3. Feminist Research: Science, Violence and Responsibility*
Maria Mies
One of the astonishing experiences of the new Women’s Liberation Movement was the realization that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there had been a Women’s Movement of which we, when we started the new Women’s Liberation Movement in 1968/69, were completely unaware. The prevailing historiography and teaching of history had totally suppressed it. This was similar to our surprise when we rediscovered the persecution and murder of millions of our sisters, the witches, which went on for at least three centuries. Even this holocaust has been largely neglected by mainstream historiography. The documentation and assimilation of our history, therefore became an important requirement of the new Women’s Movement.
This also holds true for Women’s Studies which, it is already necessary to remind ourselves, grew out of this movement. It was not the result of academic efforts, it did not arise in research institutes, it was not invented by a few gifted women scholars, but arose on the street, in countless women’s groups, in which housewives, secretaries, students, and a few social scientists came together, who jointly, as women, wanted to fight against patriarchal exploitation and oppression. In other worlds, it was feminists who had a political goal — in broad terms, the liberation of women from domination by men, violence, and exploitation — who created Women’s Studies.
This political objective was in the foreground when, in West Germany, between 1973 and 1980, women students and feminist lecturers began to use the universities as a battleground for the liberation of women by organizing women’s seminars, by opening the Berlin Summer University for Women, later by organizing the Women’s Weeks in Hamburg, Bremen and other cities, and finally by setting up some feminist organizations, such as the Association of Social Science Research and Praxis for Women (1978) and the Women’s Research Section in the German Sociological Society (1979). Similar feminist organizations were also set up in other disciplines.
At that time, it was clear to us that feminist research, in view of its roots in the Women’s Liberation Movement, ‘would have to cut across all the disciplines’ (as it was formulated at the Bielefeld Sociologists Congress in 1976), that Women’s Studies could not just be added on to the existing disciplines as a new hyphen sociology, psychology, and so on. As feminist research, it was of necessity a criticism of the prevailing paradigm of science and social science, which had not only made women and their contribution invisible, but was most profoundly imbued with androcentric, that is, male-centred prejudices, both in its general assumptions and conceptualizations and in its theories and methods. In fact, we discovered that this science had provided the most important instruments for the oppression and exploitation of women: biologism and its regard to the relations between the sexes in the social sciences, in psychology, in behavioural sciences, in education, and soon.
When we gathered for the first Congress on Women’s Studies in Frankfurt in 1978, we tried to work out for ourselves a theoretical and methodological foundation for a different, feminist understanding of social science, which would not exclude our experience and involvement as women in the study of the oppression of women and our political goal of abolishing that oppression, but would integrate it in the research process. At that time I presented my ideas on a methodology for Women’s Studies, which were subsequently widely circulated and accepted by many as the theoretical-methodological basis for Women’s Studies. These methodological postulates or guidelines were introduced by the remark that:
… there is a contradiction between the prevalent theories of social science and methodology and the political aims of the women’s movement. If Women’s Studies is to be made into an instrument of Women’s Liberation we cannot uncritically use the positivist, quantitative research methodology … Women’s Studies means more than the fact that women have now been discovered as a ‘target group’ for research or that an increasing number of women scholars and students are taking up women’s issues. (Mies, 1983, p. 120)
What follows is a brief summary of my methodological postulates for Women’s Studies, demonstrating its commitment to the goal of Women’s Liberation. (Mies, 1983, pp. 117-37)
Methodological guidelines for feminist research
(1) The postulate of value free research, of neutrality and indifference towards the research objects, has to be replaced by conscious partiality, which is achieved through partial identification with the research objects.
For women who deliberately and actively integrate their double-consciousness into the research process, this partial identification will not be difficult. It is the opposite of the so-called ‘ Spectator-Knowledge’ (Maslow, 1966:50) which is achieved by showing an indifferent, disinterested, alienated attitude towards the ‘research objects’. Conscious partiality, however, not only conceives of the research objects as parts of a bigger social whole but also of the research subjects, that is, the researchers themselves. Conscious partiality is different from mere subjectivism or simple empathy. On the basis of a limited identification it creates a critical distance between the researcher and his ‘objects’. It enables the correction of distortions of perception on both sides and widens the consciousness of both: the researcher and the ‘researched’.
(2) The vertical relationship between researcher and ‘research objects’, the view from above, must be replaced by the view from below. This is the necessary consequence of the demands of conscious partiality and reciprocity. Research, which so far has been largely an instrument of dominance and legitimation of power elites, must be brought to serve the interests of dominated, exploited and oppressed groups, particularly women. Women scholars, committed to the cause of women’s liberation, cannot have an objective interest in a ‘view from above’. This would mean that they would consent to their own oppression as women, because the man-woman relationship represents one of the oldest examples of the view from above and may be the paradigm of all vertical, hierarchical relationships.
The demand for a systematic ‘view from below’ has both a scientific and an ethical-political dimension. The scientific significance is related to the fact that despite the sophistication of the quantitative research tools, many data gathered by these methods are irrelevant or even invalid because the hierarchical research situation as such defeats the very purpose of research: it creates an acute distrust in the ‘research objects’ who feel that they are being interrogated. This distrust can be found when women and other underprivileged groups are being interviewed by members of a socially higher stratum. It has been observed that the data thus gathered often reflect ‘expected behaviour’ rather than real behaviour (Berger, 1974).
Women who are committed to the cause of women’s liberation, cannot stop at this result. They cannot be satisfied with giving the social sciences better, more authentic and more relevant data. The ethical-political significance of the view from below cannot be separated from the scientific one: this separation would again transform all methodological innovations in Women’s Studies into instruments of dominance. Only if Women’s Studies is deliberately made part of the struggle against women’s oppression and exploitation can women prevent the misuse of their theoretical and methodological innovations for the stabilization of the status quo and for crisis management. This implies that committed women scholars must fight, not only for the integration of women’s issues into the academic establishment and research policies but also for a new orientation regarding areas and objectives of research. The needs and interests of the majority of women must become the yardstick for the research policy of Women’s Studies. This presupposes that women in the academic world know these needs and interests. The ‘view from below’, therefore, leads to another postulate.
(3) The contemplative, uninvolved ‘spectator knowledge’ must be replaced by active participation in actions, movements and struggles for women’s emancipation. Research must become an integral part of such struggles.
Because Women’s Studies grew out of the women’s movement, it would be a betrayal of the aims of the movement if academic women, who were never involved in any struggle or were never concerned about women’s oppression and exploitation, should try to reduce Women’s Studies to a purely academic concern, restricted to the ivory tower of research institutes and universities, thus blunting the edge of all this discontent.3 To avert this danger, Women’s Studies must remain closely linked to the struggles and actions of the movement.
Max Weber’s famous principle of separating science and politics (praxis) is not in the interests of women’s liberation. Women scholars who want to do more than a mere paternalistic ‘something for their poorer sisters’ (because they feel that, as a privileged group, they are already liberated) but who struggle against patriarchy as a system, must take their studies into the streets and take part in the social actions and struggles of the movement.
If they do so, their contribution will be not to give abstract analyses and prescriptions but to help those involved in these struggles to discover and develop their own theoretical and methodological potentials. The elitist attitude of women social scientists will be overcome if they are able to look at all who participate in a social action or struggle as ‘sister-or-brother-sociologists’ (adapting Gouldner). The integration of research into social and political action for the liberation of women, the dialectics of doing and knowing, will lead to more than better and more realistic theories. According to the approach, the object of research is not something static and homogeneous but an historical, dynamic and contradictory entity. Research, therefore, will have to follow closely the dynamics of this process.
(4) Participation in social actions and struggles, and the integration of research into these processes, further implies that the change of the status quo becomes the starting point for a scientific quest. The motto for this approach could be: ‘If you want to know a thing, you must change it.’
(‘If you want to know the taste of a pear, you must change it, that is, you must chew it in your mouth’, Mao Zedong, 1968.) If we apply this principle to the study of women, it means that we have to start fighting against women’s exploitation and oppression in order to be able to understand the extent, dimensions, and forms and causes of this patriarchal system. Most empirical research on women has concentrated so far on the study of superficial or surface phenomena such as women’s attitudes towards housework, career, part-time work, etc. Such attitudes or opinion surveys give very little information about women’s true consciousness. Only when there is a rupture in the ‘normal’ life of a woman, that is, a crisis such as divorce, the end of a relationship, etc., is there a chance for her to become conscious of her true condition. In the ‘experience of crises’4(Kramert, 1977) and rupture with normalcy, women are confronted with the real social relationships in which they had unconsciously been submerged as objects without being able to distance themselves from them. As long as normalcy is not disrupted they are not able to admit, even to themselves, that these relationships are oppressive or exploitative.
This is why in attitude surveys women so often are found to subscribe to the dominant sexist ideology of the submissive, self-sacrificing woman. When a rupture with this normalcy occurs, however, the mystification surrounding the natural and harmonious character of these patriarchal relations cannot be maintained.
Changing a situation in order to be able to understand it applies not only to the individual woman and her life crises, but also to social processes. The very fact that today we are talking about a methodology for research in Women’s Studies is the result of a change in the status quo that was brought about by the women’s movement and not by intellectual endeavours in universities.
If women scholars begin to understand their studies as an integral part of a liberating struggle and if they focus their research on the processes of individual and social change, then they cannot but change themselves also in this process, both as human beings and as scholars. They will have to give up the elitist narrow-mindedness, abstract thinking, political and ethical impotence and arrogance of the established academician. They must learn that scientific work and a scientific outlook is not the privilege of professional scientists, but that the creativity of science depends on it being rooted in living social processes. Methodologically, this implies the search for techniques with which to document and analyse historical processes of change.
(5) The research process must become a process of ‘conscientization’, both for the so-called ‘research subjects’ (social scientists) and for the ‘research objects’ (women as target groups).
The methodology of ‘conscientizaao’ (conscientization) was first developed and applied by Paulo Freire in his problem-formulating method.4 The decisive characteristic of the approach is that the study of an oppressive reality is carried out not by experts but by the objects of the oppression. People who were previously objects of research become subjects of their own research and action. This implies that scientists who participate in this study of the conditions of oppression must give their research tools to the people. They must inspire them to formulate the problems with which they struggle in order that they may plan their action. The women’s movement so far has understood the process of conscientization largely as that of becoming conscious of one’s individual suffering as a woman. The emphasis in consciousness-raising groups was on group dynamics, role-specific behaviour and relationship problems, rather than the social relations that govern the capitalist patriarchal societies.
The problem-formulating method, however, sees individual problems as an expression and manifestation of oppressive social relations. Whereas consciousness-raising groups often tend to psychologize all relations of dominance, the problem-formulating method considers conscientization as the subjective precondition for liberating action. If processes of conscientization do not lead subsequently to processes of change and action, they may lead to dangerous illusions and even to regression.
(6) I would like to go a step further than Paulo Freire, however. The collective conscientization of women through a problem-formulating methodology must be accompanied by the study of women’s individual and social history.
Women have so far not been able to appropriate, that is, make their own, the social changes to which they have been subjected passively in the course of history. Women do make history, but in the past they have not appropriated (made it their own) it as subjects. Such a subjective appropriation of their history, their past struggles, sufferings and dreams would lead to something like a collective women’s consciousness without which no struggle for emancipation can be successful.
The appropriation of women’s history can be promoted by feminist scholars who can inspire and help other women document their campaigns and struggles. They can help them to analyse these struggles, so that they can learn from past mistakes and successes and, in the long run, may become able to move from mere spontaneous activism to long-term strategies. This presupposes, however, that women engaged in Women’s Studies remain in close contact with the movement and maintain a continuous dialogue with other women. This in turn implies that they can no longer treat their research results as their private property, but that they must learn to collectivize and share them. This leads to the next postulate.
(7) Women cannot appropriate their own history unless they begin to collectivize their own experiences. Women’s Studies, therefore, must strive to overcome the individualism, the competitiveness, the careerism, prevalent among male scholars. This has relevance both for the individual woman scholar engaged in research and for her methodology.
It is important today to recall these beginnings and foundations because what I criticized in the opening remark to these postulates has occurred: Women’s Studies is understood to the extent that the topic of woman has entered the research area, that female — and male — scholars are working on this topic, but the political goal of linking up Women’s Studies with the Women’s Liberation Movement has largely been abandoned, and Max Weber’s old separation of science and politics is again accepted as proof of the scientific quality of Women’s Studies. In other words, in a number of countries, in tandem with the institutionalization of Women’s Studies in the universities, an academization of Women’s Studies has occurred. It seems that Women’s Studies became socially acceptable only when women scholars were prepared to give up its original political goal, or when people began pursuing Women’s Studies who have never shared this goal and never taken part in the Women’s Movement.
In my view, the renewed separation of politics and science, life and knowledge, in short, the academization of Women’s Studies not only betrays the feminist movement and its goals, but will also eventually kill the spirit of Women’s Studies and turn it into some sterile and irrelevant feminology, much in the same way as the academization of Marxism led to Marxology. The same could also happen to ecofeminism if it restricts itself to an academic discourse.
The feminist critique of science was initially directed against mainstream social sciences because many of us were social scientists. This criticism has also reached the natural sciences and its central paradigm, its underlying world view, its anthropology, its methods, and its application. This critique did not initially arise in research institutes and universities either, but in connection with the ecological, peace, and women’s movements particularly with the movement against reproductive and gene technology. The more women and feminists became involved in these movements, the clearer the link became to many of us between ‘medium-range rockets and love affairs’, as Heike Sander (1980, pp. 4-7) put it — that is, the man-woman relationship between militarism and patriarchy, between technical destruction and domination of nature and violence against women, and between the exploitation of nature and the exploitation of ‘foreign’ peoples. Women, nature, and foreign peoples and countries are the colonies of White Man. Without their colonization, that is, subordination for the purpose of predatory appropriation (exploitation), the famous Western civilization would not exist, nor its paradigm of progress and, above all, not its natural science and technology either (see Werlhof, Mies, and Bennholdt-Thomsen, 1983).
This thesis is corroborated by a series of feminist works on the history of modern science which have exploded the patriarchal myth of this allegedly sexless, value-free, impartial, pure science and of the innocence of its mainly male practitioners (see Griffin, 1978; Merchant, 1983; Fox Keller, 1985).
Carolyn Merchant in particular convincingly demonstrated in her book, The Death of Nature (1983), that modern natural science, particularly mechanics and physics, are based above all on the destruction and subordination of nature as a living organism — and indeed an organism understood as female — and that at the end of this process nature is considered only as dead raw material, which is dissected into its smallest elements and then recombined by the great (white) engineer into new machines which totally obey his will. Merchant shows that this new domination over Mother Earth of necessity went hand in hand with violence. Natural discovery and knowledge of nature was linked in particular by Francis Bacon — a new father of this natural science — with power. And it was he who called for the subordination, suppression, and even torture of nature, to wrest her secrets from her, analogous to the witch-hunts which also took place in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. What is more, Bacon was not only the inventor of the new empirical method based on experimentation, he also advised the new heroes of natural science to brush aside all the old taboos without a qualm and to expose them as superstitions with which people had hitherto surrounded Mother Earth, for example, the taboo against driving mines into the womb of Mother Nature in order to get sought-after metals. Bacon said that nature must be forced by torture to yield her secrets, like a bad woman who keeps her treasures avariciously to herself and withholds them from her children (sons).1
What Merchant does not mention, but what we must surely see behind Bacon’s witch-hunt against Mother Nature, is the fact that these taboos were first, and probably with the least scruple, violated in the countries which the White Man had colonized — South America and the Caribbean. In plundering the gold and silver mines in America, the conquerors no longer needed to worry about those old taboos. Their superiority in weaponry gave them the power to ignore the old fears that Mother Nature would take her revenge. If we enquire into this source of the power that has, since Bacon, entered into a monogamous, chaste marriage with natural science, we cannot then ignore the violent destruction of the witches and the conquest and pillage of the colonies. Not only can the new relation between Man (= White Man) and Nature be seen as the first experiment, but from it also sprang wonderful new riches (that is, not based on one’s own labour), which the popes, kings, princes, adventurers, and finally the rising bourgeoisie appropriated as the basis on which the new natural sciences could finally be erected. Bacon was not only a scientist, he was also a well-paid counsellor of King James of England.
Evelyn Fox Keller (1985) unfurls the history of this new patriarchal science from another perspective, the psychological side, which mainly expresses itself in the sexist linguistic symbolism of the fathers of natural science. For these men, nature is by no means an asexual being; it is a woman, an evil, dangerous woman who must be dominated. Man can best maintain dominion over this whore through his mind, his intellect. Of course, only if he has the material military power behind him, as otherwise mind is as impotent as a withered stick. Only in combination with material force can Bacon promise his son ‘that his chaste marriage with science’ would be fruitful, that is, would produce many works — today we would say machinery and commodities. For that is what the new fathers of natural science are after: ultimately they want to bring the art of production, the power of creation, which hitherto lay with women and with nature, under their control, the control of the ‘pure’ male spirit. They want to be creators themselves. But for that they must first rob women and nature of their subjectiveness, that is, of their own dignity, their spirituality, and turn them into lifeless, controllable matter. Living organisms became raw material for the fathers of the future machinery and goods.
Evelyn Fox Keller shows that these new men have also waged this battle against Mother Nature in themselves. The organ in which their new potency is localized is not the phallus, but the head, the brain. What lies below is considered inferior, is mere animal nature and indeed, is nature already subjected, disciplined, forced into service. For this reason, the new men are no longer capable of Eros, of Love, which for Plato still belonged inalienably to knowledge: Eros, in Plato’s case of course, as love of the older wise man for the younger man. Of course in Plato, too, we already find the devaluation of women and matter, but he was still in love with the bodies of young, impressionable men and still saw spirit incorporated in them. According to Fox Keller, modern natural scientists are mostly people incapable of relationships and love. The passion with which they pursue science is the ‘chaste’ passion mentioned by Bacon, but which in fact can only be sparked off by competitive pressure within the male confederacy and by a mania for omnipotence (see Easlea, 1986). The feminist critique of the natural sciences and natural scientists has disclosed this mania as the patriarchal core of the whole progress model of the White Man.
We could simply sit back with this new knowledge and say: there you go, even science is patriarchal… (not male, as many say, even Fox Keller), if the works of these new men were not threatening the foundations of our very life on this Mother Earth, and not thanks to their brain, but thanks to the fatal marriage between brain and violence, which they, mostly euphemistically, call power.
They can only propagate the slogan ‘Knowledge is power’ with impunity — and people believe in this phrase—because scientists since Bacon, Descartes and Max Weber have constantly concealed the impure relationship between knowledge and violence or force (in the form of state and military power, for example) by defining science as the sphere of a pure search for truth. Thus, they lifted it out of the sphere of politics, that is, the sphere of force and power. The separation of politics (power) and science which we feminists attack is based on a lie. It does not exist and it has never existed, that value-free, disinterested pure science, devoted only to the infinite search for truth, which is legally protected as scientific freedom in our constitutions. Even those scientists who only want to satisfy their presumably irresistible urge for pure knowledge and research cannot do so unless such basic research is funded. And it is not difficult to identify militaristic, political, and economic interests behind this funding of fundamental research (Easlea, 1986; Butte, 1985).
As Carolyn Merchant has shown (1983), the new epistemological principle upon which, since Bacon, the scientific method is based is violence and power. Without violently disrupting the organic whole called Mother Nature, without separating the research objects by force from their symbiotic context and isolating them in the laboratory, without dissecting them — analysing them — into ever smaller bits and pieces in order to discover the secret of matter (atomic research) or the secret of life (biotechnology), the new scientists cannot gain knowledge. They cannot, it seems, understand nature and natural phenomena if they leave them intact within their given environment. Violence and force are therefore intrinsic methodological principles of the modern concept of science and knowledge. They are not, as is often assumed, ethical questions which arise only on the application of the results of this science. They belong to the epistemological and methodological foundations of modern science. But in order to be able to do violence to Mother Nature and other sister beings on earth, homo scientificus had to set himself apart from, or rather above, nature. A concept of the human being had to be developed in which his own symbiosis with nature and with the woman who gave birth to him, and with women in general, had to be negated. The modern scientist is the man who presumably creates nature as well as himself out of his brain power. He is the new god, the culture hero of European civilization. In the centuries following Bacon, this disruption of the symbiosis between the human being, Mother Nature, and the human mother became synonymous with the processes of emancipation and processes of liberation. This, in my view, is the link between the new scientific method, the new capitalist economy, and the new democratic politics. Without turning a reciprocal, symbiotic relationship between humans and nature into a one-sided, master-and-servant relationship, the bourgeois revolutions would not have been possible. Without turning foreign peoples and their lands into colonies for the White Man, the capitalist economy could not have evolved. Without violently destroying the symbiosis between man and woman, without calling woman mere animal nature, the new man could not have risen as master and lord over nature and women.
For the new scientific subject, this violent separation from and the subjection of nature and women meant that a concept of knowledge had to be created which was completely purified of all traces of the fact that we are born of women and that we shall die, that we are carnal, mortal beings. The brothers Bohme have shown how Immanuel Kant, another father of the modern concept of science, developed a concept of knowledge, of rationality, from which all other sources of knowing, linked to the carnal existence of human beings, are eliminated: our sensuous knowledge, our experience, all feelings and empathy, all power of imagination and intuition. Pure reason has no trace of all these, it is but abstract and cold, calculating and quantifying — in short, disinterested rationality. To reach this concept of knowledge or reason, a clear cut between subject and object is necessary (Bohme & Bohme, 1985).
If violence towards nature and human beings, including oneself, is necessary in order to gain knowledge, then the ethical question immediately arises: Where do you draw the line? Where do you make the break between the subject and the object? Are only humans subjects and all non-humans objects? Meanwhile, we also know that humans are used as objects for experimentation. And women, slaves, and other colonized people are not considered as subjects, neither are mentally handicapped people.
Today reproductive and gene technology are breaking down even the last boundary that so far had protected the human person, the individual, from violent invasions and from becoming a mere object for research. This is particularly true for women who are in the main the object of research in reproductive technology. The question of where to draw the line between subject and object, human and non-human cannot be answered from within science itself. Because the scientific paradigm is based on the dogma that there are no limits for the scientific urge, the quest arises for ever more abstract knowledge. No moral interventions are allowed within the research process. Therefore, scientists cannot themselves answer the questions of ethics. But as scientists are also ordinary citizens, husbands, fathers, and so on, they also cannot avoid being confronted more and more with ethical questions about what they are doing in their laboratories. They usually solve this problem according to the scientific method, namely by drawing the line between what is allowed and what is not somewhere new. This means, they offer new definitions of what is subject and what is object, what is human and what is non-human, what is allowed and what should not be. An example of this method is the way the new bioethicists deal with the tricky question of embryo research. For many people — not only the Right-to-Life Movement — embryo research is morally unacceptable. They demand a ban on embryo research. In Britain, the Warnock Committee and the Voluntary Licensing Authority (a self-appointed watchdog for reproductive technology) found a way out of the problem. They deemed the beginning of life as two weeks after conception. Before the age of two weeks, an embryo is no longer defined as an embryo, but as a pre-embryo. Therefore, research can be done on this pre-embryo. Obviously, it is just a question of definition! Meanwhile, this definition has been accepted by a number of countries who want to regulate reproductive technology. From the point of view of the scientists and the medical establishment, the case is clear: if reproductive technology, particularly IVF technology, is to be successful, then more embryo research is needed. The success rates at present are simply too low (Klein, 1989). Helga Kuhse and Peter Singer, two bioethicists from Monash University (Australia), go even further in their power of definition. For them the embryo of two weeks is just ‘a lettuce’. They make a distinction, or draw the line, between a member of the species homo sapiens and a human person:
What about the human embryo, then? Quite clearly, it is a member of the species homo sapiens, but it does not have any of the qualities distinctive of a person: it is not a self-aware, autonomous rational being: it has no nervous system, no brain — it cannot experience anything at all. In lacking any capacity for experience, it is much more like a lettuce than a person or even a laboratory mouse or rat. (Kuhse & Singer, 1986, p. 15)
It is clear that for Kuhse and Singer an embryo of two weeks is not ‘a subject that needs to be taken into account’ (Kuhse & Singer, 1986, p. 19); therefore not only should research be allowed, but spare embryos could be thrown away or artificially aborted. They want to draw the line even nearer the human person and choose for their definition the time when an embryo would be able to feel pain, that is, after the development of the central nervous system, which they think may be as late as 18 or 20 weeks. They therefore advocate extending the time limit well beyond the 14 days currently set by the Warnock Committee and by the Waller Committee in Australia (Kuhse and Singer, 1986, p. 21). They nowhere mention that an embryo is part and parcel of a woman, that it cannot live outside its symbiosis with the woman. The first division, therefore, is that of embryo and woman.
For the bioethicists, the problem arising with gene and reproductive technology is just a question of definitions. The violence of the scientist is mainly the power of definition. It has been transformed from direct violence to structural violence, which appears as clean and pure. We should remember that it is precisely this power of definition of what is human and what is non-human that broke down the moral barriers for those scientists who did their research on people in Nazi concentration camps, particularly on mentally handicapped people. The scientists who did their fundamental research on such people accepted that they were non-or sub-human. The definitions of personhood given by Kuhse and Singer (rational, self-aware, autonomous) are totally open to the manipulations of power because it is a question of power who is defined as human or non-human. Here we may remember that for a long time women also were not considered as rational, self-aware, or autonomous.
The same arbitrary divide-and-rule logic is applied with regard to the distinction between basic and applied research, or the application of research results. Fundamental or basic research is, morally speaking, no better or purer than applied research; if in basic research all taboos may be violated, all moral principles be cast aside, which otherwise hold in society, then this will also occur in the application of research results. There is no other way, according to the paradigm of the new patriarchs — what can be done will be done. This becomes quite clear not only in the case of animal and human experimentation, but also in gene and reproductive technology. Experiments first carried out on cows and pigs are now being carried out on women (Corea, 1985). However, the natural scientists do not cut themselves and us off from Mother Nature with impunity. This becomes increasingly evident through the catastrophes which have arisen from the works of these basic researchers.
Finally, there is the connection, or rather, contradiction, between science and responsibility, as indicated in the title of this chapter. It should be clear that the science we have been discussing so far — and that is what is called science in our society — does not recognize any responsibility. Even more, natural science and responsibility are concepts which, according to the self-concept of scientists, are mutually exclusive. Anyone who doubts this should have another look at Max Weber’s work on science as a profession. Because if scientists as scientists, not as husbands or citizens, bore responsibility for life on this earth, in their environment, in their daily life, they could not follow the abstract ideal of accumulation of knowledge at any price. They would have to give up, for example, basic and applied research in gene and reproductive technology.
What I as a feminist criticize is this hypocritical and schizophrenic segregation of scientists into allegedly impartial researchers who follow a different moral code in the laboratory from that which they follow outside. The reduction of ethics, morals, and responsibility to the problem of application or non-application of the results of science is bankruptcy of all ethics. This reactive ethics will always chase helplessly behind the inventions and fabrications of the natural scientists and attempt to regulate their most damaging effects, as, for example, ethics committees try to do with regard to gene and reproductive technology. But even in these committees’ value-free science, with its claim to impartiality, prevails unassailed. Not only are they predominantly composed of scientists and doctors, but ethics is also understood as science and thus follows the same paradigm. The taboo never touched in these ethics committees is the profoundly immoral marriage between science and force, science and militarism, science and patriarchy.
Brian Easlea has proved that from the outset, nuclear physicists, even when they were still allegedly engaged in pure research, already had the military application of these gigantic forces at the back of their minds and that some of them even drew the attention of the war ministries to their research. He also describes very convincingly the phallic birth fantasies of these fathers of atom bombs and rockets (Easlea, 1986).
The feminist critique of science — particularly after Chernobyl — has made it eminently clear that all current science and technology is quite fundamentally military science and technology, and not just when it is applied in bombs and rockets (Mies, 1986). Since Bacon and Descartes, modern natural scientists have been ‘fathers of destruction’ (Easlea, 1986). If we take our responsibility towards life, women, children, the future, Mother Earth and our own human dignity seriously, we must first clearly state that this science is irresponsible, amoral, immoral, and second, that we no longer want to go along with this game of a double moral standard — one set for the laboratory, another for private or political life. What the scientist would not do to himself, neither should he do to any other being.
There is no abstract gain of knowledge which justifies the drastic destruction of vital links between self-sustaining living systems on earth, of the inherent worth of plants, animals, and humans in their living environment. The marriage between knowledge and force must be dissolved. It is imperative to alter this science. Another paradigm of science cannot start, however, with the famous male urge for limitless knowledge, omniscience and omnipotency. Therefore, it cannot start within science itself but has to come from a different world-view, a different view of the relationship between human beings and our natural environment, of the relationship between woman and man, of the relationship between different people, races, and cultures. These relationships can no longer be defined according to the militaristic model of White Man, who, by force, defined himself as human and the rest as non-human.
Ideas about a different science should be based on different ethical and methodological principles. I think that a lot of my criticisms with regard to the feminist critique of social sciences as mentioned earlier should also apply to the natural sciences. Central to a new science would be the principle of subject-subject reciprocity. This presupposes that the research object is again regarded as living and endowed with its own dignity/soul/subjectivity. A new science should never lose sight of the fact that we ourselves are part of Nature, that we have a body, that we are dependent on Mother Earth, that we are born by women, and that we die. It should never lead to the abdication of our senses as a source of knowledge, as modern natural science does, particularly since Kant. It should proceed in such a way that our senses can still be our guide through reality and not just organs rendered obsolete because they have been replaced by machines. Our sensuality is not only a source of knowledge, but above all also a source of all human happiness.
A new science should also reject the moral double standard which prevails today. It should finally prove itself responsible to society at large both in its methods and theories as well as in the application of its results. This new responsibility would in my view be based on the fact that the earth and its resources are limited, that our life is limited, that time is limited. In a limited universe, therefore, there can be no infinite progress, no infinite search for truth, no infinite growth unless others are exploited. It is a hopeful sign that the radical critique of science, which came from feminists and is still carried out by them, has meanwhile led a few men to think about themselves, too, as well as about the patriarchal image of White Man, the cultural hero of Western civilization, especially of the natural scientist, who in collaboration with the male confederacy in the military, in politics, and in economics has dealt us all these wars and catastrophes (cf. Bohme and Bohme, 1985; Easlea, 1986; Butte, 1985; Theweleit, 1977).
Chernobyl showed us more clearly than anything before that the modern techno-patriarchs destroy life, living systems, and symbioses. Afterwards they can even measure the destruction perpetrated. But they cannot restore life. For that, they still need — as we all do — Gaia, Mother Earth, and woman.
1. Carolyn Merchant (1983) quotes the following passages from Bacon’s Works (Vol. 4) to prove that Bacon suggested applying inquisition methods in the witch trials to nature (Bacon, 1623/1870, pp. 96,298; italics by Merchant):
For you have but to follow and as it were hound out nature in her wanderings, and you will be able when you like to lead and drive her afterward to the same place again. Neither am 1 of the opinion in this history of marvels that superstitious narratives of sorceries, witchcrafts, charms, dreams, divinations and the like, where there is an assurance and clear evidence of the fact, should all be altogether excluded … howsoever the use and practice of such arts is to be condemned, yet from the speculation and consideration of the… useful light may be gained, not only for the true judgement of the offenses of persons charged with such practices, but likewise for the further disclosing of the secrets of nature. Neither ought a man make scruple of entering and penetrating into these holes and corners, when the inquisition of truth is his whole object — as your majesty has shown in your own example.
For like as a man’s disposition is never well known or proved till he be crossed, nor Proteus never changed shapes till he was straitened and held fast, so nature exhibits herself more clearly under the trials and vexations of art (mechanical devices) than when left to herself.
The new natural scientist is thus called upon to treat nature like a slave who must be pressed into service and who must be remodelled by mechanical inventions.
2. A large proportion of present-day basic research in the industrialized countries is paid for from the military budget; worldwide, over half the natural scientists are working on military technology, in the United States as many as 60% (Butte, 1985).
References
Bacon, Francis. (1623/1870) De Dignitate et augmentis Scientarium. In James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Devon Heath (eds.), Francis Bacon: Works, Vol. 4. London: Longman’s Green.
Bohme, Gernot, and Bohme, Hartmut (1985) Das andere der Vernunft: Zur Entwicklung der Rationalitätsstrukturen am Beispiel Kants. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag.
Butte, Werner (ed.) (1985) Militarisierte Wissenschaft. Reinbek: Rororo aktuell, Technologie und Politik 22: Rowohlt Verlag.
Corea, Gena (1985) The Mother Machine. New York: Harper & Row.
Easlea, Brian (1986) Fathering the Unthinkable: Masculinity, Scientists and the Nuclear Arms Race. London: Pluto Press.
Fox Keller, Evelyn (1985) Reflections on Gender and Science. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Griffin, Susan (1978) Woman and Nature: the Roaring Inside Her. New York: Harper Colophon Books.
Klein, Renate (ed.) (1989) Infertility: Women Speak out About Their Experiences of Reproductive Medicine. London: Pandora.
Kuhse, Helga, and Singer, Peter (1986) Ethical Issues in Reproductive Alternatives for Genetic Indications. Paper presented at 7th International Congress of Human Genetics, Berlin.
Merchant, Carolyn (1983) The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology and the Scientific Revolution. New York: Harper & Row.
Mies, Maria (1983) ‘Towards a Methodology for Feminist Research.’ In G. Bowles and Renate D. Klein (eds.), Theories of Women’s Studies (pp. 117-139). London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
—(1984) Frauenforschung oder feministische Forschung. Beiträge zur feministichen Theorie und Praxis, 11, 40-60.
— (1985) ‘Why do we need all this?’ A call against genetic and reproductive technology. Women’s Studies International Forum, 8,553-560.
— (1986) Wer machte uns die Natur zur Feindin? In: Marina Gambaroff, Maria Mies, Annegret Stopczyk and Claudia v. Werlhof, (eds.) Tschernobyl hat unser Leben verändert. Vom Ausstieg der Frauen. Reinbek, Rororo Aktuell, No. 5922: Rowohlt Verlag.
Sander, Heike (1980) Über die Beziehungen von Liebesverhältnissen und Mittelstreckenraketen. Courage, Nr. 4:4-7. Berlin: Courage Verlag.
Theweleit, Klaus (1977) Männerphantasien. Frankfurt: Roter Stern Vertag.
Werlhof, Claudia v., Mies, Maria, and Bennholdt Thomsen, Veronika. (1983). Frauen, die letzte Kolonie. Reinbek, Rororo technik und Politik, No. 20: Rowohlt Verlag [English version: Women, The Last Colony (1988) London: Zed Books.]
*This is an extensively revised version of a lecture at the University of Innsbruck, 1986, and earlier published in German in Hildegard Fassler, (ed) Das Tabu der Gewalt, Vol. I, (1985-87). Innsbruck: Universitätsverlag.