Kristen Leng
"Contesting the ‘Laws of Life’: Science, Politics and Feminism in Germany and Britain, 1890-1914"
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Abstract
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Taking the fascinating ‘scientization of the social’ in modernizing Europe as its context, my dissertation examines the texts and activism of German-speaking and British feminists during the years 1890-1914 to investigate how hegemonic scientific theories of gender, sexuality, and the body informed feminist claims for civil rights, citizenship, and social transformation. Additionally, I explore the arguments of scientific experts themselves, which served as the bases of feminist engagement. In so doing, I address three central questions:
1) In what ways did science enable feminists to advance claims for civil rights and social transformation? 2) How and why did this discourse become available to them? 3) How were feminist deployments of science shaped by the historical factors, such as women’s social status and access to institutions of education and communication? Within this study, Germany will serve as the primary case, given its history of scientifically-informed state planning around issues germane to gender and sexuality. Britain, home of Darwin and Galton—the two most influential scientific thinkers of the period—provides a good comparative case because of the ways in which existing, entrenched socio-political discourses, namely liberalism, tempered political claims legitimated by ‘science.’ In undertaking this project, I hope to broaden existing suppositions regarding women’s relationship to science beyond that of victim and opponent; to study of the ways in which scientific theories of gender and sexuality become politicized and popularized; and to construct an intellectual heritage for twenty-first century feminist scientific scholarship.
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