ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Character, Context, and Feminist intervention in Primatology

• In Event: Do Individuals Matter? Character, Community, and Controversy in the History of Science

English Abstract

Historians of science have emphasised the social nature of scientific persona, showing how shared norms shape scientists’ ideals of conduct, credibility, and intellectual style. Yet within moments of collective change, scientists facing the same political pressures and intellectual opportunities often respond in markedly different ways. This paper uses the emergence of feminist critique in primatology and anthropology during the early 1970s to argue that individual character played a key role in mediating how broader contexts were taken up and transformed. I develop this argument by comparing early interventions of two feminist scientists, Sally Slocum and Jane Lancaster. Both participated in the same feminist movement, worked within similar institutional constraints, and produced influential feminist critiques of male-centrism. Yet they presented their critiques in strikingly different ways. Slocum’s provocative paper, “Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology,” (1971) was confrontational, explicitly calling out the biases of leading theories and their male authors. Slocum’s willingness to satirise, disrupt, and openly confront dominant assumptions reflected a character inclined to risk-taking and conceptual agitation. In contrast, Jane Lancaster’s more subtle article, “In Praise of the Achieving Female Monkey” (1973) displayed a diplomatic and integrative style. Lancaster’s critique was directed at more marginal figures in the field, and her technique of drawing together multiple lines of evidence to make moderate feminist claims reflected a disposition more comfortable with cooperation, gentle restructuring and integrative reasoning. While both identified as feminist scientists, their differing modes of influence reflected long standing dispositional patterns, consistent across their training, collaborations and further work. Their two trajectories reveal that while persona may provide the normative framework for scientific behaviour, individual character shapes how scientists interpret, enact, and even challenge that framework. Examining character as the mediator between context and action offers a fuller account of how feminist insights entered primatology and why they took multiple, divergent forms.

Author

• Samara Greenwood, University of Melbourne