Presences and experiences: Gender and women in the historiography of Biology

Abstract

This essay reviews some recent publications on women in research spaces —the laboratory, the clinic, the selective breeding of plants and animals— and the gender bias of biological knowledge. The aim is to contribute to the collective endeavour of visualizing gender and women in the recent history of observation, experimentation and circulation of knowledge. Two issues are tackled here: in the first part, the social biases that pretend an absence of women that was never so, and in the second part, the biases in the construction of knowledge on hormones and chromosomes and their relation with a social order based on the dichotomy woman/man. By focusing on women, when underpinning any of the tasks women performed all along the recent history of biology, those places where they worked are retrieved as spaces of knowledge production for a wider, more inclusive epistemology.