Women Look at Biology Looking at Women: A Collection of Feminist Critiques

by Ruth Hubbard, Mary Sue Henifin (Editor), Barbara Fried (Editor)

Book by Hubbard, Ruth

Paperback

First published January 1, 1979

About the author

Ruth Hubbard was a professor of biology at Harvard University, where she was the first woman to hold a tenured professorship position in biology. She authored several books challenging the male model of science.

Born Ruth Hoffmann in Vienna, Austria, she escaped Nazism as a teenager, moving with with her family to the United States. Hubbard graduated from Radcliffe College in 1944, earning an A.B. in biochemical sciences.

Reviews

[Beans · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. I knew, going in, that it had the potential to be pretty rough, what with being written in 1979 and the tendency of second wave critiques to be super transphobic and super white-centric. And that was really what got me. The first few essays were pretty awesome for what they were, and I could mostly put aside what was obviously wrong with them and appreciate the fact that people thirty years ago were doing work very similar to what I did for my thesis. Feminist critiques of gender and sex related science is my favorite thing ever, and the authors were articulating things that more recent writers have completely failed to see.

But the negatives got to be too much, in the end. After an incredibly offensive footnote about how terrible trans* people are and essay after essay where it would have been so easy to bring race into the mix but instead white people were just assumed to be the default and the white experience was apparently everyone's experience in 1979, I had to put the book aside and let myself be incredibly frustrated. Because some good analysis isn't really worth it if you're going to run over everyone else in the process.

[Jill Thomas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. An important and invaluable resource for girls and women continuing to grow up and live under male supremacist society.

The book meticulously documents how far we have come, what we have had to go through to get here and how much further we have yet to go. Most interestingly for me, was in reading how many of the tactics that men have used to silence women or 'criticise' the women's movement in the past have not changed but are simply recycled - albeit presented each time as 'new'. Their irational fear and hatred of women and the female body continues with each generation.

If you have a daughter, mother, sister or friend interested in this subject, she would greatly appreciate this book and all the knowledge it has to offer her. 5/5 stars.