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Ellen Herman

Department of History, University of Oregon


 

HIST 460/560, Spring 2004, Week 1
Reading and Discussion Questions

Lorraine Daston, “The Naturalized Female Intellect,” Science in Context 5, no. 2 (Autumn 1992):209-235.

1. What does this author mean when she writes that “naturalization is ideology at full strength”?

2. How has the western concept of intelligence changed over the past several centuries? What are the major differences between intelligence in the early modern period that Daston writes about and its “modern” counterpart elaborated since the mid-19th century?

3. What characteristics were associated with the early modern female intellect? Why? How is this an example of naturalization?

4. What is Daston’s point in contrasting views of female intellectuals in the 17th and 18th centuries with views of female intellectuals in the 19th century?

5. Why does she conclude that early modern nature was a profoundly moral concept whereas modern nature is amoral? What difference has this made for women thinkers and for thinking about gender and intelligence?

Joel Hughes, “Brain Research Finds Gender Link: Med School Team Discovers Sexes Think Differently,” Yale Daily News, February 16, 1995.

1. Is the study reported in this article a contemporary American example of the naturalization that Daston discusses in early modern Europe? Why or why not?

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own [1929] (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13-33, 109-117.

1. Woolf argues that women must have money and rooms of their own if they are to think and write. Women have not been counted among great thinkers and writers primarily because they have not had the material resources that support intellectual creativity. “Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time.” Do you agree? Why or why not?

2. What does the metaphor about fishing on p. 34 tell you?

3. Why do you think Woolf describes the meals she eats in detail? What is she suggesting about differences between male and female writers?

4. Does Woolf hold Mary Seton’s mother responsible for the fact that Mary did not have a college to go to, or money to spend, or a room of her own in which to write?

5. Woolf notes that women in her country (England) now have the right to attend college, own property, and vote. Does this mean that women will now become great thinkers and writers?

6.Woolf ends her essay by reflecting on Shakespeare’s hypothetical sister, who never wrote a word and died young. What is her point in ending the essay this way?