Neelam Kumar, ed. Women and Science in India: A Reader.

Women and Science in India: A Reader by NeelamKumar Review by: By SallyGregory Kohlstedt Isis, Vol. 102, No. 1 (March 2011), pp. 148-149 Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of The History of Science Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/660215 . Accessed: 17/02/2013 07:27
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BOOK REVIEWSISIS, 102 : 1 (2011)

gist William K. Brooks and the geographer Isaiah Bowman promoted modernization of the industry through cultivation of privatized oyster beds, invoking an agricultural model that emphasized efciency and responsiveness to market demands. Thus, the Chesapeake oyster shery dissented from the imperatives of professionalized, state-based resource conservation that otherwise constituted a central narrative in the relations between North Americans and nature. The watermens resistance to science-based conservation was abetted by a Maryland political system that, as in other southern states, enabled rural perspectives to withstand urban scientic and business interests. This traditional industry persisted even into the postwar era. Yet as Chesapeake Bay and the wider landscape of American conservation evolved, other factors and interests emerged. Environmentalism became a signicant social factor, encouraged by suburbanization, the growth of recreational interests, and awareness of multiplying impacts on the bay. For a while, watermen and environmentalists were allies, particularly when oysters were briey celebrated for their role in restoring the bays ecological health. Even the way of life of the watermen came to be valued as part of the bays heritage. Yet environmentalisms broader view ultimately diluted the oysters status as the Chesapeakes signature issue. Most recently, concerns about exotic species have collided with, and eventually overruled, demands that Asian oysters be imported to restore the shery. The bay itself played an essential role in this history. Keiner pays close attention to oyster biology and to historical ecology, suggesting, for example, that the resilience of the bays oyster-based ecosystem enabled the industry to survive amidst continued insults from people, industry, and agriculture. The bay also inspired divergent views of nature. Thus, the conict between scientists and watermen over the future of the industry also turned on how the Chesapeake should be understood: in terms of abstract chemical and physical units or on the basis of local knowledge of oyster beds. These debates over what counts as reality inevitably implied conicting views as to who should have the authority to make decisions about the industry. Ultimately, however, the bays complexity defeated efforts to solve the oyster problem. Scientic uncertainties rendered interminable debates regarding the factors affecting oyster populations, demonstrating once again that science alone cannot solve complex ecological and social problems. Keiners detailed historical account is a

model of sensitivity to the Chesapeakes dual identity as an ecosystem and as a landscape rich in cultural and social meaning. By carefully situating her account of science and the oyster shery, while exploring the insights to be gained through comparison with developments elsewhere, she transcends strictly national narratives of science and conservation, demonstrating the benets of integrating the history of science and environmental history. STEPHEN BOCKING Neelam Kumar (Editor). Women and Science in India: A Reader. xxxii 351 pp., illus., tables, bibl., index. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009. $45 (cloth). Careful analysis of womens participation in science within and across national boundaries reveals apparent parallels in an enterprise with strong European origins while opening up the ways in which social, political, and economic norms play a signicant role in shaping participation patterns. This collection of eleven essays opens out the question of how the particular dynamics of imperialism shaped early practices in medicine in Britain and India in the nineteenth century and then jumps to the postindependence period framed by distinct Indian institutions. The most polished contributions are the previously published historical essays that constitute the rst third of the volume. Essays by Geraldine Forbes, Antoinette Burton, and Maneesha Lal focus on women in medical practice in the last third of the nineteenth century. Their accounts make clear that British women were able to use the circumstances in India and ideas about the presumably isolated zenana (segregated domestic space for women) to advance claims for medical training. The well-publicized Dufferin Fund, supported by Queen Victoria, created a set of images about helpless women and inconsiderate men in India that was contested but prevailed in the home country. A high proportion of the graduates of the London School of Medicine for Women served abroad, bringing allopathic medicine and gaining signicant clinical experience. It was after independence, according to Abha Sur, that a few Indian women found opportunities in science. Her historical account of three who worked in the laboratory of C. V. Raman documents some of their personal and professional difculties. With one exception, the essays in the rest of the book have not been previously published. They concentrate on patterns of womens par-

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BOOK REVIEWSISIS, 102 : 1 (2011)

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ticipation in science over the past quarter century. These essays emphasize the policies and practices encountered by Indian women and make frequent reference to work by feminist scholars in the United States and Britain while also, in some cases, developing new explanatory models for the changing situation in India. Carol Mukhopadhyay raises the critical question, How Exportable Are Western Theories of Gendered Science? She argues that while aggregate data suggest many similarities, closer analysis reveals that explanations are often different. Among other things, she points out that there is little evidence of fear of success or math anxiety among Indian girls but that family inuence, with an emphasis on education for sons and concerns about marriageability, tends to constrain womens entry into and advancement in the sciences. Lalita Subrahmanyan suggests that Indian women scientists are not very interested in feminism as a movement while noting the multiple layers of diversity, such as caste and class, that interfere with creating a collective identity; nonetheless, she muses that they need to organize (p. 201). A number of the essays represent specic case studies of policy and practice, some quite contemporary and some relying on data from three or four decades ago. These authors often jump casually from studies in other parts of the world to the situation in India. Veena Poonacha documents the real and proportionate increase of women in science between 1971 and 1991 but suggests that thereafter stagnation is evident in several subelds. Malathy Duraisamy and P. Duraisamy take their analysis closer to the present and tease out site-specic diversity in education as well as employment. Their graphs make clear the relative numbers of women in education by category and by region, with Kerala having the highest share of womens enrollment in science and Bihar and Jharkhand near the bottom. Neelam Kumar looks more closely at attitudes and behavior in order to explain the gender gap, ndingamong other thingsthat girls from rural areas and lower social classes have been particularly disadvantaged in access compared with men in similar circumstances and elite women. Once in science, women tend to perform at comparable levels with their male peers, sometimes even higher in the middle ranks, but there is a sudden rise in measurable performance among men in the highest ranks. This, Kumar contends, matches research elsewhere that shows a rise in performance at the highest ranks, apparently a self-reinforcing mechanism. Explanations for differences and for the problems faced by

women include sexism and nepotism in the practice of medicine; but women are also caught up in multiple constraints due to pervasive social norms, according to Alpana Sagar. Namarata Gupta and A. K. Sharma highlight the social and cultural requirements around domestic life as a triple burden that includes anxiety about trying to meet high expectations in working to balance the demands of family and professional life. For scholars who study the history of women in science elsewhere, Women and Science in India echoes familiar issues and patterns while at the same time making it evident that things that seem the same are not necessarily so. Western science brought with it assumptions and institutions that inuenced Indian scientists, engineers, and physicians, but inevitably local circumstances meant resistance to as well as adapted norms for imported practices at variance with local customs and values. These essays, collectively and sometimes repetitively, make those dynamics visible. SALLY GREGORY KOHLSTEDT Hannah Landecker. Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies. xii 276 pp., illus., index. Cambridge, Mass./London: Harvard University Press, 2010. $18.95 (paper). This 2008 winner of the History of Science Societys Suzanne J. Levinson Prize, rst published in 2007, recounts the twentieth-century development of tissue culture technique while revealing how novel biotechnical objects such as endlessly proliferating cell lines affect concepts of individuality, immortality, and hybridity (p. 1). Growing cells outside of the body, in vitro, is a technique so commonplace today as to be nearly invisible next to more headlinegrabbing developments like cloning and stemcell research. But neither of these more recent biotechnologies would be possible without it. At the end of the nineteenth century, the experimental biologist Jacques Loeb expressed his ambition to create a technology of living substance. Landecker suggests that this is a broader and more useful concept than biotechnology, and with it she characterizes tissue culture as a means of exploring and exploiting the amazing plasticity of life at the level of the individual cell. While the ability to keep cells alive outside of the body is an obvious triumph of interventionist science over the spatial boundaries naturally imposed on multicellular animals, Landecker shows very clearly and extensively how cell culture was just as importantly

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