: Franklin.
63

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hypatia
Jacob, Margaret C. 1976. The Newtonians and the English Revolution,

1689-1720. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Keller, Evelyn Fox. 1985. Reflections on gender and science. New
Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Longino, Helen. 1979. Evidence and hypothesis. Philosophy of Science
46 (1): 35-56.
.1981. Scientific objectivity and feminist theorizing. Liberal
Education 67 (3): 33-41.
----. 1983a. The idea of a value free science. Paper presented to the
Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association, March
25, Berkeley, CA.
----. 1983b. Scientific objectivity and logics of science. Inquiry 26
(1): 85-106.
----. 1983c. Beyond "bad science." Science, Technology and Human
Values 8 (1): 7-17.
Longino, Helen and Ruth Doell. 1983. Body, bias and behavior. Signs
9 (2): 206-227.
Lugones, Maria and Elizabeth Spelman. 1983. Have we got a theory
for you! Feminist theory, cultural imperialism and the demand for
"the woman's voice." Hypatia 1, published as a special issue of
Women's Studies International Forum 6 (6): 573-581.
Rose, Hilary. 1983. Hand, brain, and heart: A feminist epistemology
for the natural sciences. Signs 9 (1): 73-90.
Rossiter, Margaret. 1982. Women scientists in America: Struggles and
strategies to 1940. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Witelson, Sandra. 1985. An exchange on gender. New York Review
of Books (October 24).
64

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